MR. JOHN GORDON'S familiar brand of hysteria was, I felt,
overdone last Sunday. Mr. P. G. Wodehouse, it appears, had made a witty remark about the Daily Express, and wit being anathema to Mr. Gordon, he took exception to it. So he dragged up Mr. Wodehouse's broadcasts on the German radio at the beginning of the war. Of course, the broadcasts were a grievous folly; but Mr. Gordon implies—indeed, says—that they were made as payment for soft treatment by the Nazis. Unfortunately Mr. Gordon, who has never had an exaggerated respect for mere facts, slips rather. He claims that the broadcasts told 'how nice the Nazis really were. But how dirty the Belgians. How filthy the French.' Alas, there is only one sentence in the broadcasts, which were published in Encounter, about the Belgians—an oblique reference to the state of the latrines in one of the prisons the Germans put Mr. Wodehouse in. Moreover, the French come very well out of the talks, and the Germans, on the whole, badly. And Mr. Gordon, at this remove, worse.
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