Evening Post. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 1940. WEYGAND IN EGYPT

Evening Post, Volume CXXIX, Issue 34, 9 February 1940, Page 6

Evening Post. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 1940. WEYGAND IN EGYPT

The visit to Egypt of a soldier of General Maxine Weygand's calibre, and his taking the salute at an inspection of the great and growing British Army there, are dramatic and symbolic events. Published rumour has said that Britain's Middle East Army ("Army of the Deserts") is round about 100,000 men, the French Army in Syria and Lebanon round about twice that figure; it is known that General Weygand commands the French Army, and his visit to Egypt has been regarded as implying supreme command of the Allied forces in the Middle East. When the Great War was as old as this one is, Weygand was a young staff officer with Foch in France, about to make a reputation; in Europe he remained. Today he commands, in a French Syria which did not exist in 1914-18, a French army of a magnitude that the France of 1914-15 could not or would not have spared for a Middle East flank movement. Nothing could be more striking testimony of the changed circumstances under which the Allies fight today. Turkey is now friend, not enemy as then; the British foothold in Palestine, and the French foothold in Syria, have not to be fought for, as then, but represent well-prepared and organised sally points against Berlin-Bagdad enterprise. All these vital strategic changes, the greater French military strength in the Middle East, and the Allied unity are symbolised by Weygand in Egypt. General Weygand's fame as Marshal Foch's Chief of Staff was added to after the Armistice (1918) by his work in Poland, in repelling the Russian Bolsheviks in 1920. The Poles were then hard pressed; Warsaw was in danger of falling. It is recorded that "Weygand, a soldier of subtle and commanding military genius veiled under an unaffected modesty," had arrived in Warsaw: France had nothing to send to the aid of Poland but this one man. He was, it seems, enough. ... Weygand was given effective military control. He regrouped the retreating Polish armies and changed their retirement into a concerted counter-stroke. Before the new Polish front the Russians recoiled and fied, as the advancing Germans had recoiled at the Battle of the Marne six years earlier. To some writers the earlier battle is the Miracle of the Marne, the later is the Miracle of the Vistula. The British observers thought that the result was due to Weygand. Weygand, however, characteristically declared, both publicly and privately on all occasions, that it was the Polish army which did the work. Warsaw was thus victoriously defended in 1920, but fell in 1939, when there was present no Weygand to be either victor or scapegoat. But from another position vital to strategy —from Middle East strongholds along the Berlin-Bagdad line —Weygand still watches Germans and Russians, both of whom he has fought before. His visit to Egypt is notable for a declaration of Anglo-Egyptian solidarity by the Egyptian Under-Secretary of Finance, who says that the two Governments and peoples are united not merely by treaty, but by a sense of justice. If the war widens, it .will be Weygand's lot not to heap armies together for murderous mass attacks on a narrow French front as in 1914-18, but to conduct in the! spacious theatre of the Near and Middle East a war of manoeuvre on the widest scale.

NOT WAR, BUT MURDER

Some aspects of the Nazi German methods of warfare evident in the present struggle are difficult to explain except by the assumption of some innate brutality either in the race itself or in the dictates of its leaders. What military advantage, for instance, is to be gained by machine-gunning from the air of ships' crews in boats when their vessels have been damaged by bombs and abandoned? The bombing of unarmed merchant ships and fishing craft is bad enough in itself, but when attacks are extended to lightships and their crews, some further explanation must be sought. This seems to lie in the necessity for the Nazi propagandists to claim a "bag" for their hit-and-run method of air attack. No matter what innocent target offers, it can always be represented by the propagandist as a military objective. This was made clear by Mr. Chamberlain in a passage of his weekly review of the war yesterday. In their air attacks on shipping in the North Sea the Nazis claimed successes which bore no relation to the facts. A "bag" of at least nine merchantmen was claimed for the raid of February 3. Actually, one Norwegian merchantman was sunk, but no British merchant ship. "These vauntings," said Mr. Chamberlain, "are poured out like a smoke screen to conceal stories of callous brutality as inhuman as any yet recorded of the enemy." Then the East Dudgeon lightship, bombed on January 30, was described by the Nazi radio as a! "British naval patrol vessel," though it was known to all nations as a lightship and its identity was unmistakable. Such acts as the killing of fishermen, merchant seamen, and lightship crews under these circumstances are, as Mr. Chamberlain put it, "not war, but murder." They can have little, if any, practical effect on the outcome of the war, unless it is to strengthen the resolution of all decent people in the world to put an end to the possibility of a recurrence of such brutal inhumanity.