498 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
out to be that the British no longer had any spirit left in them; yet, for
all that, the question could not be denied a hearing in a.d. 1952; and the
British people was not, of course, the only people in the World at this
date about whom this importunate question had to be asked. If it was
at least questionable whether a third world war would be endurable for
the people of the United Kingdom, it was manifestly questionable a
fortiori whether this tribulation would be endurable for Continental
West European peoples who had undergone in the years a.d. 1940-5—
and, in the Belgian, French, Italian, and Polish cases, in the years a.d.
1914-18 before that—an experience that was more harrowing, and very
much more demoralizing, than the British people's ordeal of an aerial
bombardment. These Continental West European victims of an in-
ordinate German militarism had seen their countries partially or com-
pletely overrun and occupied by invading hostile armies, and they had
found themselves at the mercy of an occupying alien enemy that had
taken advantage of its power over them to distrain upon their material
resources for the reinforcement of its own war effort against their sur-
viving allies and to harness their energies to its own evil will by training
upon them all the terrors of a post-Modem Western totalitarian police-
state.
This institutional engine of militarism had been keyed up to a sinister
efficiency on the home fronts of a Fascist Italy and a National-Socialist
Germany; and, while in a.d. 1952 it was indisputably true that Western
Europe as a whole had had its martial spirit damped by its devastating
experiences since a.d. 1914, was this true without reservations of the
two West European countries in which Fascist national governments had
deliberately re-stoked the local fires of militarism after the First World
War with the intention of profiting, in a Second World War, by a con-
sequent marginal difference between the respective limits of their foreign
victims' and their native instruments' capacity for continuing to stand
the traditional test of an ordeal by battle ? What had been the ultimate
effect, on Italian and German souls, of the misdeeds that they had
allowed their governments to require of them, and of the retribution
that they had consequently allowed their governments to bring down
upon their guilty heads ? In what mood had the Italians emerged from
the twenty-one years a.d. 1922-43, and the Germans from the twelve
years a.d. 1933-45?
An observer in the year a.d. 1952 could predict with some assurance
that the Italians would prove to have no more stomach for a Mussolinian
militarism to which a^majority of the nation had paid lip-service, not
because they ever had it in them to go forth conquering and to conquer1
any foreign people that was their match in technical equipment, but
because they did not have in them the spirit to defy the will of a domestic
tyrant from the Romagna. It was assuredly no accident that there was
always an exceptionally strong local resistance to Fascism in a Piedmont
that was also exceptional in being the one locality in a twentieth-century
Italy that had preserved something of an earlier martial tradition. On
this showing, it might be prophesied in a.d. 1952 that Italy would go the