Perfectly True Story

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Compiegne

(from Everybody Knows a Salesman Can’t Write a Book)
Copyright: Bill Whiteside

Although it had no direct connection to either the French or British Navy, the town of Compiegne, 45 miles northeast of Paris, provides an important thread to my story. I visited Compiegne more to gain a sense of the place than to pick up additional details to add to my research. I came away with a deeper appreciation of the contrast between its quiet and majestic solitude and the monuments to conquest and vengeance that were installed, demolished and reinstalled there. To my surprise, I also encountered an unexpected reminder of the unfathomable evil of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi devils.

World War I’s fighting ended in 1918 when Germany and the Allies signed an armistice at Compiegne. In 1940, Adolf Hitler avenged that perceived stain on German pride by summoning French negotiators to Compiegne to sign the armistice that affirmed Germany’s subjugation of France at the beginning of World War II. Both pacts were signed in the same quiet clearing in a French forest, and, more remarkably, in the same French rail car parked in that clearing. Let’s start with that rail car.

American Journalist William L. Shirer was at Compiegne in 1940, sitting unobtrusively at the edge of the woods as Hitler and his entourage paraded in and briefly participated in the opening of the armistice talks that halted France’s participation in World War II. Shirer made a number of casual references to a “wagon-lit” in his radio broadcasts and in his books. He was clearly referring to a rail car - specifically the private rail car in which both armistice agreements were signed.

While “wagon-lit” might have been a common reference in 1940, it was a fresh addition to my vocabulary. A wagon-lit is a sleeping car on a European railway. The Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, which was founded in 1872, provided sleeping cars and dining cars to the state railways of countries throughout Europe. Even if you’ve never heard of the Compagnie, you probably know of its fabled Orient Express.

Rail cars were routinely confiscated for military use as the First World War expanded across Europe after 1914. Wagon-lit #2419D was commandeered in October 1918 and remodeled by the Compagnie into a rolling office for Marshal Ferdinand Foch of France, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces. By then, the war was tilting in the Allies’ favor, but few realized just how close it was to its end.

Just one month after Foch acquired his wagon-lit, the Allies selected Compiegne as the site for armistice talks with Germany, due largely to its quiet seclusion. In 1918 the site was little more than a path to battle. A pair of rail lines – built to carry heavy artillery – stitched their way through a dense forest of oak trees and beech trees. There would be no distractions in the forest as the two warring parties met to end the killing.

A train that carried a team of negotiators from Germany pulled into Compiegne at 7:00 on the morning of November 8, 1918. The German party had been escorted to the site in secrecy, in a rail car with drawn shades. When their train rolled to a stop and the shades were opened, all they could see were the dense surrounding trees, a few slices of grey sky through the branches as a gloomy day loomed, and, on an adjoining track, another sitting rail car.

The German delegates were told that Marshal Foch wished to see them in his private car at 9:00 that morning. Foch’s rail carriage sat just a few yards away. A duckboard walkway – planks of wood laid flat – was improvised between the two trains to spare the participants from having to slosh through the marshy ground.

At the appointed hour, the adversaries took their places on opposite sides of a long rectangular table set in the middle of Foch’s wagon-lit, with four chairs on either side. All of the men stood as the glass door to Foch’s private compartment opened. The Marshal entered and crisply saluted the visitors. They shared no pleasantries and engaged in minor formalities. After introductions, the German delegates presented their credentials. The talks began with an abrupt question from Marshal Foch.

“What do you want, gentlemen?”

Matthias Erzberger, Germany’s recently appointed Secretary of State replied: “We have come to receive the proposal of the Allied Powers for an armistice”

Foch snapped: “I have no proposal whatsoever to make.”

Plenipotentiary Minister Count Alfred von Oberndorff responded: “Tell us, Herr Feldmarshall, how do you wish us to express ourselves. Our delegation is prepared to ask you the conditions of an armistice.”

Foch: “Do you formally ask for an armistice?”

