World War: OCCUPIED FRANCE: 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 Pétain had to take away his vice-premiership, and Editor Marcel Deéof 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 Déat 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. Déat'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 Pétain was attending Berlioz' opera The Damnation of Faust.