THE YEARS BETWEEN THE WARS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26748, 17 April 1948, Page 7

THE YEARS BETWEEN THE WARS

By WINSTON S. CHURCHILL.

The Treaty of Versailles EUROPE’S HOPES AND FEARS

PREFACE I must' regard these volumes as a continuation of the story of the First World War which I set out in the “ World Crisis,” “ The Eastern Front,” and “ The Aftermath.” Together, if the present work is completed, they will cover an account of another Thirty Years War. I have followed, as in previous volumes, the method of Defoe's “ Memoirs of a Cavalier,” as far as I am able, in which the author hangs the chronicle and discussion of great military and political events upon the thread of the personal experiences of an individual. I am perhaps the only man who has passed through both the two supreme cataclysms of recorded history in high executive office. Whereas, however, in the First World War I filled responsible but subordinate posts,, I was in this second struggle with Germany for more than five years the head' of His Majesty’s Government. I write, therefore, from a different standpoint and with more authority than was possible in my earlier books. Nearly all my official work was transacted by dictation to secretaries. During the time I was Prime Minister I issued the Memoranda, Directives, Personal Telegrams and Minutes which amount to nearly a million . words. These documents, composed from day to day under the stress of events and with the knowledge available at the moment, will no doubt show many shortcomings. Taken together, they nevertheless give a current account of these tremendous events as they were viewed at the time by one who bore the chief responsibility for the war and policy of the British Empire and Commonwealth. I doubt whether any similar record exists or has ever existed of the day-to-day conduct of war and administration. I do not describe it as history, for that belongs to another generation. But I claim with confidence that it is a contribution to history which will be of service to the future. These 30 years of action and advocacy comprise and express my life effort, and I am content to be judged upon them. I have adhered to m,y rule of never criticising any measure of war or policy after the event unless I had before expressed publicly or formally my opinion or warning about, it. Indeed, in the after-light I have softened many of the severities of contemporary controversy. It has given me pain to record these disagreements with so many men whom I liked or respected, but it would be wrong not to lay the lessons of the past before the future. Let no one look down on those honourable, well-meaning men whose actions are chronicled in these pages without searching their own hearts, reviewing their own discharge of public duty, and applying the lessons of the past to their future conduct.

It must not be supposed that I expect everybody to agree with what I say. still less that what I am writing will be popular. I only give my testimony according to the lights I follow. Every possible care has been taken to verify the facts, but much is constantly coming to light from the disclosure of captured documents or other revelations which may present a new aspect to the conclusions which I have drawn. This is why it is important to rely upon authentic contemporary records and the expression of opinion set down when all was obscure.

One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once, “The Unnecessary War.” There never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle. The human tragedy reaches its climax in the fact that after all the exertions and sacrifices of hundreds of millions of people and of the victories of the righteous cause we still have not found peace or security, and that we lie in the grip of even worse perils than those we have surmounted. It is my earnest hope that pondering upon the past may give guidance in days to come, enable a new generation to repair some of the errors of former years, and thus govern, in accordance with the needs and glory of man, the awful unfolding scene of the future. WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL. Chartwell, Westerham, Kent. January 30, 1948.

THE STORY BEGINS

After the end of the World War of 1914 there was a deep conviction and almost universal hope that peace would reign in the world. This heart’s desire of all the peoples could easily have been gained by steadfastness in righteous convictions, and by reasonable common sense and prudence. The phrase “the war to end war” was on every lip, and measures had been taken to turn it into reality. President Wilson, wielding, as was thought, the authority of the United States, had made the conception of a League of Nations dominant in all minds. The British delegatiqn at Versailles moulded and shaped his ideas into an instrument which will for ever constitute a milestone in the hard march of man. The victorious Allies were at that time all-powerful, so far as their outside enemies were concerned. They had to face grave internal difficulties and many riddles to which they did not know the answer: but the Teutonic Powers in the great mass of Central Europe which had made the upheaval were prostrate before them, and Russia, already shattered by the German flail, was convulsed by civil war and falling into the grip of the Bolshevic or Communist Party. In the summer of 1919 the Allied armies stood along the Rhine, and their bridgeheads bulged deeply into defeated, disarmed and hungry Germany. The chiefs of the victor Powers debated and disputed the future in Paris. Before them lay the map of Europe to be redrawn almost as they might resolve. After 52 months of agony and hazards the Teutonic coalition lay at their mercy, and not one of its four members could offer the slightest resistance to their will. Germany, the head and forefront of the offence, regarded by all as the prime cause of the catastrophe which had fallen upon the world, was at the mercy, or discretion of conquerors, themselves reeling from the torment they had endured. Moreover. this had been a war. not of governments. but of peoples. The whole life-energy of the greatest nations had been poured out in wrath and slaughter. The war leaders assembled in Paris had been borne thither upon the strongest and most furious tides that had ever flowered in human history. Gone were the days of the treaties of Utrecht and Vienna. when aristocratic statesmen and diplomats, victor and vanquished alike, met in polite and courtly disputation, and, free from the clatter and babel of democracy. could reshape systems upon the fundamentals of which they were all agreed. The peoples, transported by their sufferings, and by the mass teachings with which they had been insnired, stood around in scores of millions to demand that retribution should be exacted to the full. Woe betide the leaders now perdhed on their dizzy pinnacles of triumph if they cast awav at the conference table what, the soldiers had won on a hundred blood-soaked battlefields. France, by right alike of her efforts and her losses held the leading place. Nearly a million and a-half Frenchmen had perished defending the soil of France on which they stood against the invader. Five times in 100. years, m 1814, 1815, 1870, 1914 and 1918, had

