Berlin Diary: XXXVIII

June, 1940: With Holland, Luxemberg, and Belgium captured, Hitler is marching across France...

Excerpt from Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941, by William L. Shirer.  Copyright by the author, 1940,1941.  Published by Alfred A. Knopf, June 20, 1941
 

Berlin, June 1, 1940

"Though the public is no more aroused about the great victories up on the Channel than theyhave been about anything else in this war, the newspaper headlines today do their best to stir up interest.  Typical is the B.Z. am Mittag today: "CATASTROPHE BEFORE THE DOORS OF PARIS AND LONDON---FIVE ARMIES CUT OFF AND DESTROYED---ENGLAND'S LOWER EXPEDITIONARY CORPS NO LONGER EXISTS---FRANCE'S 1ST, 7TH AND 9TH ARMIES ANNHILATED!"  

The mass of the German army which liquidated the Allied forces in Flanders is now ready for new assignments.  There are two course opn to the German High Command.  It can strike across the Channel against England or roll the French back on Paris and attempt to knock France out of the war.    From what I gather in military circles here, there seems to be no doubt that the German command has already chose the second course and indeed moved most of its troops into position face what is left of the French along the rivers Somme and Aisne.  General Weygand has now had ten days to organize his armies along this line, but the fact that he has not felt himself strong enough to attempt an offensive against the fairly thin German line---a move which if pushed home would have saved the French-British-Belgian armies in Flanders---has convinced the German generals, if they needed convincing, that they can crack his forces fairly easily and quickly break through to Paris and to the Norman and Breton ports.  

I learned from a High Commands officer that God at last has given the British a break.  They have had two days of fog and mist around Dunkirk and as a result the Luftwaffe has been unable to do much bombing of the transports busily engaged in taking off British troops.  Today the weather cleared and Goring's bombers went back to work over Dunkirk beach.  Says the High Command tonight in a special communique: "The rest of the defeated British Expeditionary Force tried today to escape on small craft of all kinds to the transports and warships lying off shore near Dunkirk.  The German air foce frustreated this attempt through continuous attacks, especially with Junker dive-bombers, on the British ships.  According to reports received so far, three warships and eight transports, totalling 40,000 tons, were sunk, and four warships and fourteen transports set on fire and damaged.  Forty English fighter planes protecting the ships were shot down."

No mention of the German air losses, so I assume they were larger than the British---otherwise Goring would have mentioned them.  The Junker-87 dive-bomber is a set-up for any British fighter.  

The Germans claim today that the battleship Nelson, flagship of the British Home Fleet, has been sunk with the loss of 700 of her crew of 1,350.  So far as I can make out, the only source for this is an alleged dispatch from the AP in New York.  But a naval officer tonight insisted it was true.  He said the ship was sunk on May 11.  

Berlin, June 2, 1940

Those British Tommies at Dunkirk are still fighting like bulldogs.  The German High Command admits it.  

Its official war communique today: "In hard fighting, the strop of coast on both sides of Dunkirk which yesterday was also stubbornly defended by the British, was further narrowed.  Nieuport and the coast to the northwest are in German hands.  Adinkerke, west of Furnes and Ghyvelde, six and a quarter miles east of Dunkirk, have been taken."  Six and a quarter miles---that's getting close.

In the air the Germans again make mighty claims.  The official communique: "All together, four warships and eleven transports, with a total tonnage of 54,000 tons, were sunk by our bombers.  Fourteen warships, including two cruisers, two light cruisers, an anti-aircraft cruiser, six destroyers, and two torpedo boats, as well as thirty-eight transports, with a total tonnage of 160,000, were damaged by bombs.  Numberless small boats, tugs, rafts were capsized..."*

Despite the lack of popular enthusiasn for this collossal German victory in Flanders, I gather quite a few Germans are beginning to feel that the deprivations which Hitler has forced on them for five years have not been without reason.  Said my room waiter this morning: "Perhaps the English and French now wish they had less butter and more cannon."

And yet the picture this capital presents at this great moment in German history still confounds me.  Last evening, just before dark, I strolled down the Kurfurstendamm.  It was jammed with people meandering along pleasantly.  The great sidewalk cafes on this broad, tree-lined avenue were filled with thousands, chatting quietly over their ersatz coffee or their ice-cream.  I even noticed several smartly dressed women.  Today, being the Sabbath and a warm and summy June day, tens of thousands of people, mostly in family groups, betook themselves to the woods or the lakes on the outskirts of the city.  The Tiergarten, I noticed, also was thronged.  Everyone had that lazy, idle, happy-go-lucky Sunday holiday air.  

