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M. Delbos returned to Paris and made a report to his Government. He had discovered, he said, a perfect unity of ideas between France and these countries. He reported that they were deeply faithful to their old loyalties. He had a most perfect assurance in their friendship and co-operation. That, of course, was for public reassurance which deceived not a soul.

Privately he seems to have expressed other ideas more closely in touch with reality. According to reports of his conversation with Dr. Beneš he spoke the following words:

“These Governments of Poland, Roumania and Jugoslavia are lost to us temporarily at least.”

The French people did not find this situation satisfactory. All the horses they backed were now running in different directions, which did not lead to any winning-post.

They had backed Italy, and she had gone from them to the Berlin-Rome axis.

They had backed Russia, and Russia was a shambles.

They had backed the League of Nations—with a certain cynicism which belongs to the French mind. They even had a little faith in it now and then as the ultimate ideal of international peace, and meanwhile as a group of nations supporting the Treaty of Versailles and French security. The League was now moribund.

Where then was French security? Great Britain was a powerful ally at sea—with a supreme naval strength. It had no army for continental warfare. Where then was French security?

The French people were dejected by their own internal affairs and their own financial weakness. In 1937 their money was devalued again. After a series of “sit-down” strikes which seemed to be a great victory for the workers during the premiership of M. Blum with his Front Populaire, wages were raised and working hours shortened, but prices began to rise against them. They were still rising. A grave financial crisis was only saved last year by a “pause”—it was M. Blum’s word—in social progress, and by a return to old methods of strict economies in Government services. M. Chautemps—a moderate Radical—succeeded M. Blum, who had been too much to the “Left” in social affairs. M. Georges Bonnet, a man of courage who dared to tell the truth about the painful situation and to deal with it on sound lines, became Financial Minister and kept France out of bankruptcy. Now at the beginning of last year there was talk of another economic crisis. The experts were writing gloomy articles in the newspapers saying that France must produce more at less cost—or perish. The forty-hour week was not helpful in this necessity of increasing production and cheapening articles. It was a grave handicap to the activity of a great nation which waked up to a day of rest on Monday mornings when all competitors were starting on a new day of work.

But even the abolition of a five-day week would not restore, it was said by the experts, the economic and financial health of France. Something far more drastic must be done. What was that something? Dictatorship by Left or Right? The German methods of social organisation with labour camps and industrial discipline?

“It is necessary that the nation gets back to work,” said M. Abel Gardey in his report to the Chamber on the budget of 1938.

The answer to that warning was a renewal of French strikes in the provisioning and transport services just before Christmas when they were calculated to inflict the greatest exasperation and discomfort on the general public for their Christmas festivities and waiting to receive their New Year’s gifts. It developed into a general strike in Paris, threatening general paralysis of all social services until the Government broke it by strong and courageous action.

“The general discussion on the budget of 1938,” said Gaston Jèze, a Radical of the old school, “has put into high relief the principal causes of our financial disorders. First of all causes is demagogic madness. This insanity is shown by incessant demands for new expenditure. And naturally those who demand such money to be poured out by the Government have no other idea of the way in which it should be paid than the usual formulæ and slogans, without any definite meaning such as: Make the rich pay.... We are at a time when France is facing a question of life or death, but nobody dares to say why.”

Those last words in italics somewhat underestimate French candour and bitterness and political passion. In Paris everybody was daring to say why when I was there at the time. They were saying it in little restaurants and over café tables from Montmartre to the Boul’ Mich. Unfortunately they were all saying different things. Some were cursing the corruption of French politicians and discovering sinister conspiracies for the overthrow of France. There was a Fascist plot. Under the name of Cagoulards—the hooded men—a group of madmen were buying arms and bombs from Germany and Italy and storing them in secret places. There was a Communist plot, a vast underground organisation in touch with Moscow and with the Anarchists in Spain—their dear comrades! Did not Gringoire expose, week by week, these “ruffians” and “bandits” who were deliberately dragging down France and inciting Labour to revolution?

So they talked incessantly and wrote in Paris, while in the provinces the middle classes of France, the small bourgeoisie—the little rentiers living on pensions and invested money which keeps dwindling at every devaluation of the franc and every rise in prices until they are forced to the most rigid and humiliating economies—despair of any relief to their continual anxieties and growing fears.... There is always in their minds the shadow of their fear of Germany. What will happen if France becomes demoralised and weakened by these internal conflicts and paralysed by this economic stagnation? Perhaps, after all, some of them are tempted to think some form of dictatorship—they hate the idea—may be necessary to pull the country together and to give it discipline. In any case, think the petits rentiers and the petite bourgeoisie, there must be a swing to the Right—away from the folly of the demagogues.

The moderate radicals—they correspond to the old Liberal party in England—had no more tolerance for that Front Populaire which for a time they were willing to support under the premiership of Blum.

“Quo vadis respublica?” asked M. Albert Milhaud, that brilliant journalist of the moderate Left, summing up the end of the year 1937. “How are we going to escape from this bog? The Chamber is no longer able to control events. Its majority is torn to bits. Socialists and Communists oppose each other. Radicals and Socialists are equally hostile. The good-will of well-meaning men avails nothing. Practical realities, emotions, doctrines, smash the old party system. The hour approaches when it will be necessary to consult the people of France on their future if one wishes to prevent ‘accident.’ That hour cannot be kept waiting.”

