FRANCE OUT ON A LIMB
Beston, Henry
France Out On A Limb By HENRY BESTON POOR, wretched France! Courts at Vichy meet to sustain one attitude of the national will, and courts at Algiers condemn Frenchmen to death for holding it. To...
...If France rises to meet him, and she well may, the game is his...
...Everything- in France which ever came up for discussion anywhere, the Third Republic, politics in general, the vague stir among the young towards Fascism or Communism, the admonitions and policies of the dispossessed and rather forlornly-situated Roman Church, got nothing but the "Bronx Cheer...
...It remembers the British destruction of the French Fleet at Oran, and issues posters to help its people to remember...
...The group which serves him in England is composed of well-born Frenchmen of the 'tween-war military and political world of Paris...
...Like people waiting for an explosion, the nation waits for the second front, and for the entire North to undergo again the titanism of modern ruin...
...With the passing of the masculine mind, great forces of power and the creative imagination grow weak in the life of a people, and the nation turns into a kind of ghost...
...The French mind had lost not only its beliefs but also its power to believe...
...Standing by their bundles and trunks, the colonists much resembled those immigrant groups one used to see in our own West waiting for a train to the farming land...
...France at home is sick and tired of blood and killing, the legal background is too military and political for the trials of civilians, and the jurisdiction is shaky...
...That would be in another way the end of France...
...if the Devil will get France on her feet, a group will meet with the Devil at midnight in a cemetery...
...The trials of Vichy politicians by military politicians at Algiers seem to me a great political mistake...
...Corrupting Diseases The France which followed Britain into war in 1939 was far more dead than Americans have ever realized...
...It sees them blithely using and organizing territories of the French Empire and wonders if it will ever get back its property...
...It is cruelly unjust to scold France so savagely for not carrying on the war...
...His Free French units are little more than token forces, brigaded with the Anglo-Americans, but he stands and.has stood consistently for Free France, for the man still fighting, and for the tricolor torn but still flying against the sky...
...You can't deal with anarchy...
...Giving all one's institutions, national voices, and ways of life "the bird," is dangerous business...
...Laval still talks of a "political peace...
...We shall see...
...He will be under no obligations to us whatever, and under few to England...
...Petain in particular regards himself as the victim of an American medicine-show racket or a game of marked cards...
...Vichy has never, I honestly believe, wanted an outright German victory...
...It did not even fight a single battle...
...If France can live with German aid, a French government will play with the Germans...
...What it hopes for is a peace by negotiation...
...The actual depopulation was terrific...
...It is the de jure and de facto Government of France, with a small, well-equipped, well-fed, and hard-boiled police army of its own...
...To the north, the coast and the harbor cities lie in solitudes of rubble blasted incessantly by the RAF, the steps of the German sentries ring in lifeless ''streets, and in the despair and silence one hears the business-like click of Vichy revolvers and the radio addresses of its ghosts...
...Ruin, judgment, captivity, semi-starvation, and a birthrate down to the neighborhood of zero—-this is what tragic and ignoble Vichy looks to from the windows of its hotels...
...There was another malady in the France I knew, this time a corrupting intellectual disease...
...To stay alive—to continue to live as a people and a nation, that is the key to all French maneuvering...
...Americans are not well-informed enough on the background of that remark...
...One has to believe in something, for all intelligent human action, philosophically considered, must have a foundation in belief...
...The disintegrative effects of not having enough men in a nation do not stop at the biological...
...Recent photographs from France show a people with scared, apprehensive eyes, hungry but not starved, and still wearing that terrible dazed look which came upon them after the defeat...
...I have seen Frenchmen here, escapees, with that same dazed air...
...Its job is to hold France together, and it intends to do so, no holds barred...
...We have a Hollywood idea of Vichy...
...With the landing of the Americans in France, Gen...
...I am told that paradoxically enough, the General has but little personal magnetism, and keeps people at a distance without exactly meaning to...
...Churchill in London, Gen...
...The nation was now twice dead, and the tragic corpse of France rolled over and over...
