STUDY IN DISINTEGRATION

A THOUSAND SHALL FALL--Hans Habe --Harcourf Brace ($3).

As human and real as a nightmare is this first-hand account of the Fall of France by a soldier of the French Army. That enormous and intricate catastrophe might have cramped the hand of a Tolstoi. Hans Habe, previously a minor novelist, has turned it into the most vivid book World War II has yet produced. He tells nothing he did not see with his own eyes. But he saw the disintegration of a great people.

A Hungarian antifascist, Habe enlisted in France's 21st Foreign Volunteers at the outbreak of the war. In May 1940 his regiment, stationed in Alsace, was ordered west. In Ardennes they held the front entrusted to them for three weeks, then joined the general retreat. A little south of Domremy, on June 21, they received orders to lay down their arms; France had sued for armistice. Habe was then captured by Germans, was imprisoned with 22,000 other troops at Dieuze, escaped in August into Unoccupied France.

"The Enemy is Stronger." It was bad from the very beginning. The men of Habe's regiment were soft after months of misdirected idleness. Their gas masks were inadequately sealed over the eyes; they had misfit helmets, tattered shoes, antediluvian weapons (Habe used an 1891, 20-lb. Remington). The first mild night air-raid revealed their cowardice: in an inn, when the lights went on again, steel helmets peeped shamefully from beneath the tables. One of dozens of Habe tab leaux: a shamed, helmeted face, trying to laugh it off, beside the knees of a peasant woman who had not moved from her chair.

On the march their officers dinned into them, "the enemy is stronger." The mottoes of "the Greatest Army in Europe" became planquez-vous (hide) and sauve qui peut. In a fatal confusion of discipline with punishment, the officers tried to toughen them while they marched: 35, 40, 45 kilometers a night. The older men fell out. The stronger, to ease their regulation load of 70 pounds, tossed their equipment in the ditches. Trucks were nowhere to be seen.

They marched against an enemy hardened by years of expert training, better handled, who had much better pay, besides daily mail from home. Later, Habe saw German work-battalions dressed in cool, spotless white. Trucks carried their coats, to say nothing of their equipment.

The French marched to battle in retreat-like confusion. "A horse collapsed and could not rise again; a tank passed over him. The heavy caterpillar treads cut into his living flesh. Stray cows . . . bellowing with pain .. . ran amidst the tanks, trucks, and cannon. Everybody was looking for everybody else. . . . And no one knew where he was going."

They marched also among the specialized terrors of sounds and silence. "The silence burst out, now at one place, now at another, with the suddenness of a cry." In Belleville, first night under shell fire, not an officer was to be found. "At that moment . . .we lost our confidence in our leaders, the confidence that is the most elementary requirement for any army that wants to win." They never had reason to regain it--except in a few true officers. The other officers liked to say they loved France better than Hitler but Hitler better than Blum. The best officer Habe knew--a Colonel de Buissy, who had served in the Foreign Legion--was sent home. His superiors felt that he took the war much too seriously. Said one, contemptuously: "He wanted to resist at any cost."

The Luftwaffe did less harm to the soldiers' bodies than to their brains. Like flying tanks, the Arrado planes, cruising so insolently low, observing every confused movement of French troops and of artillery, added to the Frenchmen's sense of German omnipotence and omniscience. "It was not a war, but a hunt." Habe's captain lost his head, ordered his men into a glade which was just right "for a solitary pair of lovers and not for two companies of infantry." Once the men were nicely crowded there, their heads buried in the damp, rich ground, the German artillery cut loose on them.

There Habe experienced for the first time (it was to become daily breath) some of the strange poetry of war: "I was suddenly close to the smallest and lowest creatures, the insects and worms, everything that crawled and writhed humbly and flatly on the ground." The worms went on about their business while the shells exploded (they are, as Darwin learned, quite deaf), the bees hummed, and now and then, between explosions, a bird sang. "It sometimes seemed that we were already in our graves, half alive and half dead: and most curiously, the whistling shells meant life and the buzzing bees and singing birds meant death."

