Spirit in the Islands

The Japanese were as mad as little boys who had been denied sticks of bubble gum. They had hoped to get the strategic French islands of the Pacific--especially New Caledonia, which might soon prove to be a vital base in the flanking of Australia--as easily as they had got Vichyated French Indo-China. But Free France, in the person of an admiral who is also a friar, denied them that pleasure last week.

Determined to have their gum and bubble it too, the Japanese warned the Admiral to look for trouble. Warned Tokyo's Japan Times and Advertiser: "Japan will not hesitate for a moment to resort to force to stamp out De Gaullists in the Pacific."

The Admiral will take considerable stamping out. In wartime he calls himself Admiral Georges Thierry d'Argenlieu; in peacetime, Father Louis de la Trinite, of the Carmelite Order. In both characters he has been persistent in the extreme.

In his spiritual character he entered a monastery in 1920, donned tunic, girdle, scapular, hood and mantle, began to study the Carmelite specialty, mystical theology. Eventually he became head of the order in all France.

In his temporal character he fought in both World Wars. In June 1940 he was captured by the Germans at Cherbourg. Three days later he jumped out of his prison train and made his way, disguised as a Norman peasant, to the Channel coast and eventually to London. He led the unfortunate assault on Dakar, where he took some lead in his thigh. After he recovered from his wound in French Equatorial Africa, where he organized Free French merchant shipping, he went to Canada to lecture, back to London to broadcast, and then, on the destroyer Le Triomphant, out to romantic Oceania to resist.

There, by last week, he had organized resistance fast enough and well enough to call down Japan's angry warning. Perhaps one reason why the warning was so sharp was because the Japanese know they oppose not just a fighter, but a man of spirit. The Admiral who is also a friar says to his island colleagues:

"We must have the simplicity of the confessor. We all have need of it in different degrees-often to shake off our deep-seated egoism . . . and to consecrate ourselves to a truly free spirit and all our energies to the greatest of duties:

"The liberation of our country and the restoration of its proud and honorable grandeur.

"The liberation of our people held in bondage by brutal force.

"The liberation of the civilized world, over which hangs the most frightful men ace."

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