"Now It Starts"

The first siren wails since March tore the night air of Paris last week and citizens as they rushed to dugouts in their night clothes saw the whole sky streaked with tracer shells erupting like Roman candles.

"Now the war starts," muttered Parisians as they watched the streaking Nazi bombers, plainly visible in the skyrocket glare. The first raids spared downtown Paris, but heavy concussions rumbled from the suburbs. Long after the Nazis were gone most citizens lay doggo in the shelters until after sunup. Then suddenly all Paris clanged and tinkled as abandoned alarm clocks went off in empty flats.

Every hour on the hour Paris radio broadcast bulletins, but there was little news beside the fact that in the crisis the Government had at long last achieved a "Union Sacree" of all parties by adding to the Cabinet Professor Louis Marin and Conservative Leader Jean Ybarnegaray from the extreme Right. Everyone who understood English tuned in the British Broadcasting Corp. Disturbing to many of the French was the BBC announcement that Winston Churchill had been made Prime Minister. In Paris his reputation is for recklessness. The French remember that in World War I the ghastly risks and losses of Gallipoli were his responsibility as First Lord of the Admiralty, and Parisians feared last week that Mr. Churchill and Herr Hitler would soon be competing in a swiftly rising crescendo of blood & thunder.

No School Today read a sign hung out on the ruins of the schoolhouse in Nancy where three children were killed by one of the first Nazi bombs. Latest estimated French civilian air-raid casualties for the week were 148 killed, 337 wounded. In every French cinema audiences were soon being warned to keep away from unexploded Nazi bombs or fallen aircraft. Some of the bombs, perhaps with time fuses, exploded last week as much as two hours after they hit the earth. Sporting events were canceled lest crowds be bombed. The French were told to shoot enemy parachutists in plain clothes or Allied uniforms.

In the emergency Government employes were put on a seven-day week and French workers in munitions plants and other war industries lost their summer vacations by decree of the reorganized Cabinet. Meanwhile every train leaving Paris for the embattled North was jampacked with either French troops or Belgian and Dutch reservists hustling home to fight for their homelands. All front-line passes for journalists were canceled.

The French were fighting for their lives.

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