the steeples of Notre Dame seen the flash of Prussian guns and heard the thunder of their cannonade. Now for four horrible years, 13 provinces of France had lain in the rigorous grip of Prussian military rule. Wide regions had been systematically devastated by the enemy or pulverised in the encounter of the armies. There was hardly a cottage nor a family from Verdun to Toulon that did not mourn its dead or shelter its cripples. To those Frenchmen, and there were many in high authority, who had fought and suffered in 1870. it seemed almost a miracle that France should have emerged victorious from the incomparably more terrible struggle which had just ended. All their lives they had dwelt in fear of the German Empire. They remembered the preventive war which Bismarck had sought to wage in 1876: they remembered the brutal threats which had driven Delcasse from office in 1903, they had quaked at the Moroccan menace in 1906. at the Bosnia-Herze-govina dispute of 1908, and at. the Agidir crisis of 1911. The Kaiser’s “mailed fist” and "shining armour speeches might be received with ridicule. in England and America. They sounded a knell of horrible reality in the hearts of the French. For 50 years almost they had lived under the terror of the German arms. Now, at the price of their life-blood, the long oppression had been rolled away. Surely here at last was peace and safety. With one passionate spasm the French people cried, “ Never again! ” But the future was heavy with foreboding. The population of France was less than two-thirds that of Germany. The French population was stationary, while the German grew. In a decade or less the annual flow of German youth reaching the military age must be double that of France. Germany had fought nearly the whole world, almost single-handed, and she had almost conquered. Those who knew the most knew best the several occasions when the result of the Great War had trembled in the balance, and the accidents and chances which had turned the fateful scale. What prospect was there in the future that the great Allies would once again appear in their millions upon the' battlefields of France or in the East? Russia was in ruin and convulsion, transformed beyond all semblance of the past. Italy might be upon the opposite side. Great Britain and the United States wsre separated by the seas or oceans from Europe. The British Empire itself seemed knit together by ties which none but its citizens could understand. What combination of events could ever bring back again to France and Flanders the formidable Canadians of the Vimy Ridge the glorious Australians of Villers-Bretonneux; the dauntless New Zealanders of the crater fields of Passchendaele; the steadfast Indian Corps which in the cruel winter of 1914 had held the line by Armentieres? When again would peaceful, careless, anti-militant Britain tramp the plains' of Artois and Picardy with armies of two or three million men? When again would the ocean bear two millions of the splendid manhood of America to Champagne and the Argonne? Worn down, doubly decimated, but undisputed masters of the hour, the French nation peered into the future in thankful wonder and haunting dread. Where then was that security without which all that had been gained seemed valueless, and life itself, even amid the rejoicings of victory, was almost unendurable? The mortal need was security at all costs and by all methods, however stern or even harsh. The Treaty of Versailles

