World War I

World War I is a historical reference point in the narrator’s account of the hopes his mother fostered and the patriotic assumptions that shaped his response to France’s defeat in 1940. He was not yet born when the war took place, but its memory framed his mother’s earlier visit to Paris and became a precedent he later invoked—mistakenly—when he expected France to recover from a new German offensive.

A boundary in the family’s past

The narrator places his mother’s visit to Paris before World War I. She had dined at Maxim’s on that journey and later insisted to her son that the restaurant was respectable. The war thus marks a boundary in the family’s remembered history: it belongs to a past his mother had experienced directly, while he could know it only through recollection and the stories surrounding him.

That inherited past fed the future his mother imagined for him. When a touring theatrical company came to their town, she dressed for the outing and took him to see Parisian entertainments. He watched through opera glasses and pictured a life of glamour, public distinction, and patriotic service. The future he imagined was not a recollection of World War I, but it grew within a family world whose recent European past his mother’s prewar visit helped define.

The war as a misleading precedent

In 1940, as the German offensive advanced, the narrator reached for World War I as a reason not to believe France could lose. He acknowledged that France had lost a war in 1870, but regarded that outcome as belonging to a different era; World War I, by contrast, seemed to him to prove that the country could recover at the last moment. He assumed the German advance through the Sedan gap would end in a trap laid by the French General Staff.

That confidence shaped his conduct as well as his interpretation. At Bordeaux, he and two other crews were assigned low-altitude patrols over working-class districts. Their briefing presented the patrols as protection for Marshal Pétain, supposedly determined to continue the struggle against Germany and a Communist fifth column. The narrator accepted this account, regarding Pétain as a military figure who would resist defeat, and flew armed patrols ready to act on a signal from base. His World War I precedent did not prepare him to recognize that France’s political and military situation had changed; instead, it made the new defeat seem impossible and helped him accept a false explanation of events.

Retrospective significance

The narrator later presents this faith in historical repetition as a source of error. The assumption that France would once again restore the situation at the last moment kept him from seeing that the supposed internal threat was a deception and that defeat had already taken hold. World War I therefore functions less as a narrated episode than as a standard against which he misjudges the crisis of 1940.

The contrast also exposes the fragility of inherited patriotism. The mother’s prewar memories and her son’s imagined future had given France the air of a story whose favorable ending was assured. When the narrator recalls his belief in that ending, World War I becomes the precedent that explains both the strength of his confidence and its failure to meet the reality of the later war.