After Erzberger and von Oberndorff responded “Ja” in unison, Foch replied “Then please sit down and I will read the conditions of the Allies to you.” Foch’s Chief of Staff General Maxime Weygand then read the Allies’ terms for the cessation of battle and the capitulation of Germany.

Notwithstanding Marshal Foch’s strident opening, the two sides negotiated over the next three days. The armistice was finally signed at 5:15 on the morning of November 11, 1918. At 11 o’clock that same morning, soldiers at the front heard the order to cease fire and laid down their guns. The fighting was over but the complex challenge of settling accounts remained. Seven months later, on June 28, 1919, the treaty that finished the war, punished Germany, and re-drew the map of Europe was signed at Versailles.

 

 

After the armistice was signed and the guns were silenced, Wagon-lit #2419D was returned to Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits. In September 1919, after a final tour of duty as a dining car, France’s most prominent rail car was donated to France’s Musee de l’Armee, and was displayed in a courtyard at Les Invalides, the vast shrine to France’s military history, surrounded by a tight array of decommissioned cannons and mortars.

To commemorate the armistice and the neutralization of its despised foe, France opened the carefully groomed “Glade of the Armistice” at Compiegne on November 11, 1922. Trees had been cleared and an oval space - a carefully tended lawn - was sculpted out of the forest. A broad 250-yard stone and dirt avenue was laid to provide a dramatic entrance into the glade. Flat granite monuments, each the footprint of a rail car, marked the placement of the two historic rail cars that had served France and Germany respectively during the armistice discussions in 1918.

Additional monuments were added to the Glade in the years between the wars. Arthur Henry Fleming, an American lumber magnate, underwrote the construction of a small museum at the edge of the park, and then financed the restoration of the museum’s primary attraction – Marshal Foch’s wagon-lit, which was restored to its November 11, 1918 condition, including the table where the armistice had been signed. Place cards showed where Foch, Weygand, Erzberger and the other participants sat. Marshal Foch and General Weygand were among the dignitaries who participated in the museum’s opening on November 11, 1927.

A towering statue of Marshal Foch was unveiled at the site ten years later - in September 1937. Set just a bit off to the left of the oval as you walk into the glade, Foch, standing with a walking stick in his right hand and a packet of papers – maps? the armistice agreement? – in his left, looks down upon the clearing, across to the museum, and down on the monuments to where the two rail cars stood in 1918. Participants in the ceremonial unveiling of the Foch statue included General Weygand and the widow of Marshal Foch, who had passed way in 1929 at the age of 77.

France’s simmering ire was most evident in a monument to the liberation of the long-disputed regions of Alsace and Lorraine from German rule. This monument stands outside the park, just across the curve in the road where the park’s boulevard entrance begins. Its focal point is a large dead eagle – the German Imperial Eagle - gruesomely sprawled across its base, impaled by a large bronze sword, in grim celebration of Germany’s defeat in World War I.

 

 

In June 1919, with the ink from 67 signatures barely dry on the treaty of Versailles, Marshall Foch predicted the inevitable next war. Unhappy with the just-signed terms that he felt were too lenient toward Germany, Foch declared: “It is not a peace treaty. It is a twenty-year armistice.”

He was deadly accurate. World War II began on September 1, 1939 when Germany attacked Poland. Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Although a number of deadly clashes at sea took place in the months that followed, the Battle for France did not erupt in earnest until Germany launched its blitzkrieg attack on Western Europe on May 10, 1940. The fall of France was swift and shocking. By June 14, German troops were casually breaking baguettes and brioches in Parisian cafes after France’s capital was surrendered without a fight.

Two days after the surrender of Paris, the French government, on a brief layover in Bordeaux after fleeing their capital, asked the Spanish ambassador to approach Germany “to find out on what conditions Chancellor Hitler would be prepared to end operations and conclude an armistice.” In response, and again through the Spanish ambassador, Germany directed France to appoint plenipotentiaries for the negotiation of an “agreement to end hostilities.” Germany would reveal the meeting location upon receipt and approval of those names.

