La France Eternelle

Entendez-vous dans les campagnes

Mugir ces feroces soldats?

Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras

Egorger nos fils, nos compagnes

--La Marseillaise

As wild and angry as when Frenchmen had cried "a has la Bastille!", the voice of French resistance echoed last week from the Pyrenees to the Swiss Alps. In its violent aspects it was still a minority resistance. But it spoke with gunfire in Paris, with hand grenades in Lyon.

The immediate cause of the outbreaks was Germany's attempt to drain France of all available manpower. The Germans, taking over from Pierre Laval the job of recruiting an additional 40,000 French workmen, launched one of the biggest manhunts in history. They sought workmen to build up the fortifications of Hitler's "festung Europa," for work in German factories, for services of supply behind German lines in Russia.

Frenchmen hid out in cities. Many fled to the Alps, many to the wild Haute-Savoie region along the Swiss frontier. They dug up buried guns and ammunition and joined former officers of the French Army. From "somewhere in France," a "Headquarters of Francs-Tireurs and Partisans" reported that 282 German officers and men had been killed, 14 trains wrecked, 49 locomotives destroyed, four bridges blown up, ten French quislings executed, between Dec. 20 and Jan. 20.

The rumble of gunfire was heard in Switzerland. The Fighting French, in contact with French underground workers, reported 500 Germans killed throughout France last week. Saboteurs blew up a troop train near Dijon, killed 250. In Lyon a German detachment was ambushed and scattered with hand grenades. Bombs killed 23 Nazi officers at a Lille cafe. For the fifth time since 1941, an unsuccessful attempt was made to assassinate the arch-collaborationist Marcel Deat.

Most Frenchmen were still imprisoned and frustrated within la patrie, but they were united in hatred of the Hun and of collaboration. London reports claimed that 80% of the French people now recognized General Charles de Gaulle as their symbol of resistance. They also recognized that the German drain on their working (and fighting) manpower can be slowed only by French resistance, halted only by a second front. Pending the day of invasion, Frenchmen remembered:

Aux armes, Citoyens!

Formez vos bataillons!

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.