A Train in Winter Read Online Free PDF Page A

up and repeated, written out and handed round, printed in Underground papers and flyers.
    De Gaulle had said nothing about the reasons for the French defeat, simply that France was not beaten and would live to see another day. In the evenings, behind closed shutters, in darkness, defying German orders, those who owned radios gathered to listen as the first few chords of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—chosen when someone pointed out that V, in Morse code, was three short taps—announced words that were quickly becoming famous: ‘Içi Londres. Les Français parlent aux Français’. It had the effect of creating links between listeners. In the long food queues, housewives discussed what they had heard. Just at the time when the Germans seemed at their most invincible, it gave ordinary men and women the feeling that they, too, might participate in the ultimate defeat of their oppressors, even if that moment lay far in the future. And though they had little notion of what de Gaulle had in mind, beyond his call for volunteers to join him and the Free French in London, some of the French at least began to see in de Gaulle a future possible liberator and leader.
    When the Prefect and future Resistance leader Jean Moulin visited Paris in November, come to see for himself whether there might be a possible resistance Française , he concluded that there was nothing much happening. But he was wrong.
    The first acts of resistance were small, spontaneous and ill-co-ordinated, carried out by individuals acting out of personal feelings of rebellion and shame. The Free French’s Croix de Lorraine—the symbol taken from Joan of Arc—and Vs for victory were scribbled in crayon, lipstick or paint on to walls, on to blackout paper, on to German cars, in the métro and at bus stops, and after the Germans co-opted the Vs, saying that they stood for Victoria, an ancient German word, the French wrote Hs instead, for honneur . Rosa Floch was only one of dozens of young girls who wrote ‘Vive les Anglais’ on their lycée walls. A few stones were thrown at the windows of restaurants requisitioned by the Germans. There were catcalls and whistles during German newsreels, until the order went out that the lights had to be kept on, after which the audience took to reading their books and coughing. A young man called Etienne Achavanne cut a German telephone cable.
    Early in October, a music publisher called Raymond Deiss typed out two double sheets containing the daily bulletins of the BBC, printed them on linotype and called his news-sheet Pantagruel . * Tracts, posters, flyers, typed up and printed by journalists and university students, reminding women that a group of Parisian fishwives had marched on Versailles in 1789 demanding bread from Louis XIV, called on them to protest against rationing. In the Musée de l’Homme, a group of ethnographers and anthropologists joined forces to run off an anti-Vichy and anti-Nazi news-sheet on the museum’s mimeograph machine.
    Inspired by a mixture of patriotism and humanism, by a view of France as the champion of individual liberties and the Germans as brutal conquerors, these early pamphlets and papers came from every class and every political ideology. Some extolled Catholicism and morality; others Marxism; others Tom Paine and the Rights of Man. All shared a conviction that to do nothing was wrong.
    Faced by this outpouring of protest, the Germans acted swiftly and decisively. The writers and printers they were able to catch they tried and sent to prison. The naïve first resisters were no match for the Nazis, long accustomed to a harsh war of repression at home. The Germans took to putting up posters of their own, warning of the consequences of resistance and offering rewards to informers. Following close behind them, young boys ripped them off while they were still wet, or wrote the words ‘Draw a line for de Gaulle’, so that soon the German posters were covered in dozens of little lines.
    There