War in Our Time Is It Peace ? By Graham
Hutton. (Duckworth. 12s. 6d.) Zero Hour. By Richard Freund. (Methuen. 10s. 6d.) EUROPE'S disasters are the opportunity of journalists, of whom Mr. Graham Hutton and Mr. Richard Freund art the latest to describe the international situation. Is it Peace ? is difficult to read because written in a style of quite remarkable pomposity. It would be interesting to discover whit exactly is meant by such sentences as this : " Iirthe new democracies of Europe a certain momentum born of a desire to make their constitutions work provided a motive force for democracy." I should guess it was either meaningless or false, but it would be only a guess. Mr. Hutton also never uses a direct English expression when a foreign phrase will do ; his pages are packed with bneutes, panache,s, entraves, detentes, faits accomplis, La Glare; himself he describes as quelque peu economiste. He has a certain amount of historical information used irrelevantly to form what is called "a background " ; if it were omitted his book could, without loss, have been reduced by a half. Indeed, Mr. Hutton's writing 'reminds one irresistibly of Brichot's, of which it was said, La vulgarite de rhomme apparaisscrit a tout instant sous le pedantisme du kure.
Mr. Freund does not have these faults ; his book is easily and naturally written, and is an excellent survey of the international situation today. In Is it Peace ? if one survives the irritation provoked by its mannerism, one will find accurate accounts of the diplomatic problems and instruments of the last twenty years, accompanied by brief histories of these problems, often going back as far as Charlemagne or earlier. The histories are too brief to throw any light on the problems, and the method of treatment abstracts diplomacy from the forces which really determine it. Mr. Freund, on the other hand, takes diplomacy for what it is—the foreign policy of actual States, and thus it ceases to be an abstraction, and Mr. Freund is able to give illuminating accounts of the States which are the real factors at work. In points of detail also he is more trustworthy than Mr. Hutton ; thus he does not omit, as Mr. Hutton does, the chief difficulty of he new Soviet alliances—the question of passage for Soviet troops over Little Entente territories.
It is only natural, therefore, that Mr. Freimd's conclusions are more reasonable than Mr. Hutton's. Is it Peace? con- tains some acute criticism of the errors of French, and especi- ally British, policy, over the Geneva Protocol, Manchuria, Abyssinia, disarmament, Spain ; and Mr. Hutton emphasises, what is too often forgotten, the immense responsibility of Governments of the Right for the international situation today. The errors, according to Mr. Hutton himself, have been of one kind—the refusal to sacrifice immediate national interests and to assume and discharge obligations to a Euro- pean or international society. Having shown this, Mr. Hutton concludes that we had now better give up all obligations except the very narrowest. Taus, he thinks, we may for a
time buy peace for ourselves ; . only the Continent will be the scene of the isolated wars which will mark Germany's ascent to the hegemony of Europe, and we ourselves must then be ready to face a final struggle. .
This conclusion is, we fear, a wish-fulfilment; perhaps .the fashion in isolationism has distorted Mr. Hutton's thought, for his own book contains much of the evidence neces- sary to prove the conclusion false. Mr. Freund proves it even more clearly. His account, especially of Far and Middle Eastern Affairs, is superior to Mr. Hutton's, and from this, and his account of Europe, it seems probable that the result will be, not a series of small wars which we can avoid, but a general war in which we may be exposed to a threefold attack by the expansioni4 Powers. Mr. Freund avoids another common and fashionable mistake,, of which Mr. Hutton is guilty ; he does not insist on contrasting the democracies and what may be called the tyrannies. If we read either of these books with care, we see that both groups of States have followed very much the same interests in their foreign policy, both with lapses into grace, and one with more consistency and violence than the other. From both books also, though only one draws the logical conclusion, it seems that the only hope for peace is in the creation of an international control. The puzzle is why the democracies have not achieved it ; and the reason appears to be that international control is as incom- patible with the interests they have so far followed as it is with those of the dictatorships. GORONWY REES.
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