There were no immediate volunteers to negotiate with the Germans. There was, in fact, heated debate over the appropriate composition and leadership of the French negotiating party. General Maxime Weygand, who sat across from the Germans at Compiegne in 1918 and was now Supreme Allied Commander, refused to participate. Weygand argued that since the declaration of war was a political act, the politicians who started the war should be accountable for its termination. After some debate, the French delegation was led by a different officer - General Charles Huntziger – who was compelled into service as France’s lead negotiator.

Early on the morning of June 20, the German government wired the French their approval of the French negotiating team. Six hours later, a second message directed the French party to travel to the Loire bridge near Tours. The French team left at 2:30 P.M., and after a long, frustrating day spent weaving their way through crowds of civilian and military refugees in aimless drift away from perceived danger, the French negotiators arrived at the bridge at 10 P.M. A German convoy escorted them to Paris, where they were permitted a short overnight rest. They were driven to Compiegne at 1:30 the following afternoon.

It had been almost a full day since they left Bordeaux, and the French high command was panicked, blind to their whereabouts and to the status of negotiations. Also, Hitler and his generals had declined France’s plea to cease hostilities until an armistice was signed. The carnage continued as France’s leaders waited to learn Germany’s terms for pausing the fight.

 

 

In 1918 there were no third-party witnesses to the armistice talks in the dense French Forest. On June 21, 1940, Compiegne’s Glade of the Armistice was a movie set. A German film crew was on hand – as was American journalist William L. Shirer, who had been tipped off by a German officer - for the preliminary German pageantry leading up to the negotiations.

As German newsreel cameras captured the scene, the tall statue of Marshal Foch still looked on from the Eastern edge of the glade. At the far end of his gaze, the Armistice Museum building was newly scarred. A large hole had been carefully punched through its front wall with pneumatic drills, just barely wide enough and just barely tall enough to drag a wagon-lit through. Foch’s rolling office was pulled out of the museum and rolled over rusty tracks to the center of the glade – to the precise spot where it rested in 1918.

The scene had been carefully staged to maximize its propaganda value and to ensure the humiliation of the French. At about quarter-past-three in the afternoon, a small caravan of gleaming black Mercedes, carrying Adolf Hitler and Germany’s most senior military leaders drove up to the curve in the road where the wide path leading into the park began. Ahead of him, an honor guard of Wehrmacht forces lined the walkway, standing three-deep. At his back, the sword-impaled, fallen German Imperial Eagle was completely shrouded for the day by an immense swastika banner.

With the swastika-draped monument at their backs, the German high command paraded down the stone and dirt pathway toward the center of the glade: Hitler, Göring, Raeder, Keitel, Hess, von Ribbentrop, Brauchitsch, and Jodl. Eyes left, Hitler proffered the stiff-armed Nazi salute as he strode past the guard of honor that stood in rapt attention. Reporting from the site, William L. Shirer noted Hitler’s solemn and grave countenance. Hitler’s true emotions were conveyed by his “springy step,” and a visage that expressed “a note of the triumphant conqueror, the defier of the world.” Hitler also displayed “a sort of scornful inner joy at being present at the greatest reversal of fate – a reversal he himself had wrought.”

When he reached the center of the glade, Hitler paused and absorbed the scene. For a moment he stood with his arms folded in front of a broad, flat granite block in the center of the clearing that rose to knee level. Hitler silently glared at the inscription: “Here on 11 November 1918 succumbed the criminal pride of the German empire vanquished by the free peoples which it tried to enslave.”

William L. Shirer stood fifty yards away. Hitler’s expression, viewed through Shirer’s binoculars, made a deep and lasting impression on the American journalist. The Fuhrer was “afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph.” Shirer later wrote about Hitler’s “burning contempt for this place now and all that it has stood for in the twenty-two years since it witnessed the humbling of the German Empire.”

The German party walked a few steps over to Marshal Foch’s wagon-lit. Hitler paused briefly, and after a courteous “enter please” gesture from an aide, was the first to climb the three steps into the rail car, with the rest of his party close behind. The name cards at each seat identified the places of each negotiator in 1918. Hitler took his place in Marshal Foch’s chair at the center of the table.

