FRANCE IN CHAINS

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4536, 13 February 1942, Page 3

FRANCE IN CHAINS

ACCEPTANCE OF GERMAN BRUTALITY “Vichy’s normal attitude is one of abject prostration, but. rarely has even Vichy grovelled quite so miserably in the dust under the conqueror’s feet as in Petain’s appeal against anti-Nazi terrorism: ‘By the armistice we laid down our arms. We have no right to take them up again to strike the Germans in the back. The foreign Powers which order these crimes know well they are wounding France in her very flesh. Of little matter to them are our widows, orphans, and our prisoners. . . . Help out justice. Find one culprit and 100 Frenchmen are saved. I cry out to you about this in a broken voice.’ It is a broken voice indeed, pitiful in its acceptance of a ‘justice’ which can slaughter 100 innocent men for every assassination, in its attempt to rivet upon France the chains which the men of Vichy expected her to wear. A Government of integrity and strength might have urged the abandonment of terrorism because of its essential futility; because of its barbarity; because it can only be destructive. This Government urges the people to drop it because of the savagery of reprisal; it asks them, in short, to allow themselves to be terrorised, to admit the validity of the gorilla justice of Nazism, to add a moral and spiritual degradation to the physical degradation of defeat.” —New York “Herald Tribune.”