"Is Paris Burning"

By Larry Collins & Dominique Lapierre. The audiobook narrator's RP accent was really a disservice for the book, which is rich in details and humanity. Among the cast of hundreds, German agent 'Bobby' Bender left me with the deepest impression.

• The Germans had even changed the face of the city. Almost two hundred of its handsomest bronze statues had been torn down. They were shipped to Germany to be melted into shell castings. The architects of the TODT labor organization had replaced them with monuments of their own-less esthetic, perhaps, but more efficacious. Sunk into the pavements of Paris were almost a hundred concrete pillboxes. Their squat forms pimpled the surface of the city like a rash of warts.
• Some cab drivers had converted their taxis into fiacres and themselves into horses by cutting their cabs in half, leaving only their back seats balanced on their rear wheels. They were called 'vélo-taxis.' The drivers towed them with their bicycles. For express service, there were super-vélo-taxis towed by four riders. The fastest was pulled by a group of veterans of the Tour de France,
• The meat ration was so small that, according to a popular joke, it could be wrapped in a subway ticket-provided the ticket had not been used. If it had, went the joke, the meat might fall out through the hole punched in the ticket by the conductor's perforator.
• Movie houses kept their cameras running on the current pedaled into their generators by a brace of bicycles. The Gaumont Palace, France's Radio City Music Hall, calculated that four men pedaling at 13 miles an hour for six hours could store enough current for two complete shows.
• the paper warned, 'The capture of Paris will entail a civil affairs commitment equal to maintaining eight divisions in operation.' <> In other words, to Eisenhower, the capture of Paris meant the risk of drying up the fuel tanks of almost a fourth of the 37 divisions he had already landed in France.
• For de Gaulle was convinced he was in a race with the French Communist party. The immediate goal was Paris; the victor's prize would be all France. <> As early as 1943 he had given orders to 'Colonel Passy,' André de Wavrin-the industrialist who controlled his arms-dropping organizations-that 'no arms are to be parachuted directly to the Communists or dropped in such a way that they might fall into their hands.'
• Yet no group had fought harder or paid a higher price in blood in the Resistance than the Communists. Latecomers to the Resistance-they did not throw themselves into the battle against the Germans until after the Nazi invasion of the U.S.S.R. in 1941-they had brought to it its best-organized, best-disciplined, and often its most courageous troops. The party's ranks had swollen enormously during the war. Never had its prestige been so high. It was the most important single political organization in France. Its FTP was the most important single armed body in the Resistance.
• Either a vengeful Wehrmacht would crush the insurrection and Paris along with it, or its victorious Communist leaders would install themselves in the capital's citadels of power, ready to spread their authority over all France. <> To Chaban, that night, there seemed to be only one way out of his dilemma. He must persuade the Allies to change their plans.
• This unknown general waiting for the Führer's train to leave the Silesia station would carry with him to Paris the reputation of a smasher of cities. It was not entirely undeserved. <> 'Since Sebastopol,' he would one day confess to a Swedish diplomat in Paris, 'it has been my fate to cover the retreat of our armies and to destroy the cities behind them.'
• Then Sperrle raised his Baccarat goblet and started the toasts. Among them, one in particular struck Warlimont. It seemed to him to sum up all the gulf of unreality that lay between this elegant dinner and the hell he had seen in Normandy. <> It was 'To this city of Paris where the flag of Germany shall fly for a thousand years.'
• Unhappily, he said, its provisions, in order to make the law meaningful, had to be very strict. In a few cases, where a general's failings were grave and he had escaped German justice by being taken a prisoner, the law provided the death penalty for the man's family.
• The parade was Choltitz's idea. Since noon, in a long and menacing flow of tanks, armored cars and trucks, his troops had been tramping through the city in combat dress. To reinforce the impression he was trying to create, von Choltitz had ordered his troops to double back over their tracks, leaving, he hoped, the illusion of far greater force than he had actually put on parade. <> It was an irony of history of which Choltitz probably was unaware, but his hasty demonstration was the largest parade the Germans had ever staged in Paris.
