NAZI MENACE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 May 1943, Page 4

NAZI MENACE

TO MARSEILLES OLD PORT POSSIBLE USE AS U-BOAT HAVEN. MEETING GROUND OF EAST AND WEST. Marseilles has come into the news again. The Germans are shifting several thousand of its population and project works in the “old port.’ Reorganisation of the “old port” has been a long-standing project with the authorities of Marseilles, embracing plans for covering it over completely. Let us watch the Germans, for under disguise of carrying out this old project they may cover up the old port and provide submarine shelters beneath it, an overseas writer observed recently.

The opposition in peace time to the changes proposed came in great part from those people who, for sentimental reasons, were against any hands being laid on the picturesque old quarter of the old oort. Suitable for wooden ships of.other days, it had long since been abandoned by the big ships of modern commerce.

Romance hung around the old port at the end of the famous Cannebiere, where all Marseilles in happier days used to congregate and gesticulate before the well stocked cafes. An inhabitant of Marseilles retorted to a Parisian, who had decried his Cannebiere as far inferior to the Boulevards of Paris, and had described it as leading to nowhere. “Monsieur, the Cannebiere of Marseilles you say leads to the water’s edge, to nowhere. The Cannebiere leads to the end of the world.” This was a reference to the huge commerce of the port of Marseilles, whence ships sailed to every part. Marseilles is one of those words which conjures up memories in all who hive travelled, and Marseilles has never disappointed the traveller. It is, indeed, or rather was before the Nazi blight descended on it, the spot where East and West did meet. In a few minutes beside its quays, and especially around the old port, one met sailors of every nationality. These men of the sea gathered at the old port, men who served on modern ships, drawn there perhaps by the spirit of the sea of other days. Crowded, narrow streets of high houses backed the old quarter. At one point these streets met at or near a public wash trough, a large square stone contraption, round which women washed clothing and chatted, and then hung the multicoloured garments on lines by the fountain, or strung them across from window to window high up in the streets. Shrill voices of the chattering women and shouting children echoed from side to side of the narrow ways. Night in these quarters was not wholly safe, if picturesque. A curtained window, with shadows flitting across a blind, a tinkling piano, shrill unpleasant laughter; a door flung open quickly, a figure reeling from it, casting curses over his shoulder in response to curses that followed him. Down a side street one would see the typical sailor man from Tyneside or Valparaiso, his hands straight by his side, penniless, waiting for the next ship, to be followed by the next binge. The port founded by the Phoenicians was “tough,” and something of American gangsterism has reached it. Here, Al Brown, the American boxer, got into a rough meeting, and the judges just had to give the fight to the local man or risk a stay in hospital. Tino Rossi, who has charmed us on many a record, a child of Marseilles, refused to be “protected” when he gave a concert in his home town, but the concert broke up in spite of the presence of numerous police, because “stink pastilles 1 ” drove admirers from the hall.