MARSHAL PETAIN.

Evening Star, Issue 25470, 28 April 1945, Page 6

MARSHAL PETAIN.

Marshal Petain has returned to France via Switzerland, and been arrested. His return from neutral territory was apparently voluntary, though it might soon have been compulsory. He was unhappy in Germany, and told an interviewer that his arrival on Swiss soil on his birthday was the best birthday present for which he 6ould have wished. The birthday was his eightyninth. All France, it has been said, has been electrified by his return, but thoughtful persons have also been concerned. New divisions are threatened by the question of what should be done with Petain. It is surmised that the Germans connived at his return with this expectation in their minds, just as, in the last war, they connived at the return of Lenin to Russia to divide that country. The supposition is entirely probable. Petain will be charged with high treason, and the _ heaviest dossier has been prepared against liim,

it is said, that has ever confronted a French soldier. At his age it seems hardly worth while, though much will depend on the evidence supporting charges that, before the armistice, he was in treasonable correspondence with the Nazis. Thirty years ago, and for many years that followed, he was the hero of France, though apparently it was more circumstances than anything inherent in his disposition that made him appear as such. It was want of a better, more than anything outstanding in his earlier military career, that caused him to be selected as the defender of Verdun. He was a rather stolid, not very French-liko soldier, who believed that, by the development of modern warfare, 'defence had been made more important than the offensive, and that the strength of defence was in stone walls and fire power. So his faith in artillery was extended to air forces, and beyond that he had no imagination whatever. He impressed de Gaulle, whom he taught in the military school, and was impressed by another pupil, Franco. But he was untouched by de Gaulle's-ideas, to be proved correct, of how the next—the present—war would be fought, and his plans for the French army in the years that immediately preceded it were based wholly on the past. " His contribution to the emergency of 1940," it has been said, " was a full equipment for the military situation of 1918;" Lloyd George Liked him when he first became French Comman-der-in-Chief some time aftor Verdun, and Haig got on well with him. But an extreme caution and tendency always to take the most gloomy view were parts of his character; his enemies called him a pacifist; and when it appeared, at the height of the German offensive, that he was prepared to abandon the British forces and leave them to their own devices British opinions of him changed. In the supreme crisis of this war, which found him wanting—at the age of eighty-four—his weakness was lack of faith, despairing too soon of the issue. He had no faith'in politicians—few of France's deserved much. That gave him a sympathy with totalitarianisni. The military position seemed to him hopeless. He had an idea that if once generals—who he had said were much the same in all countries—could come together, they would arrive at some reasonable sort of composition. The idea of trusting Great Britain and continuing the war from North Africa seemed to him preposterous. So he fell into the worst disaster of the armistice. It was tragic. It was disgrace to Petain, no longer the hero of France. He should have died, it was well said, fifteen years earlier. But France has recovered. He was not alone in his fain,t-heartedness. In the long view he has suffered most, fallen from the highest estate. Apart from natural divisions which it is important before almost anything else should be avoided, there seems little use in harrying to death a " near "-nonagenarian, for whom obloquy is inescapable and whom death awaits soon in any case.