THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET 'PATRIA

PUBLtSBXD AS A NIWSPAPEK

VOL. 184 No. 5455

LONDON, NOVEMBER 25th, 1944

SIXPENCE

THE FRENCH IN EUROPE The Forthcoming Visit o f General de Gaulle to Moscow

NATION AND STATE A Manifesto from a Group o f French Catholics

FREE GREECE Some Impressions o f a Visit. By Christopher Hollis

THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK The Nazis face the End

The bad weather o f the winter—and this is shaping to be a very bad winter—helps the defence in m odem war ; it grounds aeroplanes and holds up motorized movement on land. Nevertheless, the Allies in th e West are attacking, and accepting this handicap in the knowledge that, if they do secure a stretch o f good dry weather, their accumulated superiorities are now so vast th a t they can tu rn th em to immense account. I t is clear enough th a t th e Germans fight tenaciously for every mile ; th a t, whether or no t a different situation would confront us if our political warfare had been directed differently, our armies face th e situation today in which they have to reckon with a united nation fighting very tenaciously a defensive war on its own soil. There is the iron grip o f the Nazi Party, and the absence o f any practical alternative o r o f any mental picture o f something to be gained by taking risks against the Party now.

I t is hard to th in k th a t any other people in Europe could be trained for years to such a concentration o f interest and devotion on an individual, and could then be left, in the crisis, quite uncertain whether he is alive o r dead, sane or insane, in full command o r the prisoner o f o ther Nazis, in the Reich o r already ab ro ad and disguised. This mystification may well be n o t only covering death or a disappearance in good tim e, bu t also p reparing for a la ter po te n t legend th a t the Führer lives and will come back. The use o f doubles is by no means played out. N o r, we believe, have we yet realized the possibilities o f substituted identities, fo r no one is better placed th an the very Nazis th e Adlies are most anxious to apprehend, the men directly concerned with the police system o f th e Party, for assuming the identities o f victims, who are perhaps only selected to be victims because o f convenient physical resemblances. The problem o f identities will be discovered in all its magnitude when the war ends.

To Allied statesm en a generation ago i t did n o t seem easy to imagine anything worse th an the Prussian Junker. Get rid o f him and the ordinary G erm ans would be much more civilized. Memories o f to u r is t travel and o f Germ an university life, b u t mainly th e bias o f civilized professional men—lawyers and professors and doctors, as the Big Three o f Versailles were—against the military world, and o f p ro fessional democratic politicians against dynasties, nursed the great illusion th a t the G erm an people would n o t evolve from within themselves th a t projection o f their qualities and ideals which emerged as the Third Reich. ‘‘I am a magnet, ’ ’ said H itler, “ which passes over the face o f G erm any and elicits what is in th e G e rm an s .” Very courageous, com petent to deal with things though n o t with people, anxious to obey, n o t troubled much by scrapie and fascinated by power and strength, the Germ an people have obeyed H itle r well. I t is singularly fatuous to suggest th a t he does n o t draw his strength from his representative quality, and h is pow er to voice representative emotions and dreams. “ O thers have Empire ; we w ant an Empire ; we are n a tu ra l superiors . . . ” and so on ; those a re Germ an feelings, the collective form th a t envy and vanity take among them . They are n o t p o o r ; they a re rich among the peoples o f the earth ; bu t they feel p o o r when they th in k th a t anybody else has more.

In Hohenzollern days Catholic Europe h ad little reason to love the old Prussia, whose roo ts were o f cold steel, whose being was an organization fo r power, drawing its discipline and ideals from outside the warm circle o f Christian Europe. But the Prussian o rder was im itative, copying the West, the tru e heir o f those earlier barbarians who, entering the Rom an Empire, wanted to succeed to its places and profits and to live inside its structures. The Hohenzollerns sought to be a great European Power. What is new and touches depths which the Second Reich did not contem plate is the uninhibited sabotaging o f standards which H itle r brought in. To H itler, Wilhelm II was a halfhearted W ar Lord who let his people suffer from blockade when tiiere were weak but com fortable neutrals a t his frontier —Danes and Dutch—who could have been used as screens or slaves. The Belgian Crisis

M. Pierlot and his Government in Brussels have survived the first serious challenge to their authority, the a t tem p t o f the armed resistance to resist disbandm ent and incorporation in the Belgian Army. All over Europe the Allied policy o f offering arm s and often supplying them direct to anybody who could convince Allied representatives th a t they could make some contribution against th e Germans was a direct tem p ta tion to all sorts o f people who were very much less interested in the war th an in what would happen after the Germans had been driven from their country. In general, the a ttem pts to build up alternative Governments out o f Resistance movements are failing, a n d are destined to fail, in Western Europe. The cry o f the Resistance movements, th a t much more purging o f fifth-columns needs to be done and th a t they are the only people who can be trusted to do it, is insufficient propaganda in countries with a general trad itio n o f legality, where the ordinary citizen wants above all else no t to find himself held up on the ro ad by pickets and led away to account fo r him self before a committee o f Revolutionaries. The opposition to d isbandm ent in Belgium did not lead to any form idable dem onstration, and although the Allied authorities, who are vitally interested in the political tranquillity o f their main military base ju s t behind the front line, openly took up their position in support o f M. Pierlot, they were n o t needed. The Communists were supported by Pravda, which made headlines o f the resignation o f two Communist Ministers. Pravda has been drawing its fam iliar contrasts between “ the Government o f Pierlot and S p a ak ” on the one hand and “ Belgian p a t r io ts ” on the o th e r ; and it went on to describe a prom inent Belgian soldier, General van Overstraeten, as one who “ acquired long before the war the reputation o f being one o f the most active agents o f H itlerite G erm any.” This was because he had opposed the maintenance o f private Communist armies in Belgium.

The whole effect o f th e great movement called political emancipation, from the tim e o f the first French Revolution, has been to make o f supreme political power an unlim ited prize, open to any m an or men who can seize and keep it. This war has been fought with a virulence and a hatred on the p a r t o f the governments because the whole existence o f a m odem political regime, and very likely the actual lives o f