Evening Post. TUESDAY, MAY 14, 1940. WAR IS OUR TASK: OUR AIM IS VICTORY

Evening Post, Volume CXXIX, Issue 113, 14 May 1940, Page 6

Evening Post. TUESDAY, MAY 14, 1940. WAR IS OUR TASK: OUR AIM IS VICTORY

While the greatest battle in history thunders its first phase over the outer defences of Holland and Belgium,- the Prime Minister of Britain, Mr. Winston Churchill, compresses this fateful conflict and its world-issues into a few words pf forceful English. In its economy of words, this utterance in the House of Commons recalls Lincoln's at Gettysburg. Mr. Churchill is a master of language, but knows that this is not a war of words, and that a crisis is in hand of such momentum that the highest eloquence suitable to the occasion might be summed up in three words: "Go to it!" When the policy is to wage instant and unremitting war, and the aim is victory, language is swallowed up in action. Bruce's injunction at Bannockburn,

Lay the proud usurper low A" tyrant falls in every foe

Liberty's in every blow,

is famous in' martial poetry, and the spirit of it rings through the Churchill speech. But the finest fruit of any crisis is not what is said but what is done. And it is to the doing that Britain and the British Empire set their hand.

What is their reward? Their eventual reward is survival; their immediate reward is "blood, toil, tears, sweat . . . long months of struggle and suffering." What this means experience has already explained. Mr. Duff Cooper, the new Minister of Information, has compared these times with the Ludendorff March-April offensive, launched in 1918, the fourth and last year of what we call the Great War. The manifold experiences of the Ludendorff , offensive—as well as Moltke's early attempt to apply in 1914 a modified Schlieffen Plan, which was wrecked at the Mame — are abundantly on record. What was done and thought by the soldiers, the Army Commands, the Supreme Military Commands, and the responsible Ministers in 1914-18 is very much what is being done and thought today, Tvith due allowance for change in time, place, and circumstance. Behind the tactical movements that are expressed' in confusing contemporary reports stand principles of strategy, in the background but all-powerful. And we know, through records, what kind of a strategist in 1914-18 Mr. Churchill himself was. France will remember the view that Mr. Churchill (then Minister of Munitions) took in April, 1918, of the danger that Ludendorff would try to separate the British and the French armies. It seemed that his offensive ultimately might make it Hobson's choice for the British Army, under Haig, to retire on the Channel ports and lose touch with the French army; or to maintain touch with the French army at all costs, including the cost of loss of the Channel ports to Germany. In a memorandum to the War Cabinet on April 18, 1918, Mr. Churchill demonstrated his capacity and courage to make a decision-in-advance on a critical question not yet arisen. "Great as are the advantages which Germany would gain by the conquest of the Channel ports,*' he wrote, "there would be no reason why the war could not be indefinitely prolonged after their loss, provided the French and the British armies remained united." The same memorandum contains the following: Does not experience show that armies which get separated from the main army are disposed of at leisure? Is not the sound rule to stand together, retire together, turn together, and strike together, as we did at the Marne? What would have been the position of a British Army which, after Mons, had retreated on the Channel ports, if in its absence the Battle of the Marne had been lost by the French?

Such an unequivocal doctrine can hardly fail to appeal to General Gamelin at the Supreme Command, if old problems re-emerge. And, at the very least, the Churchill mind is not the kind of mind that rapidly moving events catch unprepared.

In this memorandum Mr. Churchill stressed the importance of "the strategic, as apart from the fortune of the battlefield" —and this is a vital point to be borne in mind in the days and weeks that lie ahead. He admitted that battlefield fortune and strategy might merge into one in the event of a rout, and that "the breakup of a whole army on the battleground is a short cut to strategic success." But such a break-up of the British Army in 1918 he ruled out — just as he would rule it out today. He assumed "an orderly retirement" before the Germans, giving time for the British Command to choose unity with the French or retention of the Channel ports; and to unity he nailed his own colours. As things turned out, victory was achieved without parting with either the ports or the French; and this is a happy augury for the new crisis which Hitler has created twenty years after Ludendorff's final kick. But it is im-

portant that the present British Prime Minister's dated memorandum to the War Cabinet stands on record to prove that there was at least one not afraid to commit himself to a specific antidote for a potential peril, the failure of which to materialise detracts nothing from his clearsightedness. The Haig order to which Mr. Duff Cooper refers, dated April 11, 1918, was issued during the Battle of the Lys. The point had heen reached, Sir Douglas Haig told his army, at which, so far as that battle was concerned, there could be no retirement. "Every position must be held to the last man . . . with our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end." The upshot was that the wall did not break, and the German waves of attack receded helplessly. In the present war of movement, such a final test has not yet been reached. When it is reached, the same British and French tenacity, and the same justice of the Allied cause, will give the same answer.