BEHIND THE GERMAN FRONT
IT is fortunate that the articles on Germany contributed by Mr. Oswald Garrison Villard to the Daily Tele- graph, The Spectator and other papers in the course of last month have been republished in book form (Con- stable, 2S. 6d. and 3s. 6d.), for they present a more adequate and, it is reasonable to conclude, a more accu- rate picture of conditions behind the German front than ordinary readers can obtain from any other source. Many allowances must no doubt be made. Mr. Villard is only a single witness—competent, conscientious, experienced, but necessarily basing himself largely on his own per- sonal contacts and seeing what he sees from his own particular point of view. Another writer, equally ex- perienced, conscientious and competent, might bring back a report differing sensibly on subsidiary points though probably not on essentials. Any such estimate as Mr. Villard has given must be checked, if need be cor- rected, in the light of other evidence gleaned from the daily messages of neutral journalists in Berlin, British and neutral official statements, and other like sources. But the fact that Mr. Villard when he wrote was the only American journalist to have spent any length of time in both Britain and Germany since the war began, and the scrupulous objectivity by which his undisguised sym- pathy for the Allies is kept in check, give the conclusions he does reach a peculiar value.
The chief service he renders is in dispelling illusions. We know exactly what we most desire to hear about Germany—that popular discontent is growing to dan- gerous dimensions, that there are rifts in the Nazi inner circles, rifts between the party leaders and the army, rifts between the party leaders and the great industrialists, rifts between the party leaders and the churches, grave and menacing disaffection in Czecho-Slovakia and Austria. Mr. Villard tells us none of these things. He tells what he saw, and he did not see that. Discontent and divisions do exist, particularly among the workers—he says he met no too per cent. Nazi outside official and army circles,—but grumbling, he reminds us, is a pre- rogative of Germans and there can be much more of it yet before Herr Hitler need be anxious ; in any case, there is no alternative leader for the workers to follow. War indeed inevitably unites a nation for a time, and it is doing that in Germany still ; reverses might work the other way at once, but there have been no reverses yet. On the contrary, confidence in military superiority is universal, though doubts about Germany's powers of economic endurance are heard. Not only Germans, but American and other neutral observers, are satisfied that so far as food and raw materials go Germany can hold on, pain- fully but not impossibly, for two years or more. (This estimate may need revision in the case of petrol.) The articles on Germany proper end on a salutary note of warning, for the writer is concerned lest the British people should fail to realise the profound gravity of the situation with which they are confronted.
Such words are needed. Nothing could be more fatal than to underrate the power of Germany and the resolve of her rulers to inflict defeat on Great Britain at any cost by any means. A sober survey of all the factors justifies the confidence that they will not succeed, but the vastest military machine ever constructed in all history will not itself be broken without a struggle so cataclysmic that the mind shrinks involuntarily from computing what fragments of civilisation will be left surviving. We have not forgotten the last war, and it is well we should not. We may have to face carnage as terrible as in the Passchendaele autumn and days as critical as in the 1918 offensive, together with air war- fare on a scale for which no semblance of a precedent exists. That has been the prospect from the first. The cost was counted before the resolve to resist Herr Hitler was taken. There is no faltering, nor will there be, but the strange course the war has taken has had psycholo- gical effects that are not altogether good. It is right that we should go about our business undeterred by alarm at what may be in store, but calamitously wrong to imagine that what has not happened in the first three months may never happen at all, and that the war means no more than black-outs and butter-rations. There is every reason to believe that the Germans are projecting an attack on this country by land, sea and air on an unpre- cedented scale. We shall await it not indeed unper- turbed—no sane man could do that—but undismayed and sure of final victory. But if the respite still remain- ing can be employed to shorten the struggle by a month or a week or a day it will be a crime not to use it so.
That is why the question of peace principles remains supremely important. There is little to be said for the now fashionable term peace-offensive, for peace-aims are no mere bargaining-counters in a diplomatic game. But the term does serve to emphasise the psychological value of demonstrating the justice and moderation of our pur- pose. The whole vast power of the German propa- ganda machine is directed to disseminating the lie that Great Britain's dominant aim is the destruction of Ger- many. So far as the German people can be convinced of that they will remain united behind Herr Hitler. So far as the Allies can explode the lie, and secure the penetration into the German mind of such declarations of aims as the Prime Minister made in his last broad- cast speech, the indispensable rift will be opened be- tween those reasonable elements which seek only the security of Germany in an ordered Europe, and the Nazi oligarchy bent not on German equality in Europe but on ruthless domination. Not a single but a double process is involved. Before the war ends there will be many peace-feelers thrown out from both German and neutral sources. Some may be genuine, some mere subtle strategy. Nothing would suit Herr Hitler better, or enable him to rally his people more effectively, than for superficially specious peace terms to be suggested and for the Allies to reject them out of hand. We must not fall into that obvious trap.
On that Mr. Villard's conclusions have some bearing. He found his financial and business friends in Germany desperately concerned for peace but not knowing how to get it. And he adds that a large section of German diplomatists and Foreign Office officials would be the happiest men in Germany if they heard that the Allies were willing to discuss terms of peace based on a small independent Czech State and a Polish State without Danzig and the Corridor. The Allies might or might not consent to discuss such terms; that would depend on what other proposals accompanied them. But what is essential is that any response made to any proposals that merit response at all should be not negative but constructive, indicating what in them we can accept, what we cannot and why, and what amendments are required. In that way we can hope to make a gradual impression on the German people ; a blank negative would make priceless propaganda for Herr Hitler and the extremists. At the same time the justice and moder- ation of our own aims must be ceaselessly demonstrated. They involve no break-up of Germany, no dictation of her form of government, no restraint on her sovereignty that we do not accept on our own, no " new Versailles," as Germans clamant against the alleged in- justice of what was broadly a just peace put it. Nothing could be better than the statement of aims in the Prime Minister's broadcast, most particularly his picture of the new Europe of our desires, a Europe in which Ger- many would necessarily hold an equal place. That Germany has made no response to that is not a reason why we should never make a response, however circum- spect, to any apparently serious advances from Germany. Only by open discussion, sooner or later, can " these days that try men's souls be shortened.
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