Eyewitness (26 page)

‘Very well,’ Leclerc said. ‘We will write out a dozen orders to the commanders of these strongpoints, instructing them to surrender. You, General Scholtz, will sign the orders. Then one of your officers and one of my officers will jointly take the orders to each of the strongpoints.’ Scholtz signed. Except at one place where a Frenchman and the German with him were shot dead, this device worked perfectly. But here and there the fighting was still going on.

One of these combat zones lay directly in front of us: the Luxembourg. It was a scene that bore no relation to anything I can remember in modern war. Here in the Denfert Rochereau were the crowds and the music and the delirious shouting. Bottles of wine were being passed up to the soldiers on the trucks. Girls with flowers in their hair were clambering over the tanks or riding in the jeeps with their arms round the soldiers’ necks. Women were lifting their babies to be kissed. Old men were embracing. Others were sitting weeping in the gutters. Others again just standing and crying aloud with joy.

We walked a hundred yards down the street to the Boulevard Montparnasse, and all the celebration was there cut off with the same abruptness with which a cliff falls into the sea. Out beyond the corner of the Boulevard Montparnasse there was simply empty space; first the wide empty crossroads, then the empty gardens, then the sinister facade of the Senate buildings, where the enemy snipers were holding out. Every few minutes a fusillade of shots came out of one of the upper windows, and they smacked sharply against the walls of the houses looking on to the gardens. Occasionally one of the French tanks drawn up under the trees spat out a stream of tracers that ran like fireworks up the face of the Senate. Here on this side was the wild rejoicing; there on that side the empty space and the war. There was no liaison between these two scenes; they might have been separate sets at a movie studio. But occasionally some unknowing cyclist or perhaps a woman hurrying home from her shopping would walk out into the empty space. At once the gendarmes and the Resistance boys blew madly on their whistles. Frantically they beckoned the trespassers back into the cover of the walls. Then for a little there would be nothing but the empty space again, and the bursts of machine-gun fire.

It was the same wherever you turned. Along all the streets where the army had penetrated the snipers had drawn back, and the people had rushed into the open to express their joy. Then when you got to the head of the column the crowds and the exultation died away together. People crept from door to door along the walls, furtively and silently. Odd shots burst down from the roof-tops.

This was the high moment in the lives of the boys of the Forces Françaises Intérieures, the maquis of the streets, the youths who had plotted in the secret cellars against the Germans through all these years. Now they were out in the open, shooting with their hoarded arms. Many of them were half-mad with passionate excitement. They had long since passed the stage where they recognised any risk at all. At this tense crisis of their revolution they had seized every workable car from the city garages, and now they were careering hectically through the streets, five or ten men to a car, all armed trying to draw the fire of the snipers on the roof-tops.

For a full week before we had arrived, this street fighting had been going on. Already three-quarters of Paris had fallen to the Resistance movement. The whole city had been secretly divided into resistance zones, little underground cells that might be in a garage or a backstreet hotel.

I was looking round for someone to guide me down towards the left bank of the river when one of the boys with an F.F.I. armband stopped me. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you to our headquarters.’

‘You speak English?’

‘I’m in the R.A.F.’

‘But how …?’

It was the sort of story that is impossible to absorb. Shot down over the Channel, the rescue and the escape, three years wandering round Europe, the fight in the Warsaw ghetto and then Paris.

‘I’m Australian,’ he said. ‘In our group we have Spanish, Dutch, Poles and Portuguese as well as the French.’

They lived in a rambling garage-cum-workshop. At the gate the young Spaniard was piling half a dozen wooden-handled German grenades into his car.

‘I can’t make out how you work them,’ he said. ‘Do you pull this or this or what do you do?’

They had about twenty prisoners, men and women, locked in a back room. All of them stood up when we entered the room, and it was fairly clear that they expected to die. More than half were French snipers. The attitude of the F.F.I. youths towards them was that of a workman in a butchery, who will presently take such animals as he is directed to take, and kill them. Within the hour they had received an order that all prisoners must be handed over to the incoming Allied authorities. It neither pleased nor displeased them. To kill or not to kill. It was all the same so long as these pieces were taken off the chessboard of Paris. The prisoners were without identity any more. To the F.F.I. youths who had captured them they were merely abstract evil; so many capsules of poison which were pleasant to display as the measure of their success in the fighting.

