De Gaulle had escaped from Bordeaux on June 17 and broadcast from London that night to the French people. With a group of other correspondents I set out for Paris this morning in a jeep, sandwiched between units of the French armour.

First it was a tear across the open countryside, and then the villages grew closer and closer together, blending into a metropolitan whole. At the street corners the people had equipped themselves with boxes of tomatoes which they handed out as soon as there was the slightest check in the traffic.

The more enthusiastic of the people, in fact, threw them at us, but the majority were more careful and made sure they were not wasted by pressing them in our hands. It is a tomato-growing district. Tomatoes were all they had and we could have them, but they wanted to make sure they were not wasted - huge, luscious things, more beautiful than any I have ever tasted.

Across the landscape there was a pillar of towering smoke from burning oil wells. As we went forward for us the most nerve-racking moments were not when an odd shot was heard but when we became involved in those road checks just before the front which are the bane of the lives of all war correspondents. We explained ourselves to a French officer of the division wearing the russet-red forage cap which is its badge and then started off once again. We did not know where we were going or how far we would get, but it was the road to Paris.

On through villages and then into Montrouge, where each of the cross streets was barricaded off with heaps of paving stones and where the trees along the road had been obviously shot through. In the middle of this famous working-class district the women, gathered in the middle of the street, cheered us by.

There were very few men around, for there are very few men in Montrouge who are not with the F.F.I. - or who are not in Germany as prisoners of war or as slaves. We went on through the area of the Porte d'Orléans through streets of closed, shabby shops and groups of very happy people. We got to the Place Denfert-Rochereau with its huge statue of the Lion of Belfort commemorating the bravery of the people of Paris in 1870-71.

As we entered the broad street lined with plane trees, undistinguished but as much Paris as anything in the city, we were halted and told that the Germans were dug in in the Luxembourg Gardens down the street. There were a few shots and lorry loads of F.F.I. in their dirty, worn working clothes went by. As they went they kept their tommy-guns trained on the rooftops. In the middle of the atmosphere of joyousness which overrode the strain, we parked our jeeps on the pavement and started to write what impressions we could give of a moment's glimpse of history.

The French surged round us with wine and newspapers. A closed café was hastily opened for us by the patron - a soldier of that army which saved the world in 1914-18 - and we established ourselves at work in mirrored halls amidst piles of tables while the patron and his family fussed about us with more wine and cigars which he had 'acquired' from the Germans. Outside the long line of French armour went crashing down the street amidst renewed cheers. It was the French Army redeeming Paris, and it was for most of the French soldiers their first sight of Paris since their mobilisation four or five years ago.

As the tanks crashed by many of them wrote notes, rolled them up, and threw them into the crowd. I picked one up. It was a message to anyone who found it to tell the parents of the writer who lived in such and such a street that Andre was safe. Outside in the street as we worked at our stories our conducting officers and our drivers held court. They were probably the only British troops in the city, and the Parisians, in spite of the wild surge of thankfulness with which they greeted their own men and their cheerfulness for the Americans, were seriously determined that the British Army should have its honours. A man passed down the street selling copies of the Figaro, which had just been produced an hour or so before by French patriots who had seized the plant.

It is before me as I write, and from it I summarise an account of the liberation of Paris from within. The Parisian expected that the relief would be effected by a vast army of Americans in daylight. Instead it was done by a small party of Frenchmen in the first instance. Amongst them was a man who had by the underground movement managed to pass word to his fiancée to meet him at the Place de I'Hôtel de Ville at an appointed time. When his tank clanked into the square his fiancée was waiting.

J. R. L. Anderson, the Manchester Guardian's war correspondent, writes:-

Last night (Friday) I watched the French mop up the last organised German resistance in the Senate building at the Luxembourg Palace, but to get there I had to walk all over the area of the left bank of the Seine, dodging down side streets which were not commanded by enemy fire and hastening forward when I found myself alone in a street with no one except the ever-present white-coated doctors and nurses from the nearby hospital in evidence.

These medical personnel have been working throughout the fighting, and never seemed to bother about taking cover at all. At the Seine itself the lead-covered locked-up stalls of the second-hand book-sellers were still there, and across the river was Notre-Dame, untouched save for bullet splashes - about fifty of them - on the principal façade.

