ABSTRACT
The Soviet insistence on a military convention as a prerequisite for a political accord had been accepted by the western negotiators in mid-July, and on 27 July Bonnet urged London that the military delegations should depart ‘in the next three or four days’. The head of the French mission was General Doumenc, a specialist in motorised warfare and at 60 years of age the French army’s youngest general. The instructions struck Ismay ‘as being couched in such general terms as to be almost useless as a brief, dealing ‘solely with what the French wish the Russians to do’ and throwing ‘no light on what the French will do’. The French representatives, Doumenc and Naggiar, wired Paris with the suggestion that General Valin, deputy chief of the French mission, should be sent to Warsaw to brief the French Ambassador, Leon Noel. The reaction of the French leaders to the news of the German-Soviet pact was to blame the Poles and Russians.
