HOW NETHERLANDS AWAITED

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21176, 27 July 1940, Page 11 (Supplement)

HOW NETHERLANDS AWAITED

THE NAZI ONSLAUGHT : : CHARACTERISTIC GENIUS

(H. B. Elliston in Christian Science Monitor)

14. A handsome soldier with a superb military bearing is talking to a group of foreign correspondents. His name is General J. J. G. Baron van Vorst tot Vorst, Commander of the Dutch army in the field. He is giving the correspondents data on the famous water defences of the Netherlands which the party are about to inspect. He winds up : “What you will see is a typical example of how a nation without great stores of material like the French or the Germans ran develop its own defences out of its own characteristic genius.” The General’s remark came to me as a reminder of what I had seen in Finland. The Finns were as one to 50 in their resistance to the Soviet invasion. All they could do was to invoke their “characteristic genius” in defence of their homeland. It was a genius in mobility of movement, a genius for fighting on skis. And this Finnish genius had developed out of the economic need to conquer an Arctic wilderness of immense forests stretching over ranges of mountains which for months are covered in deep snow. Now here were the Dutch relying upon their own “characteristic genius” in defending their homeland. In what lay the Dutch genius ? I looked across at the Zuider Zee, and the Zuider Zee gave me a clue to it. Out of that water the Dutch were peacefully pulling up the lebensraum or living space which the Nazis were trying to obtain by loot and pillage. As I looked at this grey-green sea of so much song and story, I spoke the name aloud. And a Dutch colleague gently corrected me. “Ijsselmeer,” he said. Yes, it is Ijsselmeer now, a lake which has been made out of a sea. The Dutch have closed in this great sea which comes thrusting into Holland from the north like a huge salient. Strung across the entrance now stretches a long dyke, and inside the dyke the Dutch are making the water yield its bottomland, its netherland, to the Dutch cultivator. In time these reclamations will add up to an entirely new province comprising a tenth of the arable area of the Netherlands. A witty Frenchman once said that God had made other countries but the Dutch Had Made Holland. It is true of other parts of Holland besides the Zuider Zee. For centuries the Dutch have been lassooing the sea in dykes. Inside the dykes the water is then drained out, and you have what the Dutch call a polder. They aren’t satisfied with polders, though. Canals are dug out of the polder, and water is poured back into the ditches for either communication or irrigation. The engineers used to rely upon the power generated by those windmills which dot the Dutch land-and-sea-scape. Now, however, there are electric pumps everywhere, and an engineer told me that three little electric pumps can do the work formerly done by one of those unwieldy galleons of the earth. Finally there come the bridges, and a fresh bit of Holland is all ready for habitation and intercommunication with the rest.

