FRENCH AND GERMANS

Greymouth Evening Star, 30 December 1940, Page 5

FRENCH AND GERMANS

STORIES OF EYEWITNESSES.

LONDON, October 12.

French confidence in Britain’s ultimate victory is rising, according to the accounts of life in France related by travellers who leave that country to go to Spain. Here is the story of Paris to-day told in Madrid by a young French wife of an American journalist: “The French and the Germans never mix, except for persons in the administration. It is sufficient for Germans to enter a place for the Frenchmen to call for their bills, rise, and go out. In the Champs Elysees, where the Germans are prominent, you hardly see a Frenchman. Theatre announcements are placarded up in two languages, but Frenchmen do not go. When the Folles Bergere opened all the orchestra stalls were full of Germans in their parade uniforms of glittering gold and scarlet, but there were no Frenchmen. @ “The big cafes, which are frequented by Germans, have seen their ordinary habitues clear away. The Frenchman wraps himself, up in his cloak of cold indifference, and looks across the Channel to his British friends, who, he hopes and prays, will, bring him final victory.” Another woman, the American wife of a French industrialist declared, “I have never seen anything, so sad as Paris. Yet this makes me' proud to be married to a Frenchman. It is superb the way in which Parisians ignore the Germans. When your R.A.F. drop pamphlets they are picked up, treasured, copied out and handed round. Every night in a million Paris home the doors and windows are carefully closed and the 8.8. C. broadcasts are tuned-in. The R.A.F. pamphlets warn the French not to attend German military displays, reviews and march-pasts because, some day or othfer, the R.A.F. will bomb them.”

LITTLE PETROL LEFT. A French business man, who. has walked, first across France from Dunkirk to Bordeaux, and then ba,ck across the central, mountain ranges to Vichy, inspecting the-property of his firm, which is one of th,e great oil importers of France, said: — “There is very little petrol' in France, thanks to the work of your R.A.F. From point to point I found depots blown up and burnt out, and the Germans . now have to import practically all they need. “I saw a lot of things during my hiking. Why, at Boulogne, I saw Germans with full equipment, and arms, 'machine-guns, etc., being embarked on those famous flat-bottomed steel barges. I could not count how many. There were at least 100 and they were towed away to sea. They 'did not come back, so they must have been taken to some point of concentration.”