A RTHUR KOESmER'S Scum of the Earth describes the resentful apathy into which the French fell after the declaration of a war for which the country was neither spiritually nor materially prepared. One action, however, the French authorities did carry out with vigor and determination. They promptly imprisoned the enemies of their enemies, the antifascist refugees from Germany, Italy and Spain. Among them was Koestler himself, a Hungarian journalist of some renown, who landed for a time in the concentration camp of Le Vernet. At Le Vernet, because of their race, or because they had wanted a better world, the exiles suffered tortures and humiliations that differed only in degree from the regimens at Dachau or Oranienburg on the other side of the inactive front. These men were the broken survivors of the successive tragedies of the Left, but even after Spain and Munich, after the Moscow trials and the German-Russian pact, even after hope itself, which is the essence of politics, had died, the need to be right politically persisted, and the old arguments went on. Koestler, who thought he had reached the depths of disillusionment the August before, when he saw Stalin and Ribbentrop smiling together in the newspaper photographs, was moved to new protest by a letter that reached him in prison. It said that Communists in the United States, supported by refugee fellow-travelers, were opposing American help for the Allies and the blockade of Germany. In fury he confronted a man cleaning the latrine near his barracks, a man whom he knew to be a member of the Central Committee of the German Communist Party. The argument that followed was curt, decisive, and unsatisfying. The Communist, F., declared the war was not in the interests of the working class, and explained the Russian tactics. Everything he said, Koestler wrote, sounded utterly convincing. One could almost see the well-oiled cog-wheels turn in his brain. Under F.'s questioning Koestler admitted he thought the Communists should be imprisoned,