NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 24024, 23 July 1941, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS

REICH A HARPOONED WHALE Hitler's Germany is in the situation of a harpooned whale, asserts "Scrutator," writing in the Sunday Times. The barbed spear is in the whale's side; its blood llows slowlv but inexorably. For the time it lias still a giant's ,strength, and in desperation it lashes this way and that with its terrible tail, smashing boats and killing men in them. But it cannot long survive if the harpoon holds. KIPLING AS PROPHET Discussing two possible interpretations of Kipling's lines— Far-railed, our navies melt away— On dune and headland sinks the fire— Lo, all our pomj> of yesterday >ls one with iNineveh and Tyrol the New York Times says Ninevah and Tyre have come back into the British news but not as synonyms of doom and death. British ships are fighting along the Syrian coast where are Tyre and Sidon, and the oil city of Mosul is almost on the site of Ninevah. It is not a story of decay but of vigour and courage. As for the fires on dune and headland, they may have died down because a million men stand 011 guard along the British coast against sea invasion, but the battle for Britain was won nine months ago in the air. There is general agreement that England's pomp of yesterday will not, survive the war. But that is only the pomp and pageant and punctilio, the decorative trappings in which the march of human freedom has curiously arrayed itself in England. The freedom and human worth beneath t.ho pomp will live and expand. That, indeed, is what the present fighting is for. • STRONGER WAR CABINET Mr. Churchill needs help. It is not a new Government that is wanted, but a stronger one, asserts the Economist. The present British Government is the best all-party administration. It is not the strongest possible assemblage of the Empire's leaders. What is wanted to direct Imperial strategy and satisfy the Empire's will is not, of course, representatives from each Dominion; that would simply repeat the fault of the present Government, whose main weakness is that, its members are chosen, in .balanced proportions, to represent each party. The need is for the best men in the Gommonwenlth—regardless of party or country —a War Cabinet chosen from the widest field. Mr. Menzies might be one. In another of the Dominion Premiers, General. Smuts, there is a man of quite uncKampled experience who, in the last war. played as vital a part in the day-to-day government of the country as anyone but the Prime Minister of that day. That Prime Minister himself is still alive—and kicking. Mr. Lloyd George may no longer he capable of 16 hours' work a day; but lie is no older now than Clemenceau was in 1918, and his.* matchless talent for making other men decide and act is still at his country's service. There are others of strength and vision available at home if the net is cast wider than the party politicians—Lord Trenchard, for example. There is no question that a real War Cabinet could be assembled if Mr. Churchill willed it. Total war requires

total government. Mr. Churchill was quite right some months ago when, in effect, he claimed that there were not men enough of ability among his allparty colleagues to man a War Cabinet and the war departments as well. But it would be an unproven reproach to the Commonwealth to suggest that there are not leaders enough, outside the political hierarchies, if need be, in the length and breadth of Britain and the Dominions. The lesson of the growing crisis is not. that someone has blundered. It is rather that we are strongly menaced and still perilously weak; and that to win through this trial to the years of attack and triumph requires the leadership that only a full sifting of all the brains and character of tlje Empire can give. THE 17TH DECISIVE BATTLE Writing of the victory of Charles Martel over the Saracens at Tours in A.D. 7.32, Hallam commented that "it may justly be reckoned among those few battles of which a contrary event would have essentially varied the drama of the world in all its subsequent scenes; with Marathon, Arbela, the Metaurtis, Chalons, and Leipsic." That remark of Hallam's, notes the Listener of London, inspired one of the classics of military history, the book in which Sir Edward Creasey reckoned and discussed those battles in the world's history which he considered "decisive." fie counted only 15 in all. from Marathon to Waterloo. Only 15, that is, which may be classed with Hallam's "few" by Hallam's own definition. Since then, how many more can we add to the tale'r One certainly: The Marne. For like Salamis and Zama and many other conflicts that, appear at first thought to have been epoch-making, the later and greater battles ol the First German War "merely confirmed" (in Creasey s phrase) "some great tendency or bias which an earlier battle had originated." As Valm.v was to the subsequent French victories of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, so was the Marne to the long and bloody chain of battles that ended in the overthrow of the Hohenzollern Empire. And now: Is it too optimistic to claim a seventeenth decisive battle, the Battle of the Air over Britain that was fought between August 8 and October 31, 1910? The anonymous author of the Air Ministry's official account, "The Battle of Britain," is surely justified in his conclusion that "future historians may compare it with Marathon, Trafalgar and the Marne."