One reason for this particular state of things, I suppose, is that the war has not been brought home to the people of Berlin.  They read about it, or on the radio even hear the pounding of the guns.  But that's all.  Paris and London may feel in danger.  Berlin doesn't.  The last air-raid alarm I can recall here was early last September.  And then nothing happened.  

Berlin, June 3, 1940

BBC just announced that the Germans bombed Paris this afternoon.  Maybe the Allies will drop a few on Berlin tonight.  

Donald Heath, our charge d'affiaires, was called to the Wilhelmstrasse this noon and handed a copy of a press release in which the German government stated it had information from confidential sources that the British secret service planned to sink three American liners----the President Roosevelt, and Manhattan now en route to New York with American citizens, and the Washington en route to Bordeaux to bring back a further batch of American refugees.  The Germans infomred the American governmetn through this press release---a curious diplomatic procedure---that strict orders have been dispatched to all German naval commanders instructing them not to molest any of the three American ships.  

An official statement in the release said: "The Reich government expects the American government to take all necessary measures to frustrate such a crime as the British contemplate perpetrating."  

The German "theory" is that if the ships are sunk the Americans would blame the Germans.  Something very suspicious about this.  What is to prevent the Germans from torpedoing these American vessels themselves and then crying to the skies that the British did it and that Berlin had even gone out of its way to warn Washington beforehand that the British would do it.  Submarine periscopes are very difficult to identify.  

Berlin, June 4, 1940

The great battle of Flanders and Artois is over.  The German army today entered Dunkirk and the remaining Allied troops---about forty thousand---surrendered.  The German High Command in an official communique says the battle will go down in history "as the greatest battle of destruction of all time."  German losses for the western offensive, as given out tonight, are said to be:dead---10,252; missing---8,467; wounded---42,523; planes lost---432.  All of which is very surprising.  Only three days ago the military people tipped us that the losses would soon be given out, and they were approximately 35,000 to 40,000 dead; 150,000 to 160,000 wounded.  But most Germans will believe any figures they were given.

The communique speaks of Allied losses: 1,200,000 prisoners, counting the Belgians and the Dutch.  And a whole navy destroyed, including five cruisers and seven destroyers sunk, and ten cruisers and twenty-four destroyers damaged.  It also claims the german navy did not lose a single vessel.  

Paris says 50 killed, 150 injured in yesterday's German air-raid.  BBC says the Parisians are demanding revenge.  But no planes came over here last night; none so far tonight...

I'm worried about Tess and Baby.  She called this afternoon, said she'd at last got passage on the Washington, but that it would not call at Genoa.  She must get it at Bordeaux.  But she's advised not to travel across France with the French in their present panicky mood.  The railroad near Lyon which she must take has been bombed twice this week by the Germans.  And she would still prefer to stay on.  

Berlin, June 6, 1940

The church bells rang, and all the flags were out today, by order of Hitler, to celebrate the victory in Flanders.  There is no real elation over the victory discernable in the people here.  No emotion of any kind.  In grandiose proclamations to the army and the people, Hilter announced that today a new offensive was being launched in the west.  So far no details are available here, but the BBC says the offensive is on a two-hundred-kilometre front from Abbevill to Soissons, with the biggest German pressure along the Somme-Aisne Canal.  

I've heard here that the Allies have been bombing Munich and Frankfurt the last few nights.  But Berlin is never told of these enemy air-raids.  No one here feels the war yet.  

Berlin, June 9, 1940

The High Command broke its reserve about the great offensive with a bang this afternoon.  It says the French south of the Somme and in the Oise district have been beaten all along the line.  It talks about the German troops driving towards the lower Seine, which is a hell of a way from the Somme, where they started four days ago.  BBC at six tonight confirmed this.  Weygand issues another order of the day to his men to hold.  But there is something desperate in it.  

The Germans also announce: "This morning on a further part of the front in France a new offensive has started."  Weygand reveals it's on a front from Reims to the Argonne.   The Germans are now hurling themselves forward on a two-hundred-mile front from the sea to the Argonne.  No drive in World War I was on this scale!

