A SPECTATOR 'S NOTEBOOK

GERMANS who are writing to the papers to urge that the crime of the mass-murder of the Jews shall be laid at the door, not of Germans as such but of the Nazis, are raising one of the more difficult questions that will fall to be decided when the war ends. Obviously no sort of responsibility can attach to German refugees in this country. They have the most complete and convincing of alibis. But Germany is waging a national war, under a govern- ment which Germans allowed to instal itself in power, and which they supported with considerable solidarity as long as victories were being won. Nothing was more distressing in the years before the war than to see many Gzrrnans who had habitually written and spoken on Liberal lines ranging themselves unhesitatingly behind Hitler as unqualified nationalists. When the day of reckoning comes there will, of course, be a sauve qui peut from the Nazi Party, everyone who does not happen to be called Hitler or Himmler or Goering protesting passionately that anything they did they did under orders and utterly against all their desires and instincts. It is hardly possible to formulate in detail measures for dealing with that situation, but the broad principle that a nation which fights a war as a nation must suffer the consequences of defeat as a nation holds good. Meanwhile every effort must be made to accumulate reliable evidence against guilty individuals. The Polish, Czech and other governments have been diligent to some purpose in that direction.

* * * * There has been considerable uncertainty as to which Minister should answer questions about " Sulgrave University " in the House of Commons. Mr. Eden, Sir Kingsley Wood and Sir John Anderson have all had a turn. But now all doubts should be resolved. The university (like the Oxford Group Movement) has become a company, and as such is answerable to the Board of Trade. I trust Mr. Dalton will rise to the height of his responsibilities. The following are brief particulars of the very recent registration, taken textually from Jordan's Report: • COMPANY INCORPORATED OUTSIDE GREAT BRITAIN WHICH HAS ESTABLISHED A PLACE OF BUSINESS WITHIN GREAT BRITAIN

UNIVERSITY OF SULGRAVE AND FEDERATED COLLEGES INCORPORATED (F.3663). Panics filed Dec. 15 1942. Brit add: Farthinghoe Rectory, Brackley, Northants. Regd. in Delaware, U.S.A., on July 21, 1942, to promote understanding of ideologies which obtain amongst English-speaking peoples: to organise and maintain an International University etc.

Nom. cap: " Membership Corporation," not for profit, and having no capital stock.

Name of person authorised to accept service:

E. G. Frost, Stafford House, Norfolk St., W.C.2 (solr.) Farthinghoe Rectory, which figures as the British address of the university, is, it may be recalled, the abode of the Rev. S. E. P. Needham, whose academic qualifications as given in Crockford are confined to passage through Lichfield Theological College, but who was Registrar of the Intercollegiate University, British division, and is described as M.A. and D.D. of that lately deceased institution. Has the Bishop of Peterborough, I wonder, approved the installa- tion of the " University of Sulgrave" in a rectory in his diocese?

To those, and they are many, who find citations of Tennyson's "nations' aery navies battling in the central blue" a little tiring, I would commend the peroration of a speech by Mr. R. D. Perkins in the House of Commons last week—the more so as it will other- wise lie buried and unknown in Hansard. If only, said the Mem- ber for Stroud, the Secretary for Air and the Air Council "had one tiny particle of the foresight of that great and ancient poet Thomas Gray, who zos years ago prophesied the future of British civil aviation. He said:

' The time will come when thou shalt lift thine eyes To watch the long-drawn battle in the skies, While aged peasants, too amazed for words, Stare at the flying fleet of wondrous birds. England, so long Mistress of the sea, Where wind and waves confess her Sovereignty, Her ancient traditions yet on high she bore And reigned the Sovereign of the conquered air.' "

This, indeed, is prescience. But whose? I can find no trace of

the lines in Gosse's edition of Gray's poems, or in a concordance of the poems which a diligent American has produced. Was it Gray?

* * Lord Brabazon of Tara knows a great deal about flying—much more than most dramatic critics do. It is not a subject on which

most of them would pit their views against his. Whether he knows more about drama than most dramatic critics do—and what his qualifications are for writing in the Daily Telegraph, " even assuming that the critics are nearly always wrong, I am at a loss to understand their gross misconception of this witty, moving and

important play "—is another matter. The play in question is Mr. Beverley Baxter's " It Happened in September," which is to be withdrawn on Saturday after 19 performances at the St. James' Theatre. Lord Brabazon may, of course, be right, and the critics, or the great bulk of them, wrong. Who shall decide? But the amateur on the professionals seems pontifical rather to excess.

* * * * It is a nice question whether perverse or provocative is the adjective more appropriate to the decision that soldiers must not be encouraged, through the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, to discuss the Beveridge Report till Parliament has talked about it for three days. Everyone else in the country is discussing the report,

and ought to be. We have today a citizen army consisting of men every one of whom, and their families, will be vitally affected by the proposals in the report if they are adopted, and who have unlimited democratic rights to decide by their votes at an election whether the proposals shall be adopted or not. If there is one thing that ought to be the supreme desire of everyone it is that the Army shall discuss the Beveridge Report as soon as possible, as long as possible, and as exhaustively as possible. Where does the in- credibly obscurantist decision to the contrary come from?

* * * * I offer an admiring salute to Mr. Donald McCullough for one of his obiter dicta during the Brains Trust entertainment last Tuesday. After the question whether, and if so why, punning was the lowest form of wit, had been answered with some austerity, the question- master summed up with the observation, "it is obvious that the general view is contrapuntal." The part Dr. Malcolm Sargent had taken in the discussion made the verdict the more pointed—or