Trials, Tribulations

The Chateau Chazeron is a hulk of medieval architecture which later sprouted two long gabled wings of the period of Louis XIII (see cut). It has no electricity, no running water, no heat except wood fires. Scrubby terraces lead down to the surrounding fields. In the U between the wings there is a sloping grass lawn from one end of which the castle glares out across the countryside.

Peasants in the fields glared back at the chateau last week, for they knew that scattered about in its dismal rooms was a varied assortment of once eminent French leaders. They might be scapegoats, they might face dishonor they did not warrant, but to the little people of France it looked at last as if someone was going to catch hell for the social, political and military debacle that culminated in what was grandiosely called the Battle of France.

Each little man in France knew there had been dirty work at the crossroads where finance, politics and the military met but did not merge. They did not know how much dirt had been dug up, but documents already filled a one-and-a-half-ton safe. This was enough to start on. A few miles from the chateau, at the little old market and court town of Riom, the new French Supreme Court through Special Attorney Gaston Cassagnau asked for two more indictments. Cited were Edouard Daladier, "strong-man" wartime Premier, and General Maurice Gustave Gamelin, who believed in the Maginot Line. Wording of the indictments was not divulged, because part of the seven-man court itself examines evidence and brings or dismisses charges, and presumably the evidence against Daladier and Gamelin had not been digested. But it meant that with seven big Frenchmen either under indictment or lock & key, the trial was getting well under way.

The Prisoners. Earlier indictments in absentia had been asked for former Air Minister Pierre Cot and for Guy La Chambre, who succeeded him. Peppery little M. Cot was still "somewhere in the United States."* M. La Chambre, at least outwardly unconcerned, by week's end had gone to Riom to face trial. Shocking to Frenchmen who have for years been taxed to the eyes for armaments was the lack of planes when war broke loose. In returning from the U. S., M. La Chambre either believed he could shift the blame on his predecessors or was making a gallant gesture.

At the Chateau Chazeron there awaited him the same medieval accommodations as had greeted onetime Premier Daladier, ex-Generalissimo Gamelin, ex-Premier Paul Reynaud, Georges Mandel, former Minister of Interior, and hulking, scholarly onetime Premier Leon Blum of the Popular Front.

Guards did the cooking, ate the same simple fare as their prisoners. With other guards trailing them, the onetime leaders of France were allowed to walk for an hour in the morning, an hour in the afternoon on the terraces and square. They could not walk near each other, nor converse together.

Reynaud and Mandel were quartered in the left wing. Reynaud, who has cycled for fun and sport for many years, was reported to have asked for a stationary bicycle to keep his trim little legs in shape, a pulley weight to flatten his waistline. Mandel, feared in politics for his thoroughgoing dossiers of the careers of France's great and near-great, asked for pen, ink, paper. Daladier, whom the war strain turned from a fairly pleasant individual into a red-faced, moody old bull, was more taciturn than ever. In the daylight he scrawled a lengthy history of his record in office to present to the court.

Gamelin, who dropped from sight after being succeeded by General Maxime Weygand, was the most active of all. Rumor had had him executed, dead by suicide or fleeing the country to save his skin. Actually he had been tending the rose garden at his home near Paris and showed up to give a certain zip to the dullness of the chateau's life. Briskly he did daily setting-up exercises, snappily returned the salutes he rates from the soldiers who guard him.

Socialist Blum, whose Popular Front has been condemned by Vichy for disrupting French home life, spreading sloth and dissatisfaction among French workers, and generally running France by orders from the U. S. S. R., kept quietly to himself. He wearily stroked his straggling mustache, said little, did little.

At week's end Blum and Reynaud were yet to be indicted. Of the others Mandel alone faces a possible sentence of death. He was charged with "treasonable acts" in attempting to cooperate with Great Britain's Duff Cooper and Lord Gort in Morocco in the hope of carrying on a pro-Ally Government after France had officially signed her armistice. The others face possible life imprisonment, with the present Premier, aging Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, holding power of pardon.

Questions & Answers. Great nations do not ordinarily fall without somebody, even some whole class, getting the blame and getting it in the neck. The actual trials at Riom were scheduled to be held in open court, and there France and the world were due to hear some interesting answers to some interesting questions.

There were certain to be questions on whether Gamelin sacrificed his ill-equipped troops to cover his own blunder, why Reynaud and Daladier ever conceived that France could defeat Germany, why planes were abandoned intact for the enemy to take over, and who were the men responsible for such errors as ordering an armaments factory immediately abandoned when the assembly line was filled with virtually completed tanks. Everything could come under review with a court charged to determine and judge the men responsible for "the passage from the state of peace to a state of war" and whose acts subsequently "aggravated the consequences of the situation thus created."

Errors in the handling of France's war and home fronts were as numerous as Nazi machine-gun bullets and as glaring as star shells, but to those parts of the world where an opinion can still be aired the trial was not so much that of individuals as of a way of life which bred disunity, which was so riddled with corruption and sabotaged by fatal living that it made a toboggan slide for ruin.

* In August M. Cot announced he was trying to get a job with a U. S. university as a lecturer on international law.

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