The Dutchman said in English: ‘We have been conducting our courtsmartial in the next room. Last night we had a dentist who used to give his patients away to the Gestapo. We took evidence on his behalf before we shot him.’

They had captured a quantity of liquor in their raids on the snipers. We drank brandy. There was some trouble in getting enough glasses. They wanted to follow the brandy with Benedictine and Grand Marnier, and when we refused they put the bottles in the Volkswagen. Three of them jumped on the back to guide us down to the river. The Australian had already patrolled as far as the Hôtel de Ville that day, and so we headed in that direction. It was necessary to take a detour through the back streets to the east. The Boulevard Arago. The Boulevard de Port-Royal. The Rue St. Jacques and on across the St. Germain. Every now and then the Australian shouted from the back seat: ‘Rush the next two blocks … Sharp right and keep to the left-hand side … rush the next intersection.’ The Volkswagen was going beautifully. We had the windscreen down and the hood down, and with the engine in the rear it was possible to grip the road and turn abruptly left or right as he directed.

Unawares we came out on the Left Bank, and headed straight across on to the Ile de la Cité. Notre Dame. The bridges over the Seine. The Tuileries and the Louvre. How beautiful was Paris. One more bridge. Then we went directly into a sea of human beings. They were swarming like ants across the square in front of the Hôtel de Ville. The colour red on the women, red for revolution. They opened up a passage for the Volkswagen. Then they rushed it. I could not tell exactly what they were doing; they seemed to be trying to pick it up and carry it forward. At any rate, the wheels were half off the ground, and as we were borne along to the gates of the Hôtel de Ville the gendarmes stood back and pushed us through.

Then up the staircase and into the reception hall, a place of vast Rubenesque murals and mirrors that had been lately splintered by the bullets coming up from the river bank. For a week the Hôtel de Ville had been a stronghold barricaded against the Nazis. The prefect was immaculate. He was one of those sparrow-like Frenchmen described by the French word
mince
. He bowed. He smiled and made one of those measured and polished little Parisian speeches. ‘May I offer all my felicitations on your arrival, and assure you of the warmest possible reception from the people who have been looking forward to this day of liberation with a fervour matched only by their admiration for your feat of arms in Normandy.’ Or something along those lines. It was elegance in the midst of hysteria, a strange mixture.

Three people together started telling us of the uprising which had begun a week before. Some ten thousand German troops had been left to garrison Paris. All through August soldiers had been appearing from the west and passing eastward through the city; columns of horse-drawn vehicles, men on bicycles, men wheeling prams and handcarts. More and more kept passing through. The tide had turned, and everybody in Paris knew it, the Nazis and the F.F.I. and the people. The strikes began in the factories, then incidents in the streets. It became unsafe for single Germans to go about at night. In the workers’ districts they were completely unsafe.

For the most part the Nazis had taken over the West End of Paris: the Senate and the Quai d’Orsay and the Chambre des Deputés (where Goering had a suite), the Hôtel Crillon and the Ministries and the hotels round the Rue de Rivoli, the Place Vendôme and the Rue Royale. They were clustered thickly round the Arc de Triomphe, in the Avenue Kléber (which had been partly wired off for four years) and down the Avenue Foch, where the main Gestapo headquarters operated, and the millionaires’ flats were taken over, especially those belonging to the Jews. About five hundred hotels in all had been requisitioned. The German garrison now began to retire into these places for their last stand. At the same time the ‘grey mice’ were evacuated. These were the German women wearing grey uniform who were working as clerks and secretaries for the army of occupation. Venomously the Parisians watched them going off at the Gare de l’Est, with their food supplies and their trunks of dresses and materials. The atmosphere of the city grew more and more tense and overcast.

