NEWS FROM LONDON DICTATORS AS THEY REALLY SOUND

Southland Times, Issue 23816, 13 May 1939, Page 13

NEWS FROM LONDON DICTATORS AS THEY REALLY SOUND

Contrast Of U.S. President’s “Calm, Sane Tones”

By

Air Mail from

TREVOR ROSS

LONDON, April 24. A MOMENT ago I turned off the wireless after listening to President Roosevelt’s broadcast on pan-American relations. These calm sane tones were a tonic to ears attuned to mad rantings in a distraut Europe. They came at the end of another gloomy week, a week of glum forebodings and fears. There is no denying that we are depressed these days. Certainly no good purpose can be served by concealing the fact that under their calmness and studied indifference, the English people are weary of the tension to which they have been subjected for more than a year.

Those who come from the New World, and New Zealand is part of it, still tell us that the hatreds, the power complexes and the slaughter phychoses which have gripped Europe, are completely incomprehensible to men and women who fondly believe the world is civilized.

There was something of this incomprehension in the tone of President Roosevelt as it surged out of the New World a moment ago. The nation of a “sea-girt continent,” as he called the Americas, had renounced war and pledged themselves to settle disputes by discussion. Was it too much to hope that the Old World should ever do likewise and substitute conciliation for the ravages of “the Huns and the Vandals of 1500 years ago?” Geneva Scene

MORE is the pity, but it does seem at the moment that it is too much to hope. Europe has never been so securely bound to the wheels of the chariot of war as she is today. Almost daily we are expecting it to drag us all into the thick of battle, and perhaps, in the process, to drag us back to the dark ages. The voice from America has come too late to reform an incorrigible continent, and whether it is to be war or a warlike peace, it seems that the voice of reason and sanity now has little chance of a hearing above screeching from mouths lustful for more territory to digest. Listening to President Roosevelt recalled the strangely-contrasted voices which I have heard flung over Europe by radio during these troubled months. It will not be easy to forget a warm night in Geneva last September when a score of us sat in a small room in the palace of the League of Nations and listened to the broadcast of Hitler’s momentous speech from Berlin. Geneva had been plunged into the depths of gloom. Nearly all day I had gone from telephone to telephone with journalistic colleagues from all over Europe, listening at their ejbows as they collected the latest scraps of news from the capitals. Not one consoling word came from any quarter _ of the Continent. And now we waited for Hitler. Next to me sat a Dutch diplomat whose plane was waiting to fly him home at a moment’s notice. Next to him sat an Egyptian who spoke English with an Oxford accent. Across the room was a Turkish journalist who, they said, knew more of Europe’s secret agents than any man in Geneva. On the other side of me was a French Jew who translated for me in a whisper as Hitler’s speech began. Here was emotionalism run riot, reason crucified, with the little wireless set almost bursting as the Berlin crowd screamed its frequent “Seig Heil!” No voice could have been angrier, no speaker could have lashed himself into a greater fury'with threats, cajolings, innuendoes, and boasts of power. The whole display of theatricalism left one despairing, killed belief that anything but a sword could cut short such rantings, and put the seal on fears that aggrandisement was about to raise its head. The Dutch diplomat did not fly home that night, but he, and all of us, left the room with a nasty taste in our mouths. Fireworks

THERE is always much the same display of forensic fireworks when one’s set reaches out and gathers in the words of Mussolini from Rome. I heard him in Paris not long ago. The set was belching his words over the heads of a talkative throng sitting in the sun outside a little cafe alongside Sacre Coeur where Montmartre lifts its head and gazes over the city. But they don’t think much of Mussolini in France; there were soon loud cries of protest and a dance supplanted the Duce. Mr Chamberlain’s radio voice seems to come from another world, a rather cold world, perhaps, but one which you are certain must be very precise, very well regulated and very logical. The last time I heard him he was making his famous speech at Birmingham. It was then that he gave the first sign of Britain’s new foreign policy. One almost expected him to round off with “Q.E.D.” so clear was the policy proposition stated, and so calmly was it

brought to its conclusion. There was none of the freshness (hat one detects in the tones of President Roosevelt.

