The Evening Star TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 1940. DINOSAURS WANT PEACE.

Evening Star, Issue 23725, 5 November 1940, Page 6

The Evening Star TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 1940. DINOSAURS WANT PEACE.

“ The road to victory is beginning to define itself,” said Mr A. V.> Alexander, First Lord of the Admiralty, in his week-end broadcast address. It is a simple conclusion that the road to defeat is beginning to define itself, at the same time, to Hitler, otherwise we should not hear so much of German peace feelers as we are doing. In the last war the projection of such feelers, among neutral Powers and those vyho it was hoped might act as intermediaries, was begun by the Kaiser as soon as the Battle of the Marne gave its portents of the end. Reports of them were seldom believed in British countries; nevertheless, they were true. The reports to-day come from too many sources to be rashly discredited. London is still waiting for that speech of the Fuhrer to the Reichstag, disclosing his terms for peace, which was predicted before, though the date that was tentatively announced for it has now passed, Washington’s State Department has also heard rumours of the intended speech. It would have been easier to make before now, as the ‘ Observer ’ points out, if the “ new order ” of Hitler’s dreams showed more signs of materialisation. But the iplan has gone wrong. The resistance they are encountering in the Near East, as well as on the'seas and in the air, makes a far-off, even a highly improbable prospect for that time when Germany will hold Europe under its feet, Italy will be supreme throughout North Africa, as well as in Greece, and the two Powers will feel that their future, together with the future of Britain, is in their own hands to make. So peace talk becomes the more necessary, while vast loot is in Germany’s hands, only it must be indirect and insinuating, not direct and peremptory. “ When the Devil was sick, the Devil a saint would be.” It was interesting to learn, on authority that convinced ‘ The Times,’ that Hitler had sent a ducal priest, Father Odo, to America to persuade Catholics in that country, if he could, that the Fuhrer is a good Catholic, who is “ fighting to give them fresh fields for conversion to the Christian belief.” The Nazis, like the Pan-Germans before them, put a very low estimate on the intelligence of those they would make their dupes. Father Odo denies this particular mission, but in the face of persistent talk of a peace offensive, Air Alexander has not thought it superfluous to point out what the “ new order ” envisaged by Hitler would mean. He referred to the continuous humiliations imposed on the Petain Government. The attack upon Greece demonstrated again that in the totalitarian creed nothing gave the right to a national existence save the size of armed strength. “ A nation with culture, tradition, and a long civilisation, which has given some of the greatest ideas from which the world has benefifed, desires to live at peace with its neighbours and cultivate the arts of peace. None of these things avails a small country in the eyes of the totalitariaus, in whose debased, abnormal, and immoral mentality guns, tanks, aeroplanes, and bombs in huge numbers and large size ajone give the right to live. Their ideal is that of the dinosaur —a huge body with a tiny head and almost no brain. Well, dinosaurs have vanished from the earth.” The dinosaur was an apt analogy. The contempt for brains is shown most emphatically by Nazism when it forbids them to be used for more than one end —the propagation of a thuggish cult. Three years before the war the seats of learning of Great Britain were unable to send a representative to attend the live hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the University of Heidelberg because it had ceased to be a university. The arrest of a French scientist who was a collaborator with Madame Curie merely because, when his country was free, he was the presi-

dent of an anti-Fascist committee, is of a piece with the whole Nazi record. No truce, which would give them renewed strength to complete their nefarious designs at some more fitting time, can be made with such morons. Mr Alexander had reason to say: “ We are in the fight to the end. There is no turning back. We give all, dare all, endure all—or Jose all.”