TRIBUTES BY FOREIGN OBSERVERS

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21223, 20 September 1940, Page 5

TRIBUTES BY FOREIGN OBSERVERS

GOERING’S SAVAGE BOMBARDMENT FAILS GOOD HLMOIR AND SOLIDARITY IN DISTRESS (Official Wireless) (Received Sept. 20, 11 a.m.) RUGBY, Sept. 19 The most striking witness to the spirit of London is given by M. Wauters, former Belgian Minister of Information and editor of the Brussels newspaper Le Peuple, who is in London. In an open letter to a number of friends he recounts: “Tonight I spent eight hours in a public shelter full of workers and petits bourgeois. These people’s good-humour, cordiality and solidarity in distress was profoundly moving. During the whole of those eight hours I heard not one word of complaint or recrimination, not a word against the authorities. “ Here, once more, the deep roots of that great democratic tradition which ensures that the people has confidence in its rulers because it controls them. “If Goering decided on his savage bombardments in order to provoke an exodus on the roads he has completely failed. The roads will not he choked up here as they were in Belgium and France. “ The Germans will not have a chance to assassinate 40,000 civilians in flight as they did on the road from Paris to Chartreux.” An almost identical impression was made by the shrewd American observer, Mr H. R. Knickerbocker, who has seen peoples under the strain of war in half-a-dozen areas in as many years. He reports: “ Londoners and the English people in general, stubbornly, invincibly, even stupidly if you like, refuse to become afraid. This sort of destruction is certainly not going to win the war.”