Reggeization of Yang--Mills gauge mesons in theories with a spontaneously broken symmetry

It is argued that the strongly interacting non-Abelian gauge mesons of a renormalizable Lagrangian theory with spontaneously broken vacuum symmetry lie on Regge trajectories. This Lagrangian is of particular interest since it is identical to one found by Gervais and Neveu from the zero-slope limit of a dual-resonance model. The exchange of scalar mesons in vector-vector scattering with coupling constants as given by the Higgs-Kibble mechanism is crucial for our result.