“No one seems to believe that France will even have to go to war,” Marie said to comfort him. And it was perfectly true. Even now, as the warm days of May began, Parisians were starting to sit outside the bistros and cafés to enjoy the sunshine as if Hitler and his armies belonged in another universe.

“But you think we’re going to war, don’t you?” Charlie replied. And she couldn’t deny it.

To Roland she confessed: “I’m just relieved he isn’t on the front line.”

Roland, of course, would never admit to such a thing.

“The boy can’t fight on crutches,” he muttered, “and that’s all there is to say.”

It came on the eighth day of May. Blitzkrieg. Straight through Belgium, the Netherlands, tiny Luxembourg and the Ardennes. The German armored divisions poured through between the end of the Maginot Line and the French and British forces guarding the northern coastal plain.

It happened so fast that, in later years, people would say that the French collapsed and gave up in face of the onslaught. It was not so at all. The French fought heroically. But, just as had happened in the Great War before, the high command had not adapted to the latest modern warfare. That essential combination of tanks operating with air cover, on a large scale, was lacking. Even the tank division bravely commanded by Colonel de Gaulle was forced to retire in the face of overwhelming air attack from German Stukas.

In the space of days, France lost a hundred thousand men—not casualties, but killed.

By early June, the British forces, together with a hundred thousand French troops, were trapped against the coast at Dunkirk, while Paris lay open before the German divisions.

In Paris, Charlie was beside himself.

“I’m sitting here doing nothing to defend my country,” he cried.

But his father was more realistic.

“There is nothing useful you could have done,” he told him grimly. “The war is already over. The British are about to be annihilated at Dunkirk, and that’s it.”

He was right—and, miraculously, wrong. Hitler, having just won the war, didn’t realize it. Fearful that his lines were overextended—they were, but the Allies had no armor to throw at them—and trusting mistakenly in the Luftwaffe to finish the British army on the huge beaches of Dunkirk, he hesitated. And thanks to this God-given but astounding military error, Paris learned days later that nearly a third of a million British and French troops had been ferried across the English Channel to safety.

But France itself could not be saved. France was lost. By the tenth of June, people were evacuating. Roland told Marie and Charlie that they must all go down to the château. “The Germans will occupy Paris,” he said. “If they take over the apartment, so be it. But at all costs we must try to save the château.”