Third Year

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 116, 12 September 1941, Page 4

Third Year

OW that we are into. our third year of | \ war it is natural to ask how many more years lie ahead and how much has been achieved in the two years just ended. No one climbs a mountain without looking back at intervals to see how far he has advanced, without moments of anxiety and weariness, and without wondering in the | most difficult places if his strength will hold to the end. He knows, too, if he has climbed before, that the summit is many times farther away than it appeared to his foreshortened view. Then the stage arrives at which he is too tired to do anything but struggle desperately on. And we have not yet reached that stage in the present war. We are nowhere near the end of our strength, and it would be foolish to suppose that we have passed the most difficult places. It is in fact folly, though it is human and natural, to be counting the years at all. The end may be quite near, though there is nothing to indicate that it is, and it may be so far away that we have hardly yet begun. Whatever the facts are, we must not delude ourselves by wishful thinking. If we, who have taken so much more punishment than we have been able to inflict, are only now beginning to feel our strength, it is madness to suppose that Germany, who was so well prepared to begin with, is already beginning to weaken after so short a period of real fighting. We can’t afford such madness. Magnificently though Russia is resisting, Germany is still moving forward, and the war would still not be won if the tide turned the other way. The most we can say yet of the Russian campaign is that it has cost Hitler far more than he has gained from it, even if we cut Russia’s estimate of his losses in two. And yet our second year did yield three profoundly important results. It showed, first, that Hitler was not able to win even when everything was in his favour. It brought America definitely to Britain’s side. And it proved finally to the whole world that Hitler was not merely a madman, but a treacherous madman, whom civilisation dare not endure a day longer than it would take to overpower and chain him. So perhaps there is a good reason after all for believing that the end is nearer than a comparison of present resources would place it.