The High Command also states that Germany's only two battleships, the Gneisenau and the Scharnhorst, have put to sea and have gone to the relief of the German forces driven out of Narvik a couple of weeks ago.  Hand it to the Germans for their daring, their sense of surprise.  How could the British fleet allow two battleships to get up to Narvik?  High Command says the two have already sunk the British aircraft-carrier Glorious, the 21,000-ton transport Orama, and an oil tanker of 9,100-tons.  Another instance of the Germans taking a chance---taking the initiative.  The Allies seem to take neither.  

Berlin, June 10, 1940

Italy is in the war.

She has stabbed France in the back at the moment when the Germans are at the gates of Paris, and France appears to be down.  

At six o'clock this evening, just as people here were tuning in on their radios to hear the latest news of the German army's onslaught on Paris, the announcer said: "In one hour the Duce will address the Italian people and the world.  All German stations will broadcast his speech."

An hour later they did---with a German radio commentator conveniently at hand (he'd been sent to Rome last Saturday, June 8, for the job) at the Piazza Venezia to describe the tumult.  

We got wind if it early in the afternoon when we were convoked for a special press conference at the Foreign Office at seven p.m., to hear Ribbentrop make a declaration.  At four-thirty p.m., at the Propaganda Ministry, we were shown the English propaganda film The Lion Has Wings.  Even making allowances for the fact that it was turned out last fall, I thought it very bad.  Supercilious.  Silly.  At the six p.m. press conference we were given another dose of the weekly German news-reel.  Again the ruined towns, the dead humans, the putrefying horses' carcasses.  One shot showed the charred remains of a British pilot amid the wreckage of his burnt plane.  Most Germans there seemed to get a sadistic pleasure from these pictures of death and destruction.  A few I know, however, didn't.  A few react still like human beings.  

I went over to the Foreign Office about seven and soon found myself crowding into the Hall of whatever-it-is.  Designed to hold about fifty people, five hundred had already jammed their way in.  It was a hot day, the windows were sealed tight, and hot Klieg lights were burning so that Ribbentrop could be properly photographed.  In one corner of the room the most screeching radio I ever heard was screaming out Mussolini's speech at the Piazza Venezia in Rome.  I caught just enough of it to learn that he was announcing Italy's decision to enter the war on the side of Germany.  The combination of this tin-pan racked and the foul, hot air, and the photographers scrapping and most of the newspapermen standing there sweating, and of some other things, was enough for me.  S. and I pushed our way out before Ribbentrop arrived.  I went back to Joe's room, tuned in on the radio, and got from Rome a rather comical English translation of the Duce's words.  

About the same time there was a comedy act in front of the Italian Embassy, which Ralph described to me.  Two or three thousand Italian Fascists, residents of Berlin, shouted themselves hoarse in the little street that runs off the Tiergarten past the Italian Embassy.  The Germans had rigged up loud-speakers, so that the mob could hear the Duce's words.  Later Ribbentrop and Alfieri, the new Italian Ambassador, appeared on the balcony, grinned and made brief inane speeches, Ralph reported.  

In the meantime the German army closes in on Paris.  It looks dark for the Allies tonight.  Roosevelt is broadcasting at one fifteen a.m. tonight.  

Berlin, June 11, 1940

Roosevelt came through very clearly on the radio last night.  He promised immediate material help for the Allies.  Scorched Mussolini for his treachery.  Not a word about the speech in press or radio here.  

The Wilhelmstrasse keeps making the point that American aid will come too late.  A man just back from seeing Hitler tells me the Führer is sure that France will be finished by June 15---that is, in four days----and Great Britain by August 15 at the latest!  He says Hitler is acting as if he had the world at his feet, but that some of his generals, although highly pleased with the military successes, are a little apprehensive of the future under such a wild and fanatical man.  

Word here is that the French government has left Paris.  The Germans tonight are roughly about as near Paris as they were on September 1, 1914.  This led the High Command to point out to us today that the German position is much better than it was then.  First, because their right wing is stronger, and has maintained its advance west of Paris, whereas in 1914 it wheeled east of Paris.  Second, there is no real British army to help the French.  Third, there is no eastern front, so that, not as in 1914, the entire German army can now be hurled against Paris.  (In 1914, two army corps were hurriedly withdrawn from France to stop the Russians in the east.  How Paris and London are now paying for their short-sighted anti-Russian policy!  Before Munich, even after Munich, even a year ago this June, they could have lined up the Russians against Germany.)

