Floods on the Seine

This segment of a United News Newsreel shows Paris and other French towns are flooded.

Transcript

FLOODS ON THE SEINE

NARRATOR: The Seine is in flood. The waters are the highest in 34 years.

In this most bitter winter for France, a winter of cold, of hunger, of battered towns, and smashed communications; a winter in which free France lies oppressed by greater hardships than for almost a century, the elements too, take their toll.

Industrial equipment; barges, cranes, grain elevators in the flat country outside Paris, are flooded, swamped, made useless. Boats are thrown up on what had recently been dry land. Viaducts, vital to the supply lines, must be reinforced. The people of Paris smile wryly and say, "Not enough food, but plenty of water." Water is the only commodity Paris has in abundance; water and the spirit to carry on.