There were groups in France at the time of the general strike who wanted these ‘accidents’ to happen. Their action in promoting that exasperating challenge to public order was against the wishes of the Trade Union leaders, and even their own political leaders of the extreme Left, at least in point of time and tactics. These men who broke off discussions on their claims to higher wages from a municipality already deep in debts and deficits—at the very time when their delegates were talking with the Prime Minister, M. Chautemps—did not want fair play or conciliation. They wanted public disorder, riots, bloodshed, the paralysis of French industry and the collapse of French economy. They wanted revolution according to the methods of Communism. The threat to call the working men to the colours and deal with them as traitors if they disobeyed orders smashed the strike. Briand had used the same method thirty years before in Paris when I had the pleasure of meeting him.

That bug of Communism still bites. In spite of all that has happened in Russia—all those agonies and all that blood—there are still minds even in the intelligence of France who are working always for the terrible delusion that the way to paradise is through the gates of hell. We have such minds in England, even among those who are pleased to call themselves intellectuals.

“We all have the conviction,” said M. Paul Faure, self-appointed apostle of Communism in France, “that Capital must be swept away by the Social Revolution!”

The Prime Minister Chautemps—head of a Radical Government—answered him with a grave rebuke.

“In talking like this you make a choice between two methods and two social doctrines. I rejoice to know that the majority of the French people regard these social conflicts as sterile and vicious and want a loyal and sincere collaboration between all sections of society working for the good of the country.”

I went among the French people at the end of that year of apprehensions and fears. I went among crowds of them in the Paris Exhibition which thirty million of them had visited in six months or so. They were mostly provincial folk, among whom were many peasants from French villages and farms, in their simple country clothes, nearly all black as usual. They stared gravely at all the exhibits. They whispered to each other in the great hall of the German Palace and in the show-rooms of the Russian buildings with its monstrous statue of Stalin and slogans of Soviet philosophy. I knew these peasant types. I have talked with them in the fields of France. Those middle-aged men who wandered round the Exhibition with their women-folk, tanned by wind and weather, looking at all this show sombrely, with critical appreciation, or a sense of stupefaction at its immensity, were the men whom I had seen as the young soldiers of France, in the trenches of Champagne and along the roads leading to the Marne where they defended the soil and the soul of France. Twenty years after they were anxious and distressed, and spoke bitter words sometimes, as I heard. Where were the fruits of that victory for which they fought? There was no security for France. There was no peace in Europe. Would their sons march again, as they marched twenty years ago—to where they were mowed down by the scythes of death—all their young comrades—in the northern battlefields? That was their most dreadful fear. They wanted peace above all things, but their politicians and their Press warned them every day that Germany was making ready to attack again. Why couldn’t there be peace between the French and Germans? What quarrel was there between them now?

At Verdun the French guardian of the memorial to four hundred thousand dead—all that number in the battle of Verdun—took me on one side and spoke about the Germans who came to visit those old battlefields because their dead lay there too.

“The Germans want peace,” he said to me earnestly. “They know that another war would be the end of civilisation. They don’t want it. Those who come here tell me so, and I believe it! As for France we older men are all hostile to ideas of war. France is for Peace. Is not this memorial a lesson to us? Do we want to lose more blood? Every intelligent man in France—every woman—is dedicated to peace.”

After that affirmation of faith he admitted that there were unintelligent people in France—the politicians, the journalists, some of the younger men. No doubt they would make trouble, he thought!

I wandered round Paris at night. It was very beautiful in the time of the Exhibition because of all the flood-lighting. The Champs Elysées were as light as day with all the fountains like cascades of jewels. In the Place Vendôme the tall column made of Napoleon’s guns was like a pillar of white marble newly cut, and exquisite. To me always at night in Paris there come the ghosts of French history, that fierce passionate history of valour, pain, cruelty, genius, beauty, bitterness, and the endless struggle of the mind even unto death for ideas of liberty, art, love and knowledge however good, however evil.

They are still the most intellectual people in the world—though they have been walking along the road to ruin. They are still the most civilised people in the world, being among the last defenders of the mind’s freedom.

I dined with a friend in an old restaurant with a reputation for good food and good wine, though one puts one’s feet on bare boards and sits on wooden benches.

“How goes it with France?” I asked.

France, said my friend, was not in too good shape. There was the economic crisis. There was the financial crisis. The extremists on both sides were exciting the pulse of passion. But middle-class France remained solidly in the middle of the road, scornful of both extremes, untouched by the spirit of revolution, desiring only to make both ends meet, with a rather broader margin of comfort and security.

“The five days week does not work very well,” said my friend.

“It is idiotic,” said my friend’s wife, who is a Frenchwoman and highly intelligent. “There are many idiocies in France to-day. We advance towards unpleasant adventures, and on the other side of the frontier the Germans are getting busy. It is all very dangerous, don’t you think?”

“It’s a dangerous world!” I agreed. “But I don’t believe we are going to have another war.”

“You are then an optimist?” asked this lady of France, turning to look at me with surprise. I have not, I fear, the face of an optimist.

“The wine here is good,” I said.

Since this chapter was written France, under the strong leadership of M. Daladier, has united against increasing menace, and political feuds have been put on one side for national security in the hour of danger. The heroic spirit of the French people has reawakened.