After my twelve forty-six broadcast tonight we were sitting in D.'s room at the Rundfunk when we picked up a broadcast from New York saying that the liner Washington, a day out from Lisbon en route for Galway, Ireland, and packed with American refugees, mostly women and children, had been halted by an unknown submarine just at dawn and given ten minutes to lower boats before being sent to the bottom.  Tess and child had booked on that voyage of the Washington, but had been unable to get to Bordeaux in time after the liner had cancelled its scheduled stop at Genoa.  Finally at zero hour, after the ten minutes had elapsed,  the U-boat commander signalled: "Sorry.  Mistake.  Proceed."  A German naval officer, himself a U-boat commander in the last war, happened to be listening with me.  He became quite angry.  "A British submarine!  No doubt of it!" he exclaimed.  "Those British will stop at nothing!"  The captain added angrily, when I suggested that maybe it might have been a German U-boat: "Impossible.  Why, a German commander who did such a thing would be court-martialled and shot."

Berlin, June 12, 1940

It was a German submarine that stopped the Washington, after all.  

This was officially admitted in Berlin after the Wilhelmstrasse had kept silent all day.  The Germans blame it on the State Department or our Embassy for it.  They claim that our Embassy neglected to inform the German government that the Washington was proceeding to Ireland from Lisbon.  

If the government didn't know it, the German press and radio certainly did.  They've announced it for days.  

I went over to our Embassy to check this, but they seemed a little troubled and asked us to let the State Department answer, which was reasonable enough.  It would have been a hell of a slip-up if they hadn't informed the Germans.  

The official statement here also gives another curious explanation.  It says the "error" came about because the German U-boat commander mistook the Washington for a Greek (!) steamer which he had stopped before and told to change its course.  When the American boat appeared on the horizon, he thought, says the official statement, it was the Greek boat disobeying his instructions, and that's why he stopped it.  

One might ask: (1) Have the Greeks a single vessel anywhere near the size of the Washington. which is a 24,000-ton liner? The answer: No.  (2) Why did a German submarine commander order the passengers and crew to their boats before he had properly identified the steamer?  (3) If the commander thoguht it was his Greek steamer, why did he wait ten minutes after the Washington had signalled that it was an American ship?  These points are not taken up in the official statement.  In my broadcast the censors allowed me to mention only the first point.  Their view was that the last two questions were unfair.  

In view of the suspicious German wrning of June 3, in which Berlin claimed to have knowledge that the British intended to torpedo the Washington, I'm convinced that Berlin itself gave orders to sink that ship.  It then intended to launch a terrific propaganda campaign charging that the British did the dded and pointing out that the German had already warned Washington on June 3 of what would happen.  I think Ribbentrop naively believed he could thus poison Anglo-American relations and put a damper on our sending supplies to Britain.  German naval men tell me that the U-boat held up the Washington just at dawn.  Washington dispatches say the ship was somewhat behind schedule.  It is highly possible, then, that the German submarine commander planned to torpedo the ship while it was still too dark for his craft to be identified.  But the Washington did not arrive on the scene until dawn, a couple of hours later than expected, and the commander refrained from launching his torpedo only out of fear that in the prevailing light his U-boat could be recognized as German.  It was not submerged and therefore was easily recognizable.  

I had a nasty scare this afternoon.  I was listening to the three fifteen BBC broadcast when the announcer suddenly reported that Geneva had been bombed last night, that bombs had fallen in a residential suburb, and there there had been killed and wounded.  For a moment I was floored.  Our home is in one fo the few residential suburbs.  

It took hours to get through to Geneva with an urgent call.  But about eight I heard Tess's voice.  The bombs did fall in our district, she said, shook the house, and hit a hotel down the street where we formerly lived, killing five or six and injuring a score more.  They had two air-raid alarms and she took the baby to the cellar.  I told her she and the child must come to Germany, must as we both hate the idea.  It's the safest place now.  They're cut off from any possibilty of getting home.  

The B.Z. am Mittag plays up the farewell broadcast of the CBS man from Paris Monday night, probably Eric Sevareid.  It quotes him concluding: "If in the next days anyone talks to America from Paris, it won't be under the control of the French government."  I suppose I'm nominated.  It's my job.  It will be the saddest assignment of my life.  

