Dubreuilh interrupted Henri. 'I know perfectly well what we'd say. My conviction is that these camps aren't essential to the regime, as Peltov maintains. They're tied in with certain policies which can be deplored without questioning the whole regime. We'd dissociate the two things: we'd condemn corrective labour, but we'd defend the Soviet Union.'

'All right,' Henri said. 'But it's as plain as day that our words would carry much more weight if we were the first to denounce the camps. Then no one could believe we were following a line. We'd get the credit and we'd be cutting the ground right out from under the anti-Communists' feet. They're the ones who would look like partisans when they started following suit.'

'Oh, that wouldn't change anything; people would believe them anyhow,' Dubreuilh said. 'And our intervention would give them a strong arguing point: even the sympathizers were so shocked that they turned against the Soviet Union. That's what they'd say! And that would upset people who otherwise wouldn't have believed a word of it.'