After the Germans entered the wagon-lit, the French contingent of negotiators, with an escort of three German officers, briskly marched down the path into the glade in the direction of the carriage. General Charles Huntziger saluted stiffly as he passed in front of the German honor guard that still lined the path.

The French walked haltingly into the rail car, their faces a blend of strain and humility. The German party stood as the French entered, and each side saluted its counterparts in their own way, the Germans thrusting their right arms in their Sieg Heil salute, the French wearily touching their foreheads in the more traditional military manner.

On behalf of Adolf Hitler, General Wilhelm Keitel opened with a statement in which he recounted grievances that had simmered since the last war ended.

The 1914 armistice “ended a war which neither the German people nor its government had desired and, in which, despite their overwhelming superiority, our adversaries had succeeded in decisively beating neither the German navy nor air force.”

Also: “Thus did November 11th, 1918, inaugurate, in this railway carriage, the sufferings of the German people.” That suffering included: “dishonor, humiliation and moral and material suffering.”

More recently, in September 1939, “France and Britain again, without the slightest cause, declared war on Germany.”

And now, “France is beaten. The French government has requested the German government to announce terms for an armistice.”

For perspective, “The fact that the forest of Compiegne has been chosen for the handing-over of those conditions is explained by the determination to efface once and for all, by an act of reparative justice, a memory that was a far from glorious page in the history of France and that was felt by the German people to be the greatest dishonor of all time.”

Finally, for good measure, soldier to soldier: “France has collapsed after resisting heroically and being beaten in an uninterrupted series of bloody battles. That is why Germany has no intention of giving the armistice terms and negotiations a flavor that would humiliate a gallant adversary.”

Twelve minutes after the French entered the car, and just after Keitel finished his preamble, Hitler, Göring, and all the Germans except Keitel left the rail car. Keitel, who would be hanged at Nuremberg five years later, then presented the 21 articles of the armistice agreement.

Finally, at 8:15 that night – five hours after the French negotiators entered the glade, and 30 hours after they left the temporary French capital of Bordeaux - General Huntziger was permitted to telephone his anxious military and government leaders, who were still completely in the dark as to the negotiators’ whereabouts.

Huntziger told Weygand: “I’m in the wagon.”

Weygand replied: “Mon pauvre ami.” He knew the location and immediately grasped its significance.

Huntziger informed him “The terms are harsh, but they contain nothing conflicting with honor.”

Over the next hour, Huntziger then dictated the agreement to Weygand over the phone.

After a number of requests for clarification and minor revisions to several articles, the armistice was signed at 6:50 P.M. on the following day, June 22, 1940.

 

 

With its role as a prop complete, the railway carriage now became a trophy. Wagon-lit #2419D was wheeled onto an immense flatbed trailer and towed out of the forest behind a large truck. Marshal Foch’s carriage was taken to Germany and prominently displayed on the Lustgarten in the heart of Berlin.

Back in Compiegne, a German work crew quickly razed the shrine to the events of 1918. With pickaxes and dynamite, the reminders of France’s victory and vengeance were destroyed. Tracks were yanked from the ground; memorials were hacked to pieces. The large stone monument at the center of the park and the museum with the hole in the wall that had previously housed the wagon-lit were dynamited. The Alsatian monument with the sword-defiled German Imperial Eagle was dissembled into packing cases and shipped to Germany (and then returned to France after the war). The single vestige of 1918 that remained untouched was the looming statue of Marshal Foch. It was temporarily encased in wood for protection when the museum was blown up, and then left in place as a sign of Hitler’s respect for a fellow soldier in the Great War.

There are conflicting stories about precisely how the Compiegne wagon-lit was destroyed at the end of the war. One story holds that it was blown apart during a massive American bombing run on Berlin. Another story claims that the rail car had been hidden but then purposefully destroyed to keep it from the Allies. What is not disputed is that the wagon-lit was burned almost completely to ashes.

 

 

From the earliest days of my project, I planned to visit Compiegne. The significance of the dual armistice signings and Hitler’s diabolical use of the site had established it in my mind as a must-see historical destination.

