THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

ESTABLISHED 1840 REGISTERED AS A NEWSPAPER

VOL. 173 No. 5159

LONDON, MARCH 25th, 1939

SIXPENCE

IN T i n s IS SU E “ MEIN KAMPF” An Examination by Christopher Dawson

THE FRONTIER BETWEEN FRANCE AND ITALY

A Military Correspondent describes its Present Condition THE PALESTINE CONFERENCE

By J. M. N. Jeffries

LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

Full List o f Contents on page 372.

THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK The Art of Threatening Europe

It was Marshal Goering who just a year ago, when Vienna was occupied, made the speech reassuring the Czechoslovak Republic that no intentions were harboured against it. Rather fittingly it was the same Marshal Goering, welcoming the Führer at Berlin, after the annexation of the Czech portions of the now extinct Republic, who gloried in the deed as a notable addition to the security of the German Reich. The terms he used, in celebration rather than justification, could be applied with equal enthusiasm and point to any other forcible action by Germany against any of the ten foreign countries which have common frontiers with the Reich, and the bigger those countries the more true would it be that their absorption or forcible reduction to protectorate status had notably increased the security of the Reich.

of Germany. The Hungarian plain lies at the mercy of the Reich and may be counted in the German system, but Poland, Rumania, and Jugoslavia are all countries which today are of the size and importance they are because they control so much of the territory and population which belonged to the Central Powers in 1914. Those who remember with what arguments the Dardanelles campaign was advocated, how it was then maintained that to isolate Central Europe was to ensure its eventual defeat, can today look at the position in south-eastern Europe and see that there is no question of there being there any ally for the Reich. The war would begin as though the Dardanelles campaign had been a great success in 1915. The Soviet

The action of the Führer will take rank as a major turning point in his history. I t places him in the category of the great adventurers and out of the category of the great statesmen. Bismarck was often tempted to use German predominance in a brusque fashion, but he left the heritage which he did to Wilhelm II, a heritage which was conserved and fostered for another quarter o f a century before shipwreck, precisely because he was content to let the German Empire grow up gradually but impressively, without appearing as a scourge and menace to the rest of Europe. The Austrian Inheritance

The main defence in the German Press has been based on the historical argument that the lands now absorbed have, in fact, through nearly all their history lived under German overlordship. This is true and important. The German preponderance in the Danube valley is a reversion to what has been normal and was only violently interfered with when Germany was defeated in war. Those who are today ruefully adding to the total of German strength the assets of Bohemia and Moravia must never forget that quarter of a century ago the Central Powers went into the World War holding a great deal more territory than the successive unpicking o f the Versailles network has yet given the new leader

There is a curious parallel between the anomalous position of Czarist Russia in an alliance, using slogans about “ making the world safe for democracy” twentyfive years ago, and the position of the Soviet in the new alliance which is being mooted today. In each case the value of Russia on paper afforded no real guide to the value of the Russian effort. The Soviet, a new and insecure regime, has made far greater efforts than the Czarists made to organize military equipment, but equally the Soviets are faced with a Japanese hostility from which the British alliance with Japan exempted Czarist Russia. More importantly, the Slav races of Central Europe, which looked to the old Russia as to their natural champion, view with extreme misgiving and alarm the simple faith of people in England and America that the Russia of today can be made into a useful and co-operating partner in a limited political enterprise.

Herr Hitler has exactly played into the hands of Moscow by bringing so very much nearer that conflict between the Western Powers which is to be the beginning of the development of a revolutionary situation in the West. This distrust of the Soviet in Eastern Europe, based on close knowledge, and in many parts on a vivid and recent experience, makes it quite certain that if Great Britain desires to lead an alliance, the burdens of