Resist

You can fight
Fight without ever winning
But never ever win
Win without a fight
-Neil Peart

"To carry out his duties, Cordier had to organise a system of letterboxes where messages could be left (Lyons had the advantage that, unlike Paris, its buildings had no concierges), recruit his own helpers, find lodgings — in a city he hardly knew. He conveys the extraordinary intensity of his existence in this period: the constant danger of being arrested in a routine inspection of papers, the frequent news of the arrests of comrades, the moments of immeasurable solitude-and the sheer exhaustion. Finding so much time taken up walking from one rendezvous to another, Cordier asked Moulin's permission to buy a bicycle out of the funds allocated from London. But when the bicycle was stolen, Moulin, who believed in not wasting official funds, told him curtly: "So now you will just have to walk." Cordier also describes the strange paradoxes of Occupied France. One family who sheltered him in their apartment for several weeks out of sympathy for the Resistance turned out also to be fervent supporters of Marshal Pétain. In Paris, he observes that the only people to be seen carrying the German collaborationist magazine Signal were Resistance fighters who were using it to identify each other at meetings in public places. If the Germans had arrested everyone carrying Signal, they would have destroyed the Resistance.

Read the rest here.

Wow! The French really are more than just mayonnaise!