RESISTANCE TRACTS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 November 1943, Page 4

RESISTANCE TRACTS

DISTRIBUTION THROUGHOUT FRANCE. Resistance tracts are distributed in ever-growing numbers throughout France. They are of all kinds and sizes, some mimeograph reproductions of hand-written texts, others typewritten, others printed. They are signed by strange pseudonyms. Nearly all carry a “V” or a Cross of Lorraine. The inscription “Seventeenth rung” caused some perplexity to Frenchmen, in London when the specimen tracts arrived. It was discovered later that this is a reference to a “ladder of victory,” the seventeenth rung of which the writer of the tract considered had been reached. “Young Frehchmen, enrol in the new national army,” is the heading of one tract. Serbian guerillas and what they have been able to accomplish are held up as examples. Another tract calls on those who resist to act quickly, adding: “The Americans, the British and Giraud are sending us arms.” An appeal is made in another tract to civil servants, the police and magistrates. The tracts are sent through the post, slipped into private letter boxes, left on seats of vehicles, scattered along roads, thrown over hedges into fields. Often piles of them are placed on high roofs where the wind can scatter them. Yet another trick is to drop them on to the roofs of trains passing under bridges, while others are dropped into rivers and float far down stream. Sometimes tracts are pasted up during the night. One was found recently outside a town hall on a board specially reserved for notices of the Vichy Legion, where members of this infamous organisation found two photographs of General de Gaulle surrounded by a tricolour band and crosses of Lorraine. Underneath were the words: “Don’t fight for Hitler, fight for France. Sabotage the Legion and serve your country.”