PROPAGANDA: No Box Office

Urbane, witty Jean Hippolyte Giraudoux, playwright and novelist, is always irritated to be called a propagandist. He insists he is simply the chief of the French Commissariat General de I'Information. Another pet annoyance is to be told that France and Britain are fighting a "phony war," and last week, in a speech of high literary quality before the American Club in Paris, M. Giraudoux set about to correct any such notions held by transatlantic strategists.

Already in this war, said M. Giraudoux, more British sailors and French soldiers have been lost than in those "battles to save the world— Thermopylae and Valmy."* Moreover, "even if it means boring the world to tears," the Allies are not going to bother about giving a "performance packed with box-office appeal for the reading and listening audiences. . . . Our Army is intact and ready, but fighting as we are for the principles of life against the principles of death, we would be contradicting ourselves if we sacrificed a single man to the pageantry of war."