大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by a volunteer from csvberkshire on behalf of John Hodges and has been added to the site with his permission. John Hodges fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

A Student鈥檚 Exit from Paris June 1940 Fleeing the German Invasion.

The following story is taken from an interview given by John Hodges to the Chronicle Newspaper shortly after his escape from France to England. The Germans arrived in Paris in June but as a student at the Sorbonne he had delayed leaving the city as his examinations were to be on Tuesday June 11th.

The First Bombs.
鈥淥n Monday morning, the landlady announced that she intended leaving Paris on the following night and closing her house. All the factories in the outskirts had moved, or were in the act of moving the machines wholesale into safer areas. This decision had been taken by the Government after the first serious air raid in which the Citroen motor works had been severely bombarded together with the Ministry of Air. On this same raid a stray bomb fell on some open trenches near a school, killing about 20 and wounding another 30, who were treated for asphyxiation, the bomb having severed a gas pipe line.
However, Parisian life continued quite normally until Monday, the 11th. June. Sunday passed peacefully. The avenues were filled with their usual strollers, and the caf茅s were doing a good trade, as Sunday is a day without any restrictions on alcohol, chocolate, meat etc. I paid a visit to the Opera on Sunday afternoon. The house was only half filled, but the artistes were excellent, in spite of the mobilisation, which had called up many of their numbers.鈥�
Not Very Helpful.
鈥淓arly on Monday morning, after hearing the news bulletin, I decided to leave Paris. My cases had been packed for nearly a week ready for a hasty departure, and with three young English students from the North Country we began a mad chase after taxis to convey our cases to the station. After asking for the loan of dust carts, trolleys, or any vehicle on wheels, we eventually succeeded in hiring a taxi.
We rang up the British Consulate, to be told that office hours began at 9 o鈥檆lock. The Southern Railways were no more helpful, telling us to come back on Tuesday for further information about a boat which might sail on Wednesday. They refused to tell us the route so we had to surmise that boats were sailing either from Bordeaux or St. Malo, and we accordingly decided to register our luggage to either of these ports. At the Prefecture of Police we obtained exit visas, having applied for them over a week before. There were people just submitting their application forms, apparently intending to leave in three days time!鈥�
Mighty Army of Refugees.
鈥淲e went to three stations that morning and all were equally blocked with thousands of women and children, all clinging to what belongings they had been able to save from their homes. One old lady we spoke to, a Belgian refugee, had been tramping the roads for ten days. She must have been one among thousands who had left everything and fled from Belgium and Northern France.
The official number of Belgian refugees in France was six millions, and supplementing these were all the inhabitants from the North. This mighty army cluttered up the stations, together with the fleeing Parisiens, impeding transport and straining the service of food provisioning.
By six that evening we had registered our luggage and bought tickets from another station, so, without time to buy food for the journey, we fought for a taxi and made our way across Paris. The taxi driver, who spoke worse French than I did, being a Russian emigrant, told me that only half the taxis were working, because of the lack of petrol and the requisitioning and that there would be scarcely any the next day.鈥�
A Mad Rush.
鈥淲ithin a quarter of a mile of the station we had to abandon the taxi, the road being blocked by people and taxis. It took us half an hour to push through the dense crowd and reach the gates of the station, which were closed. A loud-speaker was announcing that the gates would soon be opened and that additional trains would be leaving that night.
An hour鈥檚 wait found us in the same position, so we decided to follow the example of other young folk and climb the high railings to get into the courtyard, which the police apparently did not mind. Our hand luggage was passed over the top of the railings.
We left behind the heaving crowd of hot and dusty women and children who were patiently waiting and joined in a mad rush for a spare corner in the corridor of one of the two trains to leave that night. The platforms were packed, although they were not due to leave for another two hours.
From this moment onwards we wisely abandoned the orthodox method of getting into trains by the doors. Our method was for one of us to climb in through the window and put the hand luggage on the seats as it was handed in. The others got in later. However, it was not for long that we enjoyed the luxury of carriages.鈥�
No Food and Drink.
鈥淲e spent the night huddled up in the corridor and arrived at Bordeaux at noon the next day after a journey full of halts, with aeroplanes rushing overhead, with no food and no drink. Our companions were nearly all in the same plight as ourselves.
Bordeaux had been the principal reception town of the South West. No rooms were available and the police had issued an order that all aliens, and even Frenchmen who were strangers in the district, were to leave the town within three days.
The British Consulate informed us that a boat had left the week before with a thousand places untaken, also that the Consulate in Paris had been informed of this excess accommodation and had failed to advise Englishmen in Paris to leave by it. It was reckoned that there were about one thousand British subjects left in Paris on the Wednesday evening, when the enemy were on the outskirts of the city, unless they had made their way out on foot, like the thousands who were not lucky enough to get on a train and who left in long columns from Monday onwards.鈥�
A Pathetic Sight.
鈥淭he waiting room at the station at Bordeaux was a pathetic sight. More and more arrived from the North and South. One solitary nurse pushed around a pram in which was boiled milk and water for the multitude of babies. The rain began to fall as night approached, completing the picture of misery.
At six o鈥檆lock the next morning we started our journey to St. Malo. Boats had been leaving by this route, we were told, but we did not know if there were any more. Our luggage, registered to Bordeaux, had not arrived and it was useless to wait for it.
Our journey to St. Malo was even more uncomfortable than the ride from Paris, although we had food. We frequently changed trains, climbing into a third-class carriage with a wooden seat at the best, or a cattle truck full of eggs and cheese.鈥�
The Tommies鈥� War-time Songs.
鈥淭here were children who had no proper sleep for weeks, as they had been constantly on the move. The mothers were absolutely overcome with worry, fatigue and the never-ending cry of 鈥楯鈥檃i soif鈥� of the children old enough to speak and the continuous wail of the still younger ones.
We spent 14 hours going from Nantes to Rennes, a distance of 108 kilometres, sitting on the hardest of French seats in complete darkness. On this occasion there were a handful of Tommies in a truck farther up the train, who gave a grand concert of war-time songs, and there was something new in every one of them, sung from the inside of a truck in the middle of France, with hopes of seeing the homeland very far in the distance. The only British we met were an Englishman, who had settled in Belgium and had abandoned his home a month previously, with his wife and son. He had been bombed and machine-gunned several times while in a train.鈥�
How Military Effort Was Choked.
鈥淥n Friday morning , St Malo came in sight. A boat was waiting and we sailed that morning. The voyage was calm and the twelve-pounders and Bren guns were manned ready to give a reception to enemy planes and submarines. The only shock came when the cannon was fired off in the middle of the night without any warning. All the passengers woke up without exception. Some fell off the benches where they had been sleeping and grabbed for the lifebelts placed by their side.
Southampton was safely reached on Saturday morning, five days after our departure from Paris 鈥� five days of almost continuous travelling mid appalling sights and frequent raids of German planes.
We saw how the military effort of France had been choked and impeded by the millions of refugees rushing North, rushing South, unguided, left to fend for themselves and their helpless children.鈥�

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