Im a Frenchman and you tu might think I had no business in this column, But I don't apologize because now Everyman is British and French e. I came to England ten da the battle of Flanders.
I am twenty-seven. I belong to the generation which is now fighting the greatest battle of all time, to which the whole world is looking. The young today not like the young of foi mer years; they, like their British comrade: have had their soul tempered by the last war. And so they go forward, shining like true steel, hard, piercing and inflexible steel, using their body and their soul in this most dreadful fight to form, shoulder to shoulder, a living rampart. We have come into the world to the sound of cannon; our first visions as children were heroic; and the first stories we were told were those of battles. How many of us have never known a father, and how many of us, on our way to school, have seen each day in the village square our father's name inscribed in the long list on the monument to the fallen? All that we have known of life is the difficult years between two wars and the increasingly bitter fight to make our path and find our place in a W arid incessantly threatened.
tember. had to give up before it had en:
peons to that young generation which, it all it had worked for and struggled fo None of us, I think, feels bitter. We accept what must be as a fact calmly, and think simply that it has given us one more reason for getting our own back from life as soon zs possible. We knew what was waiting for us. On September I we set off to the war, knowing perfectly what ar was. We knew the war in its smallest de-ails. It was cur childhood's terror.
1 belong to that French youth, which, like the English youth, and partly following its example, likes to live intensively and largely—which likes the spaciousness which progress has brought to the world in times of peace. Iam proud to belong to a generation which has been able for the sake of a higher ideal to throw off comfort and pleasure, the yoke of an easy life and go forward with clenched fists, into an immense struggle, the outcome of which will be the benefit of all the peoples of the world. I am. proud of having been able to deny myself and think out and then accept with all my mind the reasons for which I am fighting.
Even a month ago we had not had in France to defend our soil against the invader, we had no province to recover, no personal vengeance to assuage. These, you understand, are stimulate ing motives for hot-headed youth. We had to find our reasons coldly in the facts spread out to see since the coming of Hitler. We had spurn the sickly-sweet propaganda which aid each day: "Come, Frenchmen, why should you die for Poland or Czechoslovakia? We mean no harm to you; let the Englishmen fight alone if they want to make war.
We had to look back to our history and to ihe history of the whole world. We had to understand that we were fighting for something greater and more beautiful than a frontier. And that we understood immediately, unhesitating and for that sake you British and we Frenchmen had to pass from resolution to action. The invasion of France has not given us a new reason for fighting; it has simply proved that our reason was sound and our fears justified. We fight as our fathers fought, but we have as well the conviction that we thought straight and saw clear.
Iam proud of being French, because for the last nine months, and particularly during the last days, France has swept away with a single stroke all the criticisms that might have been levelled at her in the last twenty-five ye: She s swept them away. not by speeches or but by facts. And what facts! By the heroism of a whole people, before an enemy three times as strong as itself. In spite of all the horror of the present time, in spite of the iron which bit into my heart as a Parisian when I heard the words "The Germans are in Paris," I continue to be confident, and to keep my faith in final victor Tomorrow I leave England to join my comrades. Like them I shall do my utmost in battle, sure that our cause is just, that the entire world is morally with us, and that one day or another ler will go down before this immense coalition of souls and wills against which his tanks and his planes will be able to do nothing. I am confident, because we have an ideal and our enemies have not. I know that we shall conquer. The spirit of Britain and France, the best that twenty centuries have made, cannot die. The whole world will come in the end and help it to win the victory.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.