Evening Post. THURSDAY, JANUARY 25, 1940. NOT MERELY THE POLES

Evening Post, Volume CXXIX, Issue 21, 25 January 1940, Page 10

Evening Post. THURSDAY, JANUARY 25, 1940. NOT MERELY THE POLES

General Hertzog's demand for peace rests primarily on the contention tKat it is not the business of Britain—or, at any rate, not the business of South Africa—to defend Poland as she existed in September, or to restore Poland now that Poland is overthrown. // Poland were an isolated case, General Hertzog's argument would have more plausibility than it actually possesses. In that event, General Hertzog might have exclaimed: "Well, it is only the Poles," and he might have pleaded—-with slightly less injustice than he now pleads—that no British guarantee should ever have- been given to Poland. That argument, weak as it is, might have been valid before the British guarantee to Poland was given. But since the South African Government never repudiated the guarantee, it would have been craven to keep out of the war that in September followed the guarantee. And since the South African Union entered the war in September, General Hertzog and others then dissenting, >, it would be doubly craven now if the Union were to adopt the dissenters' standpoint, and were to discover, at this belated hour, that it is ."absurd" to demand the return of Poland to the Poles, and to continue the war.

The South African Union, then, is honourably bound by its own voluntary war decision, a decision of a democratic majority. But let that point for a moment be set aside, and let the consideration of the question go back to pre-September events. General Hertzog's argument about Poland—a very poor sort of argument, assuming Poland's to be an isolated .case—becomes quite untenable when it is seen that, far from being an isolated case, the seizure of Poland is a link in a! chain which began in Austria with a politicalmilitary coup and which was continued in Czecho-Slovakia with the full technique of military force and repudiated contracts. The rape of Poland was not an event apart, buf was the third link in the chain, and part of a long programme of Nazi map-corrections. Some of these have since been carried out, because of the war, in an altered form; and probably even General Hertzog will not 4eny that the Soviet's terroristic gains in Estonia and Latvia, and the Soviet's war on Finland, have the official Nazi blessing. Nothing is clearer, then, than that .Poland was a link in a chain of Nazi attacks upon European freedom, and to regard it as merely a Polish issue is a shallow camouflage.

American pre-September criticism .'Jjggested that the British guarantee policy arrived too ,late —that it should have arrived in time to protect Czecho-Slovakia. ' But General Hertzog's case—or, at any rate, his only case offering any semblance of logic—is that the guarantee should not have arrived at all; in other words, that the chain of slavery should have been forged link by link, in the presence of a supine Britain and France. 'If General Hertzog were candid, he would say: "Let the Nazi programme run its course unhindered." Instead of that, he pretends that therms was' no Nazi programme—or, at any rate, no Nazi programme aiming at world domination—and he seeks peace because fighting for Poland is "absurd." Such a piece of misrepresentation cannot endure the slightest probing. To General Hertzog's pretension that there is no Nazi idea of world domination and that "we are not interested" in Poland, General Smuts replies: "The real issue in this matter reaches far beyond Danzig, far beyond Poland, and touches us vitally here in South Africa." The life or death of freedom hangs on resisting the Nazi attack on it—the piecemeal attack as well as the wholesale attack. He who minimises that attack; aids it. He who cannot see the tree of world domination springing from the Polish seed is blind to effect and cause.

At the time of the Munich compromise there were some people who really did believe that Czechoslovakia was an isolated case. No one but a fool could continue to believe such a thing as soon as the Nazi claws, having grabbed the Czpchs, prepared to flesh themselves in the Poles. The Neville Chamberlain of the appeasement policy then became the Neville of the Polish guarantee

policy. What alternative had. he, except to go on crying peace when there was no peace, and believing (as General Hertzog apparently believes) that Hitler is in no sense a worlddominator but merely collects small States in the same way as other people collect old stamps? Of course, war is a horrible thing, and there are great difficulties in carry[ing it on, as well as great difficulties in formulating peace objectives, especially when a third Power (not at war with the Allies) has seized some of the Polish loot. But people who enlarge on these difficulties—as General Hertzog does—are putting obstacles in the path not merely of Polish freedom, but of world freedom. To narrow the issue to Poland, or to localise it in any way, is merely to beg-the question. General Hertzog's distorted picture is quite correctly compared by General Smuts to a chapter in "Mem Kampf," but the common sense of the world at large remains undeceived by this sophistry,, and the course of justice will not be side-tracked.