SCHOLARS IN EXILE
By J. R. GLORNEY BOLTON
AN east wind battered granite walls. The doctors of Aberdeen walked in procession to the end of the hall. The organ- music ceased upon a convenient chord, and the assembly rustled into an attentive silence. Latin sentences began to vie with the elements for a hearing. The doctors were admitting the President of the Czechoslovak Republic to their fellowship. From a fantasy of scarlet and billowing gowns peered the faces of northern Grecians who knew the stern discipline on which rests the grace of learning. A graduate, presenting the new doctor to his Chan- cellor, praised him as a man, the youngest of ten children, who had left a peasant's homestead to acquire distinction and renown ; a Czech with the toughness of a Scot.
The new doctor spoke of the Europe which would emerge from the Greater War. He did not speak solely as the President of a Republic, as an exalted personage whose measured words rever- berate through ministerial corridors. He spoke for himself, as a University doctor ready to dispute with fellow-members of the commonwealth of learning, as a son of Prague and Paris. The ambitious Emperor and King of Bohemia who founded his University in Prague took Paris for his model. So did the excel- lent Bishop Elphinstone when he founded his University within the walls of Old Aberdeen. Paris made it her function to encourage and mould opinion and so to keep vigorous and ardent the flame of intellectual freedom. Through the centuries Prague and Aberdeen have been faithful to their exemplar.
And now the doors of the Charles University are locked and bolted. Instruments have been seized from the laboratories. Books and manuscripts have gone to Germany. Czech students remembered that on October 28th, 1939, they would reach the twenty-first anniversary of Czechoslovak independence. It was the first anniversary since the Germans had occupied their country. But France and Great Britain were at war with their country's enemy and, for all the sorrows heaped upon neigh- bouring Poland, it was a time for hope, and there was a sufficient commotion for the German authorities to take the opportunity which they had foreseen. They prepared a terrible revenge. On the cold night of November 16th, a strange quietness fell upon Prague. In the National Theatre a large audience was watching a performance of Macbeth, the tragedy of a man driven by ambition to do one wicked deed after another. It heard the familiar lines: " Receive what cheer ye may,
The night is long that never finds the day."
and its tension was released by tumultnous applause. Next day the black hour struck. More than a thousand students, herded into a square by the Germans, saw the execution of their leaders. They were then sent to concentration camps. Many have died. The rest are working as forced labourers. The Charles University was closed, and when former University teachers went in deputa- tion to remonstrate with K. H. Frank, the State Secretary, he told them : " If we lose the war, you can open the Universities and schools yourselves. If we win the war, the elementary schools will be good enough for you." So Hitler closed the first
University to be founded within the Holy Roman Empire. But locked doors do not bring a University to an end, and within a fortnight of his visit to Aberdeen Dr. Benes was follow- ing the University beadles in a little procession to the Divinity School at Oxford, where resident graduates had called a meeting, so that they might express their sympathy with the members of the Charles University. They wanted to give more than consoling words, and they urged that members of the Charles University, as well as members of the Masaryk University in Brno and the Comenius University in Bratislava, should be entitled to attend University lectures, to read in the Bodleian and other libraries and to hold meetings of their own within the University precincts. Those proposals are now embodied in a decree.
More than once when oppression lay heavily upon the Con- tinent, Oxford has been magnanimous. Students who escaped from an occupied Serbia during the last war found a refuge in Oxford. Daily they chanted their litanies in St. John's College Chapel. Some of them, now middle-aged men, may be vexing the enemy who seeks once again to destroy the Slav spirit ; and, perhaps, they remember how Oxford used to solace them by her tranquil certainty that in the end freedom triumphs over tyranny. A few months ago the Czechoslovak Prime Minister was invited to address a meeting in the Great Hall of Magdalen College. Monsignor Sramek, who is over seventy, speaks no English and refuses to speak German. He spoke, like the Vice- Chancellor, in Latin. It was the language in which Jerome of Prague spoke freely when he visited Oxford at the end of the fourteenth century, and the language which today mocks the Axis pretensions to establish an ordered Europe.
Scholars dispersed from Paris settled in Oxford, and in turn scholars dispersed from Oxford settled in Cambridge. For nearly nine years intellectual leaders, branded by race or a proper independence of mind, have wandered far from their native lands, sharing the fate of great precursors. Among Allied people in this country—and they include freedom-loving Germans, Austrians, Italians, Hungarians and Rumanians—there is a strong desire for a closer intellectual association which shall transcend the barriers of the Army camp, the workshop, and the hospital. They recognise in London both the cultural and the political capital of a free Europe. They have made English their second language. They know that the people of the British Isles have fashioned a literature of revolt, and this knowledge may have important consequences when they return to the Continent. There should be more invitations to distinguished men in the Allied forces, serving as officers or private soldiers, to lecture to members of the British forces. An Allied soldier is often more successful than the Englishman in penetrating the mind of the German, and John Stuart Mill's warning about the political opponent is true also of the military antagonist : his case needs to be studied even more closely than our own. But how often has an Allied soldier been allowed to lecture on Germany?
We need firmer contacts between men who speak for freedom. Anglo-Irishmen who live in England, men rooted to both islands, are practically denied a personal contact with the enlivening milieu of Dublin. Even before transport became too difficult, Englishmen who know India sought in vain for opportunities to cross the Arabian Sea and discuss the war with Indian friends. They might have removed many of the misunderstandings which are beyond the scope of strictly official relations. There is little evidence that cultural contacts between China and India, twin champions of freedom, have been reinforced in recent months. The time is probably ripe for an exchange of Ministers between India and China, and certainly there is something to be said for the appointment of a British High Commissioner in India, a man who complements the work done by the High Commissioner in London and can exert his influence in larger cities than the administrative centres of Simla and New Delhi. Even so, unoffi- cial relations are the ones which in the end prove to be decisive.
Only an' Allied victory can heal the deep wounds in the commonwealth of learning. A noble purpose sustains the foreign soldier as he trudges, homesick and anxious, along an English lane. He is fighting for a scholar's legure.
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