Q. And Laval?
A. He is wounded but he is surely enjoying himself because for the moment he can say, “I told you so.” He is probably the world’s most delighted observer of the Battle of Russia. My last glimpse of him was in Bordeaux at the restaurant “Chapon Fin” the night France capitulated. The restaurant was crowded with the wealthy, the powerful, the noted and notorious of France. The door was locked; without an introduction from at least a Cabinet Minister or a millionaire nobody could get in. That night ten thousand refugees were pounding for admission to the restaurants of Bordeaux. Our Ambassador to Poland, Tony Biddle, unmarked from his harrowing escape across Poland under Luftwaffe machine-gun fire, and as fresh here at the collapse of the world as though he were attending a bridge party at home, rescued us and with a gesture which implied we were all ambassadors, requisitioned a table for our party of American newspapermen. From one corner Otto of Habsburg greeted us in his cordial democratic way. He was one victim Hitler would have liked to catch. I looked around the grotesque dining room, decorated as an artificial rock garden of papier-mâché and now populated by as queer a throng as ever assembled to dine at the funeral of a nation. Nearly every French politician I had ever seen was there, most of them drinking copiously of the wine for which the city was famous. There was no gloom perceptible; not among the Frenchmen. The atmosphere was excited, laughter was frequent and high-pitched. Perhaps it was bravery; the gay talk and conviviality sounded very courageous or else very frivolous at that moment. Who could have realized that there were Frenchmen there calculating to improve their careers by the fall of their country? We American newspapermen looked more depressed than any of the men whose motherland was about to be strangled. Presently a waiter brought me a note from Laval inviting me to his table. I had not seen him enter. There he was, swarthy, ebony-haired, with his famous white string tie, presiding over a company of half a dozen friends, all talking, as everybody in the Western World was talking, about the fate of France.
Abruptly Laval asked, “What do you think, M. Knickerbocker?”
I spoke with all the emphasis I could muster and placing my fist on the table to help express my sincerity talked directly to him: “Mr. President, I think that if you give up, if you surrender, it will mean the end of France as a nation, the end of France forever unless another, outside power comes to your rescue. But Mr. President, if you go on fighting, if you refuse to surrender, even if you have to go to North Africa and base your government on Morocco, then France will live because she and her friends will win this war, however long it may take. But please believe me, Mr. President, when I say I know what the Nazis mean to do to France, and I know because I have lived for nine years in Germany as a professional observer and I know Adolf Hitler, and the Nazis, and the German people better than I know any politician, or political party, or people in the world, and I know they mean the utter destruction of France.”
There was dead silence, and to my gratification everybody at the table, all of Laval’s friends, nodded in agreement with me, but M. Laval himself, grave as a judge, leaned back and with that inscrutable Moorish air of his said, “No, M. Knickerbocker, you do not understand. Hitler does not want to destroy France; Hitler only wants to destroy the Soviet Union.”
That was Laval’s belief, and because this belief was shared by so many other Frenchmen, it became one of the principal reasons for the fall of France.
Whatever else one may think of him, Laval has guts and is no hypocrite. He hates democracy and says so. He is out to promote the fortunes of M. Laval and admits it. He calls himself a realist; and realistically he long ago estimated the strength of France as inadequate to stand up against Germany. He learned to hate Britain during those long years when every French move to bolster their position against the doubly powerful Reich was checked by an imbecile British Foreign Office which continued to think that the balance of power required a stronger Germany and a weaker France. So Laval’s belief in the desirability of a Franco-German “understanding” was not born of defeat alone.
He was the first French Premier to visit Germany after the war. I was in Berlin when he arrived in the autumn of 1931 with the aging and feeble but still brilliant Briand, then Foreign Minister. Bruening was Chancellor and that farsighted benevolent statesman, whom the Allies could have helped suppress the growing menace of Hitler, wished to make the visit the foundation for a new era of Franco-German friendship. How futile his hopes were came to light as the train bearing the French ministers rolled in. I was standing with a small crowd of Germans at the foot of the steps of the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof, and noticed that the streets had been cleared and roped off all the way to the Hotel Adlon. Masses of police manned the ropes but there was almost no crowd to hold back. Around the station were about five hundred people. I noticed they looked curiously alike, as though all from the same neighborhood, the same class. Presently I saw a friend, a plain-clothes man from Police Headquarters, all dressed up in his Sunday best, with gloves and a derby hat and the inevitable big detective’s shoes. I greeted him. He introduced his wife and children. A little surprised, I asked if he were such a great advocate of Franco-German friendship that he had brought his whole family to cheer the visitors from Paris. “Ja wohl!” he replied. “Orders, you see. They sent us all down here. Everybody here is from Police Headquarters, mit Frau und Kinder. Nobody else; no outsiders. We get a day off for coming.” Sure enough, that was the makeup of the entire crowd. They dutifully thronged around the steps and shouted “Hoch Frankreich!” Laval and Briand then passed through empty streets to the Hotel Adlon where another group of policemen and their wives and children cried “Hoch!” again. And that was the length and breadth and depth of Franco-German friendship.
Q. Has Laval a chance to come back?
A. Yes, if the Germans win he has the best of chances. Laval today is the only master politician left in France; Pétain is senile; Darlan is ward-heel size; none of the others in the Vichy camp is even that large, and the politicians of the Republic are dead and buried. Laval is the best-hated Frenchman alive; the shots fired into him by Colette were cheered from one end of France to the other, but he is still the only Frenchman capable of ruling France as a dictator.