GRIMLY FOUGHT

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 January 1943, Page 4

GRIMLY FOUGHT

SECOND BATTLE OF FRANCE.

UNDERGROUND STRUGGLE FOR LIBERATION. The second Battle of France is being grimly fought now. It is being waged by Frenchmen who daily risk their lives. They help to keep up th morale of their countrymen, distribute clandestine papers, protect those who print them in hidden places, sounding the warning when danger is nigh, and recruit a new “link” for the chain of underground workers when a comrade has been caught and shpt. It is they who place a note on the table where a notorious collaborator with the enemy will find it and learn he is a marked man.

A pistol shot in a darkened street breaks the silence of this battle as a traitor falls, and shadows flit away as Gestapo agents arrive on the scene. One of the leaders of this army has arrived in England. He is M. Pierre Brossolette, former foreign editor of “Le Populaire, and in broadcasting to his countrymen in France announcing his arrival here, he made it his duty to pay his tribute to the soldiers of the silent army. “Next to you, among you without your knowing it,” said M. Brpssolette, “constantly fighting and dying, are men —my brothers in arms—of the underground struggle for liberation. “I want you to salute these men with me. Killed, wounded, executed, arrested, tortured, driven from their homes, often cut off entirely from family and friends, soldiers without uniform or colours, a regiment without a flag whose sacrifices and battles are not writ in letters of gold except in the sorrowing memories of survivors—honour to these men! Glory is like those ships in which men die not only beneath the open sky but in the tragic darkness of the hold. Thus fight and die the men of the underground second Battle of France. •

“Frenchmen, salute them! They are the standard bearers of glory!”