Terror for Terror

Greasy-faced, German-serving Pierre Laval, who was shot in Paris last fortnight by German-hating Paul Collette, got out of bed last week. In his Versailles hospital a doctor helped him limp down the hall to see his fellow victim, German-serving Editor Marcel Deat of L'Oeuvre.

If their condition was improving, that of the German Occupation was not. France was near a state of national revolt. In Paris a night-walking German civilian was savagely beaten up. Pistols suddenly cracked in the streets--at a Nazi sergeant, at a civilian official of the Occupation Army, at a second Nazi noncom. Marcel Gitton, a former Communist deputy who had recently played ball with the Nazis, was shot dead by a young bicyclist in blue jeans and a beret. Despite death sentences threatened for railway sabotage, roundhouse turntables on the Paris-Brittany main line were blown up.

In retaliation the enraged Nazis seized as hostages onetime Minister of Justice Pierre Masse, onetime Deputy Theodore Valensi, more than 100 unnamed Jews. Three alleged Communist hostages were hustled from a prison camp near Paris, backed against a wall and executed. In the Paris suburbs the Nazis rounded up three "bands of militants." Ten "Argentine citizens" with insufficient identification papers were arrested. A "Spanish gang" of 38 was locked up.

These were the only particulars that the Nazi-controlled Paris press allowed to leak out of the city. But the Cri du Peuple was permitted to say that conditions suggested open warfare. The Vichy press admitted: "We can expect to see street incidents multiply." With the French it had obviously become a question of terror for terror.

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