NEWS OF THE WEEK
LIKE Mr. Churchill and President Roosevelt, General Smuts has the capacity and moral authority to present a broad, convincing statement of the course of the war and to show it in its setting of the past and the future. It was such a statement that the Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa made at the Guildhall last Tuesday, and, coming fresh from a triumphant General Election, he was speaking for a Dominion as well as for himself. Having paid his tribute to the incomparable leadership of Mr. Churchill, he commented on the fact that the course of the war had been transformed during the last year, and that nothing could rob Russia and the British Commonwealth of the glory of having turned the tide at the decisive battles of Stalingrad and El Alamein—a battle which paved the way to the conquest, with American assist- ance, of Africa and the Mediterranean. It was not very long ago that General Smuts was still prophesying a long war, but he has been impressed by the fact that we have already achieved more than we had planned to do by next winter. For that reason he looks forward to the grand assault on Hitler's Europe next year (this time with the United States taking a leading part). But he is well aware that the speed with which the final end is brought depends on ourselves, and he spoke with the utmost emphasis of the need to remember the time-factor. It will make all the difference whether we end the war in Europe in 1944 or 1945. The time is short, as he insists, because the moral and physical condition of Europe is getting worse and worse, and every month that the agony is prolonged will -make the subsequent healing process more difficult. Therefore the policy of continuous pressure must be prosecuted ceaselessly. That is a demand which will evoke heartfelt echoes in Russia, and already has popular support here. Afterwards—the tasks of relief, of salvage, of security-building, the future organisa- tion of peace. In eloquent terms the Boer hero of the South African War, the active leader of the Union of South Africa in the last Great War, and again today the chosen leader of his country, sketched the possibilities of civilisation in the future.
