LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Would France Fight?
SIR, While agreeing with the general sense of Lord Winster's friend's conclusions—namely that the key to vigorous defence of western Europe is the principle of solidarity, I can only marvel at the failure of even the acutest of observers (not of Lord Winster's friend alone) to treat the problems of population on the basis of ordinary arithmetic. The oldest of the French boys who might have been born if his father had not been a prisoner of war would not today be more than nine and a half year old. At all events to say that " Hitler kept as prisoners one million young Frenchmen for several years and thus denied France several million babies " is to presuppose that every prisoner of war would have been a father every year had he been free, which is improbable.
The man-power reserves of France depend in 1950 on the number of births in the years before and immediately following 1930. At that time both the number of births and the birth-rate were higher than in England and Wales for several years. They fell below those of England in the next few years (as therefore fell the French man-power reserves) until in 1938 there were only 620,000 births to 650,000 deaths— partly the reflection of the low birth-rate of the war years 1914-1918 which resulted twenty years later in a shortage of young mothers. The number of births during the last war in France was indeed catastro- phically low, though it rose before the end. It is worth noting however that the number of births has been between 840,000 and 870,000 every year since 1945, that is to say in every year greater than in any year between 1919 and 1939, and that the total surplus of births over deaths in the last five years is substantially greater than in the twenty years between the two wars. Very heavy as have been France's losses in our common cause, she is repairing them today both byj,irths and also, as between the two wars, by immigration. Let us indeed appreciate our neighbour's appalling losses, but do not let us talk as if the principle of vitality was fading out within her borders. It is on the contrary restoring sap to branches that seemed in danger of becoming dead wood. If France has time to recover she will in fifteen years time be a younger and more vital nation than she has been since 1914.—Yours, etc., D. R. GILLIE.
15 Quai Bourbon, Paris.
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