Lessons that France’s shame can teach us

Camp News, Volume 3, Issue 109, 13 February 1942, Page 2

Lessons that France’s shame can teach us

We have many lessons to learn in this country before we win the war, and many more to learn, maybe bitterly, before we find real peace and prosperity—not just for a chosen few, but for the multitude.

You may learn some of the lessons, if you study carefully a little book* —just publishedwhich tells, without passion, but with dreadful certainty some of the reasons for the fall of France. One lesson deals with the broken morale of the French Army. “This, however, was not due to political feeling or a lack of will to fight. “It was —and it is a factor warmly to be remembered in considering the state of our troops in the British Empire due almost entirely to the lack of activity in the period which the Americans described as' the ‘phoney war.’ - “The plain fact is that sufficient was not due to entertain them and boredom set in.” That “plain fact” is well worth remembering in our own army. / But France’s greatest betrayers came from the topthe rich and the supposed-great. We are told of the deliberate, vicious treachery in high places, of the unrelenting, evil grasp of the great bankers and big business men, so terrified for the safety of their profits that they preferred to yield their country to an age-old enemy rather’ than see the bulk of their own countrymen get a few of the good things of life.

“The well-off feared for their privileges, for in France then, as in the British Empire now, there was a recognition that after the war things would never be the same again." J

“Most of them wanted things to return as they were, and that implied

a quick peace before the system that gave them their privileges crashed

under the necessity of providing for the war.

The blame must be shared, too, by the leaders of labour. French Socialists were in no better way to save the nation than the men of the Right.

The censorship has its share of blame, that censorship “which was devised purely, it seems, to bewilder the French population rather than the German High Command.”

Efforts have been made in the British Empire to tighten the censorship, to prevent the public from knowing what it is their right to know, to stop the free expression of opinion by a free people. In the main these efforts have failed, but the vigilance of the public and the Press must never relax, else we may find we are fettered as France was fettered. The paralysing grip which the Bank of France had on all Governments must have special note. The great banking families were, of course, always on the side of reaction, always against the people, but lasting infamy attaches to the Bank of France and the men in control. “Latterly they backed Mussolini, even when he was demanding French colonies. They took Hitler to their hearts.” These men were simply political blackmailers, they destroyed Governments as they wished, they defeated the will of the people whenever it suited them to do so. To them France owes much of her shame, her degradation, and her sorrow. They and the politicians they controlled were traitors because they lusted after power and because no infamy was too great for their .souls.