He switched when he perceived the chance of becoming head man in the appeasement government. His change of heart was literally overnight. In London immediately after the fall of France, an old friend of mine, an officer of the French Navy whose ship had broken away and come to England, told me Darlan had issued an order to all vessels of the Navy that with the signing of the Armistice they should make for French African or other friendly ports and prepare to go on with the war; twenty-four hours later another code message from Darlan countermanded the order and directed all ships to make for French ports. In the interval Darlan had been promised a seat next to the Chief of the Vichy State. Nothing in Darlan’s record indicates that he has ever acted except for the purpose of furthering his career; he is characterized by the French as the perfect careerist, and the word has even less flattering connotations in French than in English. The one instinct in him which seems to have persisted without variance is his hatred of the British, based upon the centuries-old rivalry of the French and British navies. While the French were in the war we Americans forgot that the memory of Trafalgar is for the French Navy, or for its older officers anyway, stronger than the memory of the four years of Franco-British comradeship on the battlefields of 1914-1918. In Darlan this feeling was always strong. At the London Naval Conference of 1930 he fought for parity with the British, but they refused it to him, with a prescience blessed by the event. Suppose the French had possessed as powerful a navy as the British when the French Army fell and Darlan had commanded a force able to challenge the British! After the Battle of Oran, July 3, 1940 when the British, rightly suspecting the intentions of Darlan, attempted to disable the French Fleet at Mers-el Kebir in order to prevent its falling into the hands of the Germans, Darlan led the outcry against the “perfidious” assault. The British are convinced that if ever the chance comes Darlan will use every means in his power to injure them. Whatever his motives may have been at the beginning for joining the capitulation, Darlan like most of the men of Vichy has by now so compromised himself with the French people that, as one French friend of mine expressed it: “If Germany is defeated the best these men of Vichy could hope for would be dishonorable, furtive retirement, but I think most of them would be killed.”