. NEWS OF THE WEEK
ANOTHER week has been spent in North Africa in the barren round of agreement, rumoured disagreement, disagreement, rumoured agreement. We are apparently in the phase of rtunoured agreement at the moment of going to press, but it is not very clear what the basis of the agreement is. Nothing indeed is very clear at all, for the Giraudists and de Gaullists into which this disunited member of the family of United Nations are divided are each giving to the world their own version of what takes place in the numerous secret discussions between the respective 'rival chiefs and the mediators. A category of " moderates " is now tacitly recognised. General Catroux, of course, heads it, and it includes certainly M. Massigti and M. Monnet. There is no reason, indeed, why General Giraud should not be assigned a place in it, for there is no sign that he has at any moment adopted an attitude that could be stigmatised as extreme. General de Gaulle, of whose intractability in negotiation British Ministers have had long and painful experience, appears to be bent on establishing for himself both political and military predominance. Though considerably junior in rank to General Giraud, who has been organising and commanding armies in Tunis while General de Gaulle was exercising supremacy over the Fighting French movement in Carlton Gardens, General de Gaulle is resolved to impose • an army purge in accordance with his own drastic ideas, which are not General Giraud's, and to create a position in which Giraud will be subject to him as Defence Minister or to a National Liberation Committee on which the de Gaul-lists will command a majority, if only by a single vote. Everything suggests the existence of personal differences which no ingenious compromise formulas will render innocuous. That is a serious out- look, and the United Nations are viewing it with growing impatience. As for the demand for a general proscription of alleged pro-Vichyists, apparently to be condemned untried, what matters is the union of all Frenchmen- ready to fight Hitlerism today.
