You read “perfidious” and append Albion. Yup, there’s been plenty of dirty work at the crossroads but the UK does not have a monopoly in this department.
Before I dish the dirt I must make it clear that I am a mongrel: Irish, English, Spanish and French blood, whizzing round at rather too high pressure. ( Don’t tell my doctor but it’s 145/85.) I am reading Scum of the Earth by Arthur Koestler. He describes the awful conditions he endured in a prison camp at Vernet, near the Pyrenees. At the outbreak of World War Two the French government locked up undesirables who had fled Eastern Europe and Nazi Germany. The same happened in Britain except that here the internees had a chance to prove their credentials.
Tony, who I had the pleasure to sit beside for many years in the City, told me about his father, Dr Machacek. His father was training to be a doctor in Brno at the outbreak of war. He wanted to fight the Nazis and his mother gave him her gold wedding ring and sewed a banknote into the collar of his shirt. He was smuggled out of Czechoslovakia by the Resistance and eventually got to France to enrol as a soldier. This was at the point France surrendered and he and other Czechs were offered two choices: to be sent back to Czechoslovakia or to go to England. Although he spoke no English, he chose the latter and was promptly interned upon arrival.
After some six months he persuaded the authorities to release him and let him complete his medical training. To make a long and fascinating story short, he married an English girl (Tony’s mother) and became a doctor in the RAF taking care of Czech pilots. After the war he took his bride home to Prague and then the Communists invaded but that is another story of escape and derring-do.
To say that internees in France in 1940 were treated shabbily is an understatement. There were tens of thousands of refugees from political and racial persecution. Marshal Petain, signing the Armistice Treaty with Germany, spoke of it being an “honourable soldiers’ peace”. However, the treaty provided for the extradition of political refugees. These enemies of Germany were handed over to the Gestapo, complete with their records trustingly given to the French authorities. It is a disgraceful episode in French history.
PS, I alluded to Trouble in Tahiti a few days ago. There has been Trouble in Paraguay this weekend but my reader there reports that she’s safe. Satisfactory.