WAR’S PROGRESS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 8 March 1940, Page 2

WAR’S PROGRESS

HITLER IN A QUANDARY. Can we form any general conclusion from the way the war has gone so far? asks “Scrutator." writing in the “Sunday Times." Prophecy about war has been called a gratuitous form of error, but we can at least form some idea what developments may come in the course of events. The dominant impression that one gets from the war so far as it has yet gone is that Hitler is destitute of any consistent policy for winning. He has a tangential mind, taking up plans impulsively and presently dropping them in favour of other plans which negative them. Thus the man, one of whose motives for proposing peace on terms that allowed him to stop the war at the point at which be could keep his gains was to conciliate neutrals who preferred any peace to any war, is presently found carrying on the war in a way that loses him any chance of the sympathy of any neutral. The truth probably is that Hitler sees no way of winning the war. and does not expect to do so. He is engaged in just the kind ol war which it is consistently argued Germany should never wage. A man of a temperament like Hitler's may react in such circumstances in two opposite ways. Because he knows he is unwise, but cannot bring himself to admit it. he may persist still more obstinately in what he xr.ows to be folly. Or. on the other hand, he is capable of reverting violently back to his original ideas and making a dramatic gesture of resignation in the hope of saving his country, and incidentally himself. The course of the war so far encourages us to keep both these possibilities in mind.