Foreign News: INDO-CHINA A War of Gallantry & Despair

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Why do the French fight? Because they are doing a job for the free world? Perhaps—but this is not the dominant factor. Duty? For the mercenaries and for those who carry on without expectation of victory, yes. But the answer one hears most is pride. It hardly seems enough, except that this is a special kind of pride. It is compounded of qualities like the insistence of De Gaulle in World War II on parity with Roosevelt and Churchill; it recalls France's insistence on a special German occupation zone and its determination to be acknowledged as a world power—as one of the Big Three. Now that Germany is resurgent, that power and pride are endangered. If France were to withdraw from Indo-China, it would in effect contract itself to a nation with only an African empire, and even in Africa the nationalists would draw lessons from IndoChina's example. It is this pride that makes the French soldier a much-admired man out here, but this pride also gives to France's performance in Indo-China its own particular character. It is why no one, for example, talks of "turning the war over to the U.S.," for that, while not a disaster like a Communist victory, would also be an admission of France's failure as a world power. So France fights its precarious and parsimonious war, keeping it to a size that it can itself control.

THE PROBLEM "You Cannot Win Unpopular Wars"

The difficulty is that not all Frenchmen in Indo-China share Dejean's optimism about the outcome. Some give the impression of having thought out the relative benefits and harms of every degree of victory or defeat. Here is how many of them talk. Says a handsome officer with a good combat record: "Maybe the French did not do enough in time. But no longer can the French win militarily because French public opinion will not wait long enough for that. It would take until 1955 or 1956. If there is no solution at Geneva, French public opinion will want to negotiate with Ho Chi Minh. It is a tragedy because now, if they had a free choice, the Vietnamese would not vote for the Communists. But there is no patriotism in Viet Nam—it is not even a country. The intelligentsia have taken on the worst of the Western ways and have lost the best of their own civilization. Perhaps because I am French I say this. But colonialism is not important any more. Everyone understands that the French want to leave here. But there is no leadership in the Vietnamese people. And so there will be an appeasement. The Communists, if they are clever, will first have a non-Communist government like Burma, and the French will leave with honor. And what can the American Congress do about it? It will be angry and helpless. When the time is ripe, the Communists will have Indo-China."

Or take the French correspondent sitting in the press camp at Hanoi. He too is convinced that the war is not militarily winnable. Why do the French continue? "Because they cannot get out," he answers. "Two or three years ago, the French made a study of evacuation and decided it was not possible. That is why—I think I paraphrase the French Premier correctly—people used to say there were two solutions and now are unanimous there is only one: negotiation."