Farid Al-Hashim was a tall strongly built man who wore a tall dark green hat to accentuate that height. When the Europeans made jokes about a negro smiling in the dark, it was men like him they were imagining. They had to imagine, for none in Vichy were brave enough to make those jokes anywhere that they could be seen by him. Farid’s size had been useful in Algeria when fighting the other boys for coming near his sisters. After his sisters and father had died in the Second Great War, his mother had taken him to France and his size had been useful fighting there too, this time for himself.

As many problems as this country had, Farid still loved it for what it was, and that it wasn’t Algeria which had taken so much from him. He did not lament the ills of this place, but he was determined to stamp them out. Thus when his mother had finally passed, he had packed what meagre possessions he had and left warm Marseille in the south and come to the capital, where true change might happen. That was seven years ago. Quickly he’d found the Tirailleurs, and in him they had found a fierce resolve and soon enough a leader.

Farid smiled that bright smile, brighter for the darkness lit only by candlelight. The rattle of machinery filled this place as the salvaged printing press groaned to life on the concrete floor, working slowly at first but gaining speed. He’d argued long and hard about the first message to be put out in pamphlets. The older men, the veterans of the war wanted to claim responsibility for all their doings but Farid had been unrelenting. He knew that their way would result only in blame being put on the Tirailleurs and that the French would turn on them. He knew their cause needed the French and that - though they didn’t know it - the French needed the Tirailleurs to light the spark for them.

That cause was simple in the telling, but like most causes was difficult and complicated to achieve. For all the talk of the politicians of independence, Firad knew and deep down Jean Public knew it too: France was still a Client State to Nazi Germany. 

Thus, as the press worked through the sheets of paper, and the boys snatched them up to fold into pamphlets, their message was not what the old veterans wanted. Farid Al-Hashim had not relented and in the end they realised that he controlled their printing press and had only included them in the discussion to maintain an air of diplomacy. The message he printed was bold and powerful and above all, Patriotic. He played on the fierce pride of the French people, the people who had started the European Democratic Revolution! The people who had cast off the chains of monarchy! The people who now languished under the yoke of a new tyrant, not a King but a Fuhrer.

Vichy would wake up to his words in the morning, and they would keep printing every night until all of France had read his words.