Eyewitness

by Garrie Hutchinson

  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 wer
e 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.

  Through that night there was spasmodic gun-fire in the northern suburbs, but in the morning Paris was calm again, de Gaulle had arrived, and every able-bodied Parisian in the centre of the city was hurrying to the Champs Elysées. The people had now settled into their exhilaration. They had composed themselves for pleasure, just as previously they had had to compose themselves for the misery of the arrival of the Germans. In June 1940 they had rushed for their homes; now they rushed into the streets. Both moves were spontaneous, subjective, unpremeditated.

  The last time the Champs Elysées had filled with a crowd like this was on 14 July 1939, for the Bastille celebrations, during that last summer of peace when people, despairing of the future, were determined to seize what pleasure they could. And now the colours were the same, the immense tricolour floating from the Arc, the girls with flowers in their hair, the red, white and blue dresses, the flags hanging from the window boxes. They stood in the same places under the trees on either side of the road, in all the windows and the balconies, and they perched like flies on the house-tops. Some things were missing from that other day: Daladier with his Cabinet on the wooden stand in front of the Café Coupole, the diplomats, the top hats and the ceremonial dress. But the real difference lay in the intangible emotion of the people, this sense of utter relief. It had the glow and freshness of an adolescent love affair.

  If it is true that the greatest joy humanity can experience is release from pain, then this was it. Here it was in tens of thousands of faces, a thing beyond cynicism or excitement, a consuming wellbeing more like gratitude than pleasure. Given the meanest sensitivity you could feel this atmosphere coming out from the crowd, wave upon wave, a sense of complete content.

  I did not yet understand it. Tomorrow or the day after I would perhaps begin to understand. As yet I had not been able to find anyone who was able to explain what had happened in those four years in Paris, when she was cut off not only from the outside world but from herself as well. At this moment people were too engrossed in their revolution to talk. They simply stood and, as it were, savoured the new atmosphere in a Paris that was their own again. Not knowing what had happened, not being part of the dark experience, it was difficult as yet to see anything more than an outward Paris that was itself, a place of great open spaces, of statues and trees and graceful buildings along the river. Nothing bombed. All intact, and as it was. If anything more beautiful than ever because it was so invested with memory.

  De Gaulle got out of his car and began to inspect the ring of French armoured cars drawn up in a circle round the Arc. Ten thousand people looked at him as he walked along, stiff, ungainly, a heavy lugubrious face under his képi, an air of school-masterish tautness, an imposing and unattractive figure, General de Gaulle, le libérateur. More than ever he was the remote symbol of resistance, an undefinable man representing an idea, and now personifying an idea. His lieutenants, great figures of the Resistance, walked behind: Koenig, le vainqueur de Bir Hacheim, Leclerc of Lake Chad, and those who fought in Paris. Then the cameramen, the police, the officials.

  They moved in a body up to the central arch and the eternal flame. As de Gaulle saluted, the ‘Marseillaise’ began. The people sang it quietly and falteringly, as though it were a prayer of thanksgiving rather than a triumph. They were a little out of tune. They missed a beat and hurried to catch up again. They were facing one another, and they kept staring through one another as they sang, apparently seeing nothing with their eyes, and evidently unconscious of tears. They sang as though the words had come quite freshly into mind, as though they were singing the music for the first time. It spread and expanded, bar after bar, down the Champs Elysées, a contagion of emotional feeling; and soon everyone was engulfed, all those who were hemmed in by the crowd and could see nothing, and those on the roof-tops who could not hear and those who had expected nothing from this day beyond a celebration.

  It was a little difficult to follow de Gaulle as he turned and began to walk down the Elysées, with his men spread out in a line on either side of him; we ran for the cars. I edged the Volkswagen into a position in the centre directly behind the general. A hundred other cars came swerving forward through the crowd and soon we were locked together, twenty cars abreast, the mudguards touching, another row of cars behind, and then another and another, a solid block of vehicles moving at walking pace and hemmed in on either side by the vast crowds. It was difficult driving. Three inches from the car in front; three inches from the car behind. One was
conscious only of repeated waves of noise from the people. Once when I got a moment to look up from the driving I turned and saw with astonishment that everyone in my car was crying.

  From somewhere a young poilu had jumped aboard, and he was sitting bolt upright in the back seat, with his rifle between his knees, staring ahead, weeping. From somewhere flowers were raining down on us. From somewhere odd people kept jumping on and jumping off. Faces went by, livid and shouting, and then disappeared. It was hot. People seemed to be yelling anything that came into their heads. The congestion got steadily worse as we turned into the Place de la Concorde; then a brief clear moment in the Rue de Rivoli, then back into the dense masses of people again outside the Hôtel de Ville.

  The first shots of the snipers came from the row of buildings on the opposite side of the street, but they were too unexpected for anyone to know exactly what was happening. The crowd rocked dazedly. Then a second volley came down. One or two people round us dropped screaming on to the asphalt. At once like a house of cards the whole crowd went down and fumbled blindly and instinctively for the ground. Some crawled under the armoured cars. Others attempted to rush for the cover of the pavement, tripped and fell, in shouting and convulsive groups. In the windows people slammed their shutters. There must have been five or six thousand people in front of the Hôtel de Ville, and it was like a field of wheat suddenly struck by a strong gust of wind.