Evening Post TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 1943. ROMAN CALM: HEROIC OR NEROIC?

Evening Post, Volume CXXXV, Issue 27, 2 February 1943, Page 4

Evening Post TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 1943. ROMAN CALM: HEROIC OR NEROIC?

Once it was said that Mussolini was treading in the footsteps of Augustus, but now it seems that he is following Nero. The Emperor who fiddled while Rome burned could teach Mussolini little, either in criminality or composure; for what could be more lofty and detached than Mussolini's good-bye to Tripoli, whose loss he contemplates with "Roman calm"? This is not the first time that Rome has lost Africa, but. so far as we know, history does not record any comment so sedately classical as this farewell of the latest Caesar to his African empire. Tripoli, it should be noted, was not won for Italy by Mussolini. When he gained power in Rome, he found fertile Tripoli already in the Italian empire. It was when he became a collector of deserts, and a carrier of war to small nations, that the trouble began which has deprived Italy of her Africa. Blame for the loss of Tripoli therefore rests squarely on Mussolini's shoulders and on his shoulders almost alone. Of all me Italian ruin he sees around him he is the architect. So it comes rather strangely from his mouth, this counsel of manly calm. Of a nineteenth century celebrity it was written that he bore other people's misfortunes with Christian fortitude. Mussolini's composure is the more wonderful in that the chickens which have come home to the Italian roost were his own breeding. The calm fiddler is indeed the very one who started the fire.

With his' mind still on the classic past, Mussolini imputes to the Italian people a faith that some day they will return to North Africa. If another thousand years or so are to elapse before another Mussolini heads another period of African conquest, the matter becomes of merely academic interest, and partakes of the stuff that dreams are made of. Surely it will be at least a thousand years before Italy can afford another criminal dreamer like the Duce. While Mussolini was speaking in Italy from an undefined location —having taken a hint from the R.A.F.'s intervention in Goering's advertised proceedings—another voice, a radio voice, came out of Italy. A Rome radio man declared that this year is the "final do-or-die year" and that whoever loses in 1943 will lose the war. That pronouncement disposes of all the Nazi bluff about fighting defensively for a decade or two. The fact is that dictatorships like Hitler's tiger type and Mussolini's hyena type can flourish on nothing short of victory, and if this is not known by Hitler it is known by those about him. General Giraud declares flatly and unemotionally that the Axis war is lost and that the German General Staff knows it. Giraud even says that the octogenarian Petain knows it. No Frenchman of any calibre has faith in German victory except Laval, and he is merely in the position of an investor who has backed the wrong horse and cannot get his money back. Giraud's terse analysis of the war touches at once on the two weak spots in Hitler's career —his failure to move quickly to defeat the R.A.F. and invade in 1940, and his suicidal attack on Russia in 1941, which Goering vainly seeks to excuse. "When Hitler attacked Russia,'* says Giraud, "I knew the end was sure." Why? Giraud's answer is the common-sense answer that any layman might supply: "Russia's vastness makes her impregnable."

There is in Giraud's summary a calmness quite unlike the Roman calm of Mussolini. Giraud does not attempt to decide whether or not a junction between yon Arnim's Tunisian forces and Rommel's army-of-retreat will or will not happen. But, assuming their* junction, he regards them merely as two in one bag instead of two in two bags. "They soon will have only two courses —evacuation or capitulation.

. . . If they try to evacuate, they will give the British Navy an ideal chance to smash them. Whatever they do, they are doomed." Assuming that the two German armies together will comprise 200,000 men—somewhat less than the Axis force that met its Sedan near Stalingrad—Giraud declares that the Anglo-American strength soon to be brought against them is "overwhelming." With the same calm certainty of victory, Giraud does not ask the German malcontents in Germany to contribute to it. He does not think that the Nazis will be defeated from within, or that Himmler's deadly grip of the home front in Germany will be beaten by rebellion. Nor does he anticipate that the German military clock will run down when the Hitler mainspring is removed. That the German generals will displace Hitler from the supreme command is quite likely, but "the German national resistance will continue till the German armies are finally beaten in the field." That view of the war leaves on the Allies the responsibility of knocking out the German armies in Europe, Hitler or no Hitler. And that responsibility will be discharged, because Germany and the German people are exhausted, and the time will come when even Himmler will fail to bring a dead horse back to life.