Blood in the Snow, Blood on the Grass by Douglas Boyd Read Free Book Online Page B

German uniform as drivers in NSKK Motorgruppe, freeing Germans for more military tasks. On 7 October that year, Laval did another deal with Speer, under which 10,000 factories were designated ‘S’ and their workers exempted from the STO.
    It was one thing to enact a law, quite another to enforce it. The response to the STO summons was feeble. As one example of what increasingly happened, three neighbours of the author set out for their STO train in a gazogène wood-burning car driven by the owner of the local garage that conveniently ‘broke down’ in front of the village gendarme. The gas produced in the generator bolted on to the rear bumper being notoriously unreliable, he obligingly issued a signed and stamped procès verbal confirming the breakdown. They continued their journey to the railway station, being careful to arrive after the departure of their train. The procès verbal stamped a second time by the STO representatives there, the three young men returned home and were not called again, their names having slipped through some administrative loophole.
    At Vesoul in Franche-Comté only three of 400 conscripts reported for duty; in the Jura twenty-five out of 850; in Seine-et-Loire only thirty-one from 3,700. 5 The attitude of many police officers towards arresting defaulters was summed up by Lieutenant Theret, head of the detachment at the Gare d’Orsay mainline station in Paris. He warned his men on 9 March 1943 that he ‘would not find a single STO dodger and counted on them to do likewise as good Frenchmen’. 6 The Milice, however, made the tracking down of STO no-shows one of its main priorities.
    It was thus, and with no political intent, that tens of thousands of young men went on the run after receiving their STO call-up. The majority decided to live rough in wild country. Meaning ‘scrubland’ or wild country, maquis is the only Corsican word to make it into the French language. Thus these young men were said to prendre le maquis. The report by Gendarmerie chef d’escadron Calvayrac in Haute-Savoie dated 22 March 1943 said, ‘No-shows for STO are so numerous that only fifty of 340 reported in. Many men have abandoned their homes, their work and their family to take to the maquis instead’. 7 From there, the noun Maquis came to mean collectively ‘those hiding in rough country’ and maquisard was coined to mean a man hiding out on the run.
    On 5 June 1943 Laval announced the departure of another 220,000 young men including agricultural labourers to Germany, resulting in widespread comments that the Germans were going to bleed France white by taking all its young men. One German administrator retorted to protesters that, whereas so far Germany had limited itself to taking only half of French production, it would in future take all. If a Frenchman wanted to eat well, his best plan would be to work in, or for, Germany. However, even Laval’s new move did not pacify Fritz Sauckel, who reported to Hitler on 9 August:
I have completely lost belief in the honest goodwill of the French Prime Minister. His refusal … to execute a further programme for recruiting 500,000 French workers to go to Germany before the end of 1943 … amounts to downright sabotage of the German struggle for life against Bolshevism. 8
    Life was tough for the young men hiding out far from a town, or even a village, where someone might betray them or inadvertently give them away. In Maquis groups with a semblance of discipline, reveille was at 6.30 a.m., followed by ablutions and breakfast. The salute to the flag, if observed, was accompanied rarely by a bugle call, more often by accordion or mouth-organ. Cleaning camp and other chores occupied the rest of the morning; obtaining food took up much of the afternoon. Often, foraging turned to robbery. Another neighbour of the author recalls answering a knock on the door in the middle of the night, to find three young men outside. One waved a pistol at him and demanded clothes and