On Armistice Day the German armies had marched homeward in good order. “They fought well,” said MarshaL Foch, Generalissimo of the Allies, with the laurels bright upon his brow, speaking in soldierly mood, “ let them keep their weapons.” But he demanded that the French frontier should henceforth be the Rhine. Germany might be disarmed; her military system shivered to fragments; her fortresses dismantled; Germany might be impoverished; she might be loaded with measureless indemnities; she might become a prey to internal feuds; but all this would pass in 10 years or in 20. The indestructible might “of all the' German tribes ” would rise once more and the unquenched fires of warrior Prussia glow and burn again. But the Rhine, the broad, deep, swift-flowing Rhine, once held and fortified by the French Army, would be a barrier and a shield behind which France could dwell and breathe for generations. Very different were the sentiments and views of the Eng-lish-speaking world, without whose aid France must have succumbed. The territorial provisions of the Treaty , of Versailles left Germany practically intact. She still remained the largest homogeneous racial block in Europe. When Marshal Foch heard of the signing of the Peace Treaty of Versailles he observed with singular accuracy: “This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.” The economic clauses of the treaty were malignant and silly to an extent that made them obviously futile. Germany was condemned to pay reparations on a fabulous scale. These dictates gave expression to the anger of the victors, and to the belief of their peoples that any defeated nation or community can ever pay tribute on a scale which would meet the cost of modern war. The multitudes remained plunged in ignorance of the simplest economic facts, and their leaders, seeking their votes, did not dare to undeceive them. The newspapers, after their fashion, reflected and emphasised the prevailing opinions. Few voices were raised to explain that payment of reparations can only be made by services or by the physical transportation of goods in wagons across land frontiers or in ships across salt water; or that when these goods arrive in the demanding countries, they dislocate the local industry except in very primitive or rigorously-con-trolled societies. In practice, as even the Russians have now learned, the only way of pillaging a defeated nation is to cart away any movables which are wanted, and to drive off a portion of its manhood as permanent or temporary slaves. But the profit gained from such processes bears no relation to the cost of the war. No one in great authority had the wit, ascendancy, or detachment from public folly, to declare these fundamental, brutal facts to the electorates; nor would anyone have been believed if he had. The triumphant Allies continued to assert that they would squeeze Germany “ till the pips squeaked.” All this had a potent bearing on the prosperity of the world and the mood of the German race. In fact, however, these causes were never enforced. On the contrary, whereas about £IOOO millions of German assets were appropriated by the victorious Powers, more than £ISOO millions were lent a few years later to Germany by the United States and by Great Britain, thus enabling the ruin of the war to be rapidly repaired in Germany. As this apparently magnanimous process was still accompanied by the unhappy and embittered populations in the victorious countries, and the assurances of their statesmen that Germany would be made to pay “ to the uttermost farthing,” no gratitude or good will was to be. expected or reaped. Germany only paid, or was only able to pay, the indemnities later ex.-

torted because the United States was profusely lending money to Europe, and especially to her. In fact, during the three years 1926 to 1929 the United States was receiving back in the form of debt-instalment indemnities from all quarters about one-fifth of the money which she was lending to Germany with no chance of repayment. However, everybody seemed pleased, and appeared to think this might go on for ever. Seeds of Disaster History will characterise all these transactions as insane. They helped to breed both the martial curse and the “ economic blizzard,” of which more later. Germany now borrowed in all directions, swallowing greedily every credit which was lavishly offered her. Misguided sentiment about aiding the vanquished nation, coupled with a profitable rate of interest on these loans, led British investors to participate, though on a much smaller scale than those of the United States. Thus Germany gained the two thousand millions of indemnities which she paid in one form or another by surrender of capital assets and valuta in foreign countries, or by juggling with the enormous American loans. All this is a sad story of complicated idiocy in the making of which much toil and virtue were consumed. The second cardinal tragedy was the complete break-up of the Austro-Hun-garian Empire by the Treaties of Sc. Germain and Trianon. For centuries this surviving embodiment of the Holy Roman Empire had afforded a common life, with advantages in trade and security, to a large number of peoples, none of whom in our own time had the strength or vitality to stand by themselves in the face of pressure from a revivified Germany or Russia. All these races wished to break away from the Federal or Imperial structure, and to encourage their desires was deemed a liberal policy. The Balkanisation of South-eastern Europe proceeded apace, with the consequent relative aggrandisement of Prussia and the German Reich, which, though tired and war-scarred, was intact and locally overwhelming. There is not one of the peoples or provinces that constituted the Empire of the Hapsburgs to whom gaining their independence has not brought the tortures which ancient poets and theologians had reserved for the damned. The noble capital of Vienna, the home of so much longdefended culture and tradition, the centre of so many roads, rivers, and railways, was left stark and starving, like a great emporium in an impoverished district whose inhabitants have mostly departed. The victors imposed upon the Germans all the long-sought ideals of the liberal nations of the West. They were relieved from the burden of compulsory military service and from the need of keeping up heavy armaments. The enormous American loans were presently pressed upon them, though they had no credit. A democratic constitution, in accordance with all the latest improvements, was established at Weimar. Emperors having "been driven out, nonentities were elected Beneath this flimsy fabric raged the passions of the mighty, defeated, but substantially uninjured German nation. The Prejudice of the Americans against monarchy, which Mr Lloyd George made no attempt to counteract, had made it clear to the beaten Empire that it would have better treatment from the Allies as a Republic than as a Monarchy. Wise policy would have crowned and fortified the Weimar Republic with a constitutional sovereign in the person of an infant grandson of the Kaiser, under a Council of Regency. Instead, a gaping void was opened in the national life of the German people. AH. the strong elements, military and feudal, which might have rallied to a constitutional monarchy and for its sake respected and sustained the new democratic and parliamentary - processes, were for the time being unhinged.