• At Romainville, among the last prisoners to leave was a tubercular Polish singer named Nora. Never would the handful of prisoners left behind forget the image of the little Pole riding through the gate of the barbed-wire fence, singing proudly from the open rear end of the last bus: Attends-moi dans ce pays de France, /Je serai bientot de retour, garde confiancé.
• Through her blurred eyes, she saw Abbé Steinert's familiar figure in the group of German officers behind the open back platform of Pierre's bus. She darted past the SS guard in front of her and ran to him. <> 'My child,' he whispered, 'it's a blessing he's leaving. There'll be a massacre in the prison.' <> The buses' engines started, and the long line of green-and-yellow vehicles started to move forward. Marie-Hélène ran back to her bicycle. Without knowing why, she got on and pedaled after the convoy.
• A few 'Souris Grises'-gray mice, the Parisian nickname for the Wehrmacht's drab women soldiers-wept and waved their handkerchiefs. But the most astonishing sight of all was the stream of loot flowing out with the departing occupiers. Paris was being emptied by the truckload. Bathtubs, bidets, rugs, furniture, radios, cases and cases of wine-all rode past the angry eyes of Paris that morning.
• Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux had caught up with the train. Among the black and coughing figures lurching out of its wagons, she recognized Pierre. At that instant 'nothing in the world, not even the SS' could keep her from talking to her husband. Still holding her bicycle, she bounded across the little field of daisies that separated them. Then, seeing his frail figure before her, she performed the first gesture that came to her mind: she took a white handkerchief from her pocket and wiped the soot from his eyes. <> By some dispensation she would never understand, the guard behind Pierre shrugged his shoulders in indifference, and allowed Marie-Hélène to walk beside this pale, stumbling man who was her husband. Her skirt rustling lightly against his shredded trousers, her hand clasped in his, she savored two hours beside him. She would have ridden her bicycle to hell that morning for half as much as that.
• The Swede and Bender raced out of the building and found a lawyer to put this traffic in human bodies into Teutonically acceptable legal form. Then Huhm, perhaps convinced he was winning 15,000 soldiers back for the Reich, put his name on a twelve-paragraph document ordering the German prison authorities to hand over all the political detainees in five prisons, three camps and three hospitals into Nordling's custody. As Huhm signed, Nordling looked at his watch. It was just one o'clock. In the past hour and fifteen minutes he had talked the Germans into an agreement which was to save the lives of hundreds of Frenchmen.
• In a dry, hoarse voice von Choltitz specified just what he contemplated doing: destroying the city bridges, power plants, railroads, communications. Taittinger sat stunned in his chair. This man, he thought, 'was preparing to destroy Paris as indifferently as if it were a crossroads village in the Ukraine.'
• 'Often,' Taittinger said, 'it is given to a general to destroy, rarely to preserve. Imagine that one day it may be given to you to stand on this balcony again, as a tourist, to look once more on these monuments to our joys, our sufferings, and to be able to say, 'One day I could have destroyed all this, and I preserved it as a gift for humanity.' General, is not that worth all a conqueror's glory?'
• And he was sure Model would not hesitate to assign him the honor of scorching the earth of Paris behind him; Model, von Choltitz knew, was a man with 'an eastern front mentality.'
• With an ironic smile he realized that this night the curfew of General von Choltitz would serve the cause of General de Gaulle. It would prevent one of the three envelopes Suzanne carried from reaching its goal before morning. That was exactly what Bayet wanted. The message which would not reach its destination this night was addressed to the largest and the most powerful of the Resistance movements in the police, the network controlled by the Communist party. This night, the Communists would be the victims of their own obsession with security. Unlike the other two networks, their messages had to pass through not one, but two, letter drops before it reached its goal. The message Suzanne carried for them would spend the night frozen in their second mailbox.
