CHURCHILL'S MISTAKE

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 74, 28 March 1931, Page 20

CHURCHILL'S MISTAKE

Gettysburg, I have been reminded by ] Mi*. Winston Churchill's essay in "If" on what would have har/pened if the South had not been defeated there, is a place that has power over the heart, writes Bebecca West in the London "Daily Telegraph." It will not agree that sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Full into the present it brings v grief that has refused to be extinguished in the past. To get to it one drives southward for a day from New York, and finds a little provincial town that demonstrates that curious mixture of sleepiness and pertncsa which is characteristic of provincial America. The hotel shuts its dining-room at S o'clock in the evening, because it knows that respectable folks eat earlier than that. If folks want to eat later they're just ignorant. _ • In the morning one goes out with a map and a military texture and charts a tide of death that once ebbod and flowed over a place" like an English park, watorcd with littlo rills and shadowed by great trees; though if this is autumn they are lit'with such'burning colours a 9 England does not know. Towards the late afternoon, if one does the thing thoroughly, one com.es on tho field where Pickctt's Charge was made. And there one is as likely to weep as ever one is on the battlefields of Trance. The young men ran forward as if there were a hole in the floor of life and they had to fill it up in case the whole race fell through it into death; and indeed they did fill it up, but there were none left to take advantage of the safety they had made. They were all gone, those splendid young men from the South, innocently priggish in their culture; with their Greek texts in their knapsacks, and in their pride of aristocratic tradition. Thousands of them went, in such numbers that one realises that it is not only the colour of the autumn leaves ■. that is more vehement in America. For these casualties arc on a scale such as never was known, not oven in the FrancoPrussian or tho Boer Wars, until- the Great War; and here it was men speaking the same language, brought up in the same citizenship, that killed each other.

It is, therefore, a moving experience ♦o visit Gettysburg, eve» for those of

IF' THE SOUTH HAD WON

alien citizenship, and its effect is not diminished by what ono hoars when ono speaks of it to Americans. Some of the older generation still talk the old stuff expressing the Northern contempt for tho lazy Southern or the 'Southerners' nfatehing scorn for the Yankee, but those who arc middle-aged or younger turn a colder eyo on the situation. They consider that the deepest tragedy of Gettysburg —and the whole Civil War —is its futility. •The North could have allowed the South to secede, because in the long run economic necessity would have brought it back. The South was an agricultural community, with expensive tastes born of an aristocratic tradition and tho handicap of negro labour, which under Southern conditions is economically unsatisfactory. Its chances of remaining independent of the prosporous, industrial community next door were nil, and had the South not been beaten in the war its tendency towards dependence would have been greater, since its purchasing power and its social imagination would have been undiminished. This ono hears again and again, both from the financiers and industrialists who function in the North and from those who arc - building up the now South. Observe the subjectivo nature of history. For this interpretation of the situation was given by Americans, natives of n country where politics count for next to nothing, and economics count for everything. But in "If" we get an-interpretation of tho situation by Mr. Winston Churchill, receptive child of a country which., girt with enemies and competitors, has had to rely so much on political negotiation that it accords the politician supreme honours. One has long known him to bo in practice such an inveterate politician that if one put him in -a lobster pot and buried him in the North Sea he would presently reappear in St. Stephens, barnacled but full of bright ideas about the closure. The cssayon Gettysburg reveals the •' far-reaching theory which is the inspiration of this, practice..; ' According to Mr. Churchill had tho termination of the-'Civil. War left the North, defeated, two Republics would have formed and with England, have founded an English-speaking alliance which would have prevented the World War. •