FAITH IN VICTORY

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 62, Issue 4378, 15 January 1941, Page 6

FAITH IN VICTORY

AN ENGLISHMAN EXPLAINS. SEARCHING EXAMINATION.

(By

Sir Hugh Walpole.)

It isn’t easy 'in the space of 1000 words to say why one is feeling optimistic about England’s future. England’s future ? Now —when we are on the edge of one of the darkest and most dangerous winters in her history. Now—when London has been enduring persistent bombardment for two months. Now —when, alone and almost unaided, England and its Dominions are opposing a foe that has conquered almost all of Europe. And yet again I say: Yes, I am an optimist about England’s future. Partly I am because during the fortnight of 14th to 28th May I underwent almost the only defeatist period of my life. I am an optimist by nature, and from experience and because, I think, I take very long views. But during those weeks when the Germans swept right across France I lost for a moment all my faith. We didn’t then know all that we know now. We, or at any rate I, fancied that the German army was invincible, and I stared at an awful picture of that cruel, remorseless, (retrograde, “ altruistic ” tyranny conquering the world DUNKIRK AND 16th SEPTEMBER. I and many another Englishman faced it, and we have never seen any vision so horrible, or will, I fancy, ever again. The answer to it was Dunkirk, and after Dunkirk, a date now obscurely emerging that will prove, I fancy, when all is known, to be one of the great dates in English history—l6th September, 1940. After Dunkirk, the more horrible, the most horrible, possibility was lifted. I had long ago been told that if we held out until October we could never after be defeated; and I now believe, let them do what they will, that, with the Dominions and the Americas behind us, we cannot be defeated. But that isn’t the ground of my op- . . i tunism. I believe that this war, short of our

d'feat, will save England. Save En- ■ gland from what ? Selfishness, greed, snobbery, and, above all, sloth. LITTLE PLANNING BEFOREHAND. We are a very odd people. We have altered very little from the days when the wife of Bath rode to Canterbury and Fleullen argued with Pistol and Bardolph before Agincourt,, in that little altercation lie both our faults and our virtues. We are a people strangely lacking in imagination and yet have provided the greatest series of poets. All the good, noble, grand things we have done for ourselves from Magna Charta through the Grand Remonstrance to the Reform Bill have been effected without any planning beforehand. The Englishman in the street has quite suddenly decided that they are to be carried through, and carried through they are. So it has been with Dunkirk and the Battle of London. The man in the street has saved us again. There is one of the great grounds of my optimism. For I wasn’t sure, during the last ten years, whether our man in the street was still alive. But he is alive, flying, when young, the skies, and working magnificently when older in the London fire brigade. But everything, I fancy, before these last six months brought England straight against the basic reality, was nearly lost. All the heroes of our race have been men who, whether they believe a creed or no, are in touch with the virtues of endurance, fidelity, and integrity. During the last twenty years England was in danger of losing those virtues. Our post-1914 war writers most loudly praised by the critics have been defeatists, cynics to a man. With the exception of T. S. Eliot, every modern poet of fate has scoffed at God. Our leading politicians have avoided every serious issue. From Abyssinia to Czechoslovakia it has been a series of retreats. Every man and woman in Britain has been to blame. Our snobbery has been as rampant as ever, and if we have been faintly ashamed of our old imperialism we have most of us paid little or no attention to the great problems of our Dominions. Our slums have been a disgrace that we had scarcely begun to rem-

edy. Why ? We are not worse than the other peoples of the world. We have in us, at our abiding roots, magnificent qualities of sturdiness, patience, and endurance, and a true love of honour and fair play. But <we were falling asleep. Now, as it seefns to me, whatever trials are ahead of us (and they will be many), whatever blunders we comimit), and they will be many), we are awakened. We are awakened because this time it is a people’s war. Slowly, slowly we are realising that; realising, too, that words, so long empty in our mouths, truly mean something. We are terrible people to defeat once we realise a few simple things. It has always been so through our history. Freedom for the individual, justice for all mien of all races. What platitudes they have been in our mouths I BROUGHT CLOSE .TO HORRORS. But now, by* the grace of God, the most evil things in the heart of men —cruelty to the weak, lust for inflicting pain, tyranny over men’s minds and acts, callousness as to love of wife for husband, parent for child, friend for friends—all those horrors have come so close to us that the fire from them has burned our mouths and seared our eyelids. That is why I am an optimist. So many things in England needed doing. It needed all this to bring the necessity home to us. But very slowly we are also perceiving that we are all called to help in the making of a new world. Not a world fit for heroes to live in,” as in the last war, but a whole World, a world in which all men of like actions, of whatever race, will live together. And it is a world in which the British will have to give up possessions, trade, wealth, and much luxury for the good of him whom they have never seen—and never will see—a world which may in truth begin to move slowly toward the City of God.