Though the German High Command does not mention it, the truth is that the Germans are at the gates of Paris tonight.  Thank God, the city will now be destroyed,  Wisely the French are declaring it an open city and will not defend it.  There was some question as to whether the Germans would recognize it as an open city, but about midnight it became plain that they would.  

The taking of Paris will be a terrific blow to the French and the Allies. To the east of Paris, too, the Germans appear to have broken through to Chalons.  

Berlin, June 14, 1940

Paris has fallen.  The hooked-cross flag of Hitler flutters from the Eiffel Tower there by the Seine in that Paris which I knew so intimately and loved.  

This morning German troops entered the city.  We got the news on the radio at one p.m., after loud fanfares has blazed away for a quarter of an hour, calling the faithful to hear the news.  The news was a war communique from the Supreme Command.  It said: "The complete collapse of the entire French front from the Channel to the Maginot Line at Montmedy destroyed the original intention of the French leaders to defend the capital of France.  Paris therefore has been declared an open city.  The victorious troops are just beginning to march into Paris."

I was having lunch in the courtyard of my hotel.  Most of the guests crowded around the loud-speaker in the bar to hear the news.  They returned to their tables with wide smiles on their faces, but there was no undue excitement and everyone resumed eating.  

In fact, Berlin has taken the news of the capture of Paris as phlegmatically as it has taken everything else in this war.  Later I went to Halensee for a swim, it being warm and I feeling the need of a little relaxation.  It was crowded, but I overheard no one discussing the news.  Out of five hundred people, three bought extreas when the newsboys rushed in, shouting the news.  

It would be wrong, though, to conclude that the taking of Paris has not stirred something in the hearts of most Germans.  It was always a wish dream of millions here.  And it helps wipe out the bitter memories if 1918 which have lain so long---twenty-two years---in the German soul.  

Poor Paris!  I weep for her.  For so many years it was my home---and I loved it as you love a woman.  Said the Völkische Beobachter this morning: "Paris was a city of frivolity and corruption, of democracy and captialism, where Jews had entry to the court, and niggers to the salons.  That Paris will never rise again." But the High Command promises that its soldiers will behave---will be "as different as night is from day, comparied to the conduct of the French soldiers in the Rhine and Ruhr."  

The High Command also said today: "The second phase of the campaign is over with the capture of Paris.  The third phase has begun.  It is the pursuit and final destruction of the enemy."

I walked into a door in the Herald Tribune office tonight.  First time since the blackout that it has been closed.  Cut my nose considerably, but got it patched up at a near-by first-aid station and recovered sufficiently to go out and do my midnight broadcast.  

Tomorrow, probably, I shall leave for Paris.  I do not want to go.  I do not want to see the heavy-heeled German boots tramping down the streets I love.  

Near Magdeburg, June 15, 1940 (Later)

Spending the night in a hostelry along the Autobahn.  Very good and modern, and better food than in Berlin.  Our car broke down six miles out of Berlin on our way to Potsdam.  This held us up two hours waiting for a new car.  I fear we shall not get to Paris tomorrow.  At ten pm. in the restaurant of the road-house we heard the news.  Verdun taken!  The Verdun that cost the Germans six hundred thousand dead the last time they tried to take it.  And this time they take it in one day.  Granted that the French army is in a fix; that the fall of Paris has demoralized it still further.  Still you ask: What happned to the French?  Germans also claim Maginot Line broken through.  

Maubeuge, June 16, 1940

Got up at three a.m., started at four a.m. from the little road-house for Aachen.  In the Ruhr there was little evidence of the British night bombings.  We arrived at Aachen at eleven a.m.  Thence through Limburg to Liege and Namur. Surprised to see so little destruction along this route.   It's quite unlike the road from Aachen to Brussels, where msot of the towns lie in ruins.  We drove allafternoon up the valley of the Meuse.  Amazingly little evidence of the war.  Dinner at Charleroi.  Bitter faces in the streets.  No bread in town, and water only for drinking.  But we got some meat and salad in a little bistro.  

I bought the local journal, the Journal de Charleroi.  It publishes both the German and French war communiques.  An order in the paper said the German troops and the Belgian gendarmerie would fire without warning into any lighted windows.  Another notice from the German Feldkommandantur had to do with stopping any monkey business with carrier pigeons.  Another signed by the chief army physician ordered all local doctors to report.  Anyone unjustifiably absent, said the order, would be punished.  "No excuses will be accepted," it added.  

