By J.R.L. Anderson, ╥Manchester Guardian╙ War Correspondent
Last night (Friday) I watched the French mop up the last organised German resistance in the Senate building at the Luxembourg Palace, but to get there I had to walk all over the area of the left bank of the Seine, dodging down side streets which were not commanded by enemy fire and hastening forward when I found myself alone in a street with no one except the ever-present white-coated doctors and nurses from the nearby hospital in evidence. These medical personnel have been working throughout the fighting, and never seemed to bother about taking cover at all.
At the Seine itself the lead-covered locked-up stalls of the second-hand book-sellers were still there, and across the river was Notre-Dame, untouched save for bullet splashes ╤ about fifty of them ╤ on the principal facade. From it flew the Tricolor masthead high, but on the other side of the square the French colours flew at half-mast from the police barracks and prefecture as a salute to the patriots who had been killed in those badly battered buildings. The inside of Notre-Dame was dark, cool, and completely empty.
I went back to the Luxembourg, having been told by a weary police commissioner that that was now the only German position holding out, the French having taken in succession the Ecole de Mines in the Boulevard St. Michel, the Ecole Militaire at the Invalides, the buildings round the Place de la Concorde, and the Hotel Majestic ╤ the German military headquarters.
I went by the back streets to the Rue de Vaugirard, in front of the palace, just as a French Sherman with a seventeen-pounder knocked out two German Renault tanks under the trees and then, coming up to point-blank range, started firing straight into the palace from about ten yards. Whilst this was going on an old woman, one of those black-dressed, white-haired old women of Paris, appeared and began moving through the streets still commanded by the German weapons and picking up likely bits of wooden wreckage and branches of the trees shot down by the guns. This she piled in barrows and took away for firewood.
A few rounds from the Sherman and a white flag appeared from somewhere and French Gardes Mobiles in black helmets and tunics went in to fetch out their prisoners. The Germans came out with their commanding officer last, a tall, thin, middle-aged man wearing the ribbon of the Iron Cross in the button-hole of his tunic. He looked deathly tired, but very spick and span compared with the dusty French.
The crowd had let the other prisoners go with boos and cat-calls, but they rushed forward towards this officer and for a few minutes the Gardes Mobiles had to work hard to save his life while he watched, white-faced but rigid, from the front seat of a jeep.
I thought that my adventures for the day were over, but as I made my way home in the dusk fighting quite literally and frighteningly broke out on all sides of me, with tracers coming up and going down four different streets at a cross-road and bullets striking sparks on the pavement as they ricocheted by, with enemy snipers, French patriots╒ rifles, machine-guns, and twelve-pounders joining in.
From a pile of sand bags alongside the Pantheon I looked down the Rue Soufflet, deserted and with a couple of shops on fire down at the far end nearest the Luxembourg. Splashes of white on the houses caused by bullets and splinters were everywhere. I went on to the Seine past a six-pounder dug in behind a barricade of wrecked German lorries, paving-stones, and furniture which had been firing up the hill from the corner of the Boulevard St. Germain and the Boulevard St. Michel. All the streets leading to the river had been barricaded here, but some of the barricades were already being disbanded.
SATURDAY
This afternoon General de Gaulle rode at the head of his troops from the Unknown Soldier╒s tomb at the Arc de Triomphe to the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. With resistance on a big scale at an end last night, the first part of to-day was celebrated with the greatest light-heartedness and enthusiasm.
But while the tail-end of General de Gaulle╒s procession was passing down the Rue de Rivoli fire was opened on it opposite the Louvre and firing in the Rue de Rivoli and the neighbourhood continued intermittently for two hours afterwards as the F.F.I. moved from house-top to house-top rounding up French Fascists who were the cause of the trouble.
There is no clear indication at time of writing that an attempt was made on General de Gaulle╒s life. If anything of the sort was in anybody╒s mind, they missed far better chances earlier in the afternoon, when the General himself with his forces, first General Leclerc╒s armour and then lorryloads of F.F.I., went down the Champs Elysees. Nothing occurred then save that after the trials of four years Paris gave the General the reception of which this steadfast man must always have dreamed during his long exile and his tenacious rebuilding first of French spirit, then of the French Empire, and now of France.
It was upon the hangers-on to the procession, who had added themselves to it in a free-and-easy way which recalled prewar France, that fire was opened. A great outburst of cheering had greeted the arrival of General de Gaulle at the Place de la Concorde, on foot, and accompanied by men of the F.F.I. and the French forces. The crowd were dispersing, happy and gay. Thousands were pressing through the roads leading off from the place.
It was this moment that German snipers and their French Fascist collaborators chose to turn machine-gun fire on the crowd from upper windows and roofs. Many people, like seasoned soldiers, flung themselves to the ground under the cover of the buildings on either side of the road. Soon people were piled up on top of each other and there was not room for everyone. And so many ran on hoping to get round a safe corner or beyond range.
But ╤ either by prearranged plan or because other snipers, hearing shooting, followed suit ╤firing broke out in many parts at this hour ╤ four o╒clock. Men of the F.F.I. returned the fire of the snipers immediately.
The snipers were in church towers and steeples, at upper windows and on roofs. I turned into the Rue HonorÄ. This was for some minutes a hot sector. Snipers were shooting along the street from either end, and the F.F.I. were returning the fire both ways from the middle of the street. People turned for shelter into the entrances to apartments, shops, and air-raid shelters. In this part there seemed to be remarkably few casualties, but occasionally amid the shooting, Red Cross workers would wheel by a man, woman or child who had been wounded.
Soldiers and men of the F.F.I. were to be seen searching the roofs of tall buildings. A German sniper wearing civilian clothes was caught near the HÖtel de Ville. A woman heard him whistling to another sniper on an adjoining roof. Men of the F.F.I. mounted to the roof and captured him. He wore two pistols, had a hand-grenade in either pocket of his trousers, and had a rifle as well.
The view of the ceremony to-day at the Arc de Triomphe which I had was of that gracious monument standing against the blue sky of a Paris summer draped in a huge French flag which hung from the top nearly to the ground. One had so often hoped to see it like this, and here it was. But too solemn reflections were dissipated instantly by the riotously cheerful crowd. It swarmed over all, including British and American Army transport, which became mobile grand stands, willy nilly, for the Parisians as they drove about the city.
