Pouring scorn on corn The flames of resistance

I have no idea whether the drawing in your July issue shows Shakespeare ( News). I should just like to point out that what he is holding is snake’s head fritillary, Fritillaria meleagris. This is a wild flower, far more common then than it is now, and surely far more likely than corn on the cob!

Monica Caldwell, Brighton Roger Moorhouse is quite correct in his suggestion ( Miscellany, July) that more Parisians were killed by Allied air raids than in the bombing of the city by the Luftwaffe. The Allied attacks he refers to caused heavy civilian casualties in what would now be called ‘collateral damage’.

There are accounts of these, often very harrowing, in the memoirs of individual firemen and in the histories of the Paris Fire Brigade, a unit of the French army that, interestingly, was left intact and in situ by the Germans throughout the occupation.

The military traditions of the fire brigade led to many firemen being involved in the street battles of the August 1944 liberation, while their colleagues continued their ‘normal’ duties. These included saving large stocks of flour when the retreating Germans set the flour mills at Pantin on fire in an apparently deliberate attempt to create famine in the liberated city. Fire-fighting operations here could not begin until the firemen had negotiated with the German troops and Resistance forces waging a fierce battle in the area. Michael Smith, Essex