SHORT WAR EXPECTED

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20101, 22 November 1939, Page 5

SHORT WAR EXPECTED

BELIEF OF DR. BENES CZECH INDEPENDENCE LONDON, Nov. 7. “I may be wrong, but I do not believe this war will last long,” said the former President of Czechoslovakia. Dr. E. Benes, in an interview with the Sunday Times. “I am absolutely convinced that the independence of Czechoslovakia will be restored,” he said. "You cannot enslave for ever 8,000,000 people, and my people will never consent to live under oppression.”

Dr. Benes, t who 22 months ago was interviewed in the former Royal Palace at Prague, was interviewed this time in the modest drawing-room of a small villa at Putney, where he is starting anew the work of rebuilding his country, as he and the late President Dr. T. G. Magsaryk, did a quarter of a century ago. Dr. Benes said that a Czechoslovak Government might be set up in Britain, on the lines of that established by the Poles in France, to work from outside in conjunction with the Allies for the restoration of Czech Independence. “That matter,” he added, “is now being discussed. In any case, we plan, as in the last war, to establish a Czechoslovak Army in France, and we shall do everything we can m this country to organise it. Czechoslovakia will fight.”