A SPECTATO R'S NOTEBOOK
NO one is under any temptation to glorify assassination, but there seems to be more than a touch of false sentiment about some of the comments in various journals on the death of Darlan. After all, this is war. Officers and men by the thousand are being killed daily on every front, and everyone in uniform recognises that that fate may some day be his. War, moreover, consists of trying to kill people with bullets, and ambush is a perfectly legitimate ruse— highly applauded in the case of Russian guerillas or Australians at Buna. Mr. Cordell Hull has described the assassination of DarIan as "odious and cowardly." I cannot help wondering whether he would have applied those words to an attempted, or successful, assassination of Hitler. Harmodius and Aristogeiton became the heroes of Athens for their attack on the tyrants Hippias and Hipparchus, and subsequent commentators have been little concerned to condemn them. The fact is, I think, that the verdict must depend to some extent on the circumstances of the case. There is an obvious difference of degree between an attack on Lincoln in Ford's Theatre or Perceval in the lobby of the House of Commons, and a blow struck at a serving officer in a theatre of war—though to say that does not mean justifying the murder at Algiers. And if that deed is to be described as cowardly, the adjective must be given a strictly limited connotation. An attack on an unsuspecting man may well be described as dastardly, but the assailant can hardly be characterised as a coward when he knows well that he has not one chance in a hundred of escaping with his life.
The letter in which Admiral Muselier, who for many months commanded the Free French Navy, offers his services to General de Gaulle in any capacity is phrased in language so moderate and persuasive that it is hard to see how the Fighting French leader could reject the overtures. No good purpose would be served by discussing now the obscure and largely personal differences between General and Admiral, which came to a head at the time of the Free French landings on St. Pierre and Miquelon, but the retirement of so competent a sailor as Admiral Muselier is on all grounds greatly to be regretted, and much the more so since, as a former naval commander at Bizerta, he is probably as familiar as any living Frenchman with the defences of that vital port. At the moment when General de Gaulle's stirring broadcast on the need for unity against Germany has made so deep an impression, unity should be all-embracing.
It is fortunate that every author of a book which the reviewers say is a bad book, or a play which the critics say is a bad play, does not make the pother that Mr. Beverley Baxter feels it necessary to stir up about his It Happened in September. His article in Tuesday's Evening Standard, protesting that his play was "a play of ideas" and explaining that the dramatic critics in London, with the exception of five (of whom The Times critic is clearly not one) are people "who are bored with ideas and who have never listened to a political discussion," left a clear impression of its author's mortification, and of little else. I am not a dramatic critic, and 1 did not see Mr. Beverley Baxter's play. It may have all the merits he claims for it, but the More detached opinion of the critics whose incompetence to judge "a play of ideas" he deplores leaves me reconciled to having missed it--even though I might have qualified for addition to "the five adult minds" whose judgement on Mr. Baxter's play I infer coincided with his own.
A word more on the University of Sulgrave and Federated Colleges Incorporated, now registered as a company at Somerset House. The directors of the company are the now familiar Dr. F. W. CrossleyHolland and the Rev. S. E. P. Needham, who were Vice-Chancellor and Registrar respectively of the Intercollegiate University (British Division), and a Mr. A. F. Kaufmann, described as a lecturer, who was also, I believe, a graduate and ornament of that defunct institution. The principal offices of the corporation are in Wilmington, Delaware, and the declared object is "to organise and maintain an International University with constituent and affiliated colleges in the State of Delaware, in England and elsewhere, wherein the usual and accepted activities of a university may be carried on." One such activity is the conferment of degrees, and the original Sulgrave leaflet was quite specific regarding the intention of its founders to do that. Yet the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the House of Commons has denied Sulgrave the title of university.
I had something to say last week about puns. Here is a story which if anyone had invented it would have been rightly denounced as embodying the most execrable pun on record : At a house where cards were frequently accompanied by too much talk, "the host on one occasion remarked genially as the quartet took its place, Now tonight we won't play with any remarks,' whereupon a stout, elderly lady, rising in indignation from her seat, cried, Oh, won't you? Then you won't play with 'Enery Marks's ma,' and flounced hotly from the room." The story is told as true—which it no doubt is—by the present Marquess of Reading in his recently published life of his father.
I wonder sometimes whether journalists of today are not a little too delicate in controversy, and a note I have chanced on, giving one or two opinions of the newspapers of a century ago or so, confirms me in that view. "The Times," I read, "on one occasion described the Chronicle as that squirt of filthy water,' and the Morning Post was, in the judgement of the Chronicle, 'that slop-pah of corruption.' The Courier was, according to the Morning Herald, 'that spavined old hack ' ; and the Globe was, according to the Standard, 'our blubber-headed contemporary.' " This, it seems to me, is the way to talk. The first rule of journalism is to make your meaning clear ; no one can well complain of a lack of clarity here.
The more I hear about the action of the War Office in stopping the discussion of the Beveridge Report under the auspices of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs the less I like it. Mr, R. G. Casey, in his recent broadcast, testified to the interest the report had created among the troops in the Middle East, and it is hardly to be supposed that units at home are less alive to the importance of a document that affects, or may affect, evw one of them personally. The matter, of course, will be brought up in Parliament. Many Members are very properly anxious to hear what Sir James Grigg— and Lord Croft in the other House—have to say on the subject.
The Brains Trust's prepared question for next week, I gather, is on the Gremlin, that engaging creation of the fertile imagination of the R.A.F. Too little is known about this occult force, and elucidation by the Brains Trust will be instructive. Meanwhile I should welcome any information available on the deriVation of the word
itself. JANUS.
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