A SPECTATOR 'S NOTEBOOK
JMASARYK has written the condemnation of Clement Gott- wald wald in history for all time. In the long run his death may achieve for his country results that he would have thought it well worth dying to achieve. He has lived up to his great father's name and acted as his father would have had him act. Two Masaryks will stand enshrined in Czechoslovakia's annils—Jan had no son— and they will stand side by side. How long I had known Jan I cannot now remember ; it must gd back to very soon after the First World War. But one memory is keen—of a conversation he arranged for me with his father at Geneva some twenty or twenty-five years ago. Very few foreigners can have had so many friends. in this country as Masaryk. Thanks to his American mother he spoke English flawlessly ; thanks to his father his convictions were so unshakeably democratic that his sympathy with the British way of life was deep and instinctive. No man was ever a better companion. He saw the humorous side of everything, and was a master at con- veying what he saw—particularly if there was an opportunity for mimicry, at which he excelled. But underneath all that were deep convictions and a sincerity which was incapable of tolerating insin- cerity or hypocrisy or shams. It is all too easy to realise what these last days must have meant to him. A private message from him received in London since the coup shows that his end was no sudden or unpremeditated act ; he clearly saw no other way. Nothing, I imagine, except the closest family bereavement, could-hit Dr. Benes harder. The ties between him and the Masaryks were unique. Thomas Masaryk and Benes and Stefanik were the architects of Czechoslovak freedom in the First World War, and Stefanik was killed in an aeroplane accident. Masaryk became the first President and Benes, as Foreign Minister, his right-hand man. The older man regarded the younger as a son and as his obvious successor in the Presidency. That happened, and it was taken for granted that Jan Masaryk would succeed Benes. Now
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