The Weimar Republic, with all its liberal trappings and blessings, was regarde* as an imposition of the enemy. It could not hold the loyalties or the imagination of the German people. For a spell they sought to cling as in desperation to the aged Marshal Hindenburg. Thereafter mighty forces were adrift; the void was open, and into that void after a pause there strode a maniac of ferocious genius, the repository and expression of the most virulent hatreds that have ever corroded the human breast—Corporal Hitler. France had been bled® white by the war. The generation that had dreamed since 1870 of a war of revenge had triumphed, but at. a deadly cost in national life-strength. It was a haggard France that greeted the dawn of victory. Deep fear of Germany pervaded the French nation on the morrow of their dazzling success. It was this fear that had prompted Marshal Foch to demand the Rhine frontier for the safety of France against her far larger neighbour. But the Britisli and American statesmen held that the absorption of German-populated districts in French territory was contrary to the Fourteen Points and to the principles of nationalism and self-determina-tion upon which the peace treaty was to be based. They therefore withstood Foch and France. They gaine'd Clemenceau by promising: First, a joint Anglo-American guarantee for the defence of France; secondly, a demilitarised zone; and, thirdly, the total, lasting disarmament of Germany Clemenceau accepted this in spite of Foch’s protests and his own instincts. The Treaty of Guarantee was signed, accompanied by Wilson and Lloyd George and Clemenceau. The United States Senate refused to ratify the treaty. They repudiated President Wilson’s signature. And we, who had deferred so much to his opinions and wishes in all this business of peace-making, were told without much ceremony that we ought to be better informed about the American. Constitution. In the fear, anger and disarray of the French people, the rugged dominating figure of Clemenceau, with his worldfamed authority, and his special British and American contacts, was incontinently discarded. “ Ingratitude towards their great men,” says Plutarch, “is the mark of strong peoples.” It was imprudent for France to indulge this trait when she was so grievously weakened. There was little compensating strength to be found in the revival of the group intrigues and ceaseless changes of Governments and Ministers which were the characteristic of the Third Republic, however profitable or diverting they were to those engaged in them. Poincare, the strongest figure who succeeded Clemenceau, attempted to make an independent Rhineland under (he patronage and control of France. This had no chance of success. He did not hesitate to try to enforce reparations on Germany by the invasion of the Ruhr. This certainly enforced compliance with the treaties on Germany; but it was severely condemned by British and American opinion. As a result of the general financial and political disorganisation of Germany, together with reparation payments during the years 1919 to 1923, the mark rapidly collapsed. The rage aroused in Germany by the French occupation of the Ruhr led to a vast, reckless printing of paper notes with the deliberate object of destroying the whole basis of the currency. In the final stages of the inflation the mark stood' at forty-three thousand billion to the pound sterling. The social and economic consequences of this inflation were deadly and far-reaching. The savings of the middle classes were wiped out, and a natural following was; thus provided for the banners of National Socialism. The whole structure of German industry was distorted by the growth of mushroom trusts. The entire working capital of the country disappeared. The interna! national debt and the debt of industry in the form of fixed capital charges and mortgages were, of course, simultaneously liquidated or repudiated. But this was no compensation for the loss of working capital. All led directly to the large-scale borrowings of a bankrupt nation abroad which were the feature of ensuing years. German sufferings and bitterness marched forward together—as they dd to-day.

