Volume 3, Number 2 · September 10, 1964
Living through the War
By Jean Stafford
Divided Loyalties
by Janet Tessier du Cros
Knopf, 329 pp., $5.95
In Divided Loyalties, The Experiences of a Scotswoman in Occupied France, Janet Tessier du Cros resuscitates civilian life during World War II with an immediacy and a tension that make it surprising to remember, in reading her, that the rasping humiliations and unforgivable tragedies and physical wretchedness of those hard times belabored Europe twenty years ago. Stormtroopers and the Gestapo, trimmers and maquisards emerge, fully fleshed, from the fog of apparition in which history has swaddled them, and Jews' hearts leap to their throats at the sound of a knock on the door; the innards are clawed by hunger and the bones are stony with cold, feet in unaccustomed wooden-soled shoes are unsure on slippery bridges and through the snarls of winter as people ceaselessly prowl the countryside in search of food and fuel and sympathetic company. France bleeds from schism, divided between those who accept the armistice as an inevitability to which there had been no alternative but ruin, and those to whom the national dishonor is intolerable and the Vichy swindle nearly as atrocious as any Nazi crime. Tribal, familial, personal allegiances struggle to survive in a tempest of conflict and a web of casuistry. One chooses one's butcher according to whether he supports De Gaulle or Pétain.
Review, 793 words
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