" Must Night Fall ? " SIR,—I have just read Mr.
Vernon Bartlett's strictures in the Spectator of March 3rd on Major Tufton Beamish's book, Must Night Fall? Whilst I agree with Mr. Vernon Bartlett in regretting the absence of an index, I think it a pity that he should dismiss the greater part of this work as "an indigestible mass of documentary information." Is it not perhaps fairer that the reader should be given documentary information and allowed to draw his own conclusions than receive it in predigested form dished up, maybe, with the life and interest which Mr. Vernon Bartlett desires, but perhaps also with the lack of truth that has char- acterised so many books, articles and broadcasts on Eastern Europe ? Major Tufton Be,amish was a member of the Parliamentary delegation which came to Poland in 1946. The honest and painstaking manner with which he spared no effort to find out the truth was refreshing by com- parison with the attitude of Members of Parliament, both in that delega- tion and on other occasions, who, with few exceptions, only wished to hear and to see what fitted their preconceived views, and made no effort to pierce the smoke-screen of conviviality and propaganda put out for their benefit.
Maybe Mr. Vernon Bartlett is right in assuring us that a profound loathing of Russian Communism is not confined to members of the Conservative Party. This applies to 1950. In 1946 and the early part of 1947 those who tried to tell the truth about what was happening in Poland, in particular the steadily tightening grip of the Communist leaders, were branded in our Socialist Press as reactionaries incapable of appre- ciating a new democracy. So far as Poland is concerned, what Mr. Vernon Bartlett calls an "indigestible mass of documentary information" is a truthful history of events.—Yours faithfully,
Previous page
