THE deed is done; recriminations now about who was responsible for the Indochina catastrophe will serve no purpose but that of spite. We leave the wreckage to the historians and to the campaigners this November.

At least we have an end to the killing. For that we must thank God. For the first time in the lives of many Americans—including those now of military age—the world is free of organized war. One might take an appalled moment to look back that incredible distance to 1932 when war began and the Japanese took over Manchuria—with 150-mile per hour biplanes and horse artillery and primitive motor trucks. But are we now at the end of a drama or of an act?

Incidental music continues as the lights go up—dissonant sounds from Kenya, Malaya and North Africa. But for now the curtain is down, and M. Mendes-France is the man who put it down.

The terms he obtained from the Communists were better than might have been expected, for the French army was tragically weak. Viet Nam is divided. There will be a demilitarized zone along the seventeenth parallel, and a withdrawal of French armed forces from the north, and, supposedly, of Viet Minh guerrillas from the south. People who wish to travel to the zone controlled by the side to which they are committed are supposedly free to do so. Whether the Communists will permit Vietnamese anti-Communists actually to leave Communist territory remains to be seen. Viet Nam and Laos may not import arms and may not form alliances or permit the building of foreign bases on their soil. The same restrictions are placed on the Viet Minh-controlled sector, but, again, the Communist definition of the truce terms may prove somewhat different from the Western definition. An army which essentially is a guerrilla force is notoriously difficult to control, as Canada, which with India and Poland is expected to supervise the truce, undoubtedly realizes.

Cambodia, which has been stubborn in the past, got stubborn again in the last hours of the Geneva conference and was rewarded with much better terms: the Communist troops will not regroup, they will get out. The colantry is free to form alliances and to invite friendly powers to build bases.

But the sum of the agreement is an effective loss of Indochina to the West. North Viet Nam will never be surrendered by the Communists. South Viet Nam wiUbe neutralized at best, and may quite possibly slip under the bamboo curtain, either as a result of the elections scheduled for 1956, or as a result of continued subversion. The problem in Viet Nam is that only the French will be able to exert real power there; the Vietnamese army will be paralyzed under the truce terms, and it is doubtful that the people of the country are going to feel any kinder to French Colonials now, after defeat, than they have for the past decade.

There is one qualification to this prediction, and it is one of the two small pieces of hope which may be found lying in the wreckage. The first hope is that the new Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem, which did not sign the truce and bitterly fought its negotiation, may redeem non-Communist nationalism in the south. This government might prove to be the government Indochina has needed for these long years. The people of Viet Nam have a historic antipathy towards China. If the Viet Minh, which still has its non-Communist element, begins to be absorbed by China as North Korea was absorbed, then there might be a reaction against China from which Ngo could profit.

The second small hope has to do with China itself. For the first time in its existence, except for a brief period after the expulsion of the Nationalists, the Chinese Communists are free of war. China is no completely subservient satellite of Russia, and with its new prestige and its new peace it may turn its attention to defining its relationship with the Soviet Union. Here again there is at least a chance of friction. It is not the kind of hope on which to build a policy, as some would do, but it is a silver thread among the black, and this is a time for searching out the silver threads.