During the course of a week-long trip to Paris, I travelled to Compiegne by myself on a day when Barbara visited Claude Monet’s house and gardens at Giverny. Thanks, as always, to Barbara, by then I was comfortable with France’s public transport system. I took the Metro to the massive Gare Nord train station, and from there booked a 47-minute mid-morning train to Compiegne.

I had read that the Glade of the Armistice was about 20 minutes from the station in Compiegne, on the road to Rethondes. You could get there by taxi, and a guidebook suggested that you arrange your return trip to the station in advance - since the site is not on a major thoroughfare, and the likelihood of idling taxis was slim. (This was a few years before Uber and Lyft became options). Also, since I would be away from a major metro area, I knew I could not necessarily count on finding an English-speaking driver.

A short line of taxis waited at the station at Compiegne. I jumped in the first car and asked the driver if he spoke English. “Un peu” [a little].

OK, I was prepared. I also spoke a little of his language, and asked, in Philadelphia-accented French “Pouvez-vous me prendre a la clairiere?” [“Can you take me to the clearing?”]

When he nodded and said “Oui,” I handed him my phone into which I had already typed into Google Translate the one question that I wanted to be sure I communicated with no risk of error or misunderstanding: “Pouvez-vous revenir pour moi dans une heure?” [“Can you come back for me in one hour?”] Once again, he nodded, and said “Oui.”

Over the course of about twenty minutes, the car crossed through the small town, passed open fields, and then drove into a wooded area. There is a break in the woods off to the right, just as the road curves to the left. As the car slowed to a stop as the road curved – right at the spot where Hitler alighted from his car in 1940 - the driver interrupted our silence with: “One hour, yes?”

Hopefully I replied, “Oui, une heure,” but honestly, I forget. I jumped out right at the unpaved lane leading off to my right into the park. I remember a surge of excitement and relief – partly from a reasonable sense of assurance that I would not be stranded in the forest and would make it back to Paris that evening. To be extra-safe, when I paid the driver the 20-euro one-way fare, I added a 15-euro tip.

Before entering the park, I walked across the street to where the Alsace-Lorraine Monument stands once again, restored after World War II. The monument is striking not just for its size – including its massive rectangular stone frame and bronze sword – but especially for the unique hostility and bitter vengeance in its design, with the Imperial Eagle of Germany oddly splayed across the base of the monument, stabbed to death by the sword. There was no hint of celebration. It spoke purely of disdain and defiance.

I re-crossed the road from the monument and walked down the path leading into the glade. In 1940 a Wehrmacht honor guard, standing three-deep at attention, had lined this same path. It runs for about 250 yards and opens into a wide oval clearing that is defined by a dense ring of beech trees of varying heights.

As you make your way down the path, you see a low stone slab at the end of the clearing. As you walk into the clearing, the tall, imposing statue of Marshal Foch stands to the left.

Two sets of railroad tracks stitch the ground – one set on either side of the large granite block that sits at the centerpiece of the glade. Smaller, low-set stone monuments are set on the spots where the French and German rail cars had rested in 1918.

It’s a very quiet place, even when visitors are present, as if solemnity is desired and quiet is expected. I’m not sure if my day was a typical day, but I counted no more than eight other people in the park during my one-hour early-afternoon weekday visit. The few voices that I heard were hushed.

I felt a deep sense of personal solemnity, sharply conscious of the activities surrounding the signing of the armistice in 1914, and – especially - the armistice of 1940. Hitler’s presence at this site added an additional dimension, a disturbance of the force. I stood precisely where he stood, in front of the granite slab (which was restored after the war), marked: “Here on 11 November 1918 succumbed the criminal pride of the German empire.” I imagined his fury as he read those words. I remembered William L. Shirer’s description: “scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph.” Seriously, I felt the aura of evil.

There is a new museum building at the site, off to the right, in Foch’s direct gaze from the opposite side of the clearing. Once again, a wagon-lit is on display inside the museum. It’s an exact replica of wagon-lit #2419D, and was donated by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits in 1950. It was built in the same year as the original and outfitted as closely as possible to replicate the carriage used by Marshal Foch.

