Evening Post

Evening Post, Volume CXXXV, Issue 19, 23 January 1943, Page 4

Evening Post

SATURDAY, JANUARY 23, 1943,

DOES HITLER TRAIL HIS WING?

Few things in Nature are more interesting than the mother wild duck who trails on a summer stream an apparently broken wing, in order to lure away the intruder from her •hidden brood, resting in the reeds. The guile that animal instinct can be capable of is not too great a guile to be within the compass of German propaganda; and when a German publicist prays to heaven for strength to stem the Russian flood, the reader must remember the wild duck's broken wing, and must hesitate to believe that the German army is quite so broken as widespread German lamentations would suggest. For these lamentations are by no means confined to the publicist quoted. They appear (according to a "Times" correspondent) throughout the whole German Press. This general tone is either curiously spontaneous among individual editors, or else it is directed from an organised publicity centre. Complaints about the "merciless hardness" of the struggle in Russia (to quote one German newspaper as an example) do not as a rule grow up overnight. X not inspired from above, they are at least permitted from above. For some reason, it suits the Nazis to "play up" in the Press the Russian tidal wave.

It js, of course, possible that the reason is a double one, even a treble one. If the Russian tidal wave actually is destined to overwhelm Germany within coming months, then candid confessions made now of the strain imposed by battles that "exceed in intensity anything in history" can do the Nazis no harm. But if the Russian tidal wave ceases to roll, then Hitler will have made the utmost possible use of the Russian menace to whip up German man-power and satellite manpower. In that case, the lamentations now current will not only have done the Nazis no harm, but will have yielded man-power gains. A further moiive—possibly sufficient in itself— for trailing Germany's supposed broken wing before all the world is the possible softening of the heart of the Allies (if they are not as Pharaoh) and a consequent slackening of Allied war effort. Is Hitler experimenting in the direction of dividing the Allies by persuading some of them or one of them that Germany is more than half-beaten and that it is time to taper off both in severity of war terms and in the war itself? Does Hitler hope to prepare the public opinion of his enemies for a German offer of a compromise peace, as being preferable to the cost of annihilating several millions of still undefeated defensive Germans? Is it thinkable that the Allies could be persuaded to count the cost of the last victorious chapter, and then cut it out, preferring a draw? We wish to state here that the answer to the last question is "No." We cannot believe that the adder which was not finally dealt with in 1918, and which has stung us again, will once more be. allowed to wriggle out of complete responsibility. Moreover, we believe that the Russian offensive is not merely a movement that possesses no significance except in German propaganda; we believe that behind the Russian smoke there is a fire that sooner or later will consume Hitler's "invincibles," and which cannot be either over-rated or under-rated by Goebbels's well-worn publicity camouflages. But in order to show that Nazi manoeuvres towards a compromise peace are not mere harmless illusions, we quote from the experience of 1918 to indicate how such a manoeuvre was assessed by no less a person than Mr. Churchill himself. In his work "The Great War" he offers a dispassionate analysis of what the effect might have been on the minds of the Allies in 1&18 had Germany made the gesture of "admitting defeat and withdrawing completely from France and Belgium." He speculates as to what the effect would have been on "the cohesion and driving power of the Allies"; and he writes that had Germany tried in that way to mollify the French and the Belgians, had Germany "stood with arms in her hands on the threshold of her own land ready to make a defeated I peace, to cede territory, to make reparation; ready also, if all negotiation were refused, to defend herself to the utmost, and capable of inflicting two million casualties upon the invader ... in the lull and chill of the winter [1918-19] with the proud foe suing for terms, and with all his conquests already abandoned, a peace by negotiation was inevitable." These words are not the words that Mr. Churchill uses today, or could possibly use. But, as an analysis of Allied opinion, they convey a warning to the Allies to stand firm now as then. Mr. Churchill shows that German peace drives are as dangerous as German war drives, and are not to be dismissed as mere fantastic notions.