Word: frenchmen
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Last week as the Commandant Duboc was warped in at Duala, 2,000 miles southwest of Dakar in the Cameroons, three rows of native troops and French soldiers stood at attention. General Charles de Gaulle, leader of Free Frenchmen, stepped ashore. He kissed Governor General Colonel Leclerc on both cheeks. An officer of the Duala garrison shouted, not exactly in the military tradition: "Here you are at home and there's plenty of pinard" (French soldier's slang for wine). Then a pandemonium of cheering broke...
Other Men of Good Will in that amorphous, hopeful group were the Frenchmen Daladier, Georges Bonnet, Yvon Delbos (whom Romains says he made Foreign Minister), Ambassador André Francois-Poncet; Belgian Cabinet Minister Henri de Man; presumably many whom Good Willman Romains does not name. They believed that "nothing good could ever come of war," devoted themselves to plotting peace coups which somehow never came off. The greatest of these plots was hatched by Henri...
...permitted themselves to be surrounded by the Japanese, who then attacked from all sides. One thousand were killed or wounded, 2,000, including a brigadier general, were taken prisoner and 3,000 escaped by fleeing unarmed into the jungle. Pro-Japanese guerrilla bands were reported to have recaptured 30 Frenchmen and killed them slowly. "The Japanese herded us together like cattle," reported an escaped Legionnaire. "Some had cover but most of us sprawled or sat for four days in the open under a hellish sun." The Japanese slapped white captives to prove to native soldiers that it could be done...
...France. The Indo-Chinese were willing to be liberated. The French were at last reaping the harvest of the particular brand of civilization they had sown in Indo-China. By exploiting 23,000,000 natives, 28,000 Frenchmen had arranged for themselves an attractive existence, including the extraction of a tidy income from 10,000 tons of opium sold annually to the population under Government license. They had built European towns with broad, immaculate avenues, spacious buildings, beautiful squares adorned with statues of the French great. Beyond the exclusive French quarter, in utmost squalor and poverty, lived the native population...
...went to Paris. There everybody's morale was fine. Everybody said: "Il faut en finir"-"This time we must put an end to it." "So many Frenchmen said: 'Anyone can see that if Hitler doesn't attack now, at the peak of his strength, he's doomed.' And when you asked: 'Then why doesn't he attack now?' they replied, with vast Gallic shrugs, 'Undoubtedly because he knows he's doomed anyway.' So, the stalemate on the western front was widely explained as 'Hitler's realization...