From the Meuse to the Danube 1944–1945

June 1940. As the French armies began a general retreat on the orders of General Weygand, Commander-in-Chief, the inhabitants of the border regions with Germany and Belgium evacuated their towns and villages before an enemy advancing rapidly.
The exodus was short-lived: France signed the armistice on 25 June. A long period of occupation of national territory by German troops followed — troops who would very quickly come into conflict with the terrorists, those fighters in the shadows who would come to be known as resistants, Maquisards or partisans.
In a small village in the Meuse called Récourt-le-Creux, a few teenagers — young rebels revolted by the defeat of 1940 — hid weapons while waiting to take part in the armed struggle, which they did from March 1944.
This account traces the singular destiny of the small group that had formed around the author. Emerging from obscurity, it became the Dunkerque group — an unsung artisan of the liberation of the territory — and had the singular honour of leading the 1st French Army in forcing a crossing of the German bank of the Rhine, where it was almost entirely wiped out.
Running through it all is the story of an entire generation steeped in patriotism, who said no to Vichy in order to fight Germany and its criminal ideology.