CURTAINS

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 6, Issue 71, 11 May 1943, Page 4

CURTAINS

THE capitulation of both Bizerta and Tunis following the withdrawal of the Axis troops into the further reaches of the Cape Bonn Peninsula leaves only-a desperate handful of German troops to carry on the war of hopelessness. Behind them on the torn field of conquest lie the towns which represented their last strategical bases in Africa, now filled with the wildest demonstrations of French and Arab loyalty to the Allied cause. Africa is all but purged of the Nazi horror and to-day, despite the British Israel theory which) conceded the loss of Egypt, ere the tide of battle turned. Rommel and Arnhem, both are missing from the scene of action which from rough computation has yielded bag- of some 50.000 prisoners. It can only now be a matter of time before the final pockets of resistance are crushed and the whole of French and Italian North Africa joins hands with the freedom-loving world once again, But what of Italy ? Across the blue Mediterranean rollers lies the nation w 7 hich to use the famous Churchillian expression' personifies 'the soft under-belly of the Axis Powers.' Peace-loving and carefree Italia, sold to-day by the greatest freebooter her people, have ever raised to leadership. The land of rich wines and fine music, light-hearted people, has been betrayed! Led . along the dark path of treachery and infancy by the man who became drunken in his lust for power, by the man in th<? guise of a deliverer who surrendered as so many before him to the emptiness of self and national aggrandisment. Italy lies in trembling apprehension under the expectant and ominious threat of invasion. Unlike Churchill's England* which was promised blood, sweat and tears, Italy must bear the melancholy vista, of her wasted and defeated armies in Libya' must groan beneath the slinking methods of the German Gestapo fabric which bolsters up a false, morale and most heart-breaking of all, must continue to wage a war in which she has already lost heart and interest. Could anything present a more abject picture oi misery and dejection th„an the; plight of Italy to-day* Beaten on land on sea and in the air, yet scourged on to unnatural and wicked warfare by the driving flails of the Fascist originator, his satalittes and the dreaded undet- 1 ground system employed by the German secret police. Happier days may yet see the Italian nation shriven of its 'betrayers, delivered of its torturers, and once more lifting its amongst the nations of the world as becomes the free and independent peoples of a sunny and beautiful land.