How Big An Army?

The question of the week was: should France have a big, expensive army or a small, inexpensive one? Puffy-cheeked War Minister Andre Diethelm thought the army should be a whopper, chiefly as a matter of prestige. Lean, hardheaded Finance Minister Rene Pleven insisted that a small, tight, mechanized force was all that was necessary: in tomorrow's atomic war a massive array of manpower would be silly. Last week the Cabinet met in Paris, listened for five hours to the williwaw of conflicting opinions. The man who does France's bookkeeping finally won.

One factor was political; general elections were near and it took no crystal gazer to detect what the people wanted.

Many a Frenchman still laboriously pedaled bicycles while one-third of France's gasoline supply was going to the Army.

Forty-three tons of meat were assigned to the city of Lyons (pop. some 570,000); civilians got eleven tons, the Army grabbed the rest. Parisians who cannot find places to live watched in anger while the military requisitioned 3,271 Paris apartments in which to house officers.

And one inescapable fact was as blunt as a rifle butt. From France's current budget of 385 billion francs ($7,700,000,000), the armed forces (current size: 1,400,000) have been skimming off 175 billion.

The Cabinet saw the point. The military budget for the last quarter of 1945 was whacked by about 12 billion francs. Next year, it was reported, the cut would be even bigger--perhaps as much as 100 billion.

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