`HISTORY,' the Sunday Times tells us, 'will record whether, on
the ascent to the summit, Viscount Montgomery's personal mission to Moscow has been the decisive guidance of a pathfinder or the distracting riddle of a Yeti's spoor.' I have a mild suspicion that history will record nothing about his mission one way or the other—any more than the Sunday Times would have done if Lord Montgomery. had written about what he did in Russia for, say, the Observer. His first article on his talks with Khrushchev is typical of his Late Headmaster period : he talks with the keenness of a man who is ordinarily con- cerned only that the eleven should put up a good show in school cricket matches, but who occasionally likes to give the chaps a good, straight-from-the-shoulder pi-jaw, full of the kind of robust good sense they do not get from the padre. The people who suffer if war comes, Lord Montgomery tells us, are 'the ordinary people, the common man, the man in the street, the children'; and he goes on to provide his solution to the world's ills. 'Let both blocs, East and West, co-operate to extinguish all the sparks
which could possibly light a fire which might result in a third world war.' Not content with printing these opinions as their main leader-page
article, the Sunday Times gave over both its front- page lead and its editorial to a puff for them.
Something reminds me of Shaw's verdict on the
Shakespeare of Cymbeline, with 'his unbearable platitudes, his pretentious reduction of the
subtlest problems of life to commonplaces against which a polytechnic debating club would revolt, his incredible unsuggestiveness, his sen- tentious combination of ready reflection with complete intellectual sterility, and his consequent incapacity for getting out of the depth of even the most ignorant audience.'
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