Code Name Christine Clouet: A Woman in the French Resistance

Translated by Jane Kielty Stott, p. 10

"...Thus I became part of the general flight southward- the Exodus, as it came to be called, an estimated 10 million refugees on the roads of France that June (1940)...in our minds at that time the biggest fear was that the pattern of (the) WWI would be repeated; the German Army would cut northern France off from the rest of the country and subject it to a brutal occupation. Until mid-June of 1940, no one- not even the most pessimistic person thought that the whole of France would surrender, and so we fled south to avoid the fate of those who had stayed home in the last war."