From it flew the Tricolor masthead high, but on the other side of the square the French colours flew at half-mast from the police barracks and prefecture as a salute to the patriots who had been killed in those badly battered buildings. The inside of Notre-Dame was dark, cool, and completely empty. I went back to the Luxembourg, having been told by a weary police commissioner that that was now the only German position holding out, the French having taken in succession the Ecole de Mines in the Boulevard St. Michel, the Ecole Militaire at the Invalides, the buildings round the Place de la Concorde, and the Hotel Majestic - the German military headquarters. I went by the back streets to the Rue de Vaugirard, in front of the palace, just as a French Sherman with a seventeen-pounder knocked out two German Renault tanks under the trees and then, coming up to point-blank range, started firing straight into the palace from about ten yards.

Whilst this was going on an old woman, one of those black-dressed, white-haired old women of Paris, appeared and began moving through the streets still commanded by the German weapons and picking up likely bits of wooden wreckage and branches of the trees shot down by the guns. This she piled in barrows and took away for firewood. A few rounds from the Sherman and a white flag appeared from somewhere and French Gardes Mobiles in black helmets and tunics went in to fetch out their prisoners.

The Germans came out with their commanding officer last, a tall, thin, middle-aged man wearing the ribbon of the Iron Cross in the button-hole of his tunic. He looked deathly tired, but very spick and span compared with the dusty French. The crowd had let the other prisoners go with boos and cat-calls, but they rushed forward towards this officer and for a few minutes the Gardes Mobiles had to work hard to save his life while he watched, white-faced but rigid, from the front seat of a jeep.

I thought that my adventures for the day were over, but as I made my way home in the dusk fighting quite literally and frighteningly broke out on all sides of me, with tracers coming up and going down four different streets at a cross-road and bullets striking sparks on the pavement as they ricocheted by, with enemy snipers, French patriots' rifles, machine-guns, and twelve-pounders joining in. From a pile of sand bags alongside the Panthéon I looked down the Rue Soufflet, deserted and with a couple of shops on fire down at the far end nearest the Luxembourg. Splashes of white on the houses caused by bullets and splinters were everywhere. I went on to the Seine past a six-pounder dug in behind a barricade of wrecked German lorries, paving-stones, and furniture which had been firing up the hill from the corner of the Boulevard St. Germain and the Boulevard St. Michel. All the streets leading to the river had been barricaded here, but some of the barricades were already being disbanded.

Saturday

This afternoon General de Gaulle rode at the head of his troops from the Unknown Soldier's tomb at the Arc de Triomphe to the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. With resistance on a big scale at an end last night, the first part of to-day was celebrated with the greatest light-heartedness and enthusiasm. But while the tail-end of General de Gaulle's procession was passing down the Rue de Rivoli fire was opened on it opposite the Louvre and firing in the Rue de Rivoli and the neighbourhood continued intermittently for two hours afterwards as the F.F.I. moved from house-top to house-top rounding up French Fascists who were the cause of the trouble.

There is no clear indication at time of writing that an attempt was made on General de Gaulle's life. If anything of the sort was in anybody's mind, they missed far better chances earlier in the afternoon, when the General himself with his forces, first General Leclerc's armour and then lorryloads of F.F.I., went down the Champs Elysées. Nothing occurred then save that after the trials of four years Paris gave the General the reception of which this steadfast man must always have dreamed during his long exile and his tenacious rebuilding first of French spirit, then of the French Empire, and now of France.

It was upon the hangers-on to the procession, who had added themselves to it in a free-and-easy way which recalled prewar France, that fire was opened. A great outburst of cheering had greeted the arrival of General de Gaulle at the Place de la Concorde, on foot, and accompanied by men of the F.F.I. and the French forces. The crowd were dispersing, happy and gay. Thousands were pressing through the roads leading off from the place. It was this moment that German snipers and their French Fascist collaborators chose to turn machine-gun fire on the crowd from upper windows and roofs.

Many people, like seasoned soldiers, flung themselves to the ground under the cover of the buildings on either side of the road. Soon people were piled up on top of each other and there was not room for everyone. And so many ran on hoping to get round a safe corner or beyond range. But - either by prearranged plan or because other snipers, hearing shooting, followed suit - firing broke out in many parts at this hour - four o'clock. Men of the F.F.I. returned the fire of the snipers immediately. The snipers were in church towers and steeples, at upper windows and on roofs. I turned into the Rue Honoré. This was for some minutes a hot sector. Snipers were shooting along the street from either end, and the F.F.I. were returning the fire both ways from the middle of the street. People turned for shelter into the entrances to apartments, shops, and air-raid shelters. In this part there seemed to be remarkably few casualties, but occasionally amid the shooting Red Cross workers would wheel by a man, woman or child who had been wounded.