The Nazis are shunned by everyone. No Pole would agree to shake hands with a German; many have been actually imprisoned for declining to accept the hand stretched out to them by German officials.
Warsaw cafes empty immediately a German enters So intense is the hatred that German officials and Gestapo agents prefer to stick to their own company rather than visit places where Poles meet.
Gestapo men invariably carry automatic pistols and always walk in groups. In restaurants they order the waiter to taste the food served to them before they touch it.
Near Cracow the peasants still carry on a guerilla war and refuse to supply food to the town now made into the capital of Nazi domination.
Great problem of the Polish "under ground. movement" is to supply the people with news. All wireless sets have been seized by the Gestapo and no independent newspapers are circulating.
But, in spite of this, the Poles will act once there is the slightest crack in the Nazi system.
IHE mists of innocence hang heavily about me, I am still trying to understand this strangest of strange wars. It may not be difficult to understand why the Germans have not bombed London. It may not be difficult to understand why the war on land has not started on the Western Front.
Frankly, I hope it never will.
But mystery succeeds mystery, and when the Russians bomb-erded Helsinki in the first two days of their attack upon Finland, and created untold damage—if we are to believe the photographs—only to cease their attacks, we expected reprisals.
But the Finns sent their little air force over Leningrad, where they dropped leaflets in retaliation for the Russian bombs. There must be some strange motive behind these operations which is beyond the knowledge of the ordinary man. With the promise and threat of fire and death being rained upon us, the Dictators have assumed a pacific attitude in every case where retaliation is not only possible, but inevitable.
I only wish that intelligence was of some use in evaluating the present situation in Europe, but the people who really matter are silent and, in view of their past utterances, I cannot believe that silence means content.
It the war is really going to develop nto an economic struggle we can gird our loins and we ration our butter. We can employ some chartered accountants to keep an accurste account of the ships lost and the enemy tonnage immobilized and captured. We can count the destruction Of each submarine in terms of mer-Chant ships saved and we can count each mine destroyed in terms of foreign currency. The army will hold a predetermined line, and do a certein amount of patrol work in order to remain occupied; but that appears to be all.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.