Why Don't We Speak?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 277, 13 October 1944, Page 7

Why Don't We Speak?

to know why we are silent about Warsaw. We are pleased to tell him. We are silent for the reason that ought to keep him silent too: because we don’t know the facts. We don’t know why the patriots rose when they did, why help was not sent more liberally and more promptly, why Russia seemed to fluctuate between annoyance and indifference, why the patriots in the end preferred surrender to crossing the Vistula. We don’t know the answer to any of those questions, and our correspondent does not. know them either. It may easily be that the simplest and most innocent explanation is the true one: that the patriots rose because they heard the Russians at the gate, and expected to see them any day in the city, and that the Russians did not relieve them because they couldn’t. So far we don’t know. Nobody in New Zealand does, and comment without facts is not courage but impudence. If anyone wishes to know how difficult it is to obtain the facts even a generation after a battle or a war he will find it profitable to read a little book by Liddell Hart | that has recently reached New Zealand: Why Don’t We Learn From History? One of his examples is the case of a general in the last war who had lost his battle and who in his official account of it faked and inserted an impossible order to save his own reputation with posterity. That no doubt is an extreme and unusual case for modern times. But it is not gross corruption by generals that makes fact such an uncertain quantity: it is the deliberate, and universally approved, use of half-truths and misleading reports by all belligerent governments. It would be optimistic to think that anyone will know the true history of Warsaw’s last two months by 1950; and Warsaw is a relatively simple problem. Who will know Rumania’s war-story then, or Hungary’s, or Bulgaria’s, or Brazil’s? And who will even pretend to know the story of Paris or of Rome? \ CORRESPONDENT wants