A SPECTATOR 'S NOTEBOOK A ND what of Adolf Hitler, where
is he? That question can be read as prose or verse, and if anyone desires to answer it in the latter medium I see no objection. Mine the low level, and on that level I repeat the question. Where is Hitler and why is he so obdurately silent? If ever the German people needed heartening it is now—after the terrific Ruhr bombardments, after the invasion of Sicily, after the initial, at any rate the initial, failure of the offensive in Russia,—and where should heartening come from if not from the leader's lips. Imagine Roosevelt or Churchill silent at such a juncture. That Hitler was being eclipsed by the generals has been evident for some time, but he is now, so far as the public is con- cerned, being eclipsed by Goebbels. So, for that matter, is Goering, who is said to have been seriously ill as the result of resorting to a too drastic cure of alcoholism. It is Goebbels who goes to inspect the ruin in the Ruhr on which Goering swore the enemy would never drop a bomb, it is Goebbels who initiates the new policy of facing facts in all their starkness, with Admiral Luetzow lending a hand where the navy is concerned and General Dittmar stressing the Allies' overwhelming superiority on land and still more in the air. Obviously, if that role is to be the fashion, it cannot be played by Hitler. The " Stalingrad will fall, you can be sure of that," note chimes ill with the situation any German speaker has to face today. And some of Hitler's declarations on the U-boat campaign would be worth resurrecting now. If the prolonged silence is to be broken, and cannot be broken in celebration of German success by land or sea, it will be singularly interesting to see what the effect of breaking it is.
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The news of the Sicilian expedition sent me back to two historians, one Thucydides, the other Winston Churchill. Within the next few days Allied troops will be fighting over every inch of the ground described in such familiar detail in Thucydides' Seventh Book. The central point of that notable piece of historical writing was, of course, the siege of Syracuse by the Athenians under Nicias, and if a siege had been necessary this time, all the old names—Plemmyrium, Ortygia, Epipolae, Labdalum—might have become as familiar to newspaper readers in the twentieth century A.D. as they were to students of the Greek historian in the fifth century B.c. (I noticed, incidentally, in turning over the latter's pages, that in 424 B.c. " Embassies from all the other Sicilian cities assembled at Gela " to try to bridge their various differences.) The later historian, in his vivid description of " The Battle of the Beaches," was concerned with Gallipoli, not Sicily, but his essentially Thucydidean words might (had the Allies of 1943 encountered rather fiercer resistance than they did) have applied as well to the events of July toth and 11th. For example:
" The unique character of the operations, the extraordinary amphibious spectacle, the degree of swiftly fatal hazards to which both armies were simultaneously exposed, the supreme issues
at stake, the intensely fierce resolves of the soldiers to gain a victory, the consequences of Which were comprehended in every
rank—all constitute an episode which history will long discuss." Thucydides was the historian, Churchill was both the architect and the historian, of expeditions that failed. If the author of World Crisis lives to write—what? World Climax?—it will be, we can believe, as architect and historian of an expedition that brilliantly succeeded.
A few weeks ago I recorded my perplexity about the varying estimates of the number of the United Nations. The new issue of that invaluable publication, The Statesman's Year-Book (Macmillan, 3os.), settles the question by speaking of Great Britain " and its - 31 Allies " ; I accept that, though 48 United Nations are said to have taken part in the Hot Springs Conference. This is the Year-Book's eightieth year of publication (I once bought for twopence, and still possess, the fifteenth issue, in which Prince Otto von Bismarck- Schiinhausen figures as Chancellor of the German Empire, Benjamin Earl of Beaconsfield as Prime Minister of Great Britain, Marshal MacMahon as President of the French Republic and R. B. Hayes as President of the United States), and it is remarkable in having had only three editors during that period. It is significant that one of the features of the new volume is the inclusion of much additional information about Soviet Russia, including an instructive and sug- gestive map of strategic railways, many of them new, from the Finnish frontier to Vladivostok
* * * * The letter in The Times from Mr. George Muff, Labour member for Hull East, paying a glowing tribute to Eton and other public schools which he has just visited, comes near being epoch-making in a small way, as the subsequent correspondence it has prompted indicates. But the most notable thing about Mr. Muff's letter was the letter itself. Mr. Muff was not at a public school, nor at any school much, for he started the active business of life as a doffer in a spinning-mill at the age of ten, fifty-six years ago now. But he has learnt somewhere and somehow to write with real distinction - to the extent of two-thirds of a Times column. Public school educa- tion may have all the virtues Mr. Muff recognises in it, but it rarely develops the -gift of clear and forcible expression as doffing in a spinning-mill evidently does. (My own education, it is proper to admit, never taught me what a doffer was. But see dictionary.) * * * *
Curious things happen to books. A few days ago I saw in a second-hand bookseller's window four volumes of Froude's Carlyle, substantial and rather stately tomes, apparently in good condition. The price being within my limited reach, I acquired them, and found that the whole four were completely uncut ; no one had so much as tried to read them. The publication date was 1882. What had books like these been doing for sixty-one years? Did some person of wealth, more anxious to profess erudition than to possess it, purchase them merely to make a show on his shelves, not troubling even to stick his bookplate, or inscribe his name, in thorn? It matters little. The books look extremely satisfactory where they are and they will not stay uncut long_ But I wish I had their life-history.
* * * * There will be very general sorrow at the sudden death of Major A. J. C. Freshwater, secretary of the League of Nations Union since 1938 and deputy-secretary for 17 years before that. The Union still maintains its vitality—it has just -issued a considered statement on the matters which in the changed circumstances of the world may be held to fall within its competence—and Major Freshwater will be gravely missed. He was competent, energetic, unassuming and widely popular. An unmistakable northcountryman, he was an old Manchester Grammar School boy and for some time chairman of the London Old Mancunians' Association. JANus.
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