"We Shall Be Together"

Last week loyal subjects glowed and grinned as they read the breezy and colloquial first messages of new Prime Minister Winston Churchill to His Majesty's farflung Governments down under and up top. Mr. Churchill, who fought as a youth in the Boer War and has taken the world for his apple all his life, whipped out a cable to South African Prime Minister Jan Christiaan Smuts: It Is A Comfort To Feel That We Shall Be Together In This Hard And Long Trek, For I Know That You And The Government And The Peoples Of The Union Of South Africa Will Not Weary Under The Heat Of The Day, And That We Shall Make A Strong Laager For All Beside The Water At The End.

It was wonderful for Afrikanders suddenly to hear No. 10 Downing St. talking not top-drawer English but such familiar jargon as trek and laager (a camp bulwarked at night by a circle of covered wagons).

In Berlin the High Command announced that South African harbors are being mined by German naval units. This and The Netherlands' invasion made the Dutch blood of the Boers boil. Even Vaderland, organ of Anglophobe Opposition Leader General James Barry Munnik Hertzog, who was voted out of office when he tried to keep South Africa from declaring war on Germany, last week said of the invasion of The Netherlands: "This great crime will be repaid by history!"

Prime Minister Smuts, his Government riding the crest of popular indignation, recalled that The Netherlands once gave sanctuary to beaten President Kruger of the Transvaal Republic, advised Queen Wilhelmina last week that if Her Majesty or any members of the Dutch Royal Family should come to South Africa the Dominion would "esteem this the greatest honor and privilege in return for the kindness extended to President Kruger."

In every quarter of the globe Britons buckled down to the task of making their whole Empire a laager against the mechanized raids of Nazidom's 20th-century Hottentots.

AND In Canada the newly elected Dominion Parliament met for the first time. Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King had behind him 182 seats in a House of 245. Opposition Leader Richard Burpee Hanson, elected in caucus last week by the beaten Canadian Conservatives, was eager to jump on the Empire defense band wagon of Winston Churchill. Only criticism hurled at Canada's Prime Minister last week in Ottawa was that the Dominion is not being prepared for war. That was the issue on which the election had been held.

Meanwhile the Canadian Communist Party was declared outlawed amid a rush of Dominion feeling against Red quislings. AND Nazi invasion of The Netherlands and Belgium caused a great spurt in New Zealand recruiting. Prime Minister Peter Fraser, who during World War I was a conscientious objector jailed for "seditious utterances," is now all out for Allied victory, cabled to Prime Minister Churchill a pledge of "the fullest cooperation of New Zealand's Government and people, Europeans and Maoris alike." Recruiting spurted strongly on news of the latest Nazi Blitzkrieg.

AND In Australia Nationalist Prime Minister Robert Gordon Menzies, who faces an election next autumn, was busy fighting anti-war propaganda and a majority of Australian Labor was believed hostile to conscription.

ANDThe Gandhi Indian National Congress press flamed against Adolf Hitler much more violently than before, and Indian tribal chiefs on the northwest frontier grew highly excited at what they claimed were signs of Soviet-Afghan belligerence. ANDIndian Nationalists finally realized that the exigencies of war, plus British Labor influence inside the Churchill Cabinet, plus Foreign Secretary Viscount Halifax, were all potent factors now working in their favor. This week Indian National Congress bigwigs, instead of announcing that Britain's troubles were India's opportunity, keynoted: "The menace of Nazi domination is of serious concern to India." -- Dublin was the only British Commonwealth capital which kept mum about the Allied war effort last week, but in Washington the Minister of Eire, Robert Brennan, said it is "simply ridiculous" to think Adolf Hitler's submarines are receiving Irish aid and comfort. "The only incident that has occurred was when a German submarine put ashore in Bantry Bay the crew of a Greek ship which had been torpedoed. The Civil Guard were on the scene within a few minutes, and the German submarine had disappeared."

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