Foreign News: Planless Peace

Herr Hitler made a clear offer, said the official German news agency of Adolf Hitler’s Reichstag speech (see above), and he expects a clear answer.

That was not the way it struck the British Government. “Vague and obscure” was their description when the full text became “available in London.” The British Government agreed to give the proposals “careful examination in consultation with the Dominions and the French Republic,” but it was pointed out that “no peace proposals are likely to be found acceptable which do not effectively free Europe from the menace of aggression” and that, since Hitler had double-crossed them before, “something more than words will be required to establish the confidence which must be the essential basis of peace.”

Even before Herr Hitler proposed that “the leading nations . . . come together to draw up, accept and guarantee a statute on a comprehensive basis which will insure for them all a sense of security,” Neville Chamberlain had practically turned him down. “No mere assurances from the present German Government,” said he, “could be accepted by us.”

Peace by Negotiation? Nevertheless, Peace, not War, was paradoxically the chief concern of all three European belligerents—and most of the rest of the world —last week. Everybody wanted it but no body seemed to know the simplest factors in any plan for getting it—how? where? through whom? at what price?

If it were to be a peace by negotiation, where would the principals meet? Presumably some neutral country would supply the hotel room and presumably it would best be accomplished by doing the negotiating quietly and then springing the deal. Who would the principals be? Not Hitler, not Daladier, not Chamberlain. They could not meet anywhere obscurely, for one thing, and the Munich aura hangs too heavily over their heads.

What kind of concession could Germany make that would save Allied face? Best bet seemed to be a pint-sized “ethnographic” Polish State around Warsaw. Herr Hitler spoke mistily of further central European ethnographic shifts. An “autonomous” Polish State could always be rigged in favor of the Nazis to save them face. But if the Allied negotiator held out for an autonomous CzechoSlovakia, and there was much talk in the House of Commons about that, the negotiations would probably not get very far.

Peace by Conference? What States would confer? If the conference were five-sided—Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia—the Nazis would have the majority edge. Would Italy sit in with Russia? Benito Mussolini has been trying for years to get a four-power conference together, but in his plan Russia was the wallflower. That Russia is very much interested in current peace-talking was evident from the official reaction to Hitler’s speech. Said J. Stalin’s Izvestia this week: “One may respect or hate Hitlerism, just as any other system of political views. This is a matter of taste. But to undertake war for ‘the annihilation of Hitlerism’ means to commit an act of criminal folly in politics.”

The conferees would presumably undertake as their main job the codifying of Herr Hitler’s “statute of security.” Security sounds good to the French; it is their favorite national word. Statute sounds good to the British. With talk of Russian pressure on India (see p. 43), with more than talk of Japanese pressure in the Far East, the British would presumably welcome and help enforce any reasonable legality which would insure an ordered world. It would not have to be a British world, either, but a shared responsibility.

But what of Hitler’s record as a conferee? Until last week he never used the word conference in other than an abusive sense. He has yet to answer Franklin D. Roosevelt’s April invitation to a world peace-&-security conference. His diplomatic dealings have been consistently bilateral, even in the Axis. Italy did not sit in on the Russian Pact. Furthermore, conferring is clearly not Adolf Hitler’s dish. He cannot listen.

Peace by Encyclical? Nobody listened to the Reichstag speech with more attention than Pius XII. He canceled all Vatican engagements and gave his radio ear (he speaks German). The Pope was reported as being “favorably impressed by the moderate tone of the speech and especially by the fact that Herr Hitler did not utter drastic threats or set a time limit for acceptance of his peace proposals.” Pope Pius suspended work on his peace encyclical pending further Allied reactions.

Aimless War? To many & many a neutral, far from having any established peace aims, the Allies do not yet seem to have propounded very satisfactory war aims. King George VI said they were fighting lest “justice and liberty among nations … be ended,” an ideology echoed by Premier Daladier. The British Government is legally at war simply because it had an assistance treaty with violated Poland.

The French and British people who are actually fighting the war need no further declaration of aims. They—like the Germans—are simply fighting for their lives; their war aim is to win the war. The chief benefit to the Allies in drawing up a set of war aims would be to satisfy, and perhaps enlist the sympathies of, neutral onlookers —particularly in the U. S. For the perplexed U. S. people strongly desire to know exactly what kind of world it is that the Governments of Great Britain and France are fighting to protect or gain. Nowhere was this U. S. perplexity better expressed than in a letter to that font of British Governmental information, the London Times, from one who has lectured, instructed, amused and scared Americans by the thousand:

“I have been following the correspondence upon war aims in your columns with considerable attention. In many respects it recalls the war aims controversy of 1917-18 when the Crewe House [propaganda] organization did its unsuccessful best to extract from the foreign office a precise statement of what the country was fighting for (see Sir Campbell Stuart’s Secrets of Crewe House). No such statment was ever produced, and the Great War came to a ragged end in mutual accusations of broken promises and double crossing.

“Even then there was a worldwide feeling that a great revolution in human affairs was imminent; the phrase ‘A war to end war’ expressed that widely diffused feeling, and surely there could be no profounder break with human tradition and existing forms of government than that. But that revolution did not realize itself. The League of Nations, we can all admit now, was a poor and ineffective outcome of that revolutionary proposal to banish armed conflict from the world and inaugurate a new life for mankind. It was too conservative of existing things, halfhearted, diplomatic. And since, as more and more of us are beginning to realize now, there can be no more peace or safety on earth without a profound reconstruction of the methods of human living, the Great War did not so much come to an end as smoulder through two decades, the fatuous twenties and the frightened thirties, to flare up again now. Now at a level of greater tension, increased violence and destructiveness and more universal suffering, we are back to something very like 1914, and the decisive question before our species is whether this time it will set its face resolutely towards that drastic remoulding of ideas and relationships, that world revolution, which it has shirked for a quarter of a century. . . .

“Yours faithfully,

“H. G. Wells”

Prime Minister Chamberlain this week promised to draw up a set of aims with Premier Daladier.