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near Corbeil. They rode in on their motor-cycles first, followed by armoured cars and a few tanks, and streams of motor-lorries full of infantry. They occupied the railway station and the Mairie and the waterworks and the power-house and the gasworks; in the late evening three officers and thirty soldiers drove in to the factory to find Duchene still waiting for them, gravely courteous, with Simon by his side.
    In three days the factory was working, on a much reduced basis. A month later, fortified by fresh supplies of troubled and bewildered labour drafted by the Germans, it was in its stride again.
    The Maginot contracts were a thing of the past now. The German Commission of Control dictated their activities; aerodrome runways, new strategic roadways to the Channel ports, and above all air-raid shelters formed the new work of the S.A.F.C. de Corbeil. Duchene and Simon worked like Trojans to satisfy their new masters, and for a time they were too busy in the work to appreciate the implications of the new regime.
    It was only slowly that they came to realise their true position. At first everything seemed to go on normally; the German troops were civil and even ingratiating. There was plenty of money in the town, for the soldiers spent freely, and there was plenty of work. All the evidence of prosperity was there—for the first three months. If you did not think too hard about the position of France, or read too many newspapers, it was quite a good time. Duchene and Simon were too busy to do either.
    The first real shock they had was when Paul Lecardeau was arrested, tried, taken to the barracks, and shot, all within an hour and a half.
    Simon knew Paul quite well, and had often played a game of dominoes with him at the Café de l’Univers. Paul ran a fair-sized draper’s shop in the route d’Orléans, and he was a notable spitter. In the café he could hit a cuspidor at any range up tothree metres with accuracy, and he was gifted with what seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of ammunition.
    Paul discovered, when his shop was all but empty, that fresh goods were unobtainable. His business was mostly in household linen and women’s clothes. The German major who now sat in the Mairie brushed aside his plea for a permit to buy stock in Paris, but displayed a good deal of interest in Paul’s own capacity for work upon the roads. It was with difficulty that Paul evaded immediate conscription as a labourer.
    With little left upon his shelves to sell, Paul took to sitting in the Café de l’Univers hour after hour, gloomily smoking and staring at the Germans as they passed upon the pavement. Presently he took to spitting when a German came into the café; it was an amusing game, because the big brass cuspidor rang like a gong to each impact. A German
Feldwebel
stalked up to him and warned him—once. Next day, the brassy note of the gong was the signal for his arrest. Ninety minutes later, Paul was dead.
    Simon faced old Duchene across the table of the office which they now shared. “It is intolerable, that,” he said uncertainly. “Paul was an honest man. He was
jocrisse
, that is all.”
    Duchene stared at him in bewilderment. “But why did they do it? All Corbeil is co-operating with the new regime, as the Marshal has said. There is not a de Gaullist in the town. Why must the Germans do a thing like that?”
    It was, of course, because they were Germans, but neither Simon nor Duchene had yet come to appreciate that point.
    From then onwards things grew worse. The shortage of goods and even of foodstuffs became general, and the tempers of the people of Corbeil grew short in sympathy. They became critical of the Marshal’s new order; the old confusion, they said bitterly, was more tolerable. Before long young people of both sexes became hostile to the Germans. It was good fun, if you had no responsibilities, to creep out in the night and let down the tyres of their bicycles, or pour a little water in a petrol-tank and