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the sector, the outcome would depend on the 1st Armoured, he added.
    Evans pointed out the extreme weakness of his force which faced far heavier and more numerous German tanks. Weygand replied that, if the British could not stop the enemy with its armoured vehicles, they ‘must stop him with bare hands and bite him like a dog’.
    As the Tenth Army disintegrated, Evans prepared to retreat across the Seine. He watched French soldiers pouring to the rear, and looked in vain for any spirit of resistance. ‘No defences were prepared,’ a British report read. ‘No wire or anti-tank mines were sited and no trenches were dug. Nor was there apparently any offensive spirit among commanders ortroops . . . it is not too much to say that an atmosphere of inevitable defeat was growing.’
    In adversity, relations between senior officers in the Allied armies grew frayed. A French general accused Beauman of cowardice, and dismissed his soldiers as ‘a thoroughly undisciplined rabble’. Another said Victor Fortune was guilty of treachery, and should be court-martialled. Karslake concluded that this was part of ‘a definite policy instigated by General Weygand’, presumably to find a scapegoat for the reverses suffered by his own forces.
    In a bid to raise French morale, a Canadian division left Britain to cross the Channel. Landing at Brest, it moved through the Breton capital of Rennes and headed for the city of Laval on the line of the German advance. But, at the same time, Operation Cycle was launched to move more than 12,000 troops by sea from the big port of Le Havre in Normandy to the greater safety of Cherbourg on the peninsula sticking out into the Channel. Sixty-seven merchant ships and 140 small craft were drafted in for the task. The nature and pace of the German campaign made military planning difficult, and Churchill said the British forces should no longer accept orders from the French ‘who had let us down badly’. But, while the front-line soldiers were either evacuated or captured, more than 100,000 of their comrades were still forgotten in France.
    Some of them followed the progress of the war by listening to the radio or picking up copies of the
Continental Daily Mail
they found in shops in towns near their bases before the occupation of Paris. Alec Cuthbert, a carpenter from Holbeach in Lincolnshire serving with a vehicle repair unitoutside Nantes, heard of the German advance on the BBC, but still ‘hadn’t a clue about what was going on’.
    Many remained in the dark about the progress of the fighting or depended on the rumour mill. Some had not even heard about the evacuation from Dunkirk. ‘My time in France was nothing but retreat, anxiety, lack of knowledge of what was going on, communications were almost non-existent, fighter control as such had vanished,’ an RAF fighter pilot recalled.
    Writing in a black-covered copy of the
Stockfeeder’s Diary
, wireless operator Mervyn Llewelyn-Jones noted:
    June 9. War news grave. Germans in Sessions [Soissons]. Sent 10/-note home on 5th of June to Darling Nan.
    June 10. Bought Daily Mail. Up at 7am. Extremely hot today. Germans nearing Rouen. Italy coming in on German side.
    June 12. Went for a bath. Changed socks. Stayed in Barracks. Went over to Canteen. No letters today. Rather a dull day.
    June 13. Return of washing. Changed clothes. Wrote to my Darling also Dad and Mam.
    June 14. Two loving letters from my Darling – all is well. Little Michael doing well.Good news. Paid 50 fr. 18
    Neville Chesterton, a 19-year-old former railway clerk from Wednesbury in Staffordshire, who found France very flat and uninteresting, sensed that nobody knew where his fifty-strong Royal Engineers unit was going or what it was meant to be doing. As the men headed westwards towards the Atlantic coast, they heard rumours that the fighting was going badly, though the word ‘Dunkirk’ was not mentioned. Eventuallythey reached a camp thirty miles from the port of St-Nazaire where