MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
DURING the miserable days of appeasement I used at public meetings to be much heckled by Buchmanites, Jehovah's Witnesses and apostles of the Peace Pledge Union. I was trying at the time to warn people that the Germans, the Italians and the Japanese were arming rapidly and well with the intention of seizing by force the possessions of Great Britain and France. The term most frequently employed by my critics was that of "war-monger "—a composite word employed at the time by Dr. Goebbels and his English assistants to signify one who dealt or trafficked in war. I used to point out to my hecklers that on the same method one should rightly dub a dentist "a tooth-ache-monger," an oculist "a blindness- monger," or an aurist "a deafness-monger." They did not care for this rejoinder, and would either leave the hall with that springing youthful gait adopted in moments of difficulty by the morally superior, or else sit there with a smile of sweet forgiveness upon their lips. Sometimes, however, they would press the argument further. Still wearing their sweet smile, they would rise in their places and ask me "only one question," namely, "Do you, or do you not, consider war the greatest of human ills?" " No," I would answer, "there is an even greater ill, namely, surrender to evil." That, on most occasions, went down well enough. But sometimes they would frame their question in a more trenchant form. "Do you," they would ask with loving patience, "do you consider war a wicked thing?" "Yes," I would answer. "Then why commit it?" they would rejoin. My only reply to this was to ask them a question in my turn. "Do you," I would ask, "consider cancer a terrible affliction?" "Yes," they would reply uncertainly. "Then why have it?" I would ask. I do not think the audience understood these dialectics.
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I do not mind scoring off the Buchmanites, since they have for- feited my sympathy by assuming as their trade-name (well knowing that such action would cause offence to many decent people), the name of my revered University. I do not claim that Oxford has any copyright in its min title, but I do feel that a movement which without justification adopts a name carrying with it such serious intellectual and spiritual associations is acting as ingeniously as I should be acting were I to publish a Portuguese dictionary and call it the "Oxford Dictionary of the Portuguese Language." No, I do not mind scoring off the Buchmanites, since by this deliberate act of insincerity they have, to my mind at least, forfeited the right to be regarded as completely sincere. I have quite different feelings about the Peace Pledge Union. I respect their sincerity and well know that they are today prepared to suffer for their errors and to maintain their views. I only hope that they will not be induced by the difficulties of their present position to pursue their past activities under a new disguise. I have received recently a pitiful bundle of postcards from constituents urging me to support a move- ment to "lift the blockade which is causing unutterable hardship to women and children on the Continent." These postcards, for the most part, carry no addresses, are written in the same hand, and differ only from each other in the pathetic signatures which they bear. They indicate that some movement is on foot calculated to diminish the pressure which we are today able to impose upon our enemies. The sham virtue, the false logic of this appeal suggests a cunning inspiration. I earnestly hope that the former apostles of the Peace Pledge Union will not lend themselves to this device.
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When I was living in Germany at the time of the Weimar Republic, at a time when Hitler was still regarded by all serious Germans as a rather comic little agitator who had shot his bolt, I was impressed by the deep wound still festering in German opinion as a result of the blockade. Reasonable Germans would speak to me as follows : "We accept," they would say, "that we were beaten in the war. We fought magnificently during four long years, and we are not ashamed of having been conquered by a world in arms against us. We have no rancour and no desire for revenge. But there is one thing that we can never forgive or forget. By your blockade you destroyed a whole generation. The children who were born between 1914 and 1918 will all their lives be physical wrecks." I must confess that I did not observe any signs of wreckage among the stout little German boys and girls whom I saw around me. I was assured, however, that this was a deceptive impression. I was assured that one of the greatest of our English doctors (it may have been Lord Horder or it may have been Lord Dawson of Penn) had himself examined many German boys of the war generation and had pro- nounced that 8o per cent, of them were suffering from the effects of malnutrition during the blockade. It is these weaklings who endured the Russian winter and the plagues of Egypt. Either our nutrition experts were incorrect in their diagnosis or else Hitler has discovered some super-vitamin which has restored to the war-generation the strength of which we robbed them during their infant years. But that is not the point. The point is analogous to that which formed the central point of the P.P.U. doctrine, namely, "No country, even in war, should adopt methods which lead to the starvation of non- combatants." I am not satisfied by evading this issue. It is no help to me to say, "But the Germans are trying to do exactly the same to us." It is no help to me to say, "But if that theory be correct, then we should abandon the bombing of all enemy or enemy- occupied territory for fear lest some women or children be killed." It is necessary to face the argument at its strongest point, which is this : "We do not ask that you should feed our enemies ; we ask only that, under neutral supervision and control, you should send food to preserve our own Allies from starvation." What is the answer to that formidable question?
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The stock answer, and it is a convincing answer, is as follows : "An occupying Power is responsible for the civilian population in the territories which he occupies. It is our responsibility, for instance, to see that the civilian population of Iran do not starve. At great inconvenience to ourselves we provide them with food. The Germans in the same way are responsible for providing food to the populations of Belgium, Norway, Holland and the rest. They are not fulfilling these responsibilities. So far from providing these populations with food, they are actually taking away from occupied countries food or food-producing labour for the needs of their own war. Were we to send in food to the occupied countries, the Germans would be able to take away from those countries even more food and labour than they do at present. Thus the relief of the starving populations of occupied Europe ultimately means the relief of Germany." I am myself satisfied with this answer, since I kpow it to be true. But there are many people who remain under the illusion that it is possible in modern warfare to make some distinction between combatants and non-combatants, as between food- stuffs and munitions of war. The Nazis starved their people from 1933 onwards, not because they had insufficiency of food in the country, but because they turned their fats into propellants ; when Goering talked about "guns and butter" he meant it literally.
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Nor is it fats alone which can be turned into munitions. A handful of wheat can provide enough alcohol to drive a lorry a mile or more ; from milk you can obtain nitro-glycerine ; from starches you can obtain acetone. Why, for instance, have the Germans robbed the French peasant of his wine? Not because they drink it them- selves, but because they use alcohol for war. There would be no question of starvation in Europe if Germany were to allow occupied Europe to produce the food which it can grow ; starvation exists because Germany takes the men from the fields and drives them into the factories and the forces ; because she takes a huge proportion of the food produced and turns it into war material. The purpose of our blockade is not to starve Europe, but to starve German war- production. That purpose mustebe pursued with unflinching ruth- lessness. And when Germany surrenders, as she will surrender, then we must maintain our own not unendurable food restrictions until those who now go hungry in Europe have been fully fed.
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