South Yorkshire Times, January 6th 1940
Frozen War
Our war is still frozen, and shows little sign at present of thawing. Here do we see no enemy but winter and rough weather. The same weather has sealed up the miniature warfare of the Western Front and has laid its restraining hand even upon regions where real war lately raged. This is the dead season for war. Latest temperatures have chilled the war of propaganda, too, and except for a few snarls of hate and menace dressed up as New Year greetings from Nazidom, there is not much doing even in that quarter.
The next big offensive will probably be conducted by Sir John Simon, who has the range of the British taxpayer. It is his business to remind us that there is a limit to the comfortable doctrine that small effort means a long war and that a long war spells certain victory for us. Among many dangers to be avoided is the delusion that the Germans must collapse under economic strain long before we can be in the slightest danger of doing so. We have a long start in having, but they have a long start in doing without. It is difficult for us to realise that the political economy of the British Empire, still exercised in the open market, is something quite different from the self-imposed political economy of the Germans who for years have endured a miserable continence and are trained and disciplined to short commons. So long as they believe in their cause, mere hardship and privation will not weaken them. In the final stage of the last war it was not the cumulative effect of the blockade but the imminent peril of invasion that broke their spirit. So long as the West Wall stands, they will tighten their belts and hope for the best. They have no money worries or trade worries in our sense. We are living in different economic worlds. In this country we are fussing and worrying about a rationing that has not even yet been imposed. There is not much evidence yet of any real necessity for rationing at all, except as a measure of justice and to ensure ‘that the poor do not suffer from mal-distribution due to the power of the purse.
In Germany, rationing has for many months been a common fact of existence, accepted with “winter and rough weather” as among the natural inconveniences of life. There are certain illusions that we should not cherish. One is the collapse of this tough and stupid race from inanition—reduction by siege—which is anyhow a poor and cheap form of conquest. Another is the collapse of Germany from internal disunity or sedition. A nation brutal and bovine enough to approve Hitler’s feats in Poland and Czechoslovakia, and servile enough to accept a Bolshevik alliance from a regime sworn to protect it from Bolshevism, is capable of unimagined limits of infatuation. There is no evidence that Hitler does not still command the idolatrous and delirious devotion of all that is virile in Germany. That is a fact to be reckoned with now and to be remembered later. Twice in a generation Germany has destroyed the peace of the world not because it has been imposed upon and deluded by a Kaiser and a Fuhrer, but because there is in the German nature a Hyde underlying a Jekyll, a Teutonic ferocity which will out when it can no longer be repressed. It is true that there is a vast difference between William the Second and Adolf the Unique. It is true that historians will have to spend many volumes in explaining to the post-war world why the Germans with equal avidity “fed upon this mountain and battened on that moor,” why they followed with the same infatuated fidelity the heir of Charlemagne and the crazy Austrian vagrant.
The Germany of the Kaiser, the Germany which for four years withstood a world in arms would not have stomached this comic caricature. There was a time, as Shakespeare reminds us, that “when the brains were out the man was dead, and there an end.” To-day we are confronted with that frightful thing, a mindless nation reduced to automatism and yet fit for war—nay, the fitter. Let us not imagine that if we press the siege closely enough the garrison will capitulate without a blow. The end will not come so easily or so quietly. The end is certain, but the signal for battle has not yet been, given. We are waiting for Hitler to give it, for we have a conscience and we shrink from launching the awful avalanche. Hitler has no such conscience and would have loosed the “blitzkrieg” long ago if we had been as ill prepared as Poland to receive it. We believe that the longer he hesitates, the more certainly is he lost. But he does not believe that, nor do the German people. He believes that he can tire us out, and so do they. He does not in his heart believe that by the mightiest effort of which he is capable he can smash and divide the Western Powers. On the contrary he knows that his first hammer-stroke will weld them and destroy him. He knows also that it may come to that in the end, unless he can tire us out and win the race against war weariness. It is a poor hope, but it is his sole avenue of escape. Let us not under-rate his patience or overrate ours.