WAR ON HOME FRONT

Southland Times, Issue 24106, 20 April 1940, Page 11

WAR ON HOME FRONT

Frugality And Sacrifice In France

PARIS in half mourning, and it becomes her. Last autumn, when London put on black with such dramatic effect, Paris went only into grey. The railway stations here are dusky rather than dark; and the dimmed lights of the streets seem to give quite a generous glow when one arrives from London black-out or from the towns in the zone of the armies, writes Richard Capell, special correspondent of The Daily Telegraph, London, with the French Army. In those towns—such as Metz, Nancy and Colmar—fancy plays with the thought of a reversal of time’s clock. One often has the feeling at night of a plunge into the Dark Ages. But here, in Paris, the clock has gone back only a hundred years. You cross the Place Vendome at midnight and appreciate that you are seeing the beautiful square much as Alfred de Musset and Balzac and Chopin saw it. And whatever the motorist may say, the soft duskness of the muted lamps becomes it well. End of an Epoch LIKE London, Paris has gained in dignity by the suppression of illuminated advertisements. But again there is a difference in the effect here. In Piccadilly Circus the disappearance of the shrieking night-signs came dramatically. It was like the announcement of the end of an epoch, like the eclipse of folly and a summons to face tragic realities. The night-signs have gone, too, from the boulevards; but the change seems less drastic. Perhaps they were never quite so blatant in Paris as in London. In going into half-mourning Paris has simply put off a quantity of tawdry ornaments that never really added to her good looks. The porches of Notre Dame and the base of the Vendome column have been protected; but there is nothing here like the general look of fortification given by the London sandbags. Marochetti’s alter piece at the Madeleine is boarded up, and the boards are adorned with the flags of France, Britain and Poland. A number of big hotels have been requisitioned. The Ministry of Information, for instance, has taken over the Continental, and the Regina is now the headquarters of the Poles in Paris. But in the remaining hotels there is room and to spare for visitors. Since the autumn an extension ot the hours of opening has been granted to places of refreshment, which do not shut now until midnight. This seems generous indeed if one has come from a town in the Army zone, where all doors are shut and lights put out at 9 o’clock. Prices in the restaurants have gone up by about one-third and, so far, there is no rationing in force. Only petrol is rationed; the allowance is liberal and one hears no complaints on this score.

Gifts to Soldiers IF COFFEE is not to be had liberally at the grocers’ shops there is plenty of tea. Human nature, however, would not be itself if this question of coffee did not give rise to faint moans. It is at the moment the touchstone of the civilian’s morale. You can test the character of your friends and acquaintances by the answers you get to a

question about? the supply of coffee. While Mlle. Faint-Heart thinks that the end of civilization is at hand if she cannot have all she wants for the asking, Mme. Standfast tells you disdainfully that she would rather bite her tongue than complain about such trifles. “If coffee runs short, then tea will do so as well; and if the day should come when there is no tea, well, as the mother of soldiers at the front, I shall be well satisfied with an infusion of dandelion.” After four months spent with the French armies in the field I look at the grey and sedate Paris of this war time, this Paris in half-mourning, and think above all of the sundered families and then, by association of the great heaps of money orders which I have seen cashed by soldiers at the field post-offices. There can be but few French soldiers so friendless or of such poor homes as not to receive small remittances by money order to supplement their pay —remittances which (in how many cases!) represent real sacrifices on the part of the' family at home. Women’s Share

TO STROLL in the streets of Paris is to reflect that, from almost every house you pass, a husband or son has gone to some battalion or battery, to some airfield or Maginot fort in the east or north. In the populous quarters the memory of those piles of money orders comes back to you. Here at the street stalls, buying provisions on their way home from work, are throngs of women —women who are keeping the family going in the absence of their menfolk and, you can guess, saving every possible spare penny for that money order. . The women of the French workingclasses are shouldering a full share of the burden of war. The peasants cottages one passes in the train, the blocks of workmen’s dwellings seen as we draw into Paris —they all tell the same tale to anyone who has heard a few typical stories of this war time. It is a tale of fathers mobilized, of grandmothers in charge of the children and of wives at work earning the family bread in shops or factories or on the land with the older men.

A pillar of the national economy of France in war time is the soldier’s acceptance of a rate of pay which is not a great deal when he is in the line (10 francs a day, or about 15d), and is not more than nominal when he is out of it: this, and the slenderness of the Government’s allowance to his family. The son in the army is a charge accepted by the French family. It must be that the people as a whole prefer that the family undertake more and the State less than we on our side of the water have come to consider the appropriate thing. Not for me to do more than observe that while the men of France are in millions on guard at the frontier their womenfolk are bread-winning. From many and many a talk with them up the line I have gained glimpses into the economy of the French family of humble standing which, in a day or two spent in Paris, lent a new interest to a stroll away from the familiar beautiful scenes into the mean streets.

Any of these little shops' might be those of acquaintances of mine up the line who have described just such shops to me and have told me with how much or little success the management had been taken over by their wives. At an open stall in the street there is earnest bargaining going on between two middle-aged women. Whether the franc or two at issue is won by seller or buyer it is as likely as not that it will go toward a money order for a soldier at the front.