Where Is Gamelin?

Ou est Gamelin? asked Frenchmen last week on the boulevards of Paris and in the wineshops of Auvergne as under a new leader French Armies regrouped themselves along the Somme. Maurice Gustave Gamelin, once acknowledged "the world's foremost soldier," had seen his theories of stand-and-take-it warfare ground beneath the tread of German tanks and blasted into extinction by Nazi dive-bombers. While his predecessor and successor Maxime Weygand sweated under the gigantic task of constructing a new front, the morbidly curious speculated on the fate of the former generalissimo.

He had committed suicide "following a definite invitation of the French High Command," reported Benito Mussolini's newspaper Popolo d'ltalia, reviving the romantic tradition which demands that an officer who fails disastrously be handed a bottle of brandy and a loaded pistol.

To Washington came five reports from, dissimilar European sources, each stating that Gamelin had been executed, as had also General Andre Georges Corap, who had commanded the French Ninth Army at the vital Ardennes sector of the Maginot Line extension when the Nazis broke through.

French authorities remained officially silent, but the censor passed an announcement that the former Commander in Chief of the Allied Armies was alive and in Paris.

Best bet was that Gamelin had been put on the shelf, joining the spiritual company of his old chief General Joseph Jacques Cesaire Joffre, who in World War I bungled at Verdun, and General Charles Louis Marie Lanrezac, who boggled at Charleroi.

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