LISTENINGS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 119, 3 October 1941, Page 15

LISTENINGS

Perpetrated and illustrated by

KEN

ALEXANDER

Time And The Tied

HERE are growing signs: that recumbent Europe is straining at the Nazi bonds. When Hitler has to shoot a score of innocent French hostages to avenge the killing of one German, it looks as though even he shares the world’s view that it is one thing to get nations down and another to keep them down, France, Serbia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Holland, Belgium and Norway! What a time-bomb of vengeance waiting to go off under Hitler’s New Order! ; In spite of all the New Orders ever envisaged, the oldest order in creation is the Order of the Boot. Hitler knows and fears that when the time is ripe he will. be booted higher than any other ball of air has ever been kicked by the hoof of Nemesis, He is trying to beat Time to it. Talk about a slave of Time! Everything he does is a race against the clock. If he fails to clean up Eastern Europe without being ticked off by Time the alarm will go off in the West and he will wake up to find that instead of being on top of the world the world is on top of him,

He scurries here and there, dealing death at terrific tempo in the hope that Time, the guerrilla, won’t get him in ‘the rear, But, as sure as Time has shot up the aspirations of previous dictators

and sprinkled their remains with the disinfectant of sweet sanity, Hitler's chances of world-domination are slowly, savagely, but inexorably, ticking away to the graveyard where lay the bones of all past Tempus fugitives. No wonder Hitler lies deep in hig dugout on the Eastern Front shrieking "Onward! Onward! Never mind the cost!" He never minds the cost that others pay in blood. It is the cost that he will have to pay if they refuse to donate their blood any longer that gives him the jitters. Adolf the Damned is a rat running round and round a wire trap. The trap is Time. He can’t beat Time in the long run. The run is too long. There have been too many dee layed-action bombs in his path. Dunkirk, Libya, Greece, Crete, Iraq, Iran, Russia! All delays, no matter what other mames he gives them, No wonder he has the habit of feeling his pack: tenderly. Already Adolf’s schedule of Si os has a bad crick* in the neck. Long ere this he should have been eating the roast beef of England in Westminster Abbey, pate de fois gras in Paris, muscovy duck in Moscow, and the fruits of victory all over Europe. Instead, he is tasting the bitterness of frustration. When Time unties the tied of Europe, Hitler’s Watch on the Rhine will be a stop watch, His epitaph will be "Here lies Hitler who came second in the race with Time." Merely a hunch, you say? Well, it’s a hunch shared by better brains than mine.