Page 36 - The Kellner Affair Sample Pages

CHAPTER 26: THE DIRTy BusInEss of PEACE
Fuel trucks were attacked and captured. The German garrison held most of the main monuments in Paris and some strongpoints, while the resistance held most of the city. It was a stalemate on the 22nd and the 23rd, as the Germans lacked suf cient numbers to go on the offensive, and the resistance lacked the heavy weapons necessary to attack the German strongpoints. But it was a bloody one. A professor at the Sorbonne set up a production line for Molotov cocktails, while brave stretcher parties then collected the hundreds of wounded that resulted when the Germans shot back. Concierges were seen mopping blood off the sidewalk. It was a surreal state of siege. As Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper write, a number of people “...ignored the ring around them. Some sunbathed on the stone embankments of the Seine, while urchins dived in to escape the heat”. Hunger driving them, “Odd gures sat immobile in their little canvas chairs, shing in the river, while German tanks attacked the Préfecture de Police... Provisions were so short that when a horse was killed by stray bullets, housewives rushed out with enamel bowls and began slicing steaks off the carcass”.
The ghting increased in intensity on August 23: “Cof ns were piling up in churches... Burials were impossible in the circumstances, so
as a defense against the August heat, some bodies were kept in meat freezers in Les Halles, now empty of food”. The Champs- Élysées was empty as the incline from the place de la Concorde up to Étoile was a perfect line of re for German tanks. Electricity was on and off. In between playings of the Marseillaise, underground
Fighting increased on the 23rd and the 24th. It was a bloody and bizarre state of siege. (Peter Larsen)
When evening fell, the people came out to inspect the damage. (Peter Larsen) 516