A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
IT is a pity that, for quite intelligible reasons, the daily papers were unable to give more than quite brief reports of the Inter- national Youth Conference held in London last week-end, for it was the occasion for some quite important utterances—by Mr. Maisky on the North African offensive as a basis for the Second _ Front, by Sir Stafford Cripps on the post-war organisation of Europe, by Mr. Winant on the official American view that economic security and civil liberty are complementary necessities, and by President Benes on how to avoid last time's mistakes. The various Com- missions of the Conference, on the Armed Forces, Work and War Production, Faith, Health and Recreation, Education, and Science, produced reports which were not only valuable in themselves, but in their preparation involved a remarkable degree of co-operation, not only between nationals of different countries, but between both officers and men of the armed forces and civilians. The conference had its moving as well as its interesting moments. It has been the first important gathering during the war where " enemy " delegates have appeared on the same platform with serving members of the United Nations ; this was on the basis of their representing " demo- cratic groups supporting the United Nations." The appeal of the German delegate to his young compatriots in Germany was deeply impressive. So was the spectacle of the representatives of the youth of nearly thirty nations filing up to sign the Call to Action. The conference ended by setting up a World Youth Council as a .permanent body. This, and the establishment of a physical home for the movement in the shape of an International Youth Centre in London, may be the initiation of something really important.
* * • * * Mr. Wendell Willkie, who made a most admirable impression during his visit to this country last year, seems doing his best to alienate the friends he met here. His misrepresentation of a sentence in Mr. Churchill's Mansion House speech as meaning that Great Britain would hold on indefinitely to all she has can spring only from ignorance or perversity. The whole history of Britain in the last century and longer has been one of steady and patient education of dependencies for the responsibilities of successful independence. Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, India—the speed of whose advance in the last thirty years towards the full self- government that awaits her has been remarkable—Southern Rhodesia, and in a slightly different category, Iraq and Egypt, ate proof enough of that. But independence without education, severance that would mean inevitably administrative chaos and war, is a very different matter. Great Britain would be ill discharging her mission in the world if she accepted that doctrine and acted on it. * * * * Having felt some slight questionings about the wisdom of last Sunday's bell-ringing—as savouring a little of exuberance—I admit that the authorities were completely right. The sound of the peals from different villages ("Round all the shires they ring them, A happy noise to hear ") banished all doubts on the spot. The return of the bells must have made us all realise for the first time how much we have been missing, though if we had remembered our own poets—almost any one of them—we should have needed no reminder of what bells mean. Is it really a strategic necessity that they should still be silent? No one can pronounce an invasion- attempt impossible, but it is not today among the probabilities, and in any case church-bells are not the only mechanism of warning conceivable. One thing must be balanced against another, and the military authorities must, of course, decide. I would plead for reconsideration—and a verdict in favour of the bells.
I see that Lady Montgomery has been telling in an abbreviated form, or has been reported in an abbreviated form as telling, the story of General Montgomery's conversation with Mr. Churchill. The longer version, as it has reached me from more than one source, is substantially better. Some months ago the Prime Minister, when discussing with the then Commander-in-Chief, South-Eastern Command, the task to be assigned to him in Egypt, asked whether he was thoroughly fit physically. " Well, Sir," replied Montgomery, " I regularly take a cross-country run every morning. I neither drink nor smoke. "I count myself a hundred per cent, man." " Ah," replied the Prime Minister. " As for me, I am rather fully occupied : I haven't much time for cross-country running. I smoke a good deal. I don't very frequently refuse a drink. And I count myself a two hundred per cent. man."
* * * * At a moment when it seems possible to do so little for china, and everyone desires to do so much, it is satisfactory to learn of the work a Friends' Ambulance Unit contingent of some seventy men
is doing in Yunnan and on the Burma frontier, driving trucks on the Burma Road till it was closed, salvaging £120,000 worth of
medical supplies from Rangoon as the town was going up in flames, running up emergency hospitals in the jungle, and giving to thousands of wounded Chinese soldiers medical attention that they would otherwise not have received. There has been in the past year two deaths from typhus in China, and one from shell in Libya, but on the whole casualties have been light. * * * * I am not, and cannot well conceive myself as being, an astrologer, but the stars have their interest none the less. It was announced in The Times of last Saturday that a new star had been discovered
by observers both Wales and in Sweden. This is not a particu- larly common occurrence, but there was, in fact, a similar discovery
in 1918. On June 19th of that year Punch published a cartoon repre- senting the Kaiser scanning the heavens through a telescope, with a General in French uniform looking mi. The legend underneath ran: " KAISER : Ha! A new and brilliant star added to my constella- tion of the Eagle.'
" Fool: ' On the wane, I think.'
" (It is anticipated in astronomical circles that the new star, Nova Aquila, will shortly disappear)."
That was just under five months before November irth. As I say, I am not an astrologer, but —. After all, did not Sir William Watson write (in lines which Lord Fisher was never tired of quoting : " Time and the ocean and some fostering star In high cabal have made us what we are." * * My note last week on the acquisition of meaningless initials brings me a note on two academic applicants for exemption from certain services. One described himself as " B.A., Cambridge " ; it was found that he was a former Senior Wrangler and an F.R.S. The other wrote himself F.R.S.; here it turned out that a sibilant had been inadvertently omitted and that not the Royal Society but
the Royal Statistical Society was in question. lows.
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