A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
THE arrival of General Smuts (it is difficult to get accustomed to calling him Field-Marshal) in this country is matter for great satisfaction on a number of grounds. In the first place, there has so far been no one in the War Cabinet who can talk strategy with the Prime Minister on equal terms. It is very much to the good that there is now someone who can, and the fact that both men fought in the Boer War—on opposite sides—adds no doubt to the respect they would in any case have felt for one another. A great deal might be said about what Smuts did as a member of the War Cabinet in the last war, but it is of more immediate interest to consider the bearing of one paragraph of the statement he made on arriving in London this week. "I have continued," said the Field-Marshal, "to emphasise to the best of my ability the importance of the African theatres of war." The plural is the point. What are these theatres, apart from Egypt? So minor a side-show as Madagascar, in spite of its strategic importance, is hardly to be termed a "theatre." But if no others have been discussed in this country the Press of Axis States has been less reticent. The familiar "possibility of an Allied landing at Dakar" was mentioned once more on Tuesday by the Rome radio, and both Vichy and Rome- have displayed a lively interest in American newspapers which are "already visualising the landing of Americans in Africa, and foresee them attacking Rommel from the rear." Many odd things appear in American papers, and there these particular speculations can be left. But the Axis apprehensions are significant.
* * Whatever academic arguments may be bandied one way or the other about the chaining of prisoners, the general reaction of the country to the Government's action is altogether encouraging. There is no doubt about the complete predominance of the view that we cannot compete with the Germans in inhumanity and that it is a mistake to lower ourselves to any such competition. There is a mixture here of sound sense and sound standards—and a mixture of that kind is decidedly wholesome. All the same, this ought not, I think, to be read as a condemnation of the Cabinet, which had to take a singularly diffizult decision at short notice and took one which, if on consideration it must be pronounced mistaken, was not in any sense gravely culpable. I fancy indeed that a good many people might in the first instance have taken the same decision themselves, even though now that it has been taken, and there is more time for reflection, they see it to be wrong. In matters of this kind a general rule is hard to lay down. Where measures that may affect the actual issue of the war—like the use of gas; or indiscriminate bombing—are concerned, the question of retaliation raises issues which fortunately are not involved in the shackling of war-prisoners.
* * * * That very useful Ministry of Information publication, Spiritual Issues of the War (against which some quite misguided criticism was directed by a House of Commons questioner last week) quotes a very instructive article on the Christian Church in Germany from the Swiss religious paper, Semeur Vaudois, in which facts are recorded which deserve attention regarding the enduring conflict between elements of both the Protestant and the Roman Catholic Churches and the State. One significant fact is that, in spite of the outspoken protests against various actions by the Govern- ment or the Gestapo by Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich, Bishop Galen of Munster, and Bishop Preysing of Berlin, none of them
has so far been molested. On the Protestant side, Pastor Niemöll is still in a concentration camp (he had three years at Sachshau and is now at Dachau), and the Swiss journal asks, "is it sufficientl well known that since the day Niemoller was imprisoned—that is say, five years age, if you add the preliminary detention to th four years in the concentration camp—a prayer group with fif to a hundred people always present has been held every night the church [Niemoller's church] at Dahlem-Berlin? " It certainly not well known, and it is worth knowing. Obviou some kind of bridges will have to be built between Germany the rest of the world after the war. One of them, amo the most valuable of all, should link those Germans who ha shown that they have a loyalty to something higher than State with the Christian churches in Britain, America and elsewli My observations last week on the fact that the private sold in the British Army is provided with no pyjamas or any other fo of nightwear, have produced a crop of comment—all of it in lin with the views expressed here. Among various points made, may note the following : in this and many other matters respect shown to comfort and hygiene ill the American army much greater than the British, and the sooner the ground f invidious comparisons is removed the better ; many privates w their own pyjamas, but they have not only to buy them f themselves, but to deprive some other member of their famil, of coupons, since the private soldier does not get clothing coupons more than that, they have to pay for having the garments wash for the private's laundry-allowance—this is another genuine griev ance—is not adequate to ensure proper cleanliness. A privat writes: "You are perfectly -right when you say that this- does hay some bearing on self-respect." So it should. On active servic special disabilities are to be expected, but for the hundreds thousands of men in billets, or huts, or barracks at home, provisio for elementary decency and cleanliness may reasonably be demand —at the Army's expense.
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I was one of some thirty to forty "friends of Nansen" who met at dinner at the British-Norwegian Institute last Saturday to commemorate the great explorer's birthday and to form a Nansen Club, designed to promote by every means practicable the ideals, political, social and humanitarian, for which he cease- lessly and so splendidly laboured. Norway was represented, among others, by her Foreign Minister, the President of the Bank of Norway and Dr. Worm-Muller, one of Nansen's closest friends, who, I am glad to know, is filling alb obvious gap by writing an adequate life of Norway's greatest man. Most of the British present were men who, like Mr. Philip Noel Baker, M.P., Mr. St. George Saunders, Mr. Thomas Lodge, and Mr. Gorvin, had worked in close association with Nansen in Russia, at Geneva, or elsewhere. There is nothing the world will need more when the guns cease than men, or even one man, with the vision, the courage, the resolution. the simplicity and the limitless humanity of Fridtjof Nansen. arid it is well that an organisation should exist to call public attention to those principles which Nansen embodied in his own personality as hardly any other leader of thought and action in any country did.
Arcs.
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