A few small remnants of the original wagon-lit survived the fire in Berlin – small shards of the chassis and pieces of bronze decorative elements. Like the relics you see under glass at Notre Dame, Sainte-Chapelle, Sacré-Cœur and other churches in Paris, the bones of the carriage are on display under glass in the museum.

Even in the solemn presence of history, I am at my very core a tourist, and of course I purchased a few souvenirs from the gift shop at the museum, including a key chain with a tiny metal representation of the “wagon de l’Armistice de Compiegne”, as well as two copies - one in English, one in French - of the booklets that describe the museum, the glade and – mostly - the historic events that took place there.

One hour at the site worked out perfectly for me. I was relieved, but not surprised, to find my driver waiting at the end of the path. We picked up where our silence had left off and drove quietly back to the train station in Compiegne. I saw everything there was to see, and experienced deeper extremes of emotion than I had expected.

 

 

I was absolutely buoyant when I exited the taxi in front of the train station in Compiegne. The logistics had worked out perfectly, and my visit was even more moving than I had anticipated.

With a bit more than an hour to kill before my return train would leave for Paris, I wandered into a boulangerie a block away from the station and purchased a baguette and a bottle of water for lunch. I walked around the small town-center, and made my way back to the station, still with plenty of time before my train would depart. I sat my backpack on a bench, and, as I typically do while waiting for a train, I paced the length of the platform.

Two wooden rail cars with rusted wheels sat on a siding at the far end of the station. With faded red paint, they looked like freight cars – actually more like cattle cars - but they had small, window-like openings a short way below the roof at each end. Where there might have been panes of glass, I saw strands of barbed wire. The sliding door on each car was secured with a padlock.

These cars were clearly not built for comfort. They were clearly not wagons-lits. These cars had been used to transport Jews and other unfortunate souls from Compiegne to German concentration camps.

I knew a bit of Compiegne’s history before I travelled there on my comfortable train. I knew that Joan of Arc had been captured at Compiegne in 1430, and that rounds of golf had been played there during the 1900 Paris Olympics. However, I was blindingly and embarrassingly unaware of its role in the Holocaust. I read later that night that Compiegne had served as an internment and deportation camp - primarily for French political prisoners, captured resistance fighters, and Jews.

A sign in front of one of the worn wooden red rail cars listed the dates on which the German “destination convoys” departed, along with the number of passengers in each convoy. The destinations included Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau. According to a sign at the station, 39,564 victims were carried away from Compiegne.

Early in my research, I read about the British Naval Mission that was first established in Paris just before the war. That Mission - along with the French Ministry of Marine – was relocated to the small commune of Maintenon the day after war was declared. The new naval headquarters was established on the grounds of the Château de Maintenon, which was owned by the family of the Duc de Noailles. When I later dug through my research to fact-check myself, I noticed a story about the duke’s son, Jean de Noailles, who joined the French resistance after France capitulated to Germany. After he was captured and tortured by the Gestapo early in January 1942, Jean de Noailles was briefly held in Compiegne before he was transported to Buchenwald. He was processed through a series of concentration camps during the war and died at Bergen-Belsen shortly before the war ended.

I traveled to Compiegne intrigued by Hitler’s diabolical quest to avenge the 1918 armistice. I left even more thoroughly repulsed by his toxic heart. The stories that come together to form history weave their way along and together in so many surprising, interesting, and sometimes horrifying dimensions.

I haven’t researched or written about the Holocaust.
Although the legacies of Joachim von Ribbentrop, Marshal Philippe Pétain, and even Admiral Francois Darlan, are forever stained by the roles they played in this monstrous crime against humanity, the very worst of this systematic genocide fell outside the time span and the scope of my story, and I feel its horrors are well beyond my ability to do them justice as a writer.

The sight of those two rail cars provided the most jarring dose of reality on that day, and the most chilling manifestation of diabolical cruelty that I have ever encountered. Less significantly, I learned a priceless lesson about the striking contrast between reading about history, and walking the ground where history was made.