Resurrection

Le Bosquel was once a cluster of peas ant homes in fruitful Picardy. Serving its 244 villagers were a church, a mairie (town hall), a schoolhouse, a grocery, a carpenter's shop. One day last year the gale of battle ripped through Le Bosquel. Now only mounds of rubble and white stone doorsteps remain, lying in the tall grass like overgrown gravestones.

But last week Le Bosquel was rising from its ruin. The Ministry of Reconstruction had chosen it to be a model for the rebuilding of France's shattered villages. Famed Architect Le Corbusier had planned its new form : a brick church and schoolhouse, a mairie fashioned from local clay, a paved square with a pond, homes and farms set in a concentric pattern that did away with the clumsy, age-old system of scattered land holdings. Now a bustling team of 70 blue-uniformed boys, recruited by the Ministry of Labor from bombed-out Picardy families, were clearing debris and replotting the village.

A Million Slaves? To those faced with the immense task of French reconstruction, Le Bosquel is only the beginning, modest but heartening.

More than 1,400,000 French buildings have been destroyed. At least 600 communities, little ones like Le Bosquel and big ones like Le Havre and Brest, must be rebuilt. Ports, railways and roads have first priority. A nation struggling with hunger, lack of transport, shortages of every kind, the manifold readjustments of liberation, can move only slowly to remove the scars of destruction. But it can plan.

Le Corbusier is drafting a revolutionary blueprint for the broken towns of western France. His colleague, Auguste Ferret, is directing 45 architects on the reconstruction of Le Havre. Their first project has already materialized--a new bourse (stock exchange), built in 60 days out of salvaged brick. Around Rouen and St. Quentin "youth teams" of the Ministry of Labor are learning the building trades, forming the nucleus of a French CCC. The Government also hopes for 300,000 to a million German (slave) laborers.

No Frenchman minimizes the enormous difficulties ahead, but all remember how France came back from the wars of 1870 and 1914-18. Few are as pessimistic as U.S. Ambassador Jefferson Caffery, who thinks that France will need 20 years to complete its reconstruction.

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