ANOTHER HITLER-LAVAL DEAL?

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 134, 3 December 1940, Page 6

ANOTHER HITLER-LAVAL DEAL?

Scanning a budget of late news for French hostile reactions to Hitler's seizure of Lorraine, a reader is confronted with something rather different —a Spanish report that "the' Vichy Foreign Minister, M. Laval, is going to Berlin to make a new deal with Hitler." In the eyes of M. Laval, blessed is the hand that taketh away. Many Frenchmen do not agree w^h M. Laval, but a French newspaper reflects a fear that possibly daunts the hardiest:

Do we realise that a victorious army occupies two-thirds of France and will occupy the whole of our country if we do not comply with the whole of their demands? In principle there is little difference between breaking an armistice to

annex Lorraine and breaking an armistice to occupy France as a whole. An observer of the new order in France makes the following pertinent observation: The old French administration was a model of unity and centralisation. For its normal functioning it requires a single management to ensure that all its wheels run smoothly. The control levers are all in Paris. Without those levers Marshal Petain and his Ministers are reduced to impotence. Hitler knows this perfectly well, and he is taking good care to keep them in a position in which all attempts at : national reorganisation must be para- ' lysed. . : While a country geared to Paris rule ■ staggers along under a Vichy Ad- i ministration, fearing that worse may befall, Hitler "gives his word as a • soldier—then takes it back." And M. Laval is always at hand to build 1 a new and unbreakable order on the J ruins of the last one. ]