On Friday, the 18th of August, the F.F.I. began to strike. They overran the workers’ districts at once. The Parisian police rose with the FF.I. They barricaded themselves in their big barracks on the Ile de la Cité, and from there they had a field of fire across both banks of the Seine, and the traffic stopped. From the Hôtel de Ville too the F.F.I. blocked the eastern exits to the city.

This
coup de main
threw the Germans temporarily off balance. Uncertain of how far the revolution would spread, and urgently needing to keep the roads open for the retreating troops, they sued for an armistice. There was a confused series of negotiations through the Swedish minister, and on the Saturday it was agreed that firing should cease on condition that the Germans withdrew from the capital.

On the Sunday the Germans began to bring tanks into Paris. They had quickly re-grouped their outlying strongpoints. In the evening the F.F.I. saw clearly that they were being cheated and opened fire again. The Germans at once sent tanks along the boulevards, and attacked the Préfecture where the police were holding out. Spasmodic street fighting continued all through Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, while all Paris breathlessly waited for the arrival of Eisenhower’s forces. The skirmishing was continuous in the green belt round the city. F.F.I. sharpshooters were racing through the forests at night with their headlights full on. When they drew fire they shot back from the open luggage carriers at the rear of their vehicles.

Through this period half a dozen liberation newspapers like the
Figaro
were printed and sold openly in the streets. One after another the houses put out French flags. There were bitter gun duels with Darnand’s
Milice
: the young Frenchmen who had thrown in their lot with the Germans.

On Thursday night one of Leclerc’s officers got into the city as far as the Hôtel de Ville, and announced his news: ‘The French division is about to arrive.’

And now here we were on the morrow, Friday the 25th of August, and all Paris was rising to breathe again.

At the Ritz, the last of the German officers were running out of the front door and jumping into their cars. At the Ministry of Marine another group was trapped, and they came out carrying their luggage. The bags were torn open, and the contents scattered over the street; priceless unbuyable things like soap and chocolate and cigarettes. At that moment the Paris mob made one of its superb gestures. The people drew back from these luxury things. Then they trampled them underfoot. Fifty such incidents were going on all over Paris; at the Hôtel Crillon, up the Champs Elysées, down the Avenue Kléber. No-one knew exactly what was happening, what streets were safe.

Towards evening things were a little calmer. Exhausted by a day of mad excitement the crowds were drawing back to their homes. The Rue de Rivoli looked fairly clear, and we put the Volkswagen down it at speed. French tanks were arriving in the Tuileries. At the corner of the Rue Castiglione a heap of German staff cars burned, but it was quiet in the Place Vendôme and the Place de l’Opéra.

At this moment there were no Allied troops in Paris except the leading squadrons of the Leclerc division. The rest of us who had come in – censors and correspondents and the other camp followers – had all been instructed to gather at the Hôtel Scribe. There must have been a hundred cars drawn up outside the entrance, and twice as many men clamouring for rooms in the foyer inside. The staff of the Scribe, utterly baffled by this invasion, were crying out in despair: ‘We have no more rooms. Why don’t you try somewhere else?’

And then the correspondents: ‘But we
must
have rooms here.’

‘I tell you we are full up.’

Perhaps James Thurber could have handled that dialogue. All over Paris there were huge hotels, luxury hotels, simply dying to take in the first Allied troops. But all the vehicles headed straight by them for the Scribe. You could almost feel the managers of the Ritz and the Vendôme and the other hotels saying to themselves: ‘Now what has the Scribe got that we haven’t got?’

It seemed sensible to disobey orders and head for somewhere comfortable like the Ritz. As we turned back into the Place Vendôme it even began to seem possible that we were going to liberate the place. With precision and great aplomb the staff booked us in: ‘Perhaps we can waive the usual formality of seeing your identity card. Will you go up to your rooms now or have dinner at once?’

It was a little galling to find Ernest Hemingway sitting in the dining room over a bottle of Heidsieck. At that time he was acting as the commander of a company of maquis who had fought their way in through Versailles. He had liberated the Ritz just an hour before.