Aux Armes, Citoyens!

The girl from France spoke softly, but her eyes glowed. "You should have known Marseille as it was. One of the things you remember about it is its smell. Not just a smell of fish and the sea, like every harbor city, but a strong, spicy smell which makes you think of Oriental cities. It was a city of humming, busy life where all the races of the world jostled each other--and frequently fought--in dark and narrow streets. Its houses were ugly and dirty, narrow and low. Wash lines were strung from window to window across the streets, and all the time heads were wagging behind the drying clothes in interminable conversation. Even for a Frenchman the argot is difficult, if not impossible, to understand. But its rhythm and music are unforgettable and make you love it; and if you hear it in some distant corner of the world, it makes you homesick."

In the dark and narrow streets of Marseille last week men and women, pimps and tarts and petty thieves, dug out what weapons they could find and prepared to defend the ugly, dirty little houses which were their homes. The Germans were coming to the Quartier Reserve in the Old Harbor area, and they were not seeking pleasure. They came to throw 40,000 citizens of Marseille out of their homes, which they had ordered razed so that the waterside could be fortified against the Allied invasion they feared.

"If you walked, along the harbor looking toward the sea," the girl continued, "the Chateau d'If, barely visible in the shimmering distance, made you think of the adventures of the Count of Monte Cristo. You could take a little boat and sail out toward the Chateau. And you would go under the great bridge which opened and shut with a clanging roar as if to snap up the boats which passed below. Near by were the big ships, for there the water is deepest. Behind lay the little fishing boats with their many-colored sails being stitched up by the fishermen; above, burning in the sun, the golden image of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde opened her arms to the returning sailors."

Siege. In Vichy, when word came of the resistance, Nazi stooge Pierre Laval decreed a state of siege for the Marseille waterfront. The German soldiers and Vichy police, encircling the Old Harbor, advanced up the narrow streets to carry out the evacuation orders. The crooked windows of the old houses spat fire. The citizens of Marseille fought fiercely; they had barricaded their doors and they shot to kill. It was not the first time they had had trouble with the Germans. In those tortuous streets and forbidding houses many a member of France's Underground had found safety and comrades with whom one could hatch out new projects of sabotage.

The Germans brought up artillery and tanks. Shells burst among the ancient houses and fires spread. That night the sky glowed red from the burning Old Harbor district as men, women and children trudged out of Marseille for the evacuation camps 75 miles away. Explosions rocked the streets where the work of demolition had already begun, drowning out the rattling fire of execution squads which killed 300 men and women charged with resisting the evacuation.

"Marseille stood for everything which Hitler's New Order hated," said the French girl. "Its people were dirty, happy individualists who lived the way they liked to live and fought all attempts at change. Marseille was filthy, ancient, rotten with graft, but somehow it made you happy. The pastis was good and its fragrance of aniseed went to your head. The sun burned down as you walked along and watched the men playing at bowls in the streets.

"They played endless games, stopping traffic sometimes, but what did that matter? I have even seen the Paris-Lyon-Mediterranee express train stopping when a bowling ball rolled on to the tracks. Do you think the Germans would understand a city like that?"

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