• Rol had arrived an hour too late. Yves Bayet was, at about the same moment, climbing out of a black police car and approaching a pale man reading a newspaper on the terrace of the Café des Deux Magots. <> 'M. le Préfet,' Bayet said, 'the Prefecture has been taken. It is yours.' The man smiled, got up, put on his felt hat and horn-rimmed glasses, and followed Bayet to the car. Seven days earlier, on the orders of Charles de Gaulle, Charles Luizet had parachuted into the south of France. He had been sent on a special mission. He was to be de Gaulle's Prefect of Police. His job was to make sure that Paris's vital police force remained in Gaullist and not Communist hands. In a few moments this quietly capable man would become the first public official named by de Gaulle to exercise his office in Paris. The Gaullists had won the first round. The building which was to become the symbol of the insurrection the Communists had prepared was in their hands. It would be the firm rock to which they would cling in the days ahead.
• Above him, inches away, he could hear the scraping feet of the Germans running through the basement looking for them, driving out the stragglers. Then he heard one pair of boots stop right over his head. He heard the German's feet rubbing against the grains of sand and dust on top of the lid, almost as though he was grinding them into his balding skull.
• In the dimly lit cellar of the Prefecture itself, three men, barechested and sweating, assembled the building's most potent weapon. Stacked in the walls before them were the champagne bottles of Vichy's police prefect. One after another, their corks were popped, and, without a look, the team assembled by Frédéric Joliot-Curie poured the precious liquid onto the floor until it sloshed over the soles of their shoes. As fast as they could replace it with gas and sulfuric acid, they recorked the bottles and wrapped them with paper soaked in potassium chlorate.
• Charles Caillette, the sharpshooter, carried Henri Guerin, a World War I veteran whose wooden leg had been shot away by a fragment from a tank shell. Looking at it, Guerin had remarked, 'Thank God, they always shoot the same one.'
• Von Choltitz started at the Swede's suggestion. In his thirty years as a soldier, he had never given or asked for a cease-fire... The autonomy this Paris command gave him was a new experience for von Choltitz. Until now, he had always been firmly locked inside Germany's impersonal military machine. His decisions, with the exception of minor tactical ones, had always been made for him. Now, at the very moment at which his visit to Rastenburg had jarred his confidence in the Third Reich and its leader, circumstances had placed von Choltitz in a command in which he had to make decisions. He preferred to postpone them. Nordling's suggestion offered him that chance.
• His hand sweating nervously, de Marmier realized he would have to find land. He would have to do it alone, without instruments, without using his radio, with no idea of his ceiling, with his gas running out-and with the man who carried the destiny of France on his shoulders smoking a cigar in his cabin. De Marmier throttled back his engines and set the plane into a slow descent. Watching the altimeter descend toward ground level, Bully silently prayed that they were over the Channel and not land. In the cabin behind them, silent and impassive, Charles de Gaulle glared at the bleak world outside his window.
• De Gaulle put on his glasses, squinted at the map, peered outside for a long moment; then he turned back, jabbed his finger at a bump of land at the tip of Normandy, and announced, 'We're here, just east of Cherbourg.' Bully scurried forward... By that margin of just two minutes, Charles de Gaulle had come safely home to France-and not to a tragic end in the waters of the English Channel.
• The sound of gunfire, so conspicuously absent at midmorning, gradually came back to the streets of Paris. In disciplined bands all over the city, Rol's Communist FTP opened fire on passing German patrols. The Germans, many of whom scorned von Choltitz's truce, returned their fire with zest, or started the shooting themselves. Like a sweater unraveling, the truce began to fall apart.
• In the tangle of twisting alleys between the Seine and Saint-Germain-des-Pres, on streets with names as quaint as the rue du Chat-qui-Peche and rue Git-le-Coeur, * (Literally, the streets of 'the fishing cat' and 'where the heart lies.') hidden FFI squads trapped four truckloads of German soldiers. Some of them, their uniforms blazing from the splatterings of Molotov cocktails, ran screaming through those scenic little side streets, human torches in a thousand-year-old haven of human amusement.
• Paris's druggists, with their supplies of potassium chlorate, became the keepers of its arsenals. The hospitals, long and secretly organized, were now taken over by the Resistance. In apartments and stores, medical students and young girls organized emergency clinics. Volunteer stretcher-bearers, most of them teen-agers, posted themselves across the city. In Les Halles, FFI warehousemen seized all the food supplies they could find for a series of restaurants turned into soup kitchens.
