Terrorism Cuts Both Ways

The Nazis who are throttling fallen France made the mistake last week of giving a gun to Paul Colette, a tough 21-year-old patriot from Calvados, the applejack section of Normandy. Paul Colette, like a great and ever growing number of Frenchmen, wanted a gun so that he could "let somebody have it." The Nazis signed him up in the Legion of Volunteers to Combat Bolshevism under the impression that he wanted to shoot Russians. What Patriot Colette wanted to shoot was any Frenchman who would give any German so much as the time of day. Paul Colette had not worn the Legion's Nazified uniform long enough to get his Feldgrau well wrinkled before his wish came true more spectacularly than he possibly could have imagined.

Lined up for review with a section of Legionnaires in the Borgnis-Desbordes barracks in Versailles, Paul Colette spotted in the reviewing stand France's unholy trinity of Collaboration. Side by side stood Fernand de Brinon, Vichy's Ambassador to the Nazis, Pierre Laval, whose collaboration got to the point that old Marshal Petain had to take away his vice-premiership, and Editor Marcel Deeof L'Oeuvre, Laval's journalistic toady.

It was as easy as this. When Paul Colette's rank swung past the reviewers, he simply stepped out of line, pulled out his German gun and let Laval have it over the heart and Deat have it in the arm and belly. The colonel of the barracks and another Legionnaire got hit too.

Pierre Laval's seamed and oily face twisted in agony, but he did not drop. He was helped into Ambassador de Brinon's car and sped to the Versailles municipal hospital. Two German surgeons, whom the Nazi Army of occupation obligingly dispatched from Suresnes, arrived to help dig the German slug out of his chest. They decided not to, but collaborated on M. Deat's case and both men were given a good chance to pull through. Laval felt well enough to phone his wife at their dark little castle down in Auvergne and to receive Otto Abetz, the Nazi Ambassador to France.

Locked up in jail, as so many of his countrymen had been in the past few weeks since they began to get up off their knees and strike back at their Nazi tormentors (TIME, Aug. 25), Paul Colette was cheerful enough, although he kicked himself for not having "finished the job." He probably did not realize that what he and many other courageous Frenchmen had started last week was something terrific. They were showing that terrorism cuts both ways, that there are some men who will die before submitting to a conqueror's brutality and kill rather than see their country sold out. The news of the Versailles shooting reached Vichy that evening while old Chief of State Petain was attending Berlioz' opera The Damnation of Faust.

Up France! The Nazis' attitude toward the Versailles shooting showed clearly that they regarded the case as a case of dynamite. They first said that Paul Colette was a Communist, later admitted that he was just another De Gaullist, had in fact tried to escape to Britain and join the Free French forces. He had been incited to the shooting, said the Nazis, by the treacherous British radio. (They blandly added that Admiral Darlan, Laval's successor as Vice Premier, was next on the assassination list.) A part of the Nazi-controlled Paris press was permitted to recommend leniency for Paul Colette. So was Pierre Laval. More amazingly, so was the Volunteer Legion to Combat Bolshevism.

The shooting seemed to turn the Nazis sour on the Legion idea anyhow. Formed to confuse and demoralize the French (and possibly to serve as a tough band of mercenaries if the Nazis decided to fake an anti-Vichy revolution), the Legion was suddenly told it was not going to the Eastern Front. There might be a lot of other Colettes in the Legion.

On less spectacular French patriots, the Germans spared no mercy. Day before the shooting at Versailles, three men were decapitated for operating an underground printing press and anti-Nazi agitation. Nazi justice was especially revealing here. One man had originally been given a light sentence and fines. He made the fatal error of appealing.

Following the Versailles shooting, 16 other French and Belgians went before German firing squads, including Henri Louis Honore Count d'Estienne d'Orves. He was a 40-year-old naval lieutenant, had served with distinction in the Mediterranean, joined the De Gaullists, landed secretly in Brittany to do underground work and got caught crossing the demarcation line on his way to see his wife and five children. Chief of State Petain tried to save him. The Germans not only turned thumbs down but ordered that the news of the executions be prominently headlined in the French press.

It took more than headlined executions to handle the aroused French. In Paris there had been an anti-German demonstration in front of the Montparnasse station one day and a train wreck outside it on another. Someone had pulled up a double length of rails. At nearby Poissy, saboteurs dynamited the right-of-way and the subsequent train wreck tied up the line 30 hours. In downtown Paris young men sang the Marseillaise and near the Porte St. Denis three enthusiasts jumped out of a car with a bundle of patriotic leaflets the size of a cotton bale, slit it open and whizzed away. Twenty thousand German troops were concentrated in Paris at week's end and the Germans began taking all the radios in France--from Jews first, as usual.

If the Germans let reports like this out of France, it was safe to say they suppressed plenty more. The French were hearing that the Germans were not finding Russia a pushover; they were hearing of British raids on Berlin and the heroic resistance of the Yugoslav mountain men. The French were hungry, out of work; prices were soaring and what money they had the Germans were systematically debauching. The French were at last aware that what Naziism grasps it must utterly destroy.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.