NEWS FROM FRANCE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 February 1940, Page 9

NEWS FROM FRANCE

GERMANS FIRE CARRIERS VISIT OF THE KING. MANY PRETTY INCIDENTS. (From Our Paris Correspondent.) PARIS, December 15. The agreement signed by Sir John Simon and M. Paul Reynaud is described in France as being closer than any alliance ever signed in history, and is considered by economists as affording opportunaties far greater than those at present realised. Designed as a factor to help win the war, in peace time its effects may become even more far reaching. It is a partnership, it is said in France, that can bring the greatest advantages for both countries, and in a scheme of pooling may well show a way to a new order of international co-operation. What French people fully realise, and what the Germans never can seem to realise, is that fundamentally trade and international politics have long since parted company. Millions upon millions of pounds and francs and German money are being poured out, and one man is criminallj the cause of the loss of thousands of precious lives, in a delusion left over from the Middle Ages that something is to be gained by seizing territory. The seizure of Austria, of Czechoslovakia, and of Poland, could the Germans hold these countries, .would not add a jot to the earnings of a single German worker. To gain such ends he has for years now been suffering restrictions, has been drilled, his liberty taken from him, his individuality diminished, his family life interfered with, and he has ultimately been driven into trenches with his fellows to blaze away wealth and pile up debts for generations to come.

The Frenchman understands all these things and is reluctant to have to take up a gun again once more to kill Germans. In thirty-five years residence in France I have never met a Frenchman who wanted to go and fight anyone. All the Frenchman asks is to be let alone and allowed to live his own life his own way. He is thrifty and hard-work-ing and is a thyeat to no one. German mentality seems to suffer from a blight, and, as a French writer has put it, the whole German people appear to be doomed ever to be the fire carriers.

KING’S VISIT. During the visit of the King to France there were many pretty incidents, not all of them recorded in the Press. In one village, while everyone else shouted “Vive le Roi!" one little girl cried out, "Vive la Reine!” The King turned and smiled at her, realising the child had remembered the visit of the King and Queen to France last year. Probably the little girl had been in Paris at the lime of the royal visit, and perhaps she was one of the children who often re-enacted the scene of the landing of the King and Queen on the quay close to the Hotel de Ville before the ornamented landing stage was finally taken down. If you question French people you learn that they like our King particularly because of his frank and simple manners . and bearing. The Queen won all French hearts by her smile, and French women discovered that she not only knows how to dress but knows how to carry a dress. In a cinema a few weeks before the war a picture was thrown on the screen showing the King with the Boy Scouts, enjoying himself heartily in their midst, without formality or ceremony. There was something of a gasp of surprise on the part of the audience, then a round of applause, and you felt their admiration for a King who could be so close to his people, a pleasant, wholesome breeze after the all too many pictures of helmeted men frowning generals, and joyless faces of Nazis, men women and children, filing by beneath the sign of the Swastika.

SOLDIERS ALL. Everyone in France, almost, is a soldier, and the military uniform has spread, of all places, to the Punch and Judy show, or rather Guignol, of the Buttes Chaumont. Guignol, the French equivalent of our Punch, who performs daily in this pretty little park of the north oi Paris, has gone into uniform and instead of whacking the policeman on the head, he delivers knock-out blows to Hitler and Goering, whose medals rattle on the little board in front as he comes down under the blows of Guignol. Guignol has a closer relationship with war titan the laughing children who look on perhaps know. It was a soldier of two centuries ago who. returning from Italy after being invalided out of the army, showed little marionettes he had made as a means of obtaining money to buy food on his way back to Paris and thus set a fashion for these little imitation men and women who in their antics make us laugh at our own faults. The Guignol in the Buttes Chaumont, as though inspired by the spirit of the old French soldier, gives the children a short lecture after the show and makes them all promise that they will write to their fathers in the trenches.

Paris has a patron saint whose tomb is never without a ring of kneeling worshippers. It is in the ancient church of St Etienne du Mont, and the relies of the saint arc encased in a gilded shrine of great beauty surrounded by a blaze of candles. To this shrine come wives and mothers of soldiers to pray to St Genevieve to bring their loved cues safely back. In the dark days of 1914. when the distant rumble of the guns of the Germans could bo heard in Paris as they swept forward before their defeat at the Marne, the church was full to the doors. It was the patron Saint of Paris who turned away the Huns from the city in the early history of the French capital. PRIESTS SERVING COUNTRY. The priests of France have taken their stand once more, as they did in 1914. side by side with the citizen soldiers. Twelve thousand priests are serving their country, and in Paris, 524 on', of a total of 1,400 are with the colours, almost one out of every three. Others of the large towns show similar figures. From Lille, 480 out of 1,380 have gone to the war; Lyons, 370 out of 1,439.

During the last war, 5.000 priests fell on the field of honour. In all, 16,000 were mentioned in dispatches, 10,000 received the military cross, 900 the cross of the Legion of Honour, 1,600 the military medal. A writer in the “Revue des Deux Mondes” attributes the disappearance of anti-clericalism in the popular masses in large part to the daily contact with these priests in the trenches during the four years of war. One priest a few weeks ago was ordained to the sound of cannon, when Mgr Heintz, bishop of Metz, performed the rites in a small village of Lorraine from which the inhabitants had been evacuated. Sergeant Prache, the newly ordained priest, when giving his first blessing, blessed the photographs of his father and mother which he had placed near him. Then in succession he blessed all the soldiers present in the little church, his comrades, the noncommissioned officers, and the colonel of his regiment, as they all marched past him,' while the sound of cannon punctuated the notes of the organ and from the sky came the drone of airplanes starting out for the enemy lines. FIGHTING FOR LIFE. And what are they fighting for. the priest become soldier, the man from the field and the man from the office, the man from the ships and the man from the mines? Here is the answer of one, a soldier of the last war, a writer known in the five continents, M. Jean Giraudoux, in a speech before the American Club of Paris: — “What are we fighting for? It is simple. It is our very life. Our life, the life of us all, whether the life of France ;,r the life of each Frenchman, is impossible in the present epoch. The life -,f France? You know what that is. A life of free activity and free reflection. The life of a nation’ accustomed to take its part as an equal or as an inspiiei in the great projects of the time and of Europe. But it is also the life of a nat;on which twenty years ago had the fifteenth part of its male population killed and two-thirds of its industry destroyed. For. the third time in the -pan of a single life France had to bear the weight of a Germany each time increased each time stronger, -ach time more voracious. And we have had each time to deal with a Germany less European, each time less humane. The instruments of science 'hat she created, her techinique said ■o be above that of all others, she utilised to the basest ends. Germany each time has fallen lower in civilisation, more corrupt, more immoral. Above our frontier of the East, when a face shows itself, it is not the face of a man, it is no longer the face of a German, it is that of an oppresser or a victim.”