What were these methods? Truthfulness in the first place. "
The situation," he began on May 29, 1940, " is even more serious than a week ago." It was. " There is no doubt," he warned them a year later, " that the coming months will be full of dangers." He never diminished the magnitude of German success. Coupled with this was unflinching confidence in ultimate victory. In his very first broadcast, the day before Great Britain declared war, he said to them :—" By the name which I bear I solemnly declare to you that we shall win the fight and that truth will prevail." " A year ago," he said on September 3, 194t, " France had ceased to exist, and England alone stood face to face with the greatest war-machine of all ages. . . . I asserted always that England would hold out and survive." But confidence is not enough to hold the attention of a despairing audience over five long years. It was in the minor shades that Masaryk showed himself so great a master of the micro- phone; in intimacy, in humour, in sympathy, in solace, in exhorta- tion, in defiance, in hope. Then came the hour of certitude and triumph—and on the Ides of March, that baleful anniversary, he was this year able to rejoice :—" Our peasants will once again plough on the White Mountain, but the German will for many years be synonymous with all that will not and must not ever be again."
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