THE TABLET, September 24th, 1955. VOL. 206, No. 6018

THE TABLET

Published as a Newspaper

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN l 840

SEPTEM BER 241h, 1955

NINEPENCE

The C a th o l ic Church in H i s t o r y : The Pope’s Allocution, and an Editorial Commentary

N ew H o p e in P o la n d : The Spirit o f the Younger Generation, as Observed in Warsaw

M a g ic o f “ The M a g ic F lu te” : A Topical Interpretation. By Roland Hill

F ilm C o ld War: At the Venice Festival. By John A. V. Burke

A F o rg o t ten S h r in e : Edmund Lacy, Bishop o f Exeter. By D. John Stephan, O.S.B.

The A r t o f th e B ook: An Exhibition in Albemarle Street. By Alex Matheson Cain

B o o k s R e v i e w e d : Surprised by Joy, by C. S. Lewis ; William Weston, translated by Philip

Caraman ; Anthony Trollope, by A. O. J. Cockshut; Voice Production in Choral Technique, by Charles Cleall; Choral Recitation o f the Divine Office, by Dom Alphege Shebbeare; The Queen's Awards, edited by Ellery Queen; A Handful o f Silver, by John Stephen Strange; Margin o f Terror, by William McGivern; September Story, by Ralph Inchbald ; An Aesthetic Approach to Byzantine Art, by P. A. Michelis ; and Introducing Handel and Introducing Mozart, both by Kitty Barne. Reviewed by Christopher Derrick, Frank Davey, Roger Sharrock, Anthony Wright, Anthony Lejeune,

Edward Hutton and Rowena Hamer-Jones.

MACLEAN AND BURGESS

T HE Foreign Office White Paper on Maclean and Burgess which is promised for the week-end will be scanned with close care to see how much validity there is in the argument that counter-espionage needs secrecy as a condition of its effective work. At the moment there is a disposition to underrate these considerations ; to demand in the name of the public to be told everything about the methods of surveillance and control in use, though a moment’s thought will show the impossibility of setting out the methods in full while they are still needed, as they are.

The treachery of Burgess and Maclean, like that of Fuchs, was greatly facilitated by a whole climate of opinion that was generated between the early ’thirties and the late ’forties. Communist penetration went very far in the Press and publishing, as well as in Whitehall, with the sedulous propagation of the term “anti-Fascist” to bracket Communists with Western Socialists and Liberals, and a great many young people moved insensibly along the path towards a fullfledged Marxism. All that was asked about Fuchs was his anti-Nazi record, which was unquestionable, and little regard was paid to his Communist activities.

When the war came, but particularly after 1941, when the Soviet Union had been invaded, it was current form to be Left-Wing, and Donald Maclean’s career went forward on an easy tide ; and if Americans today are disposed to complain that such a known Communist sympathizer should have been head of Chancery in our Washington Embassy and head of the American Department in the Foreign Office, it could at the time have been plausibly said that he was just the kind of man who would get on best with the Left-Wing progressives with whom Franklin Roosevelt had surrounded himself. Those were the days when there was a British anxiety lest the New Deal Americans would prefer the Soviet to the British alliance ; and when Churchill was seen in Washington as an old-fashioned British Imperialist, personifying an old, still feudal country whose day was past, while America and Russia, each in their different ways, had made their revolution and were the two great Young Republics to whom the democratic future belonged. Only if people can imaginatively recover the mood and illusions of those years does it become intelligible that Burgess, who made no secret in conversation of his Communist outlook, was thought eminently suitable for military intelligence.

There were other Communists, one of whom installed himself in a key position at Bari over communications between Yugoslavia and London, and was able to further the cause of Tito and injure that of Mihailovitch, attributing credit to the one and discredit to the other.

In the preparation of propaganda to Germany all the emphasis was put upon Socialists, who were wrongly imagined to constitute the strength of the opposition to the Nazis. Then, when British troops captured the correspondence exchanged between the Nazi Gauleiters in Baden, a very Catholic area. That correspondence was filled with Nazi anxiety at local Catholic hostility to the Third Reich. It was carefully and firmly suppressed. Although, at a high level, the Government acceded to the request of the Catholic authorities that it should be released, this was successfully prevented by those who were determined that German Catholics should have no credit. When the delays became protracted, they explained they were waiting for parallel Lutheran documents, which were not forthcoming.

It is hard to remember now how Dr. Adenauer was coldshouldered in the first years after 1945 by the British Labour Government, which put all its money on his political opponents, the German Socialists, whose attitude to the West has always been equivocal. In Italy it was the same story, a fatuous reliance on Signor Nenni in preference to De Gasperi and the