GADARENE SWINE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 22 August 1941, Page 6

GADARENE SWINE

THE HEADLONG NAZI RUSH.

Hitler and the German Staff have now lost the war in the sense that Germany had lost the last war before the end of the year 1914. We have had a narrow escape, but we have escaped, writes Mr E. L. Woodward in the “Spectator.” It is no longer fanciful to describe the headlong victories of the German armies in terms of the headlong rush of the Gadarene swine. In the hard tests of these months, with suffering around us, with suffering i ahead of us for an unknown tale of days, it may not always be easy to realise that, unless we allow our hands to falter, the chances of ultimate victory are indeed overwhelmingly with us. In some respects we can see the turn of the tide most plainly in the prevailing mood of the German people. Not that, as yet, they expect defeat. Nevertheless, unless there is a conspiracy among all neutral observers of Germany to mislead us, the Germans as a whole, other than youthful types conditioned to war and obedience and to nothing else, appear unable to give themselves up to enthusiasm for their victories. A Frenchman, before the first abdication of Napoleon, described his countrymen as “a nation of per-

plexed spectators who have lost entirely the habit of interfering in their own destiny.” Such a nation lives in Germany today. There has been too much organised shouting in that country since 1933, as there was too mu ch 14 'self-pity before 1933, but there are special reasons why a people which passed through the cycle of years from 1914 to 1918 should be uncertain whether a series of victories does mean Victory.