A Train in Winter Read Online Free Page B

bread, soap, school supplies and meat, the quantities calculated according to the age and needs of the individual. Parisians were advised not to eat rats, which began emerging, starving, from the sewers, ‘armies of enormous, long-whiskered, dark-coated, red-eyed rats’, though cat fur, especially black, white and ginger, became popular to line winter clothes, since coal had disappeared and houses remained unheated. From November, a powerful black market in food, writing paper, electric wire, buttons and cigarettes operated in Les Halles.
    The French were becoming resourceful. Everyone made do, mended, improvised. The word ‘ersatz’ entered the everyday vocabulary of Paris, housewives exchanging tips and recipes as they queued interminably for ever-dwindling supplies. They told each other how to make gazogène , fuel, out of wood and charcoal, how to crush grape pips for oil, and roll cigarettes from a mixture of scarce tobacco, Jerusalem artichokes, sunflowers and maize. As raw materials ceased to reach France from its colonies, and supplies of linen, cotton, wool, silk and jute dried up, women dyed their legs with iodine and wore ankle socks and carried handbags made of cloth. Soon, Paris clattered to the sound of clogs and horse-drawn carts. Vegetables were planted in the Tuileries and in window boxes. A first wind of resistance was beginning to blow. When the ashes of Napoleon’s son, l’Aiglon, were returned from exile in Vienna on 15 December 1940 in a huge fanfare of military splendour to be buried again in Les Invalides in Paris, posters were seen with the words: ‘Take back your little eagle, give us back our pigs’.
    Nor was it easy to learn much about the outside world. On 25 June, a Presse-Gruppe had been set up to hold twice-weekly press briefings for those newspapers which, like Le Matin and Paris Soir , had been allowed to reappear. In theory, the Germans were to draw up the ‘themes’, while individual journalists decided on the actual content. In practice, editors had been issued with a long list of words and topics to avoid, from ‘Anglo-Americans’ to Alsace-Lorraine, while the words Austria, Poland, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia were never to be used at all, since as countries they no longer existed. Abetz had appointed a Dr Epding to ‘diffuse German culture’. Publishers, meanwhile, had been given an ‘Otto’ list of banned books, which included anything written by a Jew, a communist, an Anglo-Saxon writer or a Freemason, the better to create a ‘healthier attitude’. Malraux, Maurois and Aragon vanished from the bookshops, along with Heine, Freud, Einstein and H.G. Wells. In time, 2,242 tons of books would be pulped. By contrast, Au Pilori , a violently anti-Semitic paper based on Julius Streicher’s Stürmer , was to be found all over the city.
    Occupation, for the French, was turning out to be a miserable affair.

CHAPTER TWO
    The flame of French resistance
    Not many people living in France heard the celebrated call to arms of a relatively unknown French general, Charles de Gaulle, transmitted by the BBC on 18 June—four days after the fall of Paris. Some eight million of them were still on the roads to the south, though by now the traffic was crawling the other way, back towards their homes in the north. But the BBC had agreed to give the Free French a slot each evening, five minutes of it in French, and after his first appel to the French, de Gaulle spoke to them again, on the 19th, 22nd, 24th, 26th and 28th. With each day that passed, his stern, measured voice gained authority. His message did not vary. It was a crime, he said, for French men and women in occupied France to submit to their occupiers; it was an honour to defy them. One sentence in particular struck a chord with his listeners. ‘Somewhere,’ said de Gaulle, ‘must shine and burn the flame of French resistance.’
    Soon, the idea that it was actually possible not to give in to the Germans became an echo, picked