A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
HE most remarkable feature of the situation in France is the total absence of any reliable information about what is appening there. Between this country and that, separated s they are by little over twenty miles of sea, or five minutes' ying time, there is no communication whatever. No British 'plomatic representatives, and of course no British journalists, emain in France. Scraps of coloured news trickle out from ome neutral correspondent in Berlin, rare scraps of uncoloured nd their way from Vichy via New York. Frenchmen now in ngland, who have lived for years in the midst of great news- athering machines in France, know no more of what is happen- ng in their country that I do, and they have no means of nding out. They know nothing of their families, they know othing of how the people generally are taking the surrender, the delivery of more than half the country into German hands, and the abolition of the democracy France has professed for a century and a quarter. Even the two halves of France will be cut off from each other hardly less. One half is being administered by Germany, the other by the new Fascist French Government, but it is significant that no newspaper published in unoccupied France, poor, censored thing though it promises to be, will be allowed in any circumstances to circulate in the German occupied area. The darkness is only made the blacker ; by a few false lights.
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