NOTES AND COMMENTS

Dominion, Volume 35, Issue 137, 6 March 1942, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS

Tlie action of the Royal Air Force in attacking industrial wo.ks in three suburbs of Paris will bring home to the French people the determination of the Allies not to permit French industry to be yoked to the German war machine. It may further strain whatever relations exist with the Vichy authorities, but it will be remembered that Mr. Churchill, when he spoke at Ottawa, definitely included the Vichy regime among the “Quislings.” He said that the Vichy leaders would be excluded from a place “in the counsels of the Allies and at the council table of tlie victors.” The British leader had never been quite so outspoken about the men surrounding Marshal Petain. “They lay prostrate at the feet of the conqueror (he said). They fawned upon him.” A recent instance of Vichy’s antagonism has deeply stirred British feelings. A British ship brought a French merchantman into a South African port. It was carrying hides and other tilings of great value to the enemy, although said by Vichy to be transporting foodstuffs. “And easily tlie most repellant aspect of tlie whole episode,” stated the “Economist,” “is the Vichy description of the incident to tlie French people as a British attempt to prevent Madagascan food supplies from reaching tlie starving people of France. ... It is not so much the larger villainies of Vichy that are distasteful. It is tlie incredible meanness and spite of these little men." Recalling what the Free French have done, and what exiled Governments have accomplished, Europe today is not so much, it has been said, a division between nation and nation as between Quislings and faithful

Well spoken, Archdeacon Monaghan! There is too much of the 11m. we-can-take-it spirit in this country without the sparkling tang which comes from the soda of a healthy aggressiveness. We can give it—hand it back with interest. That is tlie right outlook. It is the feeling, the determination, the certainty that must animate us—civilians as well as soldiers. Our faultas a people today is not defeatism, which is the vice of a small minority of craven wobblers. But it. may well be that a very general fault is “defenceisra.” There is much talk of safety and protection in our civilian communities. This is right and necessary—in its place. But what of the aggressive side of our war effort? What of the hitting side—production, effort in every national sphere, doing without in order that tlie lighting arms may be strengthened and extended? And what, too, of public morale—that wartime intangible which can achieve so much? As a people we are all together in an all-in struggle, each with a job to be done. The sum total of our national strength as a warring country depends very largely on the quality of “aggressive inspiration” (to use a term coined this week by Australia’s Major-General Bennett) which is made to permeate every effort.

A timely service has been performed by the N.Z.U.S.A, in making it. publicly known that, up to the present, only 34 out of more than 3000 returned sick and wounded men have been sent to menial hospitals, and that, of these, several are voluntary patients. Factual frankness of this kind is welcome, and valuable beyond price in maintaining public morale, in the absence of information concerning mental eases among servicemen, foolish but disturbing rumours as to tlie percentage of cases have been whispered about. And, as nearly always, rumour lied. Tlie actual proportion, as tlie N.Z.R.S.A. points out, “is far less limn the normal ratio in tlie male population.” The obviqus object-lesson, of this disclosure should lie well heeded. When fact appears, rumour slinks away.