This Quarter
THE WAR OF THE NEUTRALS
I.
WAR ABROAD,
at the moment of writing, is like a movie that
has abruptly been struck into immobility by the jamming of the
projection apparatus. The film started off briskly and portentously
enough, with the ratification of the Stalin-Hitler Pact by the Soviet
Congress, and the first German guns roaring in Poland a few hours
later; the ultimatums of England and France to Hitler, followed by
formal declarations of war; the swift, brutal German
blitzkrieg
in
Poland; the massing of French troops in the Maginot Line; the
disappearance of the British High Fleet into the North Sea on war
duty; the torpedoing of the
Athenia;
the nightly blackouts in Paris
and London. It seemed that the final cataclysm, long expected, was
at last here.
But once the Reichswehr and the Red Army had divided
Poland amicably between them, the film jammed. For weeks now,
the great European powers have been facing each other on the
Western front, their furious gestures of hostility frozen into fan–
tastic rigidity. And while the armies, ranked in battalions and divi–
sions and corps from the North Sea to the Alps, face each other
expectantly behind their fortifications, the politicians of the bellig–
erents wage a desperate, last-minute struggle behind the lines for
the support of neutral powers. Here, for the present, is the real
struggle.
If
war is the continuation of politics by other means, as
Clausewitz said, politics can also be temporarily substituted
for war.
This suspension of serious warfare has cast an air of ambi–
guity over the whole business. It is clear that the players in the
game, whose stake is nothing less than world power, are not yet all
lined up. Until the final crystallization takes place, only the most
provisional sort of analysis can be undertaken. These pages are an
attempt to throw some light on the positions of the two great-and
