These are the British

by Drew Middleton

There would be no great opposition to China's entry into the United Nations. Again, this would not reflect admiration for communism. For many reasons the British doubt the effectiveness of the United Nations. One reason is that a nation of over 500,000,000 people has no representation in the UN's councils.

The relationship between the French and the British is a fascinating one. For nearly a thousand years these two peoples have faced each other across the channel. During that period, in Britain at least, there has developed a curious love-hate relationship. By turns loving, exasperated, and enraged, the British think of the French as a man might think of an affectionate but wayward mistress.

In June of 1940, when the world between the wars was being shaken to bits, the fall of France shocked and saddened the British as did no other event of those terrible days. I remember that while waiting in the Foreign Office, the morning after my return from France, I saw an elderly official, a man with a brittle, cynical mind, walk down the corridor with tears streaming down his face. There was no recrimination. All he could say was: "Those poor people—God, how they must be suffering!"

Few enemy actions during the war distressed the British as much as the decision to attack the French fleet at Oran. Few post-war diplomatic achievements gave them more pleasure than the re-establishment of the old alliance with France. The rise and fall of French governments, the convulsions of French politicians are watched in Britain sometimes with anger and harsh words but never without an underlying sympathy.

Perhaps because of the alliance in two world wars or perhaps because France offers such a complete change from their own islands, the British know France very well, far better than they know the United States or some nations of the Commonwealth. This is true of all classes of Britons.

The elderly doctor or retired officer of the middle classes will spend his holidays at an obscure resort on the coast of Brittany. Before the war a Continental holiday was one of the indications of middle-class status. Today the Continental holiday is within the financial reach of the working class. The conductor on the bus I sometimes take to work was full of his plans this spring for "me and the missus" to motorcycle from Boulogne to the Riviera. Thousands like him tour France in buses or spend vacations not in Blackpool but in a French seaside resort.

The national attitude ranges from tolerance to affection. I do not believe, however, that the British respect the French as they do the Germans or the Russians. The mutiny in the French Army in 1917, the catastrophe of 1940, the Anglophobia of the Vichy government ended, probably permanently, popular British reliance on France as a powerful ally in world affairs. When the Suez crisis arose in 1956 and the governments of Sir Anthony Eden and Guy Mollet hastened to reinvigorate the alliance, their efforts awoke little response in Britain. "Now that we're in this thing, we have to go on and win it," a friend said. "But think of being in it with the French, especially these French—Mollet, Pineau, and Bouges-Manoury." He made a sound more customary in Ebbets Field than in a London club.

The British are amused by the French (the French, of course, are even more amused by the British). Sometimes it seems that every Englishman of a certain age and financial position has his own "secret" village where the Hotel de la Poste provides a good dinner for five hundred francs. Britons have great knowledge and affection for France born of contact in two wars, but they do not rely on the French.

For other reasons the British hesitate to rely on the Germans. Two generations of Britons have learned that the Germans are a tough, resolute, and courageous people, characteristics admired in Britain. But the British groups devoted to furthering friendship between the two peoples are fighting a losing battle. There is among all classes in Britain an underlying distaste for the Germans. This feeling is not often expressed, but it is there, as it is in most countries in Western Europe. The attitude is a factor in the relationship between Western Europe and the key question facing the continent as a whole: Germany's ultimate reunification.