Word: reynaud
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Night had fallen. The President's train coursed northward through the moonlit Shenandoah Valley, bearing him back to Washington from Charlottesville. At the State Department in Washington, a message marked "Personal for the President" awaited him. It was French Premier Paul Reynaud's last appeal for "clouds of war-planes." The U. S. had no such clouds to give. At Charlottesville. Mr. Roosevelt had already said: the U. S. would throw into World War II. on the Allies' side, all that it had except its man power...
...Time is limited." Well might Reynaud and his hands hurry last week. The peril was immediate, for as this week began, not only was France at war with Nazi Germany, but with Fascist Italy. Perhaps France had a millennium of freedom ahead-but it looked more like a mere thousand hours, perhaps less. The length of French resistance, the rigid odds of mechanization being what they were, depended directly on morale-of the troops and of the populace. Over the radio, Premier Reynaud addressed himself to this intangible factor. The enemy, he said, had embarked on three enterprises...
...know what the colossal raid means for the people of Paris-nothing." The third and by far the grimmest German-and Italian-enterprise was the death struggle which was instinctively named The Battle of France-aimed at the morale of a people. But even this Reynaud challenged. "The dream of German hegemony will clash with French resolution. The France resisting Hitler today is not one between two wars. It is a different France, just as England combatting Hitler is not the England of the past 20 years. We of June, 1940, shall not lose our time debating responsibilities when...
France, like her ally, is calm and proud." As he concluded, swift Reynaud made one last plea for speed: "Immense values are at stake and time is limited."Calm and proud. Someone has said that though most human bodies are composed of oxygen (65%), carbon (18%), hydrogen (10%), nitrogen (3%), calcium (1.5%), phosphorus (1%), the body of a Frenchman is a simple compound of pepper, garlic, pate de foie gras, common bread and good red wine of the land. The French are pungent people. Little things make them gesticulate wildly and pour maledictions like a flood: a bowl of soup...
...Frenchmen, the ultimate ideal of France is a transcendent thing. As this desperate week began, Paul Reynaud the Leader faced the Italian declaration of war with the sentence: "Nothing has lowered our will to struggle for our land and liberty." At the same time, Paul Reynaud the Frenchman said: "France cannot...