A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
IT is a long time since a series of articles has attracted such wide attention as the six, on conditions in Ger- many, which Mr. Oswald Garrison Villard has been con- tributing to the Daily Telegraph last week and this. One of my earliest recollections of Mr. Villard was a dinner with him and Ramsay MacDonald in a little restaurant in the Rue Daunou in Paris during the Peace Conference. He had just come from Germany then, too, and told how in Munich he had ducked to dodge the bullets flying in the Diet the day he was there. In his Daily Telegraph articles he has simply told what he saw and heard in Ger- many, and makes his own reservations about various state- ments given to him as fact. He is, of course, at least too per cent. anti-Hitler, but he is profoundly impressed—even more profoundly than his articles indicate—with the magni- tude of the task confronting the Allies if the struggle has to be fought through ; it is as well that we should be brought to realise that. The incident that struck Mr. Villard most in Europe was a burst of laughter from two soldiers in a bus. Then he realised that he was in a London bus. In his three weeks and a half in Germany he had never seen a soldier smile ; to hear soldiers laugh was startling. Mr. Villard is now on his way home by the kind of route Americans are at present compelled to take—by air to Paris, thence to Genoa, and so by an Italian liner to New York. He broadcast on Sunday to Germany in German, telling his hearers they could never hope to win the war.
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