"Dear Rusia"

"Dear Russia"

In Britain's House of Commons a plain question at long last got a plain answer:

Laborite J. H. Martin: Will the French Committee of National Liberation administer liberated France?

Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden: Yes. Incidentally, we have no intention of dealing with Vichy under any circumstances whatever.

Did this forthrightness dispel the ambiguities in U.S. Secretary Cordell Hull's recent statement that Washington was disposed to let the Algiers Committee exercise leadership in France? Things actually were not that simple. Buck-passing Washington has passed the buck on the question of whom to deal with and not to deal with during and immediately after the invasion--that was still, said Washington, strictly General Dwight D. Eisenhower's business. Last week that overburdened officer had to turn from pre-invasion military chores, confer on French politics with General Joseph Pierre Koenig, doughty hero of Bir Hacheim and the De Gaulle Government's military envoy in London. At week's end a hitch occurred. The Committee protested against Britain's diplomatic-code ban, maintained that under pre-invasion restrictions of communications' and travel the conversations "cannot be usefully pursued."

In Tunis, General Charles de Gaulle pointedly reminded the U.S. and Britain that France has another friend. Said he: "Toward the west the French want to be a center of direct and practical cooperation while they want to be permanent allies in relation to the east--that is to say first in relation to dear and powerful Russia." De Gaulle's loving phrase in French: ". . . la chere et puissante Russie."

Anthony Eden's forthright assurances obviously did not yet apply in practice. Apparently, they had been spoken for the record.

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