• in the House of Moliere, the men and women of the Comedie Française, the national theater troupe of France, turned this classical theater into a hospital and barricaded strongpoint. Marie Bell, the husky-voiced queen of the French theater, Lise Delamare and Mony Dalmes, two of its prettiest young actresses, rummaged through their wardrobe trunks for the seventeenth-century sleeping gowns which served them as improvised nursing dresses. Among the volunteer stretcher-bearers was a quiet man with horn-rimmed glasses. He took the night duty because it would, he thought, be quieter. He wanted to record his impressions of these days on paper. His name was Jean Paul Sartre.
• Among the figures dropping noiselessly through an open trapdoor in the basement of the headquarters of the Paris Waters and Sewers Administration, was Dietrich von Choltitz's most implacable enemy, 'Colonel Rol.' Rol walked softly down the 138 stone steps to his new underground command post. At the bottom of the last step, an armor-plated metal door creaked open. Here, on the foundations of Paris among the skulls and skeletons of forty generations of Parisians, was the secret fortress from which he would now direct the battle for the streets of the city 90 feet above his head. Its code name was Duroc, for another French soldier, a marshal of Napoleon's armies. Its door led to a city under a city, the 300 miles of tunnels threading the foundations of Paris for its sewers, its métros and its catacombs. <> Stepping inside Duroc, throwing the beam of his flashlight over the room in a first satisfied inspection, Rol started with a surprise he could recall twenty years later. On the ventilating machine above his head, his flashlight had fallen on the plate bearing the name of its manufacturer. He knew that name-and the machine, made on a special order-well. Eight years earlier, before leaving to fight in Spain, Henri Tanguy, a simple metalworker at Nessi Freres, had riveted together the seams of this ventilator which would today filter the air he would breathe during the most glorious hours of his life.
• Most imposing, perhaps, of all the barricades in the city was the stonework of a group of engineering students at the corner of the boulevard Saint-Germain and boulevard Saint-Michel in the heart of the Latin Quarter. Made entirely of paving stones, six feet thick, it dominated a key crossroads in the city, soon to be known as the Carrefour de la Mort-the Crossroads of Death. <> In front of the Café de l'Univers, opposite the Comédie Française, the actors of the theater built their own barricade, swelling its girth with the leftovers from their scenery storeroom. They found it skinny and unprepossessing. To fend off German tanks, they decided to use psychology. They set a ring of canning jars around it. On each they wrote the words 'Achtung! Minen!' All week long not a single German tank ventured within striking distance of their frail fortress.
• Morandat wondered what to do. 'If there is opposition,' Parodi had told him, 'leave.' 'If there is opposition,' Morandat thought, 'I'll leave in a coffin.' <> 'I am the commander,' rasped the little man before him. 'What do you want?' <> At that instant Morandat decided what to do. In a voice of stentorian splendor, in a rich authoritative tone that even surprised him, he announced, 'I have come to occupy these premises in the name of the provisional government of the French Republic.' <> The little man who for four years had given his allegiance to the government of Vichy braced to attention. 'At your orders,' he said. 'I have always been a firm republican.'
• The laundry basket was full of Molotov cocktails. Clara Bonté, the wife of a Communist deputy, and her daughter Marguerite had filled them themselves. They and the other women of the neighborhood had set up a Molotov cocktail factory in the Eleventh Arrondissement Ladies' Club a few doors away. Their husbands waited at a windowsill on the place de la République to hurl them onto these two tanks now firing at the two women scurrying for cover.
• The first was a courtly Virginian named David Bruce, * (Later United States Ambassador to Germany and to Great Britain.) a colonel, the head of the OSS for France, whose capture would have afforded untrammeled delight to the Germans. The second was a jeep driver, a taciturn GI named 'Red' Pelkey, from West Virginia. The third was a war correspondent. True to a promise sworn long before, Ernest Hemingway was leading the United States press corps to Paris... Sole liberators of this hunting preserve of the kings and presidents of France, and forty-eight hours ahead of the rest of the Allied armies, the trio found themselves saddled with an embarrassing problem: too many Germans. 'Every time we turned around,' Bruce found, 'one was crawling out of the woodwork to surrender.' Hemingway took away their pants and put them to work in the kitchen peeling potatoes for his growing band of FFI.
