A SPECTATOR 'S NOTEBOOK
FIND from various recent conversations that the impression still University Press in 1939. The subject is too complicated to go into at length here, but two or three important considerations may be noted. There was an acute shipping shortage at the end of 1918 owing to the wholesale sinkings by German submarines ; Germany, Though she had gold, boggled at the financial arrangements to provide payment for food sent to her ; and, it must be added, the Americans in insisting on scrapping as soon as possible organs like the Allied Maritime Transport Council, which were admirably adapted to deal with the food problem, several weeks got lost before new machinery was constructed to do the work. It is true that for good reasons the technical mechanism of the blockade continued in being, but • not true for a moment that Germany was starved. * * * *
I understand that the expected statement on Foreign Office reform is to be made next week, but I doubt whether it will follow the lines of the proposals put forward in two recent and important articles in The Times. The suggestion that there should be a Minister in general charge of all branches of foreign policy, with supervision over separate Ministries dealing respectively with diplo- matic, economic and" informational" contacts with foreign countries, would seem to remove the supreme Minister from the direct control over the Foreign Office. It would be surprising if that commended itself to Mr. Eden.
The death of Richard Hillary has sent me back to his book The Last Enemy—the only one he lived to write. Whether he would have reached the same high standard in another who can say? As it is, he will live in memory as the author of one of the outstanding books on the war. Passage after passage, as one re-reads it, is charged with a bitter poignancy, and the description of what Hillary suffered after his accident, when in operation after operation his burned face was being built into something new, makes it un- speakably tragic that after all that had been achieved by the surgeon with such skill, and borne by the airman with such courage, death should so swiftly and finally obliterate it. Hillary ended his book with the reflection that if he could not fly again he could do one thing—write. "If I could do this thing, could tell a little of the lives of these men, I would have justified, at least in some measure, my right to fellowship with my dead, and to the friendship of those with courage and steadfastness who were still living, and who would go on fighting until the ideals for which their comrades had died were stamped for ever on the future of civilisation." He did write. He wrote the book of which these sentences are the concluding words. And he did fly again after all for a few months. Last October I heard him speak at a luncheon in London (I understand that what he said appears on a later page of this issue), when he talked little about flying, but suggestively, gropingly, about the heart of men, and about men in society. Such deaths drive deep into the consciousness realisation of what a price is being paid for victory.
* * I am not an assiduous concert-goer myself, but I am told that the increase in the demand for good music since the war is quite remarkable. Every Sunday afternoon in London now there are at least three orchestral concerts, and very often it is impossible to obtain a seat at any of them, except perhaps in some distant corner of the vast Albert Hall. If the Queen's Hall could be rebuilt it could be filled afternoon and evening, so extensive has the public demand for the best music become. It is unquestionably for the best that the demand exists ; for the more " classical " the programme, the larger the attendance. This phenomenon is not confined to London but is manifest throughout the country. The call on the Manchester Halle orchestra from neighbouring provincial towns is greater than can be comfortably met, and the new Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra is having the same experience. It is clear that an immense new public has found in good music a form of refreshment and recreation which good music alone supplies.
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Writing without the necessary references available, I was in- accurate in one or two points of detail in my paragraph last week about a letter to The Times signed F. S. T., in which the writer (subsequently revealed as Lord Baldwin) announced that he was making over a substantial sum of money to the Treasury. The letter appeared in 1919, not 1917, and it was not a third of the writer's income but a fifth of his estate that he thus gave to the Exchequer.
* * * * The degeneracy of Janus is a topic for which I could never decline to find space. Here, for my chastening, is a communication which I reproduce as received, from a not infrequent correspondent.
To "Janus," The Spectator.
Sza,—Your recent " Notebooks " are causing me anxiety and unhappiness.
Where is the genial gentleman and upright man of former weeks?
Who is this who upholds the shuffling into the game of war a card outside the pack in the murder of Mons. Darlan ; who is it who deplores courtesy and restraint between editors ; who is it who disdains an apposite derivation of the word " gremlins," those first cousins to the Devonshire pixies, and who prefers a far-fetched supposititious origin which is disgusting and which to those who have cultured, clean-thinking men amongst the officers of the Air Force is an insult?
It is not " Janus " as I have known him, unless indeed the hammer of war is proving the supposed diamond to be paste. I trust no: and think not.
But whatever, Sir, is the cause of these aberrations from sobriety. I beg you to re-nove it or desist from its influence.—Yours ver faithfully, THERZA WARLEY (Miss;. The Quab, Welsh Newton.
All my impulse is to don a hair-shirt, but that (I assume) is unobtainable without coupons. As to aberrations from sobriety, my critic, I feel, unduly flatters me in suggesting that I was ever a
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