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Looking out upon the world as last year began the preachers and the prophets, as well as the politicians, did not conceal their grievous anxieties at the prospect it presented.

“As we look back to the year now closing,” said King George in his broadcast speech to the nation and Empire, “we see over parts of the world the shadows of enmity and fear.”

Twenty years after a world war we were faced by the dreadful truth that civilisation has made no kind of progress, and that we had failed most lamentably to move even one step forward by the light of intelligence. Through fear and folly nations had built against each other a thousand barriers, thwarting the free movement of trade—which would bring prosperity to all. The attempts to establish a reign of law by way of the League had been utterly frustrated. By some extraordinary paradox the average intelligence of men and women, which in some ways has reached higher standards, had failed to exercise any influence upon the march of events which dragged them to the razor-edge of an infernal precipice. Against our wills, against our instincts, we were advancing steadily down the wrong road.

On New Year’s Eve I sat up, like millions of others, waiting for the year of fate which was numbered 1938, and as into a house in a quiet English village—so quiet and dark outside—there came through a magic box the sound of clashing bells, my mind was conscious of the frightful aspect of our earthly scene. While men and women were linking arms and singing “Auld Lang Syne” outside St. Paul’s Cathedral away in Spain the merciless war between men and women of the same blood went on with new horrors on more ruins. There was no truce in Teruel. Through blinding snow masses of young men were trying to advance under a flail of machine-gun bullets until many lay black and quiet on that white mantle of the earth.

In that country, once renowned for beauty and chivalry, there had been a year of horror. Men had behaved worse than beasts, in cold-blooded cruelty, or the frenzy of hate, or some devilish desire to smash, kill and destroy all that was fine and noble in their land—miracles in stone, every symbol of faith, every decency that had made them civilised. The Red Terror in Spain, inspired by Russians in its methods, has degraded humanity itself by its abominations—the daily murders of prisoners forced to dig their own graves, the soaking in petrol and burning alive of men, women and children, the outrages upon women, the killing with torture of innumerable priests, the filthy cruelties in the prisons. There have been too many witnesses of these things for disbelief, though I for one tried to disbelieve them because I hated to think that men could be so vile in a country which once was civilised. They are not denied even by the Government which has these murderers in its ranks.

“Man comes not from God but from beasts,” said Garcia Olivier, Minister of Justice in the Government of Valencia, “that is why his reactions are those of a beast.”

On the other side there was little mercy, for it became a vendetta of blood and vengeance.

“The brutality of the Roman world into which Christ was born is returning,” says Mr. Arnold Lunn in his book called Spanish Rehearsal. “Torture, which was slowly disappearing from a world influenced, but never dominated, by the Christian ethos, is reappearing, and it is no coincidence that this recrudescence of sadism should coincide with outbursts of that Communism which is directed by the only State which has formally adopted atheism as its creed.”

So it was in Spain while the bells were ringing in a new year; and in another country of ancient civilisation there were crowded corpses in its cities, and the stench of death rising from its fields, and millions of people—the Chinese—in flight from an enemy to whom human life is a cheap thing.

Twenty years after.... Was there no light in the darkness? Men I know watching the trend of things, knowing many countries of the world, in touch with its leaders, saw little hope ahead.

“I feel in my bones,” said one of them, “that we are walking towards another European war. There are terrible forces moving. Intelligence has lost control. It is powerless against these racial and biological uprisings.”

I sat in a quiet room with five men. One of them wore a crimson coat and lace ruffles. He was a Bishop. The other men were Colonial administrators and Civil Servants.

“How long have we before the next war?” asked the Bishop after much argument about these things.

“Have you abandoned the hope of peace?” I asked.

He had abandoned the hope of peace as long as all nations refused any measure of disarmament.

“This piling up of armaments,” he said quietly, “must end in war. The strain is too great to hold for long. At the farthest I think it can’t hold for more than ten years.”

“Germany means war,” said a man by my side.

I had ventured to hope that Germany meant peace. In that room there was no one who believed it.