NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 24000, 25 June 1941, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS

KEYED UP BY DANGER

Public health in Britain, as Lord Border observed in his vigorous and salutary discourse, keeps an astonishingly high level, considering the discomfort borne by crowds of homeless people in shelters —deep refuges being so regrettably few in proportion to the population. Conditions of life so manifestly unpropitious, notes the London Observer, have propagated very few of the diseases which medical judgment would expect from them. Lhis is partly due, as Lord Border affirms, to excellent measures of sanitation and ventilation. But something must also he allowed for the sanative influence of high morale. In other words, the "war on nerves" doubly frustrates itself by keying up body as well as mind.

FRANCE WILL RISE AGAIN

There was once a. France, corrupt, betrayed and cowardly, that was saved bv a peasant girl, says the New York Times. There was once a France saved by soldiers who were not well armed or well trained, but who were singing a new song that would not let thoin gu any where but forward though all hoi I was mobilised to enslave them again. There was once a I'ranee that lost- a war and paid a ransom, but nevertheless remained tree and l' rench. There was once a I 1 ranee whose soldiers laid their bodies down many thousands strong in front of the fortress of Verdun so that an enemy of the French people and of their civilisation might not pass. There was once a France where liberty had sprung in fire and glory out of'a long suppression; where men wrote, painted and composed in a very ecstasy of new freedom; where, for the humblest, life was an art, decent, civilised and individual; which had humanised its cities, wedded tradition with a quick appreciation of all that was witty, precise and novel, made itself a place of nilgrimage am! a second homeland for all who loved the fine, the delicate, the genial, the penetrating, the mellow aspects of human existence. That France has been misled, conquered and silenced. Strangers of her own blood and of alien blood may now speak for her in Paris. But that France lives. She has the allegiance of her people though they cannot proclaim it. She has, as ever, the respect and admiration of the free nations, not least our own. No act or word of her temporary lords of misrule will make us think of her as the less our friend. She will rise stronger and better loved from these days of her tribulation. LORD HALIFAX APPRAISED It is significant of the quality of Lord Halifax's eminence that the average man is still capable of forgetting who he is, writes Mr. Basil do Selincourt. Indeed, how many of us realise that this Yorkshire M.P.H. and Chancellor of Oxford University has been a Minister of War as well as of Agriculture, and twic Minister of Education ? How many remember that the Lord Irwin who made history in India was the Edward Wood, Fellow of All Souls', who served in the Yorkshire,

Dragoons for the first three years of ] the Great War, and before the end of it had evolved with Lord Lloyd—Sir George Lloyd as he then was—his ideas for reconstruction at home, and published them under the title "The Great Opportunity": an all-round man, if ever there was one. Whatever else Lord Halifax mav be, he is intensely English. There is that blend in him of high principle and shrewd practice that no other country knows how to produce. Wherever he touches men his sincerity shines out, but for enemies and opponents he is a hypocrite. "Do you believe in guns or God'r" a woman shouted in Southampton. His biographer himself admits that Lord Halifax let hope verge on credulity in his desire to believe good of the dictators; and perhaps he has believed more good of his own countrymen than history could at all points claim for them. Hut now in his great position in America his conviction that the British cause is the cause of Christianity will surely serve us in good stead. His dry humour, laconic utterances and enjoyment of good things will endear him wherever he goes; while even the Fundamentalist will find for once that he has something in common j with a master of diplomacy.

THE MODERN VANDALS

The systematic devastation of an enemy territory is no new device in war. but, while most nations have had recourse to it in case of retreat and defeat, tho Germans have used it as a stimulant and as an aid to victory. They are not content with defeating their enemies; they must also grind them down, writes a French correspondent of the Times, With Teutonic thoroughness tho Germans not only commit the foulest crimes, but revel in committing them during the process of invasion. The damage inflicted in this war on French territory through German air and land action or through wilful devastation, naturally without approaching that suffered by France in tho Great War, that lasted four times as long, is considerable. Tho modern Huns, like the hosts of Attila, left tho regions they had devastated "like a field ravaged by wild beasts." According to the estimate of M. Chabot. Director of Historical Monuments at Vichy, over 400 historical buildings and 1-150 bridges in Franco were damaged through enemy action during May and Juno, 1910.