INTENSE FEELING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 8 October 1941, Page 6

INTENSE FEELING

FRENCH ATTITUDE TOWARDS GERMANS. INCIDENTS IN OCCUPIED TERRITORY. A Frenchman named. J. Bonsergent, who pushed a German officer as he Was getting into a train, was tried by a German court-martial and executed the following morning. The execution was more than a punishment to meet this particular case. It was undoubtedly a warning, for the bitterness between the '‘occupied” and the “occupiers” is growing daily. The Germans have tried everything to ingratiate themselves with the French. In a crowded compartment of the Paris underground railway no French woman ever accepts a seat offered to her by a German. , The life of the German women, wives of functionaries, is made unbearable. The process is simple. French women stare them out, looking critically at every item of their dress, from their shoes to their hats. Not a word is spoken, no law is broken, no one can make a complaint that can be sustained, but the German woman is made to feel that she is a “fright.” Germans who try to order a meal in a French' restaurant are treated with the greatest politeness, but the mai--Ire d’hotel and waiters are, almost imperceptibly, condescending, making the Germans feel by implication that they do not know how to order a meal or the wines that accompany the dishes. In other words, the Germans are made to feel they are an inferior’ race in all that touches refinement. When Goering entered a well known Paris restaurant (his visits to Paris have grown less frequent) everyone got Up ahd bowed ceremoniously, at which he was greatly pleased. What he did not know was that French people do not generally get up and bow in restaurants, arid he failed to grasp the sarcasm of the gesture. Goering in Paris ostentatiously handed out large tips. There is a story that in Paris he found a thousand franc note he had just handed out as a tip fixed on the wall with other paper where he could only be alone.