A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK F OUR points are worth nothing about the
R.A.F.'s attacks on Italy. They came at a moment when (a) there was a full moon, (b) the nights were long enough for a double journey to be made under cover of darkness (not that the R.A.F. seems to trouble overmuch about that nowadays), (c) the battle in Egypt was beginning, (d) Italian morale was known to be particularly low. I confess to some sorrow about the inevitable destructon of many of the great merchant-palaces at Genoa, including possibly enough the hall where the Genoa Conference met twenty years ago, with the Russians admitted for the first time, at Mr. Lloyd George's instance, as full and equal participants. (I have a postcard still depicting M. Chicherin tailored, perhaps for the first time in his life, in impeccable evening dress.) Up in the hills that ring Genoa round in a semi- circle, at the top of a funicular railway, there is a little restaurant, the Ristorante Righi (kept, if I remember rightly, by the Pratelli Picco), where I used often to dine with other habitués of the con- ference, with streets and quays and port spread out far below. It ivould have made a marvellous vantage-point last week, for every detail of the attacks on the city must have been visible from there, as an attack on Paris would be from the Sacre Coeur at Montmartre, and the dwellers on the hill-top could, and no doubt did, stand in relative security watching the dozen fires below them merging into one vast conflagration.
* * * *
The Chinese, of course, want aeroplanes badly. We are sending them some, but not many. The Americans are sending more, but still, relatively to needs, not many, as Mr. Wendell Wilkie has just pointed out rather bitterly. The fact is that so far we have little that we can spare. The Chinese understand this where modem machines are concerned, but even machines that are obsolescent here, they protest, would be of great value there. The trouble is, I understand, that there is really no such thing in war as an obsolescent aeroplane. Everything that can fly is doing some job or other—transport, training, reconnaissance—so long as it can go on flying at all. But there seems grave reason to doubt whether the Chinese have ever been told that clearly. Many of them imagine, not unnaturally, that we have hundreds of out-of-date and more or less useless machines lying about the country, which could be serviceable in a dozen ways in China—if it were worth while to get them there. The Ministry of Information might make itself useful here, working no doubt through our Embassy at ChungEng, or best of all through China's own information services.
* * * *
We have heard a great deal about India from almost all classes of experts on the subject except one—the missionaries. Yet they, by the nature of things, are likely to be as well worth hearing from as anyone, for they get into far closer contact with the average Indian than either the European business man or the European official, and their natural sympathy with Indian aspirations is combined in most cases with a very open-minded appreciation of the difficulties of the British and Indian Governments. Certainly those charac- teristics mark a very instructive pamphlet* which Mr. Norman Goodall, one of the foreign secretaries of the London Missionary Society (which sent David Livingstone to Africa), has just written, on the basis of letters from experienced missionaries now in India.
* The Indian Deadlock. (Livingstone Press. 4d.) .What strikes me is its combination of sympathy with sanity. There is no girding at the Government ; there is no attempt to exculpate Mr. Gandhi or Congress ; it quotes a senior missionary as writing "there is definite evidence of a planned campaign in an attempt to paralyse the country's life and communications "; and while supporting the demand that there shall at Once take place some transfer of real authority in the central Government of India, it has to admit that a prerequisite of the solution of the present difficulties is "a Measure of agreement among Indians themselves greater than has yet been reached." There is of course no acquiescence in the deadlock; the plea for a new Spirit is earnest and eloquent, even if it is hard to see how that is to be created. The pamphlet is an admirably just statement of a position a little nearer to Mr. Churchill's than to Mr. Gandhi's.
* * * * A friend who (I judge) specialises in Archbishops reminds me that the Church of England was directed for forty years from Canterbury by prelates, Dr. Davidson and Dr. Lang, born in Presbyterian manses, and that the last four Archbishops of Canterbury (Dr. Frederick Temple, Dr. Davidson, Dr. Lang and Dr. Wiliam Temple) had a single child between them—,the present Archbishop. On the former point I might recall an incident which I hope I have not mentioned here before. Years ago, when Dr. Davidson was Archbishop of Canterbury and Dr. Lang of York, both of them were visiting Oxford on some ecclesiastical occasion and made contact with the Rev. Donald Matheson, who was a kind of Presbyterian chaplain to undergraduates. "And what exactly is your function, Mr. Matheson?" one of the Archbishops asked. "Oh," he answered, with a cenain gleam in his eye, "trying to round up strayed Presbyterians." The point was taken.
* * * *
The same page in one of Wednesday's papers happened to carry in diagonally opposite corners articles on goods that are undelivered because they are not addressed and on goods that are undelivered because they are. The latter are the packages which, if the dis- turbing indictment by Admiral Lord Cork and Orrery in the House of Lords recently was justified, as there is reason to believe it was, destroy all hope of keeping the sailings of convoys secret by lying openly on quays labelled plainly with their destination, e.g., Malta. Now a High Court Judge has been asked by the Minister of War Transport to look into the allegations. That is a proper move on Lord Leathers' part, but had no private representations ever been made to him before the matter was ventilated publicly in the House of Lords?
* * * *
One regret I had in listening to the broadcast of Field-Marshal Smuts' speech last week was that his warm reference to France. "not dead, but only sleeping," evoked such sporadic and half- hearted applause. A member of the South African Prime Minister's audience has since told me the reason. "We were rather like boys at a school speech-day," he said, "dutifully cheering each prize-winner as his name was called. In this case by the time we bad done our duty to the Allies—Russia, China, the United States, Norway, Greece—one by one, we were getting rather exhausted. That is why France got less than her due." I am glad
Previous page
