1940-02-27 — Page 23

Tuesday,

HONGKONG TELEGRAPH

February 27, 1940,

VIGIL IN THE CITY

I VISITED Strasbourg while I was at the front. It is a city of death.

Of its population of 200,000 only such munici- pal employees remain as are necessary for its essential services and the police, the customs officers and a certain num-

are

ber of soldiers who there to guard the city and keep it swept and garnished.-

On the day I was there, for a wonder the sun shone brightly; it was high noon, but you had the sinister feeling of a city at dead of night. It was like a city in a fairy tale where everyone who dwelt there was wrap- ped in a magic sleep.

Here and there, in a house or a flat, a window has re- mained unshuttered and you cannot resist the notion that someone is living behind that closed window, closed be- cause there is a nip in the air, and that at any moment a face will appear behind it; but you know that not a soul is there.

These hundreds and hundreds

of houses, street after street, lane after lane, are empty.

Most of the shops have their shutters up, but some had none to put up, and in these the goods for sale remain in display.

Women's underwear, silk stock-

of the

DEAD

were

ompty cottages, but they dilapidated. The rofugees set to with a will to make them habit- jable. Now you could eat off the floors.

The refugeen have to sleep on straw mattresses, sometimes the

on

doal floor, sometimes on trestlos that they have made thomselves. The authorities aro providing wooden beds as fast as they can, but there is a shortage of wood, and it takes time to pro- Ivide beds in wartime for such numbers. There is still a lot of overcrowding.

But for all these inconveniences, these real hardships, life still goes on. The general health is good. The children, blue-eyed with apple-red checks, aro neat and clan. Though there are no books for their lessons, they go lo school, bringing wood with them in tho (morning to heat the room, and the nuns teach them as best they can They are in the circumstances. bright. nice-mannered children, and for them indeed the wholo thing is rather a lark.

It is wonderful with what spirit these people, snatched away from. comfortable homes, bear their lot. I went to see some stables atand- ling in the grounds of a chateau;

byl SOMERSET MAUGHAM

оп mattross

the safety and the wind blow bitter third time in seventy years that its there were six stalls and in each through the aisle. The lovely economic life had been disturbed was a straw

Many of the manufac-ground, without shorts, and in pulpit with its delicate carving by war.

to places dach stall two persons slept. A had been boarded up. All was turers have removed cold and grim and bare. It had where they could set up their fac-tiny room at the side, I suppose already the look of the wreck of tories in fety and unless peace the old harness room, was their brought them security for the living room. There was an open a church,

futuro they would never return. fireplace with a pot boiling over THE city is waiting for "It is a dead city," he said. two sticks. destruction. Of that cathedral, "No." I answered, "only sloop- which in the middle ages was ling." considered one of the marvels of He alghed. "That is what I hope, but it is a sleep from which the awakening will be bitter."

1.—"All

Quick on

the Western Front," says the communiques, but this photograph was taken only three weeks ago. When it really starts-

2.-This is what happens to a city. Photo-

graph on left was taken at Ypres in the last war.

I asked a woman whether there was anyone at the chateau.. "No," she said, "the pro- prietors only come down in the summer."

A little while later I visited

A smile broke on her healthy the districts in the Charente to

face. "It would be nice if they which the refugees from Alsace let us sloep in the servant's and Lorraine have been evacuat-rooms," she said. "To sleep in a stable-well Our Saviour was born

ed.

The department which I visited in one." A woman with a sense is a poor que, it has 300,000 in-of humour.

ré-

habitants and 85,000 refugees Work is gradually being secured not from the Moselle have been dis- for the refugees on the land or inga, hats; they have a strange- They had to leave their cats be- the world, it may be that

an-tributed among its towns and vil-in factories with adequate wages. ly forlorn look. At a pastry hind and now, fed by the soldiers, one stone will stand upon

lages, but its habits and its stan-The unemployed receive from the dards of life are very different State ten franca a day for each cook's little cakes, sweets and they wander disconsolate and other.

And as if to call my attention from those to which the people adult-and-six-francs for each what not lie mouldering in the new. The pigeons-are-fed-too,

flocks of them, and they gather to this dreadful possibility, pre-of more prosperous Lorraine have child under thirteen.

They have window.

round hungrily when 1 mansently high, up I saw half a dozen been accustomed. It was not large families, and two or three comes along with a great hunk planes. They were allied planes easy, for the authorities to find families often pool their of bread and crumbling it up and were, I was told, hunting a lodging for this great number of sources, so that their meals are throws the pieces into the flutter-Messerschmitt that had been persons.

There were plenty of good and copious, signalled. ing crowd.

I watched them till THERE was no time to put; The Cathedral was rose-red they were lost in a anything away when the evacun-against the pale blue of the walked on. tion took place. Things had to wintry sky and here men in Then, on a sudden, the sinister be loft just as they were while khaki were still busy making a note of the siren broko the un- wraps the the owners huddled a few clothes protection for the central porch, earthly silence that into a bag, such household linen The stained glass of the windows city like a shroud; it rang through as they could carry, and fled. has been removed to a place of the stillness with a merciless in-

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tensity, echoing through those jempty streets so that it seemed to aaail you from every direc tlon; and though I had heard it more than once before it had in that deserted city л ominous horror. Two or three men sirted running, and, following them, I found myself at the police station,

Thors were perhaps a dozen of us, policemen, employees of the municipality and three or four soldiers. They were impatient and exasperated, but facetious.

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I lunched with the Mayor, large heavy man with an friendly face, who spoke French with an Alsatian accent. loves his city and he looks for- ivard to what he fears will be lis inovitable ruin with anguish. Ho

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