Last Mile

Seventeen months after the armistice of Compiegne, the leaders of the Third Republic stood in the dock at Riom to answer war-guilt charges dreamed up by Adolf Hitler. Instead they attacked the Vichy regime, praised General Charles de Gaulle. Delicate, scholarly, 70-year-old onetime Premier Leon Blum raised his grey head proudly and accused his accusers of rank mockery. Cried onetime Premier Edouard Daladier: "We shall make it clear where treason lurked and by whom France was betrayed."

These voices of defiance struck sympathetic chords in millions of French hearts. Hitler called the trial off hurriedly. But it was too late. France had awakened, not to collaborate but to resist.

Last week, no longer protected by the shadow of the once-great Code Napoleon, Blum and Daladier were en route to Germany. Paul Reynaud, Georges Mandel and General Gustave Gamelin had already joined General Maxime Weygand in Berlin, where a German "people's court"* awaited them.

Of the leading statesmen of the Third Republic, only solid, 70-year-old Edouard Herriot remained in France. He was too popular to touch yet. On at least one occasion the Fighting French arranged an escape for Herriot, but he refused to leave his country. Said he: "I shall stay and suffer with my people."

*This might well move Moscow to renew demands for the trial of Rudolf Hess.

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