The British temper towards Germany, which at first had been so fierce, very soon went as far astray in the opposite direction. A rift opened between Lloyd George and Poincare, whose bristling personality hampered his firm and far-sighted policies. The two nations fell apart in thought and action, and British sympathy or even admiration for Germany found powerful expression. The League of Nations

The League of Nations had no sooner been created than it received an almost mortal blow. The United States abanboned President Wilson’s offspring. The President himself, ready to do battle for his ideals, suffered a paralytic stroke just as he was setting forth on his campaign, and lingered henceforward a futile wreck for a great part of two long and vital years, at the end of which his party and his policy were swept away by the Republican Presidential victory of 1920. Across the Atlantic on the morrow of the Republican success isolationist conceptions prevailed. Europe must be left to stew in its own juice, and must pay its lawful debts. At the same time tariffs were raised to prevent the entry of goods by which alone these debts could be discharged. At the Washington Conference of 1921 far-reaching proposals for naval disarmament were made by the United States, and the British and American Governments proceeded to sink their battleships and break up their military establishments with gusto. It was argued in odd logic that it would be immoral to disarm the vanquished unless the victors also stripped themselves of their weapons. The finger of Anglo-American reprobation was presently to be pointed at France, deprived alike of the Rhine frontier and of her treaty guarantee, for maintaining, even on a greatlyreduced scale, a French Army based upon universal service. The United States made it clear to Britain that the continuance of her alliance with Japan, to which the Japanese had punctiliously conformed, would constitute a barrier to Anglo-American relations. Accordingly this alliance was brought to an end. The annulment caused a profound impression in Japan, and was viewed as the spurning of an Asiatic Power by the Western world. Many links were sundered which might afterwards have proved of decisive value to peace. At the same time, Japan could console herself with the fact that the downfall of Germany and Russia had, for a time, raised her to the third place among the world’s naval Powers, and certainly to the highest rank. Although the Washington Naval Agreement prescribed a lower ratio of strength in capital ships for Japan than for Britain and the United States (five; five: three), the quota assigned to her was well up to her building and financial capacity for a good many years, and she watched with an attentive eye the two leading naval Powers cutting each other down far below what their resources would have permitted and what their responsibilities enjoined. Thus, both in Europe and in Asia conditions were swiftly created by the victorious Allies which, in the name of peace, cleared the way for the renewal of war. While all these untoward events were taking place, amid a ceaseless chatter of well-meant platitudes on both sides of the Atlantic, a new and njore terrible cause of quarrel than the Imperialism of Czars and Kaisers became apparent in Europe. The civil war in Russia ended in the absolute victory of the Bolshevist revolution The Soviet armies which advanced to subjugate Poland were indeed repulsed in the battle of Warsaw, but Germany and Italy nearly succumbed to Communist propaganda and designs and Hungary actually fell for a while under the control of the Communist dictator, Bela Kun. Although Marshal Foch wisely observed that “ Bolshevism had never crossed the frontiers of victory,” the foundations of European civilisation trembled in the early post-war years. Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of Communism. While Corporal Hitler was making himself useful to the German officerclass in Munich' by arousing soldiers and workers to fierce hatred of Jews and Communists, on whom he laid the blame of Germany’s defeat, another adventurer, Benito Mussolini, provided Italy with a new theme of government, which, while it claimed co save the Italian people from Communism. raised himself to dictatorial power. As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism. Thus were set on foot those kindred movements which were destined soon to plunge the world into even more hideous strife, which none can say has ended with their destruction. Lost Opportunities

Nevertheless, one solid security for peace remained. Germany was disarmed. All her artillery and weapons were destroyed. ''Her fleet had already sunk itself in Scapa Flow. Her vast army was disbanded. By the Treaty of Versailles only a professional longservice army not exceeding 100,000 men, and unable on this basis to accumulate reserves, was permitted to Germany for purposes of internal order. The annual quotas of recruits no longer received their training; the cadres were dissolved. Every effort was made to reduce to a tithe the Officer Corps. No military air force of any kind was allowed. Submarines were forbidden, and the German Navy was limited to a handful of vessels under 10,000 tons. Soviet Russia was barred off from Western Europe by a cordon pf violently anti-Bolshevist States, who had broken away from the former Empire of the Czars in its new and more terrible form. Poland and Czechoslovakia raised independent heads and seemed to stand erect in Central Europe. Hungary had recovered from her dose of Bela Kun. The French Army, resting upon its laurels, was incomparably the strongest military force in Europe, and it was for some years believed that the French Air Force was also of a high order.

