HATE IN HEARTS

Waihi Daily Telegraph, Volume XXXI, Issue 8837, 28 October 1942, Page 4

HATE IN HEARTS

RUSSIANS’ WAR ENERGY

VERY PIT OF FURY NEVER THINK OF SURRENDER One evening this week two men came to see me. One was thin, bronzed, in the uniform of the Red Fleet. The other was a civilian with stained clothes, gaunt and hollow-eyed (says Ralph Parker in an article- wireleased to the New York Times). We sat and talked and drank glasses of pale tea, looking on to Moscow’s crowded and bustling ; streets where people were pouring from movies and theatres and standing to watch the girls and youths of the Home Guards march past with their rousing songs, to listen to a broadcast of air raid defence instruction, given point by sardine-shaped balloons slowly heaving upward into the limpid sky. The sailor was a young Soviet writer just returned from Sebastopol, where he stayed until only a rearguard was left to defend the • beaches; the civilian was a factory manager from the Voronezh front, who had made an equally hazardous journey from territory now occupied by the Germans. (Both were still suffering from the strain of their experiences.

News From West As we talked two items of news reached us from the west. During an air raid on 'Britain, the London radio announced, a family of six has been killed. The calm and haughty voice of the 8.8. C. announcer was telling the world. A Norfolk, Va., telegram from New York informed us that 29 members of a U-boat crew had been buried with full military honours. We swung the radio dial around. ‘ Chairmany calling, Chairmany calling. Now we broadcast messages from British and Dominion prisoners of war. To Mrs Blank from Major Blank: ‘All right, slightly wounded, most of gang safe. Love.'” a bland voice announced. The man from Sebastopol resumed his tale: "Never for a moment did we think of surrender. Even at the very end when the city had fallen and we were foiced to the Chersonese beaches, the wounded struggled with the doctors trying to evacuate them. I saw them, with tears streaming down their faces, stoop to kiss the Crimean soil and grasp pebbles to take with them. We never were told what had happened to Tobruk. In the heat of that battle of Sebastopol, where no quarter was asked or given, capitulation just would not have been understood.”

Flight of Don Civilians The other man told of the flight of Don civilians before the advancing enemy. How workers were crowded on to flat cars with their machines; how old women and children crouched in the forests with sacks of dry bread. He told of the greed with which the Germans and Hungarians ransacked the houses of the rich Don farming communities, the ferocity with which columns of weary civilians streaming along the dusty roads were machinegunned by the implacable Luftwaffe; the torture, arson, loot and that indiscriminate murder, which is, in fact, a scheduled, systematic terror. Tales one does not forget are more memorable told against a background of a “family of six killed—full military honours —all the gang safe.” It is the background' of a war which described in those terms sounds phonier than the Franco-German war of 1939 and 1940. The Russians know that Britain and America’s wars are not being fought phonily. Every Russian sailor was thrilled by the Battle of Midway and the struggle for the northern passage. Every airman knows what strain and dangers are involved in the R.A.F. raids, the defence of Bataan Peninsula, Malta, Tobruk. These firmly established British and American fighting qualities.

Russian Fury But there is a general feeling here which recent reverses have caused to come more and more to the surface and to break out in hitter or querulous though more often just curious questioning. It is that the governments and the opinion of some groups in 'Britain and America do not understand the kind of war that is being fought. Military honoffi's to U-boat pirates and changes of courtesies between enemies on the subject of prisoners help this impression to grow. Only when people are infused with hatred, only when they reach the pit of fury that the very mention of the enemy causes the urge to kill or. to work with desperate energy to make arms to kill, can they reach the tempo and spirit with which Hitler can be beaten, is the view widely held in Russia. The Russian people are in that spirit, and Moscow to-day—Mos-cow, flower spangled, with its glittering gay surface, its little pleasures and simple joys—seethes with hatred, and from this hatred springs the energy to work to a standstill, to bear patiently the war. Intellectual Ferqicnt 'Hatred too is a stimulus for the extraordinary intellectual ferment at work here, seen in the theatre, poems and music. Could Shostakovich have composed the sharp-angled, ugly “March of the Fascists” in his Seventh Symphony if he had not learned to hate the Germans who shelled the Hermitage, blew up Peterhof and rained bombs indiscriminately on Leningrad? Could Kosta Simonov have written the grim melodrama “The Russian People” if he had not been at Odessa and seen how the Germans shoj; t}o\yji the old, the aged and the innocent? “Machine-Guns and[ Bayonets”

■ "‘We understand that Germans are not human beings. From now on the word 'German is a terrible curse; it is a word which makes one spring / to arms. Indignation is not enough; you must kill. Every day you don’t kill

Germans is a day wasted. Nothing is a gayer sight for Russian eyes than a German corpse. Don’t count by days or by miles; count by the number of Germans you’ve killed. Kill Germans—that’s what your mother begs you. Kill Germans, your child begs you. Kill Germans, your country begs you.” With these words Red Star addressed the Red Army yesterday morning.

Hatred has not been learned easily in Russia. In the Soviet Union nothing in peacetime education stimulated those instincts of rapaciousness, individual competitiveness or self-asser-tion that are fundamental of Fascist ideology. On the contrary, these atavisms were sublimated into effort for the common good, the individual was taught to integrate his purposefulness with that of the community. Systematic campaigns have been necessary to instill hatred in those people who have not learned it with their own eyes, as did the Red Army advancing last winter into devastated villages and towns, or as the inhabitants of those occupied territories did. Stalin himself on May 1 urged the people to learn to hate. Suspicion and Doubts

No one here thinks of a second European battle front in terms of repayment of a debt. There are impatience, suspicion and doubts about a second front: there is what in the West is called “popular demand,” which can turn soon to popular disillusionment and to bitterness as full of recrimination as last month’s rejoicing over the London and Washngton agreements was full of hope. To disappoint those hopes would incur responsibility for damaging Russian morale in battlefield and factory.