There is something of the maturity of Westminster’s tones in the measured syllables of the British Prime Minister. The same applies to Lord Halifax. I picked up his recent broadcast _ to America and could not help wondering at the time just what would be the reaction to this voice which seemed to pin down every word with a rivet of ice before it passed to the next. Still, among all the voices which have assaulted the European air since we were plunged into a state of tension, one can listen to the English word and know that it will neither descend to abuse nor shatter the ear with the barbarisms of open hate. For what it is worth, that is some slight comfort in a world in which the wireless is playing a bigger part almost every day. A New Urgency WE need a little comfort in London these days. With each week that passes the city assumes a stranger mien Since the New Year London seems to

have lost a little of its plentiful stock of friendliness. It seems, as you move about, that the city has become more businesslike. There is a new urgency among the people. They have finally realized that Europe and its troubles are very close to them, and that they might be involved with a terrible suddenness in what official statements still politely call an “emergency.” The people themselves call it “war.” I was standing in the Strand the other evening watching a man selling late papers with the first full reports of Mr Chamberlain’s pledge to Greece and Rumania. A woman almost ran up to him, a spare little woman with the accent of the East End. “It is goin’ to be a war?’’’she asked the paper seller as she thrust a penny into his hand. “No, everything’s all right,” was the reassuring reply. That just about sums up the thoughts of most of us each time a statesman makes a speech or each time we read of some delicate doing on the Continent.

Recruiting Progress BUT they are not letting us forget in London that Nelson’s exhortation at Trafalgar still holds good. The recruiting campaign for ahother. 250,000 territorials has this week got into its full stride. Busy, pleasure-loving London has been given a sense of realities by the, sudden appearance of recruiting depots everywhere. And the recruiting officers are out again with their red sashes and their canes, making the biggest drive for soldiers for nearly a quarter of a century. The Lord Mayor opened his own recruiting depot at the Mansion House during the week with a flourish. There was a big procession through London to the centre of the City, portable searchlights, an anti-aircraft gun, a light tank, various field equipment units and a detachment of Territorials told the lunch-hour crowds that the Army really meant business. An enormous amount remains to be done before London, and the rest of the country for that matter, can really be satisfied that it is ready to face the worst with some sort of equanimity. We certainly could not have done so last September, but we have gone a long way since then. Take, for instance, a few scraps of information which have become available during

the last few days. In September, evacuation plans were in chaos. Today there is some semblance of order, and it is estimated that 3,000,000 children could be sent out of the danger zone within the first 48 hours or so. They, of course, would have to be housed. Since September there has been a complete check throughout districts near London, and there is scarcely a spare room or a spare bed that has not been noted. I even know of one man, living almost in the heart of London, who has been told that he will have the use of only two rooms in his big house. The rest (he has made his home almost completely bomb proof at enormous expense) will be requisitioned by Government officials on essential duty. “Old Bill”

TO round off the week the Wai’ Office issued a recruiting poster designed by the famous war-time artist Captain Bruce Bairnsfather. It shows his famous “Old Bill” with the walrus moustache, now a little older, plumper and dressed in a mechanic’s overall. He is pointing with a spanner to a tank parade and saying to a young man alongside him, “Yes son, that’s what I’d be doin’ if I had my time over again!” It was “Old Bill” who fought in a “war to end war” 25 years ago. Well, looking .back over this, it doesn’t seem to make very pleasant reading. It only remains to say it was revealed in coroners’ courts this week that three people committed suicide as a result of depression after hearing news bulletins from the 8.8. C. We are not all quite as gloomy as -that, but I think we are all thoroughly determined to “see it through.” whatever “it” might imply.