the news from Russia with growing admis Life seems to consist chiefly on watch
tion for the Russians and quiet satisfaction at the thought of the number of Germans who will fight no more. Which is no doubt unchristian, yet human, for the one thing one can be quite sure about is that the fewer Germans there are in the world, the better the prospects for decent peoples to live peacefully together. It is interesting to hear the view of different folk. Without exception the few Cassandras one meets are wealthy people with nothing to do. busy folk are quite cheerful. After all Mr. Churchill's exhortation to the boys at Har row, "Never, never, never give in to force" expresses the philosophy of the vast majority of British people.
Those who are not serenely, unquestioning confident in our ultimate victory are an insignificant decimal per cent, of the nation.
Two interesting aspects of the Russian resistance come to light recently. One is an article in "Soviet War News" describing the nation-wide nature of the guerilla warfare, for which every village forms a base, with women joining in as avidly as the' men Moscow radio has given a thrilling account of how the women of one village armed with pitchforks and axes set fire to the house in which the German officers were sleeping and slew them as they ran from the burning house crying "That for our men whom you have killed." Then the women with their children hid in the woods. They managed to kill several more Germans who were hunting for them and after incredible privat tions got safely to the Russian lines, The other interesting disclosure is that directly the German invasion took place the Russians began to move back the machinery from Kief and other industrial centres to the Urals. It sounds very much like the Chinese beginning to build the Burma Road while the fighting still raged round Shanghai.
Apart from the war we have had in one week four first class murder mysteries. In the first a park-keeper named John Child was found dead in a hut at Moat Farm Park, Hendon, with six revolver bullets pumped into him. The police are satisfied that this was a crime of jealousy of which they are said to know the story, but they have not found the man who fired the shots nor the revolver from which they came. Then there was the well-to-do widow Mrs. Greenhill, living in a flat in West Kensington, found with her head bashed in with a bottle and valuables missing worth about £100. This happened in broad daylight and the murderer came out, coolly, stopped a taxi, drove to Euston. In this case an arrest has been made of a so-called Dr. Trevor, who is alleged to have made a confession, for the worth of which one had better wait for the trial. "Another murder much resembling the Greenhill case is that of Mrs. Humphries, also well-to-do, found dying in har flat in Gloucester Crescent. What the motive was in this case has not appeared and no trace whatever of the murderer has yet been found.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.