Wairarapa Daily Times [Established Over 50 Years.] MONDAY, 18th JANUARY, 1935. EUROPEAN AFFAIRS.

Wairarapa Daily Times, 18 February 1935, Page 4

Wairarapa Daily Times [Established Over 50 Years.] MONDAY, 18th JANUARY, 1935. EUROPEAN AFFAIRS.

Sir Philip Gibbs proved himself a brilliant war correspondent, and has some telling facts in his new book, “European Journey.” Just as Mr Knickerbocker tried to get an answer to the question, “Will War Come in Europe?” from the rulers, so Mr Gibbs looks for his reply to the waiter in the cafe or the newsvendor in the kiosk. He describes his book as “the narrative of a journey in Prance, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Germany and the Saar in the spring and summer of 1934, with an authentic record of the ideas, hopes and fears moving in the minds of common folk and expressed in wayside conversations.” The encounters are casual, and the reports give glimpses of the mind of ordinary Europeans (if we dare use such an embracing term in these jingoistic days!) rather than a complete picture. But these haphazard glimpses are both interesting and illuminating. They go beneath artificial nationalisms to the common, essential element of humanity. We find repeated, like a

melancholy burden, the trouble and anxiety of the depression, the feeling of uncertainty, the fear of approaching war, and yet with it an intense hatred of having the 1914-18 horror all over again. Often the remarks condense themselves into the puzzled and despairing cry of “ ’Tis a mad world, my masters.” We find, too, the old diversity between youth and age, between town and country. In Paris the anger at the corruption implied by the Stavisky scandal led to the shooting in the Place de la Concorde, when 30 people were killed and 1000 wounded. The city was seething, but in the French provinces the vigneron remained calm, troubled only by the fact that his crops did not pay. Everywhere youth was rebellious, intolerant, looking to such extremes as French Royalism, German Nazism and Communism to solve the riddle. But everywhere older men shook heads at the excesses of youth. The workers were realistic, ready for revolution before war. Sir Phillip Gibbs distrusts Hitler’s brutal methods and rearmament, and feels that the self-sacrificing devotion of the Nazis might easily be turned into fanatic aggression by “something dark in the mentality of men who had the destiny of the nations in their hands.”