MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
WALKING last week in the streets of my constituency,—wearing upon my face that fixed but ambient smile with which one seeks to mitigate by general benignity a possible failure to recognise
an individual elector,—I was accosted by a man who said that he ' wanted to ask me a question. I paused with an expression of ready sympathy, foreseeing the usual introduction regarding "a square • deal," the usual peroration on the subject of "red tape," between which would be wedged some story of real misfortune such as sends one along tingling with indignation and impotence at the helplessness of.the citizen when caught sideways in the machine. But not at all. He did not want to know why he should pay income tax upon his wife's old age pension ; he did not want to ask that the third of his four sons should be sent home from Burma to help rescue from disaster his small and decaying business ; he did not want to complain that his competitors were obtaining a larger petrol allowance than he was himself accorded ; he did not wish to bring to my notice the flagrant incompetence and malevolence of some medical officer in Northern Ireland. His question was less personal and less simple than those customary appeals. "Can you tell me," he asked, "when this war is likely to end? " I replied that I was unable to answer such a question. Even if the gigantic heave which before long will be delivered from north and south, from east and west, were to bring down in ruin the remaining bastions of the Reich, it would still be impossible to predict how long the final act would last. Even if we broke into the northern plain, even if we captured Hamburg and joined up with the Russians in the Mark of Brandenburg, even if Dresden fell, and Vienna and Leipzig, even then the Nazis might retire to their Highland redoubt and fight on for weeks or even months. It might last till Christmas, it might end in June. No sane man, at this stage, could venture upon any prediction.
I could see that he was disappointed by this hedging on my part. He looked down at the pavement and then gazed sadly into the distance, collecting dark thoughts. "But what I do not understand," he said, "if what they tell us be true, is how the German people stand it. It is all the fault, I suppose, of unconditional surrender." I have never been enamoured of that careless Yankee phrase, which has from the first seemed to me illogical, unwise and inexact. Even the most crushing armistice contains conditions ; even the most ruthlessly imposed peace treaty must embody certain terms. The phrase is in fact so devoid of all logical interpretation that a Minister of the Crown recently referred, without blushing, to the "terms of uncon- ditional surrender." But although the expression is a terminological misfortune, the idea behind it is inevitable and correct. It will be essential this time, not only that the German armed forces should be defeated in the field, but that the German nation should know that they have been defeated. No legend of "the unbeaten army" must on this occasion be allowed to persist. And even were it not that this dire -necessity will impose upon us prolonged and arduous effort, it will in practice be impossible to secure the pacification of Europe by any means other than total and complete victory. There does not exist in Germany today any body of opinion comparable to that represented in 1918 by Ebert, Noske and the Weimar Assembly. The people with whom we might consent to negotiate would not command the simultaneous obedience of all the armed forces of Germany ; and those who could command that obedience are not people with whom, in any circumstances, we could consent to negotiate. Inevitably this time there must come an absolute capitulation, and an absolute victory, before the conditions of surrender can be stated. The problem is not one of policy or intention ; it is one of inescapable facts.
* * * "I see all that," he said, "I think I agree with all that. But what I do not understand is why the German people persist in courting further disasters when they must know that the position is hope- less." How difficult it is, in any convincing way, to answer such a question! It is almost impossible for any British citizen, nurtured as he is in the habit of liberty, to understand the self-surrender of the ordinary German. To us such words as "patriotism," "disci- pline" or "sacrifice" suggest conscious acts of personal abnegation in the interest of the community as a whole. They are not instinctive acts, but are justified to each individual by processes of reason, and as such could be modified or abandoned once they became patently unreasonable. For the German, surrender to the State, or even to the herd, has little to do with personal volition, consciousness or reasoning ; it is a blind and primitive instinct, a surge of blood to the head, an hysterical jangle of the nerves. We often ask ourselves how it comes that a nation of such superb physical courage should be almost totally devoid of any moral courage ; we might as well take one of the Gadarene swine to task for lack of personal initiative. In every German there is a dose of suicidal mania, of the "gout de l'abime." They do not attach to human survival the immense importance which we attach to it ; and once the hysteria of self-immolation has seized upon the German herd, once the evil spirit has entered into them, they rush towards the Wagnerian close with a mass-ecstasy which has ceased to desire any happy or comfortable ending. We never realise sufficiently that their nervous equilibrium is so easily disordered that there comes for every German a moment when he welcomes upon his cheek the wind of the wings of madness.
* * When I listen to the German wirelesss, or read the Monitoring Reports from day to day, I realise how thoroughly Dr. Goebbels has absorbed and exploited the terrible doctrines of Mein Kampf. In place of truth they are given fantasy which they know to be fantastic ; in place of reason, wild cries are uttered such as those with which a Mexican muleteer will urge his mule-train through the defiles of Ixtaccihuatl ; in place of sober exhortation come appeals to savage hatred, creating what Hitler called a "far-reaching mood of hysteria." The announcement was made this week that Mr. Stettinius had appointed Mr. Lubin as United States representative on the Moscow Reparation Commission. This led the D.N.B. to burst into a perfect orgy of vituperation. "The Yiddish broker, Isidore Lubin," they yelled, "has been appointed 'Commissar for Reparations and Deportations,' in order to 'regulate the slave market by which millions of Germans will be confined for the rest of their lives in Russian concentration camps.'" "For all Germans," continued the D.N.B. on the German home service, "the battle cry is 'Kill our enemies like mad dogs.' We will thoroughly upset the machina- tions of those slave-drivers of the Jewish international. Are these internatioal criminals under the impression that we have no means of retaliation? They will be taught a lesson. We will make every Jew who is in, or falls into, our hands pay for all the others. When this war comes to an end there will be no more Jews in Europe." Such threats are more terrible than the snarl of a wounded animal ; they suggest a condition of dementia which we are bound to take into account.
* * * * When it is all over ; when the German wakes from his nightmare and finds that the birds are still singing and the grass still green ; when the evil spirit has been exorcised and the German citizen recovers from the great hurricane of hysteria which since 1930 has thundered through the land ; then we shall be assured on all sides that they regard us as liberators from a fierce oppression and that never for one instant did they share or approve of the wild fantasies which the Nazis preached. Their subservience will be excused upon the ground of Gestapo cruelty ; the atrocities committed will be attributed to our own " propaganda " ; and their mistakes will be ascribed to the disordered ignorance of Hitler's mind. I do not despair of the re-education of Germany ; I do not doubt that their conversion, when it comes, will be perfectly sincere ; the Nazi system has in truth exploited their vices and crushed their many virtues. But a people who have succumbed to mass insanity so universally and for so many years cannot be regarded as dependable ; nor can we predict in any way how they will react to the terrible ordeal to which they are about to be exposed.
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