The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo and The Sun. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 26, 1940. FRANCE'S TRAGEDY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 150, 26 June 1940, Page 6

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo and The Sun.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 26, 1940. FRANCE'S TRAGEDY.

For the cause that lacks auptitaticc, For the vxrang that needs resistance, For ihe future in the distance, And the good that tee can do.

Some of the miserable story of France'* collapse, and her betrayal of her Ally, lias been told by Mi*. Churchill. The rest will some day be told in detail, but already its main features are sufficiently clear. We who live in a democracy are indeed well able to understand it, to fill in the gaps and to rend between the lines. Our attention now is naturally fixed on the final act of France's tragedy, but it.is the earlier acts which it will be more profitable to study. There is, ns Mr. Churchill said, no use or advantage in spending time in reproaches, though that advice cannot be stretched to cover the deliberate action of the. Petain Government in agreeing that the French fleet should pass into enemy hands. Whether all of it has been handed over is still not clear, but there is to be found in Mr. Churchill's words little encouragement of the hope that either the officers and men of the French fleet would refuse to acquiesce in the surrender of a senile leader, or that at least some units of the fleet could be intercepted and brought under British control. According to Mr. Churchill, events moved too fast; and what M. Reynaud would possibly have agreed to do Marshal Petain would not do.. Petain evidently cherished the illusion that the more he offered the Nazis the more generously they would reciprocate. Presumably even he is disillusioned by now.

But though vrc deplore and condemn the actions of the French leaders upon whom fell the responsibility of delivering their country into servitude we shall do well to distinguish between . causes and effects. What biwght.France to this pass? It was military defeat, but behind the defeat lqy months and years of political incompetence. Friends of France, feeling it necessary to apologise for the political strife and the Governmental deadlocks which have for so many years disfigured her life, used to say that when an external threat appeared Frenchmen closed their ranks. That was partly true, but the effects of the same . political strife, itself derived front seelional and individual selfishness and greed, could not be obliterated by gestures in the hour of danger. iS T or could the habit of political bickering. That continued even" after war was declared; Frenchmen played politics until the enemy was over the frontier.. And the enemy, long before war was declared, knew how to use the political situation in" France to his advantage—and did use it. { The Germans are jubilant over a victory gained in six weeks; if they were candid. they -might say -that they began to beat France six years ago.