L'AFFAIRE DARLAN
Snt,—It is a relief to turn from the scurrility of some of your contem- poraries to your own reasonable comments on the Dalian affair. None the less one may feel that the Allies' behaviour is more justifiable than you appear to think. Darlan and the other men of Vichy—who are cer- tainly to be distinguished from the execrable Laval, Doriot, Deat, and their sort (just as the French people distinguish them by directing all their efforts at assassination against the latter), composed the government of a defeated nation, burdened with an onerous armistice and virtually at the mercy of a malignant conqueror, and inevitably their conduct, for us, took on the hue of "collaboration" with the enemy. But Darlan has joined us now, and as we have declared before, we accept as ally whosoever will fight by our side against the common enemy.
That Darlan could so join us and group behind him French West and North Africa argues powerfully that large sections of French opinion—in- cluding colonial opinion—accepted the armistice and maintained an tin- blamable and undetachable allegiance to the Vichy Government of metro- politan France. It is indeed a pity that our good friends, de Gaulle and his Fighting French, do not represent all France, but it is patently a fact, and when one day a new France struggles to her feet it will be our task to reconcile the divergent and understandably estranged and embittered sections, to reconcile those who went away to continue the fight side by side with Britain and those who stayed at home to steer the defeated nation as best they could through the bitter waters of humiliation and de- gradation, and not for us to impose any one group upon the French people. Our task is but to liberate France from the conqueror, and then assist her to go her own way, framing afresh her own institutions, working out her own political problems. To invite Darlan into the great com- pany of those who war against Hitler—and President Roosevelt has made it plain that we have not invited him as anything more than that—in no way compromises this laudable aim.—Yours faithfully,
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