Blood & Dollars

Last week L'Humanite, the Communist daily in Paris, published a cartoon showing Secretary of State Dulles, in a snappy convertible, pulling up at a filling station operated by French Premier Joseph Laniel and ordering $385 million worth of French blood. (The U.S. recently decided to increase dollar aid to France that amount to carry on the Indo-China war.) In the National Assembly, during a crucial debate on Indo-China policy, ex-Premier Edouard Daladier echoed L'Humanite's blood & dollars theme. After tolling off the well-known drainages (76,000 casualties and $5 billion) and frustrations of France's seven-year war against Communism in Asia, Daladier said: "One of the parties brings dollars, while the other makes a gift of its blood and its sons . . ."

This was the same Daladier who, along with Neville Chamberlain, spoke for Allied appeasement at Hitler's Munich. Daladier is not a Communist or even a Socialist; he is a member of the moderate, right-of-center Radical Socialists. And on the Indo-China question he spoke for many a Frenchman who would violently reject the label of appeaser.

In recent months the clamor in France for pulling up stakes and getting out of Indo-China has been louder than ever beore. This may seem rather a paradox, in view of increased vigor and will to win in the theater itself, under General Henri Navarre (TIME, Sept. 28). But since the end of the war in Korea, France is the only Western nation shedding blood on a major scale to fight Communism in Asia. Hence the resurgence of the blood & dollars theme--which could not be raised very loudly while the U.S. was fighting in Korea. Also. France now faces a painful decision on EDC (see INTERNATIONAL), and the feeling is prevalent that a pull-out of her troops in Indo-China would help her to counterweight the German "menace" in Europe.

After the Assembly had heard Daladier, big, rumpled Premier Laniel put the case for fighting on in Indo-China. "We want to make perfectly clear to the enemy," he said, "that he has not a single chance of obtaining by force the departure of our troops ... I think that it will be possible for us to maintain the initiative of widespread operations and to improve our situation rapidly, until the national [Vietnamese] armies have developed enough for their weight to be felt in battle . . . The war will not end by extermination, but by the discouragement of one of the two belligerents, and causes for discouragement are, in the long run, smaller on our side than on theirs." As to negotiating with the enemy, Laniel said cautiously: "My government is prepared to seize every opportunity for making peace, whether encountered in China or on the international level."

Dawn was coming up over Paris when the Assembly at last voted. Laniel's resolution was carried, 315 to 257; for a while longer, France will fight on in Indo-China.

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