Up till the year 1934 the power of the conquerors remained unchallenged in Europe, and indeed throughout the world. Th'ere was no moment in these 16 years when the three former Allies, or even Britain and France with their associates in Europe, could not in the name of the League of Nations and under its moral and international shield have controlled by a mere effort of the will the armed strength of Germany. Instead, until 1931 the victors and particularly the United States concentrated their efforts upon extorting by vexatious foreign controls their annual reparations from Germany. The fact that these payments were made only from far larger American loans reduced the whole process to the absurd. Nothing was reaped except ill-will. On the other hand, the strict enforcement at any time till 1934 of the Disarmament Clauses of the Peace Treaty would have guarded indefinitely, without violence or bloodshed, the peace and safety of mankind. But this was neglected, while the infringements' remained petty, and shunned as they assumed serious proportions. Thus the final safeguard of a long peace was cast away. The crimes of the vanquished find their background and their explanation, though not, of course, their pardon, in the follies of the victors. Without these follies crime would have found neither temptation nor opportunity. In these pages I attempt to recount some of the incidents and impressions which form in my mind the story of the coming upon mankind of the worst tragedy in its tumultuous history. This presented itself not only in the destruction of life and property inseparable from war. There had been fearful slaughters of soldiers in the First World War, and much of the accumulated treasure of the nations was consumed. Still, apart from the excesses of the Russian Revolution, the main fabric of European civilisation remained erect at the close of the struggle. When the storm and dust of the cannonade passed suddenly away, the nations, despite their enmities, could still recognise each other as historic racial personalities. The laws of war had, on the whole, been respected.

There was a common professional meeting ground between military men who had fought one another. Vanquished and victors alike still preserved the semblance of civilised States. A solemn peace was made which, apart from unenforceable financial aspects, conformed to the principles which in the nineteenth century had increasingly regulated the relations of enlightened peoples. The reign of law was proclaimed, and a World Instrument was formed to guard us all, and especially Europe, against a renewed convulsion. The Fruits of Dissention

in the Second World War every bond between man and man was io perish. Crimes were committed by cne Germans under the Hitlerite domination to which they allowed themselves to be subjected, which find no equal in scale and wickedness with any that have darkened the human record. The wholesale massacre by systematised processes of six or seven millions or men, women and children in the German execution camps exceeds in horror the rough and ready butcheries of Genghis Khan, and in scale reduces them to pigmy proportions. Deliberate extermination of whole populations was contemplated and pursued by both Germany and Russia in the Eastern war. The hideous process of bombarding open cities from the air, once started by the Germans, was repaid 20-fold by the ever-mount-ing power of the Allies, and found its culmination in the use of the atomic bombs .which obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. YVe have at length emerged from a scene of material ruin and moral havoc the like of which had never darkened the imagination of former centuries. After all that we suffered and achieved we find ourselves still confronted with problems and perils not less, but far more formidable than those through which we have so narrowly made our way. It is my purpose, as one who lived and acted in these days, to show how easily the tragedy of the Second World War could have been prevented; how the malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous; how the structure and habits of democratic States, unless they are welded into larger organisms, lack those elements of persistence and conviction which can alone give security to humble masses; how, even in matters of self-preservation, no policy is pursued for even 10 or 15 years at a time. We shall see how the counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger; how the middle course adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life may be found to lead direct to the bull’s eye of disaster. We shall see how absolute is the need of a broad path of international action pursued by many States in common across the years, irrespective of the ebb and flow of national politics. It was a simple policy to keep Germany disarmed and the victors adequately armed for 30 years, and in the meanwhile, even if a reconciliation could not be made with Germany, to build ever more strongly a true League of Nations capable of making sure that treaties were kept or changed only by discussion and agreement. When three or four powerful Governments acting together have demanded the most fearful sacrifices from their peoples, when these have been given freely for the common cause, and when the longedfor result had been attained, it would seem reasonable that concerted action should be preserved so that at least the essentials would not be cast away. But this modest requirement, the might, civilisation, learning, knowledge, science of the victors were unable to supply. They lived from hand to mouth and from day. to day, and from one election to another, until, when scarcely 20' years were out, the dread signal of the Second World War was given, and we must write of the sons of those who had fought and died so faithfully and well: Shoulder, tci. aching shoulder, side by - * " side, ■' ' : ", - They trudged away from life’s broad wealds of light. (Copyright 1947 in the British Empire by the Daily Telegraph, Ltd.; in U.S.A. by Time, Inc. (publisher of Time and Life), and the New York Times Company; elsewhere by Cooperation Press Service. World rights reserved. Reproduction in full or in part in any language strictly prohibited.)