FRANCE'S AGONY

Evening Post, Volume CXXXII, Issue 77, 27 September 1941, Page 15

FRANCE'S AGONY

REVEALING LETTERS

"Tell us if 16-year-old French boys would be accepted in the R.A.P." It was not an adventure-seeking youngster who wrote that to the British Broadcasting Company, but his mother, a soldier's wife, listening with her son every evening to the English radio which brought the only news the French could believe. They listened overhead, too, for the English planes whose "visits" made them "especially happy," even though destruction was thus being dropped upon their own country. For such destruction the French are long past caring.' Even hunger does not matter. "Let the English win; we'll eat afterwards." When English troops come again to fight on French soil ("which I hope will be soon") the French people will be ready to .help, them. And in December a group of 78 denizens of the "unoccupied zone" sent to the international radio station in Boston a message which rings through all this book like an epic refrain:

"Dear friends, it isn't necessary to think of giving us food supplies; help only our allies and our free brothers; as for us, we shall endure our privations courageously to the victory. Long live America! Long live England! Long live Free France!" ! For more than a year no voice spoke for the people, the nation, of France. No voice could. Without representative government or freedom of communication the people have been shut away in their heavy silence. But gradually letters began to come through, and from thousands of such letters has been compiled "They Speak for a Nation." This is what these letters actually do. Coming from all kinds of people, all classes, ages, backgrounds, almost all shades of political opinion. They disagree on certain conspicuous Questions —Marshal Petairi, for instance—but on one great question there is no disagreement: hatred for the invader and his few French abettors; prayer for British victory from 90 per cent, of the population: willingness to suffer anything. if only France may again be free. As early as January there is mention of the "multitude? ' f little V's" popping out everywhere. "The Ger mans though! they had conquered, us. but each day their victory diminishes." wrote a war veteran. From oppressed and forsaken Lorraine a young girl wrote to General de Gaulle. "All these 'prohibitions' don't annoy us much. What infuriates us is that .vord 'collaboration.'" And another woman summed up. "The more they want to talk collaboration with us the more the French people resist-" The letters are alive with significant detail: '"eartions of French youth, attitude towards colonial populations, notes on German industrial permeation, comments on Nazi "efficiency." secret instructions for co-operation with the British, confessions of past weakness urderstood too late —this and more.