• Twenty years later, von Choltitz would still be haunted by his awful debate this August evening with his own conscience. Between his instinctive obedience to orders and the apocalypse to which they seemed to be leading him, he found himself caught in an appalling dilemma. That history would never forgive the man who destroyed Paris was a persuasive argument to von Choltitz; that the man who did it might be hanged in its ashes was more convincing. Von Choltitz was prepared to die as a soldier in Paris, but not as a criminal.
• In that French car, driven by a French driver, guarded by French troops, de Gaulle intended to make his own entry into Paris. Just as he had deliberately neglected to inform his allies that his 'visit' to France was going to be permanent, he neglected now to inform them of one other fact: He had no intention of leaving Paris once he got there. For de Gaulle, his own entry into Paris was just the first in a rapid series of steps that would plant his provisional government, recognition or no recognition, in Paris.
• Before the war, von Zigesar-Beines had lived a more glorious hour in this palace. He had been one of the stars of the German Army equestrian team and had, on countless occasions, galloped the tanbark of the ring over his head, the applause of thousands of admiring Frenchmen ringing in his ears. Now, from his window, von Zigesar-Beines saw a German soldier, like some comic-strip figure, leading a flock of rosy pigs down the Champs-Élysées.
• Von Choltitz got up and came around his desk to take Nordling to the door. He felt 'a great load off his conscience.' He had found a way to warn the Allies of the danger hanging over Paris, and he hoped to make them realize that, for the moment at least, the road to Paris was open. How long it would remain open he could not know. If the reinforcements he had been promised arrived before the Allies did, his soldier's honor would force him to try to close the door himself, and defend Paris in a wasting and destructive street battle.
• This man who had been chosen to carry the desperate warning of Dietrich von Choltitz to the Allies 60 miles away could barely drag himself the few feet across his office to a spare bed. He had just had a heart attack... In Nordling's black Citroën were two Gaullists Charles de Gaulle did not want to see, two Allied intelligence agents who did not know each other, and the wrong Swedish diplomat. Raoul Nordling had sent in his place the only other man in Paris who could fill this mission for him and answer to the name 'R. Nordling,' handwritten on von Choltitz's laissez-passer. It was his brother Rolf.
• Saint-Phalle had just begun to accelerate when another German leaped at them from a roadside ditch and hurled himself at the hood of the Citroën. Saint-Phalle skidded to a stop. As he did, he heard the word the German had been frantically shouting: 'Minen.' Just three feet from the Citroën's front wheels was the first emplacement of a carefully seeded minefield. Any one of those mines would have destroyed this handful of men and, with them, the plea on which the destiny of Paris seemed to depend.
• Three days earlier, tragedy had overtaken Lesueur. He had bitten hard onto a bar of K rations, and this ration bar had bitten back. It had chipped off part of a front tooth. What to his fellow newsmen would have been only a minor discomfort was, to broadcaster Lesueur, a disabling wound. He whistled when he talked. He had done everything to repair it; he had stuffed the gap with bubble gum, with his finger, with his tongue, with a gluey flour paste that had dissolved as soon as it had entered his mouth. Nothing worked. Lesueur could not broadcast without sounding like a midday factory whistle... As Lesueur flew back to London, the one competitor he feared more than any other was already announcing the liberation of Paris.
