BOOKS OF THE DAY

Disgrace Abounding (E. H. Carr) 451 Benjamin Franklin (D. W. Brogan) 452 Hermann Goering (Con O'Neill) The Defeat of Poverty (Honor Croome) 452 453 The Good Pagan's Failure (Edwyn Bevan) 454 Henri Beyle (Goronwy Rees)

456

Robert Laird Borden 458 Unchanging Prussia (Christopher Hobhouse) The Wild Asses (Christopher Sykes)

458

460

Fiction (Kate O'Brien) .

462 A CANDID COMMENTARY

By E. H. CARR THis book, Mr. Reed explains in his preface, is addressed principally to his compatriots. He avows in one place that he " no longer understands his country-people "; and it would occupy the whole space allotted to this review to enumerate all the things he does not like about them. He dislikes Bethnal Green ; but he equally dislikes the " leprous and scabrous landscape " presented by the new housing estates and the endless procession of cars on the road to Margate and Ramsgate. He dislikes most members of the Cabinet for being peers, or sons of peers, or husbands of daughters of peers. But he does not seem to like the Prime Minister any better for being none of these things. He dislikes the Labour Party and " the little pansy voices " which say " Good-naight " on behalf of the B.B.C. He dislikes the fact that England is not in Europe, and that there is no English equivalent for the verb bummeln or for the thing it represents. He disliked The Times enough to resign from its service, though oddly enough it is one of the few English institutions which he treats with some degree of respect.

Most of all, Mr. Reed dislikes the Old School Tie. He warns us at the start that he is going to be a bit of a bore on this subject ; and he keeps his word. Like other bright young things, Mr. Reed rather belatedly discovered Marx, and the discovery went to his head. He has become firmly convinced that the only reason why anyone is appointed to any position of responsibility and influence in Great Britain is that he was in the same house as somebody else at Eton. Current issues of British foreign policy are all explained on " class " lines, though this would appear to involve treating Mr. Winston Churchill and Mr. Duff Cooper as enlightened proletarians and Mr. Maxton as a benighted Etonian. Mr. Reed does not, however, carry his Marxism too far— not, for instance, as far as Central Europe. It does not occur to him to describe Dr. Benes as a tool of Czech capitalists exploiting Slovak peasants—though this is at least as plausible as most of his descriptions of the British political scene. Dis- tinctly un-Marxist, too, is his detestation of the Jews. One touch of anti-Semitism makes the whole world kin, especially in Central Europe ; and two or three chapters of this book read like a hitherto undiscovered supplement to Mein Kampf. There is, at any rate, one issue—it is about the only one—on which Mr. Reed does not ask us to fight Germany. Anti- Semitism apart, some sympathy may be felt with Mr. Reed's complaint that, owing to the superior organisation and wealth of the Jewish community, Jewish victims and refugees have had the lion's share of the pity and assistance of the Anglo- Saxon world to the exclusion of more deserving cases.

Lively prejudices make for brisk writing and easy reading ; and there seems no reason why Disgrace Abounding should not repeat the success of Insanity Fair. Mr. Reed has spent the last year moving incessantly round Central Europe, from an interview with Dr. Benes in Prague to Hungary, from Hungary to Yugoslavia, then to Roumania, then back to " Bohemia in Bondage," then to the new province of Car- pathian Ukraine with its overgrown village capital of Khust- philosophising on the new Pax Germanica, on the tact and skill of German propaganda, and on the German trade drive in the Balkans, wondering what difference the new regime really makes to the Czech butcher, baker and candlestick- maker, and ever and anon resuming the prophet's mantle to call down the wrath of Heaven on his own backsliding nation.

What Mr. Reed has seen himself he describes well and straightforwardly, and there are plenty of good sketches of Central European life in his pages. But when he is dealing with " facts " gleaned at third or fourth hand, not much bitigrace Abounding. By Douglas Reed. (Cape. ros. 6d.)

reliance can be placed on his critical faculty. Where did he get that story of the secret visit of King Alexander of Yugo- slavia to Hitler just before the fatal journey to Marseilles? Or the canard, made in Paris many years ago and long since exploded, that Pilsudski in 1933 appealed to Great Britain and France for common action against Germany, and when they declined made his pact with Berlin?

The general picture which Mr. Reed wishes to leave in the reader's mind is clear enough. Great Britain and France have betrayed their " allies " one by one (even Abyssinia is pressed into this category, but not China, which apparently lies too far from Central Europe for Mr. Reed's angle of vision). Now, like the Babes in the Wood, they are awaiting their own doom. " It's getting dark. Salvoes of approaching thunder. Lightning stabbing from a darkening sky. The twilight thickens." And all because the Babes, instead of listening to experts (does Mr. Reed remember the time when all the ills of the world were attributed to the fact that foreign policy was controlled by experts who made entangling alliances, and not by plain men who wanted peace?), have followed the lead of men wearing Old School Ties. But why England, or even England's leaders, should be so " implacably bent on self-destruction " Mr. Reed cannot tell us. He clearly does not believe in his own attempts at explaining. It does not occur to him that he may perhaps be wrong. It must be part of some mysterious national degeneracy which makes him glad that he does not feel like other Englishmen. The picture of England has become " revolting and incomprehensible."

Mr. Reed is a very candid writer ; and it is his merit that, in revealing the confusions of his own mind, he puts the issue more clearly than many more sophisticated assailants of the Munich settlement. Like other writers, he is on a good wicket in attacking the inconsistencies of British foreign policy since 1933. But what did he really want, and what was the alterna- tive to Munich? The answer is simple : " an armour-plated and indestructible arrangement . . . to confront any violent peace-breaker with overwhelming force." In fact, Mr. Reed "would have liked to carry the British flag everywhere." Fortunately or unfortunately, international politics are part of human affairs, in which there can be nothing armour-plated or indestructible ; and this vision of the British flag waving over an armour-plated European (and why only European?) status quo is a pure Utopia born of the unreal atmosphere of the first post-War decade. From this Cloud-cuckoo-town Munich brought us down to earth with a bump which dis- turbed the equilibrium of better-balanced heads than Mr. Reed's. But we have now begun to take stock of where we stand; and the peculiar nightmarish quality of Mr. Reed's clos- ing chapters is already old-fashioned—by two or three months.

Mr. Reed's brief incursions into domestic politics arc also not without interest. Slums and unemployment and many other abuses are blots on British civilisation. But when Mr.

Reed wants to hold up an ideal to us for imitation, he finds it in Germany, where there are " few unemployed, no slums, no chronic under-nourishment of children," and where everyone has " health and good houses, and sunshine and light and air, and access to the countryside." What we want are " rigid laws of employment, of dismissal, of pension fixed by the State and binding for the employer "—and presumably also for the worker. Perhaps there is some mistake ; for a few pages later Mr. Reed is once more denouncing the wicked " group " who are preparing for " some form of disguised Fascism in England." Yet one is not altogether reassured. Is Mr. Reed also among the prophets? Or is he merely over-simplifying domestic, in the same way in which he has over-simplified international, problems?