...I think of those dazed faces, and the sudden northern thunder of a devildom of shells...
...France is gone for a long time," said Marshal Smuts...
...de Gaulle will have to play cards with the Government at Washington, Mr...
...Vichy hates them like poison...
...And the nation was drinking too much, wearing out its elbows on the zinc bars and getting into a routine fuddle of wisecracks and rotgut aperitifs...
...There is no getting around the fact that collaboration with the enemy you went out to skin alive is a completely ignoble business, but Vichy doesn't give a hang...
...de Gaulle...
...All the patriotic emotions fight tirelessly against it...
...As the landings in Africa involved a lot of confused intrigue and some rather dirty work at the crossroads, Vichy thinks of us with its fingers crossed...
...Four years of captivity have followed the debacle...
...If the Yanks carry the day, it will become more neutral, and if the victory goes over in a rush, Vichy opportunists will presently be meeting other opportunists in a hotel...
...Or take anything Gen...
...Then came the war, entered most unwillingly and under last-minute pressures future historians must someday discuss...
...Encountering the Nazi strength, the Army disintegrated at the frontier, and hot-footed it in runaway crowds and corner gangs as far as the Loire, looting and sacking its own towns as it fled...
...The radio-talks of the regime counter with the complete social and political failure in Italy, and tell the French to keep their eyes in the boat...
...A recent dispatch from Washington says that Vichy will be liquidated...
...A people with the power of demons in modern technology and therefore to be feared, but mentally creatures with the minds of children...
...Will the nation obey Vichy or welcome de Gaulle...
...It is this emotional side—which Vichy cannot use-that makes the strength of Gen...
...The British...
...It is not a nest of gangsters headed by a feeble old rat running up and down his cage at the orders of the Nazis...
...We are so obsessed in America by political hopes and formulae that we do not realize that one's "politics" can come to mean any maneuver helping one to stay alive...
...Let none underestimate the appeal, especially with the young and adventurous...
...Only the leaders, probably...
...De Gaulle's Strength When the second front breaks, Vichy will clamp down hard to keep France quiet, favoring the Germans as it can...
...Americans...
...The regime they have ready for France will be of military inspiration, some sort of first military commission, perhaps, with a "here's your hat" for the allies as swiftly as they can reach them down from the peg...
...We shall soon see...
...There was no principle of life, physical, spiritual, or moral, to give the body a soul...
...There is no figure present of the true intellectual world, but the whole outfit is ruse and intelligent...
...How could an army be strong with no reserves...
...American promises of liberalism and democracy...
...He is at the moment persona non grata in the United States...
...She had sacrificed her men, both a young generation and a middle-aged, to the guns of the first mass-massacre, and was biologically on her way out via the geometric progression in reverse...
...Whatever we do, let us stop this furious, senseless flogging of the dead horse of France, and try to understand the reality of the situation with intelligence and humanity...
...They say that he has been too long"absent from the tension and the suffering, and is not one in spirit with France of the captivity and her hopes...
...Vichy's Assignment NOW let us ask what such a nation will, or can do, when the invasion comes...
...A certain school of French opinion, however, protests that the General is not popular in France...
...if the Anglo-Americans will help France revive, somebody will work with the Anglo-Americans...
...In what condition is the ruined nation and what will happen when the grey channel covers itself with ships, and the first paratroopers begin landing on the soil of France...
...These are the people who now wonder if they are about to die a third death in an unresolved chaos between friend and foe or escape at last from the Festung Europa...
...She was dead, twice dead, and the dead don't fight...
...Do you recall all that tosh one used to read about the French Army being "the strongest in Europe" and so on...
...The Vichy position is a purely intellectual one, an attitude of the French mind in ft mood of despair...
...Moreover, they now think we are crooks...
...Eisenhower in France, and the wreckage of Vichy...
...Every now and then at the Gare de l'Est in Paris one could see companies of Swiss immigrants, fine, strong, rosy-cheeked people, arriving to take over the dead and deserted farms...
...Eisenhower may politically improvise...
Vol. 8 • May 1944 • No. 18
