Comment
Notes on a Strange War
THE SECOND WORLD WAR
is now in its eighth month, and it seems
not yet really to have begun. The fighting in Norway, which for a
few days looked like the long-awaited breaking of the stalemate on
the Western Front, seems to be settling into another sort of stale–
mate-one of bloody guerilla raids, sudden explosions of violence,
with not enough forces involved to be decisive. This is the kind of
fighting that went on in this dark prehistoric land of fjords and
mountains in the time of the old Norse hero-tales. The atmosphere
is enhanced by the place names of the new battlefront-Stavenger,
Narvik, Trondheim, Natodden, and, in today's paper, "the long
valley called Gudbrandsdal"-so much less
civilized
than other
European place names. At the moment of writing, the Germans are
digging in throughout the South and have not yet even been dis–
lodged from Narvik, while the English are talking in terms of a
summer campaign in Norway.
It
looks as though it will take
months of this sort of skirmishing to decide the question of mastery
of the Scandinavian peninsula-with the main war still to come.
It
is only prudent to make this, or any other, prediction about
the war abroad, in the most tentative way. The one safe prediction
to be made about the war, on the basis of its first eight months, is
that no prediction may safely be made. Some of us were prepared
for a Nazi-Soviet pact, but who expected it to be an agreement for
common offensive action, the solemnization of which by the
Supreme Soviet was the signal for Hitler to invade Poland? Who
expected the Reichswehr to overrun Poland in ten days and the
Red Army to fail to occupy any appreciable amount of Finland
after three months of fighting? Who foresaw that Stalin would
partition Poland with Hitler and proceed to reduce the three Baltic
states to vassals-without, furthermore, disturbing their capitalist
property relations? Who expected the first serious fighting between
170
