MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IN the gap between Christmas and the New Year, the gap between the Dionysia and the Lenaea, six days seem to be but discards from the pack of the year, mere idle playing-cards, at which one scarcely glances and then pushes aside. It is a period when wise people rearrange the books upon their shelves, and put in correct order the loose leaves of their diary, pausing from time to time to read again the hopes and fears, the expectations and the dis- appointments, of the twelve tremendous months that have passed. Few years indeed can furnish such a succession of excitements. The Russians took Kharkov in February, lost it again in March, and recaptured in it August. Stalingrad, in circumstances of the most intense drama, was relieved. At the same moment the First Army was in danger at Tebessa and Sbiba and many anxious days passed before the Germans retreated from the Kasserine. Then came Montgomery's attack upon the Mareth line, the first disquieting check, and the swing round by El Hamma and the final break- through. At the end of April the First Army again took the offensive and captured Longstop Hill, and thereafter, day after day of victory followed, and upon our maps we traced with rising excitement the seizure of Mateur and the entry into Tunis and Bizerta. It was at midnight on May 12th that the great news came. " The long African campaign is over. Von Arnim has been captured." In July we invaded Sicily and on July 25th came the astounding news that Mussolini had resigned. The Italian landings followed and on September 7th came the news of Italy's surrender. Cold autumn winds came to nip the excitement of these adventures. Mussolini was rescued from the Gran' Sasso and the battle of Salerno went ill indeed. Kesselring laid his iron hand on Rome ; our Dodecanese landings were a failure ; and the soft under-belly of the Axis proved, as Mr. Aneurin Bevan so unkindly remarked, about as sticky a backbone as one could find. And then came the Cairo and Teheran Conferences, the intensive destruction of Hamburg, Frankfurt and Berlin, and the certainty of enormous things to come.
* * It is not easy, even when we look back upon this wonderful year, to assess which of these victories was the most decisive. The battle of Hammam-Lif was undoubtedly one of the most brilliant of all British feats of arms, and will live for long in our military annals. But it did no more than complete, with extreme neatness, a story already written by the First Army in the Mejerda Valley or by the Eighth in its amazing march from Alamein. The Russian offensive was undoubtedly a decisive offensive, from the effect of which the German armies cannot hope to recover. Our bombing attacks will have done much to diminish both the capacity and the will of Germany to wage a protracted war. Yet all these dramatic acts and energies would have proved uncreative had it not been for the immense labours of the British and American peoples in the factories and in the fields, and had it not, above all, been possible for our naval forces to keep open the high seas. It will be said, presumably, by those who in after years study this great year of 5943 that the most decisive of all our many campaigns has been the campaign against the U-boats. And it is a fitting conclusion to the year that the Royal Navy, whose skill has been so great, whose endurance so superhuman, whose resource so inexhaustible, should at last have received a dramatic triumph of its own, and added the sinking of the Scharnhorst ' to labours which, through night and day, have been unseen and ceaseless, constant but unnamed. It is this aggregate of unrecorded effort which has given us our victory in the end.
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It is encouraging at such a moment of retrospect to consider what must be the apprehensions of the average German when he considers the circumstances, the changed proportions of power, which exist as 1943 glides off into 1944. When I was in Sweden recently I met a Swedish politician who had spent much time in Germany dining the present war and who had observed with care their reactions of this year between the month of January and the month of September.
He said that the year 1943 would be known in Germany as the year in which the legends were destroyed. The first legend was the legend of Hitler's invincibility ; the belief that this daemonic corporal possessed some genius for strategy which enabled him to defy the laws of warfare and to disregard the advice of senior and more experienced strategists. That legend had been destroyed at Stalin- grad. There was not a German who did not know that Hider had insisted on the retention of Stalingrad, long after his military advisers had told hint that a withdrawal was inevitable. This error did not mean that Hitler had lost his hold upon the German imagin- ation ; it meant only that their former confidence in his judgement had been replaced by a deliberate form of belief in his destiny ; a far less durable form of faith. The second legend had been destroyed at Alamein. It was not that this great battle had convinced the Germans that the British soldier, if properly equipped, could defeat German armies in the field : whatever their propagandists might say, the Germans had never had any doubts about the fighting qualities of the British armies. The lesson that Alamein had taught them was, my informant assured me, quite a different lesson. It had destroyed a second of their comforting legends ; the legend of the U-boats. Until then they had been assured that, however enormous might be the productive capacity of their Western enemies, only a mere trickle of guns and ammunition would be able to reach the fighting front. The .great barrage of Alamein blew that legend into fragments. They learnt at Alamein that the unconquerable resources of the Western Factories could be transported across half the world. That was a most alarming lesson.
* * * * "And what," I asked my Swedish friend, "was their third legend?" " Their third legend," he replied, " was the legend of Germany's own invulnerability. You people seem to underestimate the signifi- cance of this particular legend. .But at the back of every German's mind is the belief that war for Germany is a profitable thing, since while, owing to their efficiency, they are able to invade and despoil the territories of their neighbours, their own home country, their fields and factories, remain untouched. The American and British bombers have destroyed that legend most completely." " And are there any more legends? " I asked him. " Yes," he said, " there are two more legends, and if you manage to destroy them also, you will have destroyed the will of Germany. You will be left only with Germany's despair—which will offer another, and perhaps scarcely less potent, difficulty." The fourth German legend, according to my friend, was that in modern warfare the command of the seas is of little value except in the widest oceans. The invasion of Sicily, the bombardment at Salerno, had done much to shake that legend ; but it had not as yet been destroyed. And the final legend was of a political nature. It was the conviction that, if the worst came to the worst, Germany could always make a separate peace with Russia against the West, or with the West against Russia. "That sounds," I said to him, " rather. a Ribbentrop sort of legend." " Not in the least," he answered, " it is a legend which many serious Germans will cherish to the very last." And this may well explain the almost panic fury with which Dr. Goebbels treated the Teheran Conference.
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These short grey days at the fag end of the year hang sadly round us. We are conscious of -the weariness of the past and the anxieties and efforts of the future. But we know that our legends— and we were glad enough of our legends in 194o—have miraculously come true. The Germans know that their own legends are fantastic and that they have built upon them an edifice of fear and hatred which will be terrible in its collapse. The months in front of us will be months of sober anxiety. But they will not be months either of hopelessness or remorse. Our pride has been justified and our faith fulfilled. I am glad that I am not a Guinan when 1943, and all its legends, fades wanly into 1944.
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