MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
THE resignation of General Weygand is a portent, the full consequences of which it is still impossible to forecast. " After fifty-six years of public service "—so ran the Vichy communiqué—" General Weygand retires into private life." It would be foolish were we to imagine that the General has retired of his own will. It is nor in his character to abandon responsi- bilities at the hour of danger : he is not that kind of man. I have known Weygand well. I knew him in the days when he would seek to accord his swift 'footsteps to the slow strides of Marshal Foch. I knew him when, under the distressing rule of Poincare, he struggled to reconcile his loyalty to his superiors with his loyalty to his former allies. I saw him when he had become Commander-in-Chief of the French Armies, when he had become more worried, more authoritative, more sedate. Being convinced of his integrity, I think I can understand his point of view. As a fervent Cath9lic he may well have believed that France could be regengrated through suffering ; as a strategist he may well have felt that the defeat of 1940 was complete and irremediable ; as a soldier his sense of obedience to his military superiors was such as to seem excessive to the civilian mind ; as a patriot and a man of honour he was willing to carry out the terms of the armistice, but to grant no more. His dismissal implies that the Government of Vichy, for thirty pieces of silver in Reich currency, are about to behave dis- honourably. And by the time these words appear in print Admiral Darlan`may have gone to Fontainebleau and signed away his country's honour. The effect of this upon the relations between Vichy and the western democracies will be serious indeed. And the loyalty of those of us who believe in France will be subjected to strain.
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