Cushy Numbers

Neal Ascherson

• French and Germans, Germans and French: A Personal Interpretation of France under Two Occupations, 1914-1918/1940-1944 by Richard Cobb
  University Press of New England, 188 pp, £10.95, July 1983, ISBN 0 87451 225 5
• Still Life: Scenes from a Tunbridge Wells Childhood by Richard Cobb
  Chatto, 161 pp, £8.95, September 1983, ISBN 0 7011 2695 7

‘The fascination exercised by the study of collaborationism on the historian (especially the Anglo-Saxon one) can be attributed partly to unfamiliarity with something outside the national experience, but, perhaps even more, to the sheer range of mutual personal situations involved.’ Even now, that Anglo-Saxon unfamiliarity remains immense. It seems, at least to me, that all the books and – especially – films of recent years about the German occupation of France, and about French behaviour during that period, have still taught the British little. All that has taken place is a retreat from our naive belief in an almost universal support for the Resistance, associated with righteous horror at the ‘handful’ of Collaborators (even though shaving girls’ heads was ‘going a bit far’), to the idea that the Resistance was a Communist fraud backed from London by leftist elements in SOE, operating in a France where Pétain was thoroughly popular even for assisting the Germans in the extermination of the French Jews.