THE THIRD WEEK THE Prime Minister was wise in wasting
few words in the House of Commons on Wednesday on the speech Herr Hitler had delivered at Danzig the day before, for apart from abuse of Britain and a singularly crude attempt to divide the British and the French, the utterance contained nothing worth attention. Herr Hitler did indeed declare that he had no war-aims against Britain or France. That may be so, but he has deliberately and wantonly created a situation in which they are compelled to have war-aims against him, chief among them, as the Prime Minister rightly said, the restoration of Poland, the destruction of Hitlerism and the rebuilding of a stable international order for the prevention of war and the settlement of disputes by pacific means on a basis of justice. Nothing that has occurred in Poland or elsewhere can shake the resolve of the British and French nations to see that programme carried out.
In a week that has seen such sombre developments as the Russian invasion of Poland and the sinking of the ' Courageous ' the Prime Minister's sober and objective review of the general situation is of peculiar value. We need to see the war steadily and see it whole. It is true that as a military factor Poland has been almost obliterated, in spite of the epic defence of Warsaw and the certainty that guerrilla warfare will for some time continue on a scale sufficient to detain considerable German forces in the country. The ultimate aims of Russia are undisclosed, and Mr. Chamberlain acted prudently in suspending judgement on the situation her invasion of Poland has created. Moscow remains inscrutable. The Soviet papers, alone among the Press of the world, made no reference whatsoever to Herr Hitler's Danzig speech. What is clear is that sacro egoismo is as completely the controlling motive of Russian policy as it is of German, and that at an early date the two egoisms must inevitably clash.
But the Allies cannot base their calculations on that. Poland may give the Germans more trouble yet. Czecho- Slovakia, from which news of violent and extensive anti- German action was received on Wednesday, will be a permanent source of weakness. Within the Reich itself division may increase; the elimination of Goebbels and the arrest of Streicher have some significance ; the dis- covery that many captured German prisoners had British leaflets in their pockets shows the value of the R.A.F. flights. But all this at the present stage is incidental to the main conflict. There may be new alignments of forces on the Baltic seaboard or in the Balkans. The ultimate decision of one or two neutrals is still in doubt. But it will be on the Western Front that the issue will be decided, and those who express impatience at the absence of early achievements there do well to remember that what Germany needs is a lightning victory, and what she cannot face, either in the field of morale or of economics, is a war of attrition. If the Allied generals decide on the latter it is for the civilians to give them all support in their power by maintaining home defence, both active and passive, in the highest state of efficiency, even though the expected blows have not yet fallen.
