1945

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 288, 29 December 1944, Page 5

1945

= ICTORY," we said a year ago, "is on the way." It is still on the way, and we have no words to eat or retract. But it would be dishonest to pretend that it is as near now as we expected it to be when we wrote that sentence. It may be closer than the latest news suggests, but most people expected a year ago that it would be here now (including General Eisenhower and FieldMarshal Montgomery). We shall not pretend that we knew better than the generals, or saw in 1943 what other people are only beginning to see this week. It is not a good war for prophets, and we are not anxious to join their ranks; but it is easier to endure prophets than pessimists. Our armies have had a severe reverse west of the Rhine, and it is cowardice to try to explain it away. Events have taken a most painful turn in Greece, and it would be equally stupid to gloss that over. But the crowning folly is to see those shadows and nothing else. The reverse on the Rhine may or may not have delayed the end of the war by months: at present no one knows, since no one on the

German side knows how heavily | the Americans can hit back, and no one on the Allied side knows what the counter-attack is costing Germany in reserve material and men. The upheaval in Greece may have died down before this sentence is dry or®may spread and grow: again we have not the facts for a judgment. But the overriding fact is that reverse and upheaval are mere incidents in relation to the general march of events. We are still winning the war and making gigantic preparations for securing the peace. Throughout 1944 events have moved steadily in one direction, and there is no suggestion anywhere that the direction will change in 1945. "On the way" is our way, not the enemy’s. It is the way in which all those things lie for which, with all our failures and false steps, we are still fighting. Pessimism has about the same foundation in such circumstances as the phobias that prevent some people from crossing the street and others from going to sleep in the dark.