• Half of Paris heard the sound of Houcke's circus exploding. As the last vibrations of its echo fluttered out, a column of black smoke started seeping up from the Grand Palais. To finish the work started by the radio-guided, explosives-laden tank Saumon had seen, the German tanks outside started to fire incendiary shells into the building. Inside, smoke, screams, the sound of running feet, animal and human, produced a panic. The lions and tigers of Houcke's circus roared in terror. His horses stampeded through the burning building. In the commissariat, the police hastily opened their cellblocks, turning out the band of prostitutes they had rounded up the night before, and the shrieks of the frightened women mixed in the smoke and dust with the outcries of Houcke's frightened lions... From every building nearby, hungry Parisians with plates and knives in their hands swarmed toward the dying animal still harnessed in the red, white and blue ribbons Houcke had ordered for his Liberation show.
• a young Frenchman listened in astonishment to the German seated before him. Sprawled comfortably in an armchair by the bed of ailing Swedish Consul General Raoul Nordling, Abwehr agent 'Bobby' Bender was repeating to a representative of the French Resistance the substance of the secret cables the commander of Gross Paris had just read. <> With the extraordinary freedom of movement he had enjoyed at the Hotel Meurice for the past ten days, Bender had visited the hotel before seven and carefully noted the contents of the cables waiting for the breakfast tray of the commander of Gross Paris;
• the Eiffel Tower. <> All along the three advancing columns of the 2nd Armored at this same midday hour, these men, on whose arrival Police Prefect Charles Luizet so desperately counted, began to see that magic skeleton beckoning in the sky ahead. <> To Colonel Louis Warabiot, it seemed as though his men had been 'galvanized by an electric current' at the sight. In the turret of his tank, Captain Georges Buis stared solemnly at its distant outlines and thought that 'the Crusaders seeing Jerusalem's walls or navigators catching their first glimpse of the Sugarloaf at Rio' must have experienced the same almost sensual delight he felt flowing through his body.
• 'My God,' thought the stunned Frenchman, 'this man is committing treason!' For the second time in less than eight hours, Lorrain Cruse, Jacques Chaban-Delmas's assistant, was standing by the bedside of Swedish Consul General Raoul Nordling, listening to Abwehr agent 'Bobby' Bender's rich soft voice. A glass of whisky cupped in one hand, a pencil in the other, Bender was leaning over a frayed Michelin map of the Paris region, its folds spread across the foot of Nordling's bed. With a precise poke of his pencil, Bender was exposing, one by one, every German strongpoint on the road to Paris.
• The two men fell silent. Then Krueger asked Choltitz what he was going to do. 'I don't know,' replied the Paris commander. 'The situation is bad.' Again there was a silence, and then the two men said to each other, 'Hals und Bein bruch'-'Break your neck and your legs.' It was an old German Army term. It meant 'Good luck.'
• For this last dinner in Paris Dietrich von Choltitz was dining off a special porcelain service commanded by his predecessor from the centuries-old manufacturers of Sèvres. Hand-painted on each plate of that service, capped with the seal of the Wehrmacht, was a monument of the city Adolf Hitler had ordered him to destroy.
• Howling in happiness, people poured into the streets, banged open their shuttered windows, threw themselves into the arms of neighbors to whom they had not spoken for years. With all the power of Paris's electric plants behind it, the radio pushed one pulsating 'Marseillaise' over the air. As it did, a remarkable thing happened. In hundreds of thousands of homes, Parisians spontaneously spun up their radios full volume and threw open their windows. <> From balconies, doorways, windows; from sidewalks, streets and barricades, the whole darkened city, proud and alive again, sang with the radio. For a few moments Paris wrapped herself in the sound of that anthem rolling and reverberating through all her blacked-out streets.
• For four years the bells of Paris had hung lifeless and silent. Not once during the occupation had their rich notes rung out to call Parisians to Mass, to proclaim the news that 'A king is born,' or 'Christ is risen,' or even to toll the passing of a departed parishioner. Now, on Schaeffer's call, they threw off that cloak and shook out the dust gathered in four years of silence and sorrow.
• The precious intelligence on the exact location of the German strongpoints in the city, given by Abwehr agent 'Bobby' Bender to Lorrain Cruse, had not reached Leclerc. At dawn Cruse had leaped on his bicycle to ride out himself with the information. He found Colonel de Langlade near the pont de Sèvres, but Langlade, irritated by the mass of well-meaning but often ill-informed FFI that had swarmed over his headquarters all night, ignored Cruse. It was only after one of Cruse's college classmates on Langlade's staff had vouched for him that the colonel accepted his intelligence. By that time, Langlade's radio communication with Leclerc had broken down, and the three columns had already set out on their established attack plan.
