WHAT NEXT?—RUMOUR AND PROPHECY

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVI, Issue 55, 2 September 1943, Page 4

WHAT NEXT?—RUMOUR AND PROPHECY

The shadow of coming events —not yet to hand—has been overhanging the recent war news. Any day, it is said, Italy may be out of the war. Shortly after the fall of Messina it was announced that the mid-Mediterranean and Levant armies were prepared to go anywhere, and at once; they have not yet gone. The Quebec conference has ended, but not in an atmosphere of finality; Mr. Churchill remains in ; Canada- apparently to hold post-confer-ence discussions with the President as soon as coming events shape themselves, and his cautious broadcast

survey of the position comes ■ from Quebec. It is pitched, like the current news, in a tone of expectancy..' There is nothing clear-cut in the European position save the pushing back:'of the German armies by Russia and the air blitz on Germany herself. The political accord of Britain, America, and Russia is sound in principle, but is so far from being clear-cut in detail that it is proposed to allot the spade-work of an agreement to the special diplomacy of the Foreign Ministers or their immediate representatives. Since Sicily fell nothing has been finalised, but the overall picture is, from the Allies' point of view, excellent. For Germany, on the other hand, it is barren. Hitler's battle for an expanded Germany is already lost. Germany herself cannot avert defeat unless her diplomacy can divide the Allies by separating Slav from Anglo-Saxon.

Last May an American writer wrote that Italy had nothing to fight for and nothing to fight with. Events have come near enough to confirming this estimate. Germany is, in a different position. She has plenty to fight with, but what has she to fight for? The Nazi dreamer Rosenberg used to picture an expanded Germany including all of Russia west of a line drawn from Riga (on the Baltic) to the Crimea, on the Black Sea; but the Red Army and the Anglo-American airmen have blasted that dream, and no sensible German today believes that Germany is fighting for a slice of Russia, or for anything else than to, save her own skin. Now, the Germans are not f c kind of people who believe in fighting for nothing. If they still have something to fight with, but nothing to fight for, their natural tendency is to end the fight, cut their losses, and save their fatherland; to use the words of Emil Ludwig, who should be an excellent interpreter of the German mind, "it is no longer a question of supplies but psychology. The Germans have not the English nerves for defence. You can say I am a very bad psychologist if the German war is not finished in 1943." So much for the free-lance psychologist. Turning from him to the official informa-tion-giver, Brendan Bracken, the opposite story is told—"there is no chance of destroying Germany in 1943." The conflict is understandable if the two prophets are working on different material—Bracken in the physical field, Ludwig in the mental.

But the net result is to deepen the shadow of coming events, and to emphasise mystery at the expense of history. There have been periods of lull before, and they have been broken by big-scale action. It may be that the same escape will be found now from the shadowland of rumour and counter-rumour, and of conflicting prophecies. ' '