UNDERGROUND STORY
By ALAIN VERNEY LIVEN in 1940, when the Germans were parading along the Ei avenues of Paris, there lingered within French hearts some frail hope, strengthened by the voices and messages of Mr. Winston Churchill and General de Gaulle. Then the petty " Petainist Press" began to fawn on the Germans and whine and confess to sins, imaginary in the past, at the time all to real. A few dailies tried to outwit the drastic Nazi control: when compelled to publish their news and their news-comments, they mocked them subtly by altering now a word, now a punctuation mark, so that an under- current of truth kept running in their very depths, felt everywhere but coming to the surface at rare intervals. Yet the Germans at last understood, and suppressed them. Apart from two or three exclusive literary reviews, disguising the nation's feeling in poetic, surrealist or mythological garb, there remained only the all-potent French Goebbelized Press. It is all but impossible to imagine the plight -of- such times: your ideals were being basely traduced and sullied and you could not speak ; you felt your silence was being mistaken abroad for consent, your helplessness for help to the hated enemy, and all the time you knew that your hatred and your shame were of no avail. This was a living nightmare, dispelled only by night, but renewed every day by the Nazified morning press, a nightmare akin to, but much worse than, the evil conjured by Kafka in "The Castle" and "The Trial."
Yet something was possible. Unknown to each other, several groups of readers felt the urge of writing and printing secretly, if only to save honour, what no paper would care or dare to print. The aim of the Clandestine Press was moral and spiritual as much as political, and Defense de la France—D.F.—expressed at its best what is involved in the words of Pascal, which it chose to inscribe every month on its secretly published double page, je ne crois que les histoires dont les temoins se font egorger.
Great difficulties had to be overcome before the first number of D.F. could be completed on the symbolic date, July lath, 1941. The necessary tools had to be secured ; a rotaprint and a typswriter were needed, as the Roneo system would have given poor results. P... somehow got a light rotaprint (8o kilogrammes) working quickly withoutsequiring too much electricity. The typewriter was provided by two young volunteers, who entered a Nazified Government office ; choosing the best they could find, they put it in an old potato sack and triumphantly walked away, without noticing ten yards of black and red ribbons trailing from the bag behind them. The requisite plant once acquired, the next problem was the question of how to use it. A schoolmaster, a doctor, three young women students and a nurse resolved to learn the technique and succeeded aftes forty hours of earnest efforts, though the professional man who had agreed to teach them had warned them they would need at least five or six months' training. It became possible to start work as soon as safe premises could be found. But where could an "underground" newspaper find safe premises in 1941? The romantic obvious answer was—under- ground. So D.F. established its quarters in a dusty room, crammed with torn uncut old theses, in the very heart of the Sorbonne's substructure. It was, as the crow flies, within three minutes reach of the great university lecturing hall, or rather as a nightbird flies, for none but that would have known its way in the maze of pitch- dark subterranean staircases and passages. But for the Resistance no place can be safe for long. When the group had to leavi hurriedly, a better printing plant was ordered by means of specially forged official authorisations. The party which was to fetch it had agreed to telephone a message, referring to the new Offset Rotaprint as Simone—and soon it was learnt that "Simone was staying as a guest in the bathroom of M.A.D.," the well-known professor of Greek at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes.
Later on Simone was transferred to a cork-lined padded room, as it was necessary otherwise to play the piano or the wireless at their loudest to conceal all the sounds of the noisy machine, and the neighbours began to resent dangerously the proximity of such bohemians. It was consequently only prudent to remove the rotaprint. Like all of us, it was provided with a false identity card and a fictitious story —a synonometre Le Verrier was being consigned by the Faculty of Science to a branch laboratory. It had a strong escort ; girls opened the way—girls always open all ways in the Resistance—and armed cyclists accompanied the lorry on its journey. The end of Simone, the Rotaprint then serving with the Maquis, was that of the women and the children of Oradour ; it was burnt alive in a quarry, when the Germans found it in 1944. It had had its day, and had long been superseded by4several three-ton presses.
Past experiences had shown that deserted out-of-the-way hiding- places were the most dangerous in the long run. So the first press was set up in the back room of a large laundry, where its din wag covered by that of the washing-machinery. It "pleased the old lady who owned the premises, as she felt she had a personal interest in taking revenge on Petain, whom she could not forgive for being born in the same year as herself. When Darnand's French Gestapo raided the house, whilst everyone was escaping through a hidden door, " Granny " loudly protested again and again that they could not teach her how to recognise "wicked terrorists"- as she always.- listened to Darnand and Henriot's descriptions of them ; her lodgers did not tally with them, they even had god manners! The Milice was at last convinced of her good faith and sheer stupidity.
Another press was put up in a small Parisian factory (at Clichy), "working for Germany" under the supervision of a few Nazis. The room in which it was locked was next. to that of the Germans, so that no suspicion was aroused. However, if they had rushed in unexpectedly, either there would have been time to lower by a crane the enormous box which hung high above the press, and which when lowered concealed it completely, or the well-armed bodyguard. would have availed themselves of another advantage the room possessed—its window looked on to a deep canal. Actually the materials were brought in and the papers brought out in the canteen's lorries without being interfered with at any time. At the next stage a printing concern was openly purchased and installed in a three-storied house situated within two hundred yards of the notorious Sante, in the cells of which so many Gaullists were starved to death. It was under the unsuspecting eyes of policemen from the Sante that five lorries discharged the heavy apparatus that was needed to supply every region ot France with D.F.
When Paris rose, part of the group—which had increased every year—insisted on exchanging setting-sticks for tommy-guns, whilst the others prepared in haste the first open number of D.F., then rushed out to shout its too-long-whispered name in the streets, where the fight was raging: the vicious fire of German guns seemed but to serve as a salute announcing to all clandestine journalists the new birth of their papers. For the first time one met the comrades in arms of Combat—Franc-Tireur, Liberation, Front National, L'Humanite, Le Populaire, La France Libre, Le Parisien Liberi, L'Aarore, L'Aube. Everyone of these had passed through similar experiences and different adventures ; D.F. has been singled out hero not so much as a tribute to a recent past but as a typical example of all clandestine papers, which have shared common anxieties, common hardship and common victory.
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