Before the whole shaking structure fell to pieces, there was a taste of bravery for some of these men. Captain Count Ravel forced enemy units five times superior in numbers to retire two kilometers; Habe's division--the Thirty-fifth--held a deep wedge of the victorious German army of Sedan motionless until the final collapse of France--although it was only half-fed, undefended from the air, tortured with noise and silence.

At length came a morning when Habe, at his observation post, saw the opposing slope mushroom brazenly with helmetless German heads, and their officers, calm on the skyline with spread maps, pointing at him with gloved fingers. The French had no ammunition. Later his phone went dead. He and his two companions realized that everyone had withdrawn behind them. They faced 60,000 Germans. Carrying their 250 pounds of observation equipment--"we were three soldiers unable to lose confidence in the army in a single night"--they retreated too.

The Breakup. They walked under a night sky which bloomed with the "strange, skin color" of burning villages. They went among walls which fell not crashing but crumbling "like bread in a man's hand." Twice they met diving Stukas whose "sound alone, like a vertical thunderbolt, nearly destroys your consciousness."

After 45 kilometers, with virtually no rest, they found their regiment; and, with the regiment, kept right on retreating. They retreated single file, in open daylight, with the pitiful hope that this insanity must be for a strategic reason worth hoping for. They lived in "the soldier's vital element: ignorance."

Marching for twelve hours on the sharp ballast of a railroad, they were strafed, and Habe learned "what it feels like to be a pheasant or a deer." They passed a vacant town in whose vacant railroad station the bell and clock were still at work. At Vienne-la-Ville, from three converging highways, "the army defeated without a fight streamed toward the fourth highway, leading south. . . . Their hands were cramped, as though surprised by rigor mortis as they clung to the wagons. Now and then one of them would fall asleep. Then his clutching fingers would relax, and he would roll down on the pavement. The horses drawing the next wagon would trample him, the wheels would roll over him."

From there on, all the regiments they passed had followed the order to "leave the Germans nothing." The soldiers stole everything in sight for the pure sake of stealing; they hobbled along, drunk and heartbroken, and "out of their pockets hung bottles, women's shoes, neckties, ribbons, toys. . . . Most had found hats in some store: there were gray, black, brown felt hats" instead of helmets; "a few of the Arabs had pinned flowery women's hats to their fezzes."

Desertion was taken for granted; regiments dwindled to the vanishing point. And "since every town and village offered new luxuries . . . [the] loot from a whole town would be lying on the highway five kilometers further on." Some of the officers marched with their men, "overcome by a profound disgust and an unspeakable sadness"; but more and more swept past in cars piled high with loot. For several minutes on end, a car Habe was in skidded through cheese, loot that had been dumped in the road.

They passed through the provinces of the Marne, the Meuse, the Vosges and the village of Domremy-la-Pucelle. There, in front of the birthplace of Jeanne d'Arc, two soldiers wrangled over a bicycle. Not far beneath the town, his calm and valiant captain, Saint-Brice, took Habe aside and let him know that the war, for them, was over. They knelt before a roadside shrine of the Virgin and prayed.

Hans Habe is the nom de plume of tall, bleached-blond, 30-year-old Jean Bekessy (bekeshay). Before the war he wrote three anti-fascist novels (Three Over the Frontiers and Sixteen Days have been published in the U.S.) of which the Nazis burned one. In 1932 Nazis attempted to assassinate him in Vienna. Thenceforth, until the war, he worked as a journalist in Geneva.

After his imprisonment and escape (described with many sharp sidelights on Nazi methods of occupation) Habe reached the U.S., where his wife and parents have joined him. He is at work on a new novel. Subject: the war between generations (he favors the elder). He lives in Manhattan's Alden Hotel, does his work out of town, at West Point. He has applied for U.S. citizenship; has a draft number. In his pocket he carries a crystal rosary, wrapped in a lace handkerchief. It was given to him by the proprietress of a Nancy brothel who hid him from the Germans for three days.

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