I AT FR
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% backs against Dunkerque and
their faces toward the withering
fire of the German panzer divi-
sions. Calais was in flames, each moment
only increased the impatient fury of the
bombardment. ‘Every hour you continue
to exist 1s of the greatest help to the B.
E. I.” was the urgent command. So these
riflemen fought by order of their govern-
ment— 3,000 British and 800 French
soldiers- fought the five-day battle that
made the Dunkerque retreat possible,
fought until all their strength was spent
and their last round fired, fought on
against enormous odds, fought when there
was no hope of help or vietory; and by
their unfailing courage and by the fury
of their death struggle they held back the
claw of the German attack. Only forty-
seven returned, but not one of those who
fought in the Stuka-torn streets of Calais.
What a destiny! What a rendezvous!
Not only behind the concrete and ron
of Berchtesgaden, or the rock-walled cliffs
of the Brenner Pass, or the walls of centuries
old Chungking, or in the gray silence of
two friendly men-of-war in the Atlantic
does the arched shadow of destiny’s wing
touch men's supreme moments. In the
simple solitude of individual decision the
treatest schemes of man have become
reality. The upward lift of civilization has
always been purchased at a supreme price
_life itself. Commissioned men who sit
at destiny’s conference table seldom die.
Such a rendezvous bespeaks bloodletting
elsewhere. No truth can be more sacred
ZB
and more dear than that common man
gladly dies that freedom, home, and child-
hood may survive the abnormal pressure
of the ambitious-long fingers of the evil
architects of fate. oo
Thus it was in fire-encompassed Warsaw,
in frightful Rotterdam, in bleeding London.
Out in the far-flung desert stretches
between Sidi Barrani and Tobruk men
from the distant corners of the earth faced
one another and died behind their machine
guns. The white snows of Lake Ladoga
are stained with crimson and filled with
frozen corpses. The dead and broken fill
the narrow roads from the Danube to the
Pass of Thermopyle; float in the inlet
waters surrounding the Island Crete; hide
in craters, crags, and mud-gulched crevices
from Podolski to Odessa, from Berdichev
to Kiev, from Petrozavodsk to Leningrad,
from battle-shattered Smolensk to stub-
born Moscow. Millions of dead, millions
forever crippled, millions homeless, millions
hungry. What a carnage! What a war!
®
When will this mischief end? Have we
no right to ask? Prince and pauper who
alike must bear the criminal burdens of
war and reconstruction seek assurance,
inquire for the answer—inquire of history,
inquire of statesmen, but remain confused.
For indeed the destiny of mankind is as
mysterious as the Milky Way or the em-
bryo in a thistle seed, but as certam as
Page TEN
A RENDEZVOUS WITH 1
By Theo. b. Weis
Arcturus and her suns or the bloom of
apples before the fruit.
As long as God is in His heaven, no man
need be in doubt about the outcome of his
life or the final consummation of all things
ocood and evil, for no Alexander from Mace-
donia, no Corporal from Corsica, no high
prince von Hohenzollern, no house painter
from Bavaria has vet been able to alter
the destiny of this world.
The tragic battles of 1941 are not new.
Men of flesh rising out of the mud sur-
rounding Smolensk with steel helmets on
their heads and gasoline bombs in ther
hands to stand against crawling, crushing
monster-tanks — veritable {fortresses on
moving tracks - - these are merely re-
peating what other generations in earlier
decades have done. We read:
“The use of the German air arm as long
range artillery was a new technique, but
the principle of concentrated artillery
preparation was basic in Napoleon's cam-
paigns. The daring penetration and wide
sweeps of the mechanized forces were at
least as old as cavalry tactics upon which
the world-sweep of the Mongols had been
based. . . . Steel tanks and modern weap-
ons were simply more enduring mounts
and more destructive than the shaggy
Mongol ponies and their hard-bitten
riders.” 1041 “Britannica Book of the
Year,” p. 271.
Let us reflect a bit. Prophetic history
savs there would always be war, there
would always be hate. It also says that
no new order, no all-inclusive kingdom,
no universal sway could be rooted upon
the soil of any one of these continents no
matter how many bavonets are stuck into
the ground and no matter what confeder-
acy of power may put them there. Pro-
phetic history records the existence of four
universal kingdoms and after that a royal
debacle, 1 mad fang-and-claw tussle be-
tween a multiplicity of kingdoms, races,
and nationalities. This Lebensraum urge,
this rush for material, this clash of inter-
ests, these Maginot impregnations filled
with distrust and deceit would continue
and increase until the end of the world. The
Sacred Record further savs that while the
manufacture of destruction is at its fierc-
est, eternal peace would come but not
through formations of Stukas or hundreds
of Flying Fortresses, or by radio from a