The Far East
Red Moon Rising. By George Rodger. (Cresset Press. ns. 6d.)
The Future of South-East Asia. By K. M. Panikkar. (George Allen and Unwin. 5s.) The British Pacific Islands. By Sir Harry Luke. (Oxford Pamphlets on World Affairs. 6d.)
MR. RODGER is one of those resourceful, courageous young men who have helped to make Life the least tedious of illustrated papers. Early in 1942, after photographing the campaign in Abyssinia, he was assigned to the tragic theatre of Burma. Fitted out by the Chinese with a jeep, he just had time to go up the Burma Road into Yunnan before Allied resistance began to collapse behind him.- Thereafter he was darting all over Burma, photographing and chronicling bravery and horror, wrecked pagodas, the Western-style offices of Rangoon abandoned to a lawless and fiery future, the Chiang Kai-sheks' visit to Maymyo, the beauties of Imlee Lake or of the Shan girls. He does not attempt an ordered account of the Burmese campaign. He has given us instead one of the most moving books about war that I have yet encountered.
The Burman are surely undeserving of their misfortunes. Amiable, neat, handsome, gay, they were first condemned to watch the British, the Indians and the Chinese exploiting the considerable wealth of their country which from a beguiling indolence they had hardly noticed. Now their lush valleys and demure villages have suddenly acquired a portentous strategic importance which must fill them with dread. I can think of few records of recent fighting which inspire such a sense of the essential futility of war as do Mr. Rodger's descriptions of charming Burmese towns, a parklise of bowers and pretty girls one minute, and next one a hecatomb of amputated bodies bleeding to death among the smoke. And one's regret is heightened by the thought that Burma almost certainly must endure such horrors again, if ever we are going to triumph in the East.
From Mr. Rodger's account, treachery among the Burmans was less rife than we have supposed. But how different the outcome of the campaign might have been if a burning comprehensible ideal had brought them to stand by the side of our troops. Mr. Panikkar, in The Future of South-East Asia, proclaims most eloquently the need for such a principle. At the same time, he postulates an independent " Pakistan " India of two enormous States closely associated with each other and with the British Empire. He believes —and rightly, I think—that India is the key to the defence of those territories in South-East Asia upon which Western industry has become almost morbidly reliant. And he envisages India becoming a great self-supporting arsenal and aeroplane factory.
In the past our hesitation to permit the development of " heavy industry " in our colonies has proved disastrous. Mr. Panikkar suggests that only immediate industrialism can give them that local strength which is essential. The Tata Ironworks in India, the new foundries in China, are, I suppose, a guarantee for the future. But I am old-fashioned enough to shudder at this almost universal taste in the Orient for the Bessemer world and open-hearth furnaces. To me it resembles the equally unfortunate craze of European Liberals in 1848 for constitutions that embodied the English Parlia- mentary system. For some time to come, let us hope, such dingy problems will not affect the South Seas, upon our holdings in which Sir Harry Luke has written a charming pamphlet. I fail, however, to understand why he ignores New Guinea and the Mandated
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