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By HAROLD NICOLSON /T is difficult to assess the relative values of expert opinion and the fresh eye. A man who has lived for long in the same country, who has for years been dealing with the recurrence of similar problems, is apt to become so muscle- bound by his own knowledge that he is rendered impervious to new ideas. Unless, moreover, he be a person of unusually equable or indifferent temperament, he is apt with the passage of time to acquire certain prejudices and affections that are destructive of the objective point of view. I have known officials who have spent so much of their life in the Near or Middle East that they have come to assume that the foreign policy of. their own Government ought to be concentrated upon the local problems that to them loom so gigantic; and that a Foreign Secretary who permits our relations with Washington or Paris to override our relations with Tirana or the Bakhtiari tribes must be either " blind " or " mad." It is in order to mitigate such ossification that the Foreign Office, in their wisdom, endeavour to prevent their gifted officials from becoming experts and will despatch to Bahia Blanca a man whose know- ledge of the Serbo-Croat dialects is unsurpassed. The fresh eye, on the other hand, should never be as fresh as all that; if the opinion of the occasional and sudden visitor is to be of any use, he must be a person of some intellectual equipment and of some experience of similar conditions and problems in other lands. He must, moreover, possess sufficient modesty to give full weight to the views of the experts and to advance his own opinions, not with the slick arrogance of Paget, M.P., but with tentative charm. The ideal combination is when the expert provides the local information, and the fresh eye propounds the resultant policy. The extremes, either of expert or fresh-eye, certainly are always to be avoided.
* 4, * * Having suffered slightly, although not much, from the improbous new-comer who arrives on Tuesday by the Orient Express, and who by Thursday evening is in the position to expound the errors of the policy being locally advocated and pursued, I can fully sympathise with the expert's indignation. It is annoying, when one has concentrated for several years upon some local problem, to be informed by a visiting Member of Parliament that Qualunque Pasha, whose hospitality has been so agreeable on the previous evening, is right in asserting that the British Embassy, in their insistence on opposing a minor railway concession, must be either ignorant or corrupt; it is even more irritating, when we inform the visiting legislator that the said Pasha has for long been in the pay of the Deutsche Bank, to observe upon his features a dismissive grin, indicating, " He warned me that you would say that." Yet we all know how accustomed and resigned we become to the furniture of our own room, and how improving may sometimes be the suggestions made by a visitor who has never seen the place before. I have never noticed, during the years of my sojourns in foreign countries, that the intelligent visitor makes sugges- tions or criticisms that are palpably bumptious or absurd; it is the stupid visitor who makes arrogant assertions, and one learns early in life not to be unduly perturbed by anything that stupid people say. Thus in the days when fwas a local resident I welcomed the remarks made by the man who arrived on Tuesday by the Orient Express; they often pierced the crust of habit that had formed. Conversely, when it is my own eye that is ffesh, I am careful to render my own remarks as unassuming as a primrose in March.
* - I have just returned from a short visit to Western Germany. Although I had spent several years in Berlin and other German cities before the war, I realised that I was now visiting a country almost wholly different from that of my previous experience; that I arrived with a fresh eye and must therefore guard against both the survival of previous assumptions and the falsity of new intuitions. Certain facts were self-evident and indeed obtrusive. I was impressed, as all visitors must be impressed, by the amazing powers of recuperation of the German people. Day and night, in the cities where I stayed, there came the sound of hammering; the whole of Germany appeared to be engaged, in sun-light and by arc-light, in repairing the ravages of war; wide boulevards, lined by massive bank buildings and glittering shops, had been cut through the rubble; ducks and water lilies enlivened the ornamental canals, and the citizens, in the rare intervals when they were not hammering, would sit under striped awnings and consume beer, coffee, and large wedges of chocolate cake lashed with cream. The sight of these sparkling boulevards conveyed the impression of formid- able energy, wealth and indulgence; but in the smaller streets behind them the calcined houses raised their ruined windows to the September sun, and herb and hemlock thrived amid the rubble. This contrast between opulent frontages and decayed back-yards appeared to my untutored eye as symbolic of a situation. I had the feeling that behind all that the Germans will say to foreign visitors, behind even what they will avow to themselves, lie acres of concealed and tumbled thoughts, too tragic and insoluble to be redeemed from present chaos.
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I had been told that the younger generation of Germans were so disillusioned and disgusted by the experiences of the last nineteen years that they took no further interest in national or international politics, and concentrated solely upon estab- lishing their own economic position and creating a personal life for themselves without regard for what the uncertain future might bring. I gathered from conversations with university professors and school-teachers that, although this was true for the generation born between 1925 and 1930, it was not equally true for the younger boys and girls who were children when the war came to an end. This more recent vintage, now aged between eighteen and twenty-one, were beginning to seek for political principles, to enquire into Germany's future position in the world, and to ask themselves and their teachers what were the special virtues of the democratic as opposed to the totalitarian system. It will be this new generation that will have to answer questions that to their elders appear too horrible even to contemplate. It is taken for granted that, behind all the party animosities that today rend opinion in Western Germany, there exist two fundamental aims and desires uniting the whole body of opinion. Every German, we are assured, is united in the aim of liberating his brothers from Russian tyranny and of restoring the ancient frontiers; every German, so they tell us, is determined to preserve his country against the destruction of a third world war. If one suggests that these two aspirations may in practice be difficult to reconcile, an expression of sad reticence clouds their faces. One feels obliged, in common decency, not to probe their perplexity; the conversation reaches a dead end.
* No politician in Western Germany could overtly advance the theory that the eastern provinces are irrecoverable except by war; that therefore they must abandon their brothers and cut their loss. Similarly it would be difficult indeed for any such politician to advocate that the sole hope of peaceful liberation lies in an agreement with Soviet Russia. Such terrible questions are hidden behind the glittering façade of reconstruction. But one day these questions will be posed by the rising generation, and will have to be answered. No living person can foretell what that answer will be. As the train, on my return journey, swung past the sun-lit Aneyards of the Rhineland, past the legendary shrines of the German people, my admiration for their courage mingled with compassion for their harsh destinies. All that the fresh eye could see was a dark tangle of obscurities.
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