He was the first French Premier to visit Germany after the war. I was in Berlin when he arrived in the autumn of 1931 with the aging and feeble but still brilliant Briand, then Foreign Minister. Bruening was Chancellor and that farsighted benevolent statesman, whom the Allies could have helped suppress the growing menace of Hitler, wished to make the visit the foundation for a new era of Franco-German friendship. How futile his hopes were came to light as the train bearing the French ministers rolled in. I was standing with a small crowd of Germans at the foot of the steps of the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof, and noticed that the streets had been cleared and roped off all the way to the Hotel Adlon. Masses of police manned the ropes but there was almost no crowd to hold back. Around the station were about five hundred people. I noticed they looked curiously alike, as though all from the same neighborhood, the same class. Presently I saw a friend, a plain-clothes man from Police Headquarters, all dressed up in his Sunday best, with gloves and a derby hat and the inevitable big detective’s shoes. I greeted him. He introduced his wife and children. A little surprised, I asked if he were such a great advocate of Franco-German friendship that he had brought his whole family to cheer the visitors from Paris. “_Ja wohl!_” he replied. “Orders, you see. They sent us all down here. Everybody here is from Police Headquarters, _mit Frau und Kinder_. Nobody else; no outsiders. We get a day off for coming.” Sure enough, that was the makeup of the entire crowd. They dutifully thronged around the steps and shouted “_Hoch Frankreich!_” Laval and Briand then passed through empty streets to the Hotel Adlon where another group of policemen and their wives and children cried “_Hoch!_” again. And that was the length and breadth and depth of Franco-German friendship. Q. _Has Laval a chance to come back?_ A. Yes, if the Germans win he has the best of chances. Laval today is the only master politician left in France; Pétain is senile; Darlan is ward-heel size; none of the others in the Vichy camp is even that large, and the politicians of the Republic are dead and buried. Laval is the best-hated Frenchman alive; the shots fired into him by Colette were cheered from one end of France to the other, but he is still the only Frenchman capable of ruling France as a dictator.