During 1938 and 1939 there was a growing belief that another war between France and Germany was becoming inevitable. In September 1939 the French government declared war on Germany, and a general mobilisation was implemented. At its final meeting (before it was banned) the CGT-SR) ten days earlier, had finalised plans to call a general strike in the event of a general mobilisation, but those plans appear not to have survived the reality of the German and Soviet invasions of Poland. Paul Lapeyre was among those conscripted to join the army in August/September 1939. He hesitated for several days before reporting to the barracks at Auch. He was sent to Alsace, which had been reincorporated into France in 1919, and spent several months on the banks of the Rhine. It was presumably in the context of the German invasion of France, which took place during May and June 1940, that the regiment in which Lapeyre was serving found itself surrounded and obliged to surrender. Now German prisoners of war, Lapeyre and his comrades were held in their barracks for slightly more than a month before being transferred to a large farm and set to work at Hoisdorf, some 25 km (16 miles) to the east of Hamburg. An escape attempt failed. Lapeyre spent the next five years in a succession of four labour camps. At one point he narrowly avoided being sent to the notorious death camp at Rava-Ruska, but in the end he was sent back to the Hamburg region where he worked alongside the other prisoners of war. During a week in July 1943 "allied" bomb attacks completely destroyed the saw mill to which he had been assigned. In the end, however, he was liberated by the English ("... par les Anglais") in June 1945.