Fatal contract
Sir: Mr Terraine is disconcerted to find him- self in disagreement with the argument of my book Why France Collapsed. 1 am equally dis- concerted to have a long book, one sixth of which is devoted to the political and social preliminaries of a campaign, and five sixths to the campaign itself, handled by a man who gives 85 per cent of his review to setting out his opinion that I ought to have sought the causes of the collapse in the long-term effects of Petain's mystical pact ("unspoken contract') with the troops in 1917 rather than in the tangible facts of military and political adminis- tration and personalities, strategy, tactics, weapons. To the campaign itself" he devotes a mere fifteen lines. This part of the book, 280 of 330 pages. which Sir Denis Brogan in the Observer felt able to call 'a' model of lucidity,'
Mr Terraine finds 'not easy reading.' This makes me doubt whether he has much know- ledge of what a battle is like.
The whole tone and trend of his review im- plies—though he hardly dares to put it down— that the French in 1940. morally weakened by the events of 1917, did not fight, which is the opposite of the truth and of what I have written. It is not Mr Terraine's fault if he has no active experience of fighting a war, but he should not undertake to comment on a work largely concerned with precisely that.
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