"We Are With You"

Many Frenchmen, who had stomached the idea of Marshal Petain as a possible savior of France, vomited all hope for Vichy when Pierre Laval took over.

Last week, while Laval was singing the praises of Hitler's New Order to the staccato tune of German firing squads executing more than 65 French hostages in Rouen, St. Nazaire and Paris, five top members of Vichy's Embassy in Washington headed by Counselor Leon Marchal, saw fit to resign their posts and join the De Gaullist Free French movement.

In Occupied France, the Germans had a dapper new high executioner, Prince Josias Waldeck-Pyrmont, 45, whose early enthusiasm for Naziism might have been connected with the failure of his inherited sugar-beet and seltzer-water interests to yield him much money. The Prince became one of the Gestapo's chief pre-war agents in France, and his polished manners persuaded many uncouth Nazis not to scratch their heads with their forks. One of his first acts last week was a decree that hereafter French hostages would be carried on German troop trains, to discourage sabotage.

In Unoccupied France, Pierre Laval had not yet shown his hand. Time might soon tell whether he would, or could, order the French Fleet into action or turn Madagascar over to the Japanese.

But whatever the shape of his soiled hand when he showed it, the French public was not likely to respond. Wrote Columnist Samuel Grafton in the New York Post last week: "If we but understood our politics, the clear and simple politics of freedom, we would know that a great battle has been fought in France by Fascism for two years, and that in it Fascism has lost. Hitler did not want the unpopular Laval. If he had wanted him, he could have had him in at any time. . . .

"France has remained democratic, that is the amazing and wonderful thing which has happened, and it has become necessary to put a fearfully hated Hitler stooge openly in charge, and to consummate collaboration by naked force, with no pretensions to even partial popular support. . . .

"The people of France have sent us a message, transcending all censorship; they have just said to us, clear and loud, if we but knew: 'We are with you still. No Frenchman, only a Laval, could be found to do this dirty thing. . . .' "

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