THE CHILDREN OF EUROPE S111,—In your issue of September 4th
your valued contributor "Janus" raises some questions regarding Mr. Harold Nicolson's remarks in the previous issue about the blockade. Will you allow me to explain very briefly why it is that many people who do not deny that we must use the terrible weapon of the blockade, if the war is to be won and the occupied territories freed, nevertheless do not accept Mr. Nicolson's absolute refusal to consider any mitigation?
Mr. Nicolson writes that he knows it to be true that the Germans, "so far from providing these populations with food, are actually taking away from occupied countries food or food-producing labour for the needs of their own war." We must not overstate the case. That the Germans have taken away food m great quantities everyone knows ; but the Belgian authorities have stated that during 1941 Germany contributed 400,000 tons of bread grains to that country alone. Belgium, an industrial country, before the war imported 50 per cent, of her food, partly from the Belgian Congo, and the German supplies represented only a part of this. In an important article from the correspondent on the German frontier in The Times of May 5th it was stated that there are now no longer any reserves in Europe on which the Axis can draw to supplement its own inadequate production. The continental area occupied by Germany has been consuming more than it produces. It is clear, there- fore, that partly owing to blockade Germany cannot any longer feed the occupied countries adequately, even if she were willing to do so. This has been admitted by H.M. Government in giving permission for food- stuffs from Canada to pass through the blockade to relieve the famine ill Greece, and control by the International Red Cross and the Greek Red Cross has been accepted. The situation in Belgium has not yet reached the stage of actual widespread famine, but the conditions, especially in urban Belgium and in parts of France, are similar to those in post-war Vienna, a state of things in which nothing less than the survival of the next generation is at stake. I hope that Mi. Nicolson does not feel too secure about his argument that the children who endured the blockade during and after the last war were the tough young men who endured the Russian winter and the rigours of the Western Desert. It might equally well be argued, as Vry Nederland does (November 29th, 1941), that Hitler recruited his S.A. men "from the pale children born after 1914 and 1915."
A Famine Relief Committee has been formed under the chairman- ship of the Bishop of Chichester, with an office at 67 Brook Street, London, W. i. It is not asking for large imports of food into enemy occupied countries. It is asking our own Government to permit the entry of powdered milk and certain milk products, together with vitamins, into the most seriously affected of the occupied countries, in order to relieve the worst dangers of famine for the child population of these countries. The International Red Cross have categorically stated that Germany has kept her promises not to remove for the benefit of occupy- ing troops any material sent for the relief of needy populations. If she did so the arrangements would be cancelled. Moreover, the type of material which we propose might be sent is not six.. as Germany can supply, so that it cannot be argued that by this action we relieve her of a burden which she ought to bear. We do not think that the British Government is unmindful of these arguments, or that it believes that a promise of plenty of food immediately the enemy has been cleared out is .wholly satisfactory. For, as the well-known Belgian writer, M. EmileCammaerts, has said: "If our children die before us they will take with them the very object for which we are fighting—a free Belgium for the next generation. What is the use of waging a war of liberation if there is nothing left to liberate? Why accumulate these vast stores of food if there is no one left to be fed?" If this is an exaggeration, it is an exaggeration of something that is true and that we must not forget.
The Nazis may plaster Brussels with posters showing the towering ogre Churchill standing over a fainting woman and her starving children, but the Belgians know to whom they owe their sufferings. Because this is so we dare not presume upon it. Even a small alleviation of their misery, and especially any help for their children, must mean a strengthen- ing of courage and renewal of constancy. Policy would seem to agree with what compassion enjoins. May I add that the committee to which I have referred consists in the main of representatives of the Churches, possesses a qualified technical committee, and began its work under the special patronage of the Archbishop of Canterbury and Cardinal Hinsley?
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