Verdun, the Somme, and the Fate of Poland

One warm Saturday evening last August I sat in the garden of an Oxford pub discussing the future of Europe with a group of young Europeans. Some were students, some junior academics, all born since the last gun sounded in 1945. They were the type of European 1 had known as a graduate student in Germany in the early 1970s, ten years older now. The intervening decade had not had much effect on them; the effect it had was not a hopeful sign of what Americans may expect from Europe in the 1980s.

The thirty-year-old European has two outstanding characteristics, both of which he denies strenuously whenever a persistent American calls attention to them. He is almost totally ignorant of the facts which have shaped his own postwar history, while, at the same time, he is unconsciously a product of an atmosphere which has gripped Europe since August 1914. It is a deadly combination.

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Edwina S. Campbell

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One warm Saturday evening last August I sat in the garden of an Oxford pub discussing the future of Europe with a group of young Europeans. Some were students, some junior academics, all born since the last gun sounded in 1945. They were the type of European 1 had known as a graduate student in Germany in the early 1970s, ten years older now. The intervening decade had not had much effect on them; the effect it had was not a hopeful sign of what Americans may expect from Europe in the 1980s.

The thirty-year-old European has two outstanding characteristics, both of which he denies strenuously whenever a persistent American calls attention to them. He is almost totally ignorant of the facts which have shaped his own postwar history, while, at the same time, he is unconsciously a product of an atmosphere which has gripped Europe since August 1914. It is a deadly combination.