COMMENTARY by S. A. Voigt, for many years a foreign correspondent of a leading British paper. broadcast over the B.B.C. on Thursday.
Few of us sent home from the front at the end of the first World War dreamed that we were just going home on leave. but 20 years leave it was, When the second World War began in September, 1939. the intervening years became quite unreal and like a dream. This feeling is much stronger amongst the enemy than ourselves. I notice it unmistakeably when I listen to German broadcasts and read German newspapers; it permeates the whole German outlook. To the Germans the intervening years are as nothing. even less than ihe shadow of a dream. After all. we thought the war was over once and for all, thet the account was settled; but the German view has always been that the war was not over and the account is not settled. so they quite unconsciously began where they left off.
The intervening years of peace were. we now realize, not devoted to the arts of peace in Germany, but were just a period of preparation for the renewal of the first World War. When we talk of peace it is the 1918- 1939 period we have in mind, but to the Germans peace is not represented by the period between the two World Wars—that is not their lost Paradise—the only peace period that they are able to remember at all vividly is the period before the first World War; that is their peace-time.
I mention all this because it will. I think. help us to understand the manner in which the Germans are taking the events of the last few ays—the sinking of the Hood and Bismarck, and President Roose-speech.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.