• The Paris so quickly slipping from Hitler's grasp was already a scene of wild contrasts. On one street corner, crowds poured over the city's liberators in an orgy of delight. On the next, in a welter of smoke and gunfire, these same liberators slowly, and often painfully, had begun the job of prying Choltitz's men from their strongpoints.
• Driving into the place des Pyramides, Jacques d'Étienne, the gunner of the Laffaux, saw three Germans sprinting past the statue of Jeanne d'Arc, a bare 30 yards ahead of him. D'Étienne fired. With a kind of horrified ecstasy he watched the Germans' severed limbs fly into the air like a wild bouquet garlanding for a second the gilded limbs of the Maid of Orleans.
• From his rooftop outpost on the Kriegsmarine, Lieutenant Commander Leithold watched as the Sherman charged like a locomotive through the smoke billowing around the Panther. He thought the sight looked like a 'medieval joust.' <> In the turret of his tank, Bizien braced himself. Below him, Campillo pressed back against his metal seat to absorb the blow. Like lances, the cannons of the two tanks crossed. In a fountain of sparks and a thunderclap of sound, the seventy tons of metal smashed together in the center of the most beautiful square in the world. Then the echoes of their crash died and an eerie silence filled the square.
• Now, in the first soft strokes of twilight, the only angry sound left was the occasional snap of sniper fire. The occupiers' guns had been stilled, but not without their price. Almost 20,000 Germans had been taken prisoner in the past forty-eight hours; 3,200 had been killed and wounded. On this day alone, the 2nd Armored Division had lost 42 killed and 77 wounded. Of civilians, 127 had been killed and 714 wounded. Each of those figures produced its island of sorrow in the waves of happiness sweeping the city.
• And unlike the British, who signed the agreement on the Foreign Ministers' level, the United States insisted on its being signed between military men. F.D.R. wished to make sure that the document was not confused with formal recognition of the French government. <> Looking at the situation in the city as he signed, professional diplomat Holmes reflected on the gap between this document and reality. No one in Washington, he knew, had planned to see de Gaulle's government installed and functioning in Paris for some time. Yet here, he realized, was de Gaulle, already digging in, and 'nothing short of force was going to budge him out.' The State Department, he mused, was already going to have to start agonizing over changes in this document on which the ink literally was not yet dry.
• Levy saluted and, convinced of the urgency of his mission, began to ransack the streets of Paris for these precious items de Gaulle deemed indispensable that night to the orderly administration of France. <> The cigarettes-Players-he got from a British colleague, the C rations from a truck of the 4th Division near the Hotel de Crillon. The lanterns were more difficult. He found them in a quartermaster convoy pulled off the road outside the city. The GI on guard duty at first refused to surrender any of his cargo. Finally Levy convinced the GI to turn his back while he performed a 'moonlight requisition' for the lanterns that would illuminate Charles de Gaulle's first night in Paris.
• Larry Lesueur of CBS had just made, as he had promised himself he would, the first broadcast out of Paris. He had done it by using the French radio's transmitters to get his broadcast out of the capital. He was the only radio correspondent in the city to think of it.
• The CNR, instead of its 'National Palace,' was assigned a nondescript villa belonging to an English lord for the few meetings that would precede the organization's swift march to oblivion. De Gaulle, of course, never 'assisted' at its meetings. He received its members once, briefly. They expressed their intention to transform their organization into a permanent body, functioning alongside his authority, to hand over to the COMAC as their military arm the control of the Communist Milice. De Gaulle politely but bluntly informed them their functions had ceased. The police would take over law and order, he said. There was no longer any need for the Communists' 'Milice Populaire.' They were dissolved, as was the COMAC whose members he never received. <> 'The iron,' de Gaulle later wrote with eloquent understatement, 'was hot. I struck it.'