By the time John got home from the meeting, it was past eight o'clock in the evening. Pen ~ Fun ~ Pavilion www.biquge.info John saw little Ella playing with rag dolls alone, so he asked, "Ella, where is Mommy?" ”

"Mommy is in the bedroom." Ella's delicate little face frowned, and she looked sullen.

"What's wrong, my little princess?" John took his daughter to his lap and pinched her little nose affectionately.

"When my mother was teaching me French, she suddenly cried and went back to the bedroom." Little Ella said sadly: "I'm not disobedient, why is my mother crying." Does she not like me? ”

"How is it possible, our Ella will always be the heart and soul of Mom and Dad." John comforted his daughter as he picked up the French book he had thrown on the couch.

This is a collection of short stories by the French writer Alphonse Dude, whose John had learned in a Chinese textbook in his previous life. Judging from the fold of the book, Adele read "The Siege of Berlin" to Little Ella before. At the end of this page, in the bleak silence of the square, a shout, a terrible shout, was heard: Get your weapons・・・・・・ get your weapons・・・・・・ the Prussians are coming", there are obvious signs of being wet with tears.

John knew that this was a novel about the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Adele is touching the scene. Recently, the newspapers and broadcasts have been full of news of the defeat of France, and in order not to worry him, although Adele has not said it, she must have felt very uncomfortable in her heart. France is, after all, her homeland, the place where she was born and spent her entire childhood.

After comforting little Ella and telling her to listen to her mother and Grandma Susan at home, John got up and went to the bedroom. Pushing open the door, he saw Adele lying on the bed, covering her face with a quilt. John walked over, gently lifted the covers, and took his wife into his arms.

"Honey, we've lost this war, haven't we?" Adele, whose face was stained with tears, asked in a whisper.

John didn't know what to say to her for a moment. Could it be that Marshal Petain, who comforted her "heroic", would once again perform miracles? I am afraid that in a few days, when the news of Petain's surrender reaches Washington, Adele will feel even more desperate.

"My dear, the French Third Republic may fail, but France never will. I believe that more brave people will stand up and continue to fight for it. Aren't you French people the most liberal, and what can stop them from fighting for freedom? ”

But in recent years, no one has been able to stop Hitler's demon. The Washington Post says that yesterday the Germans had occupied Lyon. Adele cried again as she spoke.

John wiped away tears for his wife, "Think of General Giraud (Adele didn't know he had entered a German prisoner of war camp) and Colonel de Gaulle, who was now commanding an armored division to fight the Germans. There were so many strong-willed soldiers in France like them that they would not give in to the Germans. President Roosevelt has already stepped up his support for Europe, and believe me, we will achieve the same final victory as last time. ”

While Adele was crying in John's arms, in the far north of France, in the heart of the Flanders Plains, four infantry divisions of the French First Army were fighting to the death with German Panzer Divisions and SS units. A few dozen kilometers behind them was Dunkirk, where nearly 500,000 Anglo-French troops and the remnants of the Belgian army were waiting to evacuate the ships.

And they received an order to slow down the advance of the German armored forces at all costs, to buy time for the "dynamo" program. These French soldiers were well aware that there were only two endings waiting for them: death and a prisoner of war camp. But this desperate situation aroused their will to fight, and the sound of the Marseillaise song often wafted over the position amid the rumbling of cannons.

In a rural monastery on France's northern border, the 61-year-old commander of the French 9th Army, Admiral Giraud, once again began his own escape program. On the ninth day of the Battle of France, the French general was captured by a German assault team while on a front-line inspection.

This was already the second time that Giraud had entered a German prisoner of war camp. Last time he was a young captain in the prime of life, but now he is an old man with gray hair and disabled legs and feet. But that didn't stop him from fighting, and he began to pick up the German language he had discarded for more than twenty years, trying to correct his pronunciation, ready to flee in disguise.

In northeastern France, in the forests near the Meuse River and the Canal Zone, Charles de Gaulle was gathering his panzer divisions and preparing to attack a group of German infantry attacking the Cypriot division's defenses.

Although de Gaulle had been committed to promoting the development of French armored forces, the French Army's belief in cannonism had been ingrained since the Napoleonic era. Even his old boss, Field Marshal Pétain, treated tanks only as an appendage to the infantry. For so many years, de Gaulle worked as an obscure staff officer in a marginal role in the Ministry of Defence, never getting the opportunity to command an armored unit.

Only not so long ago was he appointed commander of a newly formed armored division. Although he had only 50 Renault tanks in his hands, he was fortunate to encounter a retreating French artillery unit, supported by three field artillery battalions. This gave him the strength to launch a surprise attack on the Germans while the Luftwaffe's Stuka bombers were evacuated from the battlefield due to lack of fuel.

De Gaulle's first battle was won rather neatly, and when thousands of French troops rushed out of the enemy's rear singing Marseillaise songs and following de Gaulle's tanks, the caught off guard Germans were routed in less than ten minutes. Most of them fled into the forest not far away, and about a thousand of them became prisoners.

When the French soldiers and the rescued Cypriots began to cheer loudly and celebrate the victory, it was clear to de Gaulle that the victory in the battle was meaningless because of the total collapse of the French Second Army front. What he had to do now was to quickly gather as many troops as possible and go south to the Aisne River to form a new defensive line.

De Gaulle leaned out of the turret of the tank and took one last look at the land of northern France. As a proud French officer, even in the tank, de Gaulle insisted on wearing that well-made cylindrical military cap, which made him unusually conspicuous in the crowd. "Let's go!" He shouted orders to his men to leave the battlefield before the German bombers returned.