Editorial

Do we really understand what we were commemorating and celebrating yesterday? One can easily reply we were celebrating the end of the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century.

But why should there have been such a catastrophe when the Great War of 1914 - 1918 (an anthem to doomed youth) was fought "to end all wars"? Substantially, there was a failure of collective security when the League of Nations was made to look like a laughing stock by a Germany revivified by its leader and dictator, Adolf Hitler. But there was more than that.

The humiliating terms imposed by the victors at Versailles had within them the seed of future discord.

So if May 8, 1945 celebrated the Allied victory at such a cost in human lives - the alternative was to exist under Hitler's dictatorship - it also commemorated a stark failure in the leadership of Britain and France during the 1930s, a lack of political will that preferred to choose the way of appeasement rather than to confront evil. For that evil there had been enough evidence provided by Hitler; but not enough, pleaded the appeasers, whose desire to avoid war failed to take into account that with each passing year after 1936, war was inevitable.

By the time France and Britain faced the might of Hitler's armies in 1940 there was no doubt as to who had the upper hand in Europe or, as the former Prime Minister of Britain, Neville Chamberlain, put it, "we were in a fix and no personal considerations must be allowed to stand in the way of measures necessary for victory". He suggested that Winston Churchill should address the nation, the first time since Mr Churchill had become Prime Minister.

His message was stark, but inspirational: "Is this not the appointed time for all to make the utmost exertions in their power?" He then went on to talk of "groups of shattered states and bludgeoned races; the Czechs, the Poles, the Norwegians, the Danes, the Dutch, the Belgians - upon whom the long night of barbarism will descend, unbroken even by a star of hope, unless we conquer, as conquer we must; as conquer we shall".

So we celebrate the braveness of the leader, the heroism of the men who went to war, a war that lasted almost five years to the date from when Hitler's armies invaded Belgium, Holland and France. By the time the war was over, Europe was devastated. As if that international conflict had not been enough, it was not long before another loomed, this time under the shadow of nuclear weapons.

The end of World War II saw the beginning of another struggle, this time between the free nations and a totalitarian Soviet Union. Mercifully that, too, has passed - without a shot being fired except by Soviet forces and communist governments in Eastern Europe on any of their own who showed a tendency to wish to live in freedom. That tendency was to become a groundswell in the 1970s, especially after the election to the papacy of a man from a faraway country the invasion of which by Germany in September 1939 finally precipitated the war to end, we must hope, all global wars.

War has always been a sobering thought, but peace, if it is to be maintained, has a sobering effect of its own. Peace, too, has to be won, every day. Like money it does not fall from the trees. It has to be earned at a price, like freedom; and that price is eternal vigilance.