Wairarapa Times-Age THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5, 1940. FRANCE MAY YET STRIKE.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 December 1940, Page 6

Wairarapa Times-Age THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5, 1940. FRANCE MAY YET STRIKE.

TN spite of the best efforts of a Nazi-controlled censorship, it X is being made clearer as time goes on that anti-German feeling is rising steadily in France and that an increasing proportion of the French people perceive that their only hope of ultimate redemption from the terrible fate in which they are meantime encompassed is in the victory of Britain and her allies. Amongst other things, it may be hoped that definite limits are thus set to any possible development of the deplorable policy of co - laboration with Germany to which the Vichy Government is committed. Sabotage in factories and a widespread and rising spirit of resistance to the invaders may make it difficult for-(the Nazis to draw at all freely on French war industrial and technical resources in direct, furtherance of their war effort and it is prob'ably beyond the power of Laval and others ol his kidney to make any large number of Frenchmen fight against Britain. It has to be recognised, however, that metropolitan France is very largely at Germany’s disposal. Economically the French in their homeland are reduced to a state of serfdom and must accept whatever treatment their conquerors choose to mete out to them. Tll the use, too, of French air and naval bases and in many other ways, Germany derives immense advantages iiom her occupation of France. This state of affairs for the time being is beyond remedy, but much more open questions are raised where those paits of the'French Empire which still own allegiance to the Vichy Government are concerned —particularly Morocco and lunisia, West Africa, and the mandated territory of Syria. It has been said, and no doubt it is true, that the Germans have held back a little in their oppression and exploitation of France in the hope eventually of gaining control over the French colonies. At the same time it has been suggested that in retaining control over some of the principal French colonies, the Vichy Government is able to do a certain amount, of bargaining With the Nazis. , ft is sufficiently clear, however, that any hopes Marshal Betain ami his colleagues may be basing on this foundation are pathetically illusory, flow little France is gaining, even at an immediate view, from her attempts to placate the Nazis by reducing her colonies to inaction is demonstrated in events like the expulsion of the French population of Lorraine and the incorporation of that,territory in the Reich. The cardinal fact to be faced is that France’s only hope is in the decisive defeat of Germany, and that if Germany were not ultimately defeated, France and her colonies would be involved in a common ruin. From their hitler experience even to the present stage, the people of France must be well aware of the truth stated by Mr Winston Churchill in a broadcast he addressed to them not long ago—a broadcast in which ho said of Hitler: — I say this evil man, this monstrous abortion of hatred and defeat, is resolved on nothing- less than the complete wiping out of the French nation and the disintegration of its whole life and future. With that truth being ever more plainly emphasised, it may be hoped that, prospects are improving that the French colonies still adhering to Vichy will follow eventually the example of those which have taken their st,and with General de Gaulle and the Free French movement. Helpless as she now is in her homeland, it is open to France, through the agency of her colonies, Io contribute powerfully to the effort that will ensure her ultimate liberation. A. good deal may depend upon .the individual action of General Weygand, of whom remarkably little has been heard since he went to North. Africa, to endeavour, as BrigadierGeneral John Charteris wrote- recently in the “Manchester Guardian,” “to stem the tide now flowing steadily -towards General de Gaulle and the Free France of the future.” Asking whether General Weygand would be content, to fulfil this rather ignominious mission at the end of a long and distinguished life in the service of France, Brigadier-General Charteris addl'd :— He is the only man in the sorry crew that now form the Government of unoccupied France of whom it may be said that in accepting every humiliation that Germany can impose he is not acting true to type. But Weygand served Foch, and Foch used to say'that Weygand knew his mind almost before he had made it up himself. Foch fought the Germans with an enmity as fierce as that of Clemenceau himself, and he shares with Clemenceau the honour of France’s victory. It seems inconceivable that a man to whom Foch gave his confidence in the anxious hours of the last war should not rise to meet the difficulties which now beset his country. . . . Whatever General Weygand’s appointed course may be. it is clear that the people ami armed forces of I lie French colonies, not least in North Africa, which meantime are pawns in the defeatist policy of the Vichy Government. are faced by a great, opportunity and a momentous choice.