on their sea beaches. That is how the nations came to Rope In Three Miles of the Sea as an integral part of their territorial domain, and adhered to free movement for all men outside the threemile limit in accordance with the Grotian doctrine. But all these geniuses could not have flourished without the water engineer. In more senses than one he paved the way for them. And so it was to the water engineer that the Dutch turned when the storm ovei Europe made the Dutch come out of their peaceful polders to look to their defences. They had an army, it is true, but it was only a bare 30,000, an army which relied upon what the British used to call “Saturday afternoon training.” Holland thus offers another chapter in the democracies’ story of military preparedness. The army had little equipment Of heavy guns I saw but few on my tour of the defences. I asked a Dutch officer why the guns were of such low calibre. “Our heavy guns were to come from Krupp,” he said, “but we ordered them too late, and the Germans never filled the orders, and now we cannot get them elsewhere.” But what they could do with the means at their disposal they proceeded with alacrity to do with the aid of a spiritual inheritance symbolised by the motto on their national coat of arms : “I Will Stand My Ground.” And the sturdy Dutch were on perilous ground. For the Netherlands stands on the balcony of Europe. To be sure, it escaped contagion in the last war. Germany had pushed through the narrow gateway of the Belgian frontier, and had been held up for many precious days. But the lesson had been learned by the Nazi tacticians. This was the day of the Blitzkrieg, or lightning war, and, if the Germans struck, it was obvious that they would strike at every entrance into the Low Countries simultaneously. Not since the day that war broke out had the Netherlands expected to escape involvement. Parts of the country were immediately put in a state of siege, especially the frontier districts. A state of siege is a new phrase which testifies to the passion for democracy of the Queen and her people. (What a contradiction in terms that sounds, but there’s no democracy more real than the democracy of Holland under the autocraticallyminded Wilhelmina!) It is not martial law. Under a state of siege the military does not supersede the civilian government, but must co-operate with it. A state of siege, however, means a partial mobilisation. And so when I was in the Netherlands the army standing at 30,000 had been swollen to nearly half a million, All Ceaselessly at the Ready. Foreigners said that the Dutch would not fight—that, like the Swedes, they had got soft from too much easeful living and a long surcease from fighting. For well over a century they had been at peace. In the 1830’s, when the separation of the Low Countries took place, there had been no blood letting. One must go back to the Napoleonic wars for the last time that the Dutch left their polders for a battlefield. They were at Waterloo —appropriately enough. And they had their bit of military glory when the Prince of Orange led his Nassau troopers in the last charge. Men will fight for their own. however, even when the memory of fighting has been lost. This the Dutch themselves took for granted. I put to the Dutch the question whether they would fight, which I had heard and was to hear so often in Britain and America. Of course, the phrasing was not as bold as that. One asked the Dutch the question by sceptic cally handing on the negative opinion of other foreigners. Most of the Netherlanders simply replied, with meaning, “It’s a question that has never occurred to us.” ExPremier Hendryk Colijn added, “We’ll fight like tigers.” Yet the Dutch, despite the overhanging shadow of Nazi threats, would not entertain military conversations with either the Allies or Belgium. The Belgians could not understand Dutch aloofness. It would be elementary prudence to join together in a defence policy ! But the Dutch, contrary to von Ribbentrop’s indictment, did not wish to give the Nazis a shred of an excuse to attack the Netherlands, and refused all overtures from people who were merely offering police services. They continued to keep free of all entanglements. This aloofness, indeed, may have been their undoing. The defences we saw were in three parts : First, the frontier river system of the Maas and the Ijssel. then the canal system leading north through the marshy Peel to the inundations southwest of the Ijsselmeer. The third line was merely a fencing around of the so-called fortress of Holland, including the capital and the chief cities of the Netherlands. It ended at a place called Goringchen, or Goring’s home (!), and left the distance between Goringchen and the Belgian frontier unprotected. Yet the coastal port of this region was the place that the Nazis most prize as a point d’appui, namely. Flushing. The Dutch explained the “hole” by saying they wished to keep away from entanglements. They were under no illusion that they could hold off the iron-clad invader. But they were Determined to Try To. One evidence was the way that Dutch flyers took to the air and downed any airman that came straying over Holland. There was no Swedish hesitation about this swift defence of Dutch neutrality. The same swift reaction came when the invader finally stepped foot over the frontier en masse. This was the day against which they were preparing when I was in Holland. And the only way they knew of eking out their deficiency in men and material was to use the “characteristic genius” which had literally made Holland in the attempt to save Holland. They intended to put the heart of the country back under water by an ingenious system of dykes and sluices, and accesses which we correspondents inspected as the guests of General Vorst tot Vorst.

The Netherlands may thus be said to be half manmade reclamation. The entire country is so crisscrossed with canals across the old polders that you can sail through Holland as well as drive through it. And lam told that it is like seeing two different countries. The illusion comes from the elevation of the Dutch canals over the countryside. Perhaps you will get some notion of the extent to which this pancake of a country is manmade from the fact that nearly half the country remains under sea level. So the characteristic genius of the Dutch lies in water engineering. The Dutch, of course, have other geniuses, too. This land of fog and dew and damp has bred one of the most wonderful schools of painting in the history of art. The school is no more, alas ! But painters in less environmentally favoured lands lead the pilgrimage every summer to Holland. They must do their painting, I think, in the late afternoon. Between four and six, at any rate, Dutch colours are at their clearest, and Dutch light is most transparent. In this mud, too, have grown gardens of tulips and hyacinths which reappear on dinner tables in many other countries. No People Excel the Dutch in Floriculture. The culture of flowers has reached such a high perfection that the Dutch actually export edelweiss to Switzerland ! Gardening in Holland is an art which these practical people have made into a great industry- Would that more industries were such a joy to the senses ! Philosophers sprang out of these reclamations as well as artists and gardeners. This country produced Erasmus. Spinoza and Grotius, a trio that make a Dutch triumvirate. Their winged words went to the far ends of the earth with the products of Dutch gardens. They were born with the flowers out of this reclaimed environment. Could we not find the influence of the hard working Dutchman in the gentle Erasmus’s counsel to say yes to life ? Holland itself is a grand affirmation of what can be accomplished by industry and ingenuity. Grotius is even a better example of the influence of environment. He is often called the father of international law, but it was maritime law that most concerned him. and he enounced the doctrine of mare liberum, or the free seas. This is the doctrine which codifies the principle that the seas are free to all mankind. The seas would be free right up to the low-water mark of every sea-fronting country if the Dutch had had their way. In other words, there would not have been even territorial waters for a nation to control along with its territorial domain. It was a Dutchman chasing a herring that made the nations fence in the waters up to the three-mile limit. Centuries ago, the herring moved out of the Baltic into the North Sea. The Dutch went after it the North Sea—right under the noses of the angry British