A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK I HAVE been making some enquiry,Iit„ quarters that
ought to be well-informed, about what is happening to the Luftwaffe, which at present seems to be .completely in eclipse on every front. In the east the Russians have now definitely a superiority in the air, partly, as I said last week, because so large a proportion of German fighters has been diverted to the west. Raids on this country are at present negligible. In Sicily German machines were practically driven from the sky, and at Salerno, after one difficult phase when the Allies had no airfields within effective fighter-range, exactly the same thing has happened. This needs a good deal of explanation, and I have found no one who professes to be able to explain it adequately. The suspicion that there is something sinister behind this, that the Luftwaffe chiefs have something up their sleeves, is not taken sericus.:y. The assumption is that, with r,000 miles of eastern front to cover, as well as one existing southern front and the prospect of others, to say nothing of Norway and France and the Low Countries, the Luftwaffe is stretched beyond its strength. There is also tt•: possibility—which it is tempting to exaggerate—that to a shortage of machines there may have to be added a shortage of oil. That would be the best news of all, for thanks to the attacks on synthetic oil-plants and on Ploesti any existing shortage must rapidly grow more acute. But nothing of the kind can be safely counted on at present. It is more likely that Goering is nursing a substantial central reserve somewhere in Germapy, and that its weight may be sharpy felt somewhere some day.
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We hear a good deal one way and another about what the men in the Army will do and want to do when they get home. It mostly takes the form of assertions about the men, not by the men ; I always mistrust the more dogmatic of them. Here is a voice from the Middle East, and I can't help thinking it represents a good many other voices. It is part of a private letter. " S. talks about the bell-ringing at your end after the Tunisian victory ; the bells of Great St. Mary's must have delighted C. At least the children have so many things to look forward to when at last this is over. As for me, I look forward to quiet and domestic things: a coal fire and a teapot and- a china cup, toast, bridge, beer, darts, and The Times at breakfast in a pub on Dartmoor. They are things, of course, to which memory holds the door. And my generation is, or will be, too old, too tired and too glad to be home to bother with another and different kind of struggle—this ` building a new world,' which politicians and economists proclaim so glibly. But what we can and will do is to create the conditions in which a new world may be built. C.'s generation will enter it and help to build it." There is something to think about here. I fancy, all the same, that the fighting men, when they are readjusted and rested, will feel that if there is " building" to be done, it is their. job to take a hand in it. •
* * * * Democracy with all its virtues has one thoroughly bad habit—to give a public man, justly or unjustly, a bad name as result of some alleged lapse and see that it sticks to him for ever. A conspicuous example of that—so far as certain partisan sulk ns of the Press and public are concerned—is Sir Samuel Hoare, of whom nothing good is ever believed or admitted because of the tentative plan for the ending of the Italo-Abyssinian war which he framed with the French Foreign Minister in 1935 ; since the Foreign Minister in question was Laval, it is, of course, convenient to attribute to Sir Samuel
some at least of the qualities which the French snake has since revealed. These reflections are prompted by the admirable speech the British Ambassador at Madrid delivered at Chelsea % Monday. Much might be said about it, but I can only touch on two points here. One is Sir Samuel Hoare's insistence that " the danger to Europe is not Russian influence but Russian isolation" ; the other his picture of a new free Europe, in which—particularly in this country—the Church, capital, labour, the professions, the Press and, above all, the universities would make their specific contributions to the European civilisation of the future. Sir Samuel Hoare has now been at Madrid for more than three years. Some day, no doubt, enough will be told of his difficulties and his achievements to convince even his critics that he has been a conspicuous success there. His first concern, of course, was to keep Spain out of the war. No one would claim that he had done that single-handed, but no one who knows the facts can doubt that the position he has built up at Madrid had a great deal to do with Franco's refusal to help
Hitler—particularly when the Allies landed in North Africa.
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These are difficult days for the Swiss merchant navy. It is not generally realised, I fancy, that Switzerland possesses a mer- chant navy. But it does ; I think I may have mentioned it here before. Switzerland is far from self-supporting. Some imports from oversea are essential to it. So early in the war it bought ships, mostly from Greece, and arranged with Italy to allow them to use the port of Genoa, when the goods they brought were trans- ported by train to Switzerland. Even if Germany, now in posses- sion of Genoa, is ready to continue that arrangement (which no doubt depends on what quid pro quo she can exact) Genoa is not likely to be a very healthy harbour for some time to come. Nor is any
other port convenient to the Swiss. * * * * The announcement that the National Stud is to be transferred from Kildare, in Southern Ireland, to Gillingham, in Dorset, is a symptom that concerns more than bloodstock. The National Stud is not an extensive enterprise; but its removal will have, within limits, adverse financial consequences for Eire. And other removals before or after the end of the war are probable. It is one thing for British concerns to be established in a British Dominion with the temperament of, say, Canada, and quite another when it is a question of a small defenceless country as incalculable in its policy and intentions as Eire. * - * * *
I should be grateful if any reader experienced in the handling of poltergeists could assist in the matter of one which has installed itself in The Spectator's printing-works, fired with a grim resolve that Mr. Wendell Willkie's book One World shall not be called One World. In a paragraph in this column three weeks ago I wrote of One World; it was printed Our World. Last week I referred to the book again, and, schooled by experience, watched particularly to see that the title was correct in proof. It was. But the poltergeist won. He saw to it that Our World appeared in the paper. It is a
disturbing situation, in which anything seems possible. * * * * The reference to "Lake Mackinac," on the other hand, instead of Mackinac Island was due not to a poltergeist but to sheer aberration, the result of excessive study of maps of Lakes Michigan and Huron in search for the island. JaNus.
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