The House Near Paris

LAST summer thousands of Frenchmen flocked under the Eiffel Tower to inspect at close range American airplanes like those they had watched in sky battles over their country only a year before. The USAAF spokesman who inaugurated this exhibition dedicated it to the thousands of anonymous men, women, and children who had risked their lives sheltering fallen Allied airmen and piloting them to safety.

For security reasons it was impossible, as long as any deportees remained in German prison camps, to publicize the exploits of this great underground network. Books like The House Near Paris, following on the heels of such accounts as David Prosser’s Journey Underground and Beirne Lay’s I’ve Had It, should make the general American public more fully acquainted with the extent and nature of these rescue activities.

Drue Tartière, an American woman married to a Frenchman, also known on the stage and screen as Drue Leyton, remained in France during the entire occupation. “I am deeply conscious of the fact,” she writes, “that I was merely a cog in the vast machinery of heroism which functioned daily in France against her oppressors.”In finding food, clothing, and entertainment for many fallen Allied aviators, in sheltering some of them in her own house in Barbizon, in accompanying them to mysterious rendezvous, she was taking the same risks as hundreds of others.

Her peculiar usefulness came from her ability to appreciate the state of mind of boys from Texas and Iowa as well as the reactions of their French hosts. Among the aviators there were a few problem children who caused needless risks to their protectors; but on the whole, Drue Tartière testifies, they appreciated the kindness and courage of the people whose language they could not understand.

There are both poignancy and humor in these descriptions of bailed-out Allied flyers, silently suffering in the forest or cooped up in crowded Paris apartments. Who can forget the picture of M. Christol, clerk in a government office, who slept sitting in a chair when there were more flyers than beds in his home? Or the remark of Bill Spellman from Indiana, when he was put to bed on a divan in an American woman’s Rue de Seine apartment beneath a Picasso portrait: “Do I have to sleep under that?”

Helping Allied airmen is only part of the author’s “adventure in occupation and resistance.” The earlier chapters of her narrative, unnecessarily long perhaps, cover more familiar ground: the flight to Bordeaux, the internment camp for American women at Vittel, and the countless problems of daily living in a Nazi-occupied country.

With a keen eye for places and people, Drue Tartière re-creates for American readers the atmosphere of fright and anxiety that went with living in a country which was for more than four years “one big prison, even for those who were not locked up officially.”

HOWARD C. RICE