The Evening Star SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 1939. ARMISTICE DAY.

Evening Star, Issue 23421, 11 November 1939, Page 10

The Evening Star SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 1939. ARMISTICE DAY.

The first Armistice Day came to all the freedom-loving couritries of the world with a sense of inexpressible, almost incredible joy and relief. A great danger was vanquished, a war that took daily toll of lives was ended, a new world had begun. Armistice Day might have been observed always as a day of rejoicing, but for the toll of lost lives that it recalled. To-day it is a tragic irony that, after twentyone years of its observance, it has to be commemorated amidst a return of that affliction and horror which the world, less than a generation ago, thought it had learned too much ever .to allow to be repeated. The victors of those days did not achieve their task so fully as it was believed they had done. Their war, they were told, was to end war, and the nations once more are raging. In the intervals of this conflict, during years of new fighting which seem the most probable prospect, there will bo much room for asking what went wrong. The leaders who spoke of “ a war to end war ” were not wilful deceivers. They promised other things that have not come to pass. The world was to be “ made safe for democracy,” and democracy again is in peril. Britain was to be made a land “ fit for heroes to dwell in.” The statesmen who made that last promise, or their successors, have built four million houses, but the pledge still leaves something wanting. It has been common to blame the Treaty for the larger failure, but that can be explained in great measure by the Englishman’s propensity for blaming his own rulers and his own people before all others just as long as possible. The treaty was a fair, average human treaty. People who make wars, wage them harshly and lose them, cannot expect to receive rewards. It is noticeable that Sir Norman Angell re-

ferred recently to “the defects of the Versailles Treaty, which of late years have been grossly exaggerated.” Dr Merrington put the case for the treaty —not perfect because it was human—both fairly and convincingly in a discussion this week. Hopes wore pitched too high in the hour of the last deliverance because, to support its courage or after escape from great danger, to do that comes naturally to human kind. The mistake was not made by everyone. Quo observer concluded his ‘ History of the Great War ’ in this moderate manner: “Writing at the moment of the signature of peace and in deep thankfulness for the relief it brings to a stricken world, Mr Punch is too old to iazz for joy, but he is young enough to face the future with a reasoned optimism, born of a belief in his race and their heroic achievements in these great and terrible years.” He defended his country against one charge, relating to proceedings after the Armistice, that is still heard at times. “ The whole position was provisional. If Germany, Austria, and Russia were to be fed, how was it to be done without disregarding the prior claims of Serbia and Rumania ? Even at homo the food question still continued to agitate the public mind.” What could not be foreseen was that another German—or an “ ersatz ” German—in so short a time would revive the dream of Bismarck and the ex-Kaiser’s military clique of raising his adopted country to extreme heights of power, to a position where it would dominate all others, by the crude means of a military machine. Happily the Germany that wields that machine to-day is less strong than the Germany of 1914, and Great Britain and France, thought once more by incredible Nazis, despite the last war’s experience, to he degenerate nations, are stronger than they w.ere then. The life of the Third Reich will be much shorter than that of the first or second, and the Fourth Reich, we may hope, is already envisaged by those Germans, monarchists and others, who hate Hitlerism, as one that will deal reasonably alike with its own people and with the rest of the world, which will have every reason to co-operate with it.