THE EVENING POST WELLINGTON, SATURDAY, APRIL 28, 1945. A PEACE VISTA: WILL IT BE REAL?

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 99, 28 April 1945, Page 6

THE EVENING POST WELLINGTON, SATURDAY, APRIL 28, 1945.

A PEACE VISTA: WILL IT BE REAL?

"The outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace" is a famous sentence sacred to religion. It implies a duality—the sign or symbol that is seen and the inspiration that is unseen. At this very moment the world is witnessing a symbol probably unparalleled in history—the linking-up in Germany of two of the greatest liberating armies that the world has known. This symbol is so potent in its implications that its grandeur is beyond the power of architecture to portray in the finest building or monument that could be built. Even if the Pyramids of Egypt could be transferred to the linking point—"Torgau, on the upper reaches of the Elbe"—they would riot sufficiently commemorate the magnitude of the new opportunity offered to a world weary of war; nothing that architecture could uprear, whether minaret or dome, whether the Eiffel Tower or Cleopatra's Needle, could do full justice to the new vista of peace of which this linking-up of invading armies is the symbol. And yet all this "outward and visible sign" is promise only, in. the absence of the "inward and spiritual grace."- What the momentous happening on the Elbe promises is the defeat of the tyrant Master Race; what the victors still have to do is to conquer themselves ] sufficiently to assure, by virtue of the grace of the spirit, that peace may be permanent. So Torgau on the Elbe is only half the.story—the external half. For the inner half the world must turn to San Francisco on the Pacific.

To give actuality'^to the new vista of peace, all the requirements of military power have been met, and the symbol thereof, demonstrated in the heart of the enemy country, is worthy of all the hopes built on it and expressed in the Churchill, Truman, and Stalin speeches. Power is the necessary foundation; but the power to prevent war can never be sufficient without the consenting and determined will. To the will the world must look for that which is inward* and spiritual —the power that is unseen and cannot be measured or placed on a scales. In war the hea-vy tanks are powerful, but •in peace it is the imponderables that really weigh; without these spiritual quantities, "the outward and visible sign," however magnificent, is incomplete. Nevertheless, the peace-loving world is right in acclaiming the magnificence of this unprecedented meeting of two great hosts possessing a single purpose, and perhaps possessing—as is devoutly hoped—the single will to pursue that peaceful purpose to its conclusion in a united way. All that can be said now with certainty is that the upper Elbe is the scene of history's greatest spectacle. Beside it, the Field of the Cloth of Gold was a puny effort. Nothing in the Crusades can- compare with it either physically or symbolically. But the Big Three will need the crusading spirit in statesmanship as well as on the battlefield if this very latest of the world's just wars—as near holy as war can be— is to produce something deeper than the outward,and visible sign.

Although the Second World War will leave all the inward and spiritual questions undecided, it will accomplish two' wonderful things: a new approach to these all-important questions, and a 'clear demonstration that the most perfectly worked out conspiracy against world .peace ever contrived by human' hands and brains is about to utterly crash. More than this war can hardly do. It can destroy the Nazi phoenix, but only statesmanship can prevent a rebirth of war from the dead ashes. The chief criticism directed at the new approach to war prevention is that it is not ideal, because it is power-based, and because it is founded on the power of a Big Three (or a Big Four or a Big Five), not on the equal authority of the impotent States and the potent ones. But whatever reproach may attach to the existent power basis, and to the plan of approaching principle through paths of expediency, the fact remains that the military symbol exhibited so grandly on the Elbe does point a possible escape from war. The small States that have suffered and are suffering must recognise the merits of the march of the Big Three's armies in seven-league boots—2ooo miles from Stalingrad across and 1000 miles from Normandy to the Elbe, constituting 3000 milestones in history and 3000 reasons why inward and spiritual matters lean on the outward and visible.

At San Francisco are gathered delegates whose countries participated but remotely, or not at all, in this 3000 miles of final war effort. Surely their sense of the ideal, however meritorious, will not blind them to the realities, and to the fact that it is through the use of existent power, however unevenly distributed, that mankind must begin its march to the prevention of aggression—the first real milestone on the long pilgrimage towards a better world.