Maubeuge itself has been terribly destroyed.  The main part of the town is reduced to broken stone, twisted girders, and ashes.  One of the German officers tells us what happened.  German tanks tried to get through the town.  French anti-tank guns concealed in houses got the first five or six.  The Germans had to retreat.  Word was sent back to the Stukas.  They came over and did their job with their usual deadly efficiency.  Underneath the church, the commandant tells us, was the town's biggest air-raid shelter.  One of the bombs hit it square one.  Result: five hundred civilians lie buried under the debris.  Buried air-tight, though, because on this warm, starliet summer evening there is no smell.  

One of the soldiers from South Germany later whispered to me: "Yeah, it was the Prussians who destroyed the town."  He, a common German soldier, is disgusted with the destruction.  "Always the poor people who get it," he says.  

The local commandant, a German businessman called up from the reserve, recieves us in one of the few houses in town still standing.  A few facts from him: ten thousand out of twenty-four thousand residents of Maubeuge either have retunred or rode out the bombing and bombardment.  The German army, and since a few days, German relief workers, help to keep them from starving.  They bring bread from Germany.  But yesterday, the old boy says, he uncovered some wheat and is getting it ground into flour.  "One business," he says, "apparently didnt close up shop at any time, during the battle or since.  The local bordel.  I finally closed it but the Madame came in to see me and was very put out. 'Business as usual, why not?' she said."  Yesterday, he reveals, the High Command ordered the opening of all houses of prostitution in the part of France occupied by German troops.  "I must send for the Madam.  She will be pleased to hear it.," he chuckles.  

We consume several bottles of pretty fair vin rouge and nibble biscuits, and the commandant talks on enthusiastically about his problem.  Obviously he enjoys his job, and he is certainly not the old sadistic Prussian master of the story books.  On the whole, a very human fellow.  Homesick, I gather.  Hoping the war won't last much longer.  Somehow it's worse, he thinks, that what he went through the four years of teh World War in this very district.  But perhaps that is beause it's so recent, and the old memories blurred.  Anyway, he talks of his dog and his wife and his family.  

We finally take our leave.  An orderly shows us our quarters, in an abandoned house with atrocious pseudo-Oriental furnishings, which, we would soon establish from the wall-hangings and papers lying around, was occupied by one of the leading local bankers.  French bourgeois taste at its very lowest.  I take myself to one of the family bedrooms.  The mattres is stil on the old fashioned double bed.  The banker's clothes hang neatly in the armoire.  even the long-tailed black coat---you can see him, fat and important, strolling through the streets to church on Sundays in it----is there.  Obviously he has left in a great hurry.  No time to pack his wardrobe.  Downstairs we noticed the breakfast dishes on the dining room-table.  A meal never finished.

What a break in his comfortable bourgeois life this must have been, this hasty flight before the town was blown up!  Here in this house---until last month---solidity, a certain comfort, respectability; the odds and ends collected for a house during its lifetime.  This house one's life, such as it is.  Then boom!  The Stukas.  The shells.  And that life, like the houses all around, blown to bits; the solidity, the respectablity, the hopes, gone in a jiffy.  And you and your wife and maybe your children along the roads now, hungry and craving for a drink of water---like an animal, or at best---and who would have dreamed it a month ago!---like a caveman.  

Three soldiers take us for a stroll through the debris of the town as dusk falls.  Just inside the town gates a frowsy-looking woman is didding in a pile of bricks.  The soldiers shout for her to beat it.  It is after the curfew hour.  She continues digging.  One fo the men, grasping his rifle, steps over to chase here away.  We hear her shout: "Coucher?"  She asks him to go to bed with her.  By God, all is not destroyed here.  The soldier laughs and sort of pushes her on her way.  Apparently she is living in a cellar near by---like a rat.  We continue through the town and pretty soon we see her over the shambes of what was once an alley.  She shouts:"Coucher?"  and then runs.  We walk through the town, pausing before what is left of the church.  It is hard to grasp that under those charred bricks and rubble five hundred women and children lie buried.  There is so much debris that their grave has been perfectly sealed.  There is not a whiff of the familiar, nauseating, sweet smell.  

Back to our banker's house as darkness comes.  Outside, the army trucks roll by all night long.  Once during the night I hear some anti-aircraft going into action down the road.  Up at dawn, feeling not too bad, and off towards Paris."