Two Who Followed

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 261, 23 June 1944, Page 3

Two Who Followed

T seemed to us last week that the most important men in Western Europe-and at the moment in the whole world-were those landing on French soil with guns in their hands: Allied soldiers, and the sailors and airmen helping them. Our feeling is still the same. But it is worth looking for a moment at two of the men who followed-one in his seventieth, the other in his seventyfifth year. They had first met forty-four years earlier, and the elder had sent the younger to prison. Six years later they met again, with the tables not merely turned, but upside down. The younger man now had the power, the elder the role of supplicant, and it is on record that the attitude of the younger was a "little stiff." It could not have appeared to an observer then that the foundation was being laid for an enduring friendship; that these two men eleven years later would be sitting side by side in the same Cabinet, facing the same crisis; or that they would land on a French beach twenty-seven years later still to observe together one of the great movements of history. But it has happened. Field-Marshal Smuts is the political sage of the British Cormnmonwealth; many would say of the whole democratic world. Mr. Churchill is the leader and inspirer of that Commonwealth, and most people think its saviour. They .are as unlike as any two men could be who (politically) wear the same clothes and speak the same language; but for a generation at least they have fought the same fight and marched to the same music. When Smuts pleaded for self-government for the South African people-release from the. consequences of defeat only four years after they had been imposed -it was Churchill who persuaded the Hause of Commons to agree. He was then only thirty-two; but the wisdom of 1906 was of critical importance in 1916, and perhaps made the difference in 1940 between crisis and disaster. To-day our fate is in the hands of our soldiers. For an unnumbered succession of days it was in the hands of these two old men whom our soldiers have just been cheering.