Pacific Outpost

How War Came to One Pacific Outpost

ON the night of August 31 there was feverish excitement here on the is land of Mangaia, southern outlier of the Cook Group.

The natives were aware that hostili ties between Poland and Germany were likely to break out, as announced by the usual brief radio press on the post-office board, but the receipt of an unusually clear re-broadcast of Adolf Hitler’s speech in the Reichstag, over Station KFI in the U.S.A. caused a crowd of some two hundred to assemble within hearing dis tance of the radio in the house of Mr.

Hickling, the Resident Agent.

A favoured few Europeans were in vited to sit round the radio, but of course there was no room in the Residency for as many as wished to hear the speech, so the speaker was turned up to open air pitch for the benefit of the native audience at the gate.

It was quite a job to shove through the crowd into the Residency, and when I arrived things were just warming up.

The great event did not come on till later owing, we may suppose, to a traffic block in Berlin, that made it difficult for Der Fuehrer to get “on the stump” earlier; but when he did, he gave us of his best.

As the Fuehrer spoke in German, we should have found little satisfaction, but the interpretation was supplied in Eng lish as he went along. Abominable Adolf was first moved to describe —pianissimo and con amore—how the well-meant efforts of Deutschland to woo Poland to an alliance with Nazidom had been abortive. The Poles simply wouldn’t part up with Danzig and other territories, and it was just too mean of them.

Adolf went on—lagrimose and andante

cantabile—to declare that there was no other resource but to take up the sword of correction. (The interpreter here ap peared a trifle out of breath.) The Fuehrer next introduced a rising Lohengrin-like motif, swelling to a venge ful, tom-cattish-sounding climax drowned in his satellites’ yells of “Heil! Heil!

Heil!” The excitement was tremendous —in fact, we nearly found ourselves shouting, “Heil, Hitler!” with them.

The loud-speaker simply rattled with patriotic Teutonic fevor. And then the American announcer, his voice bubbling with excitement, “Cut in” to say that a wireless from Warsaw on short-wave an nounced a German air-raid.

Adolf maundered somewhat, and at last was faded out by the Yankee station, to a final “Hell, Hitler” from nearly every German in Berlin by the sound of it. To an uninformed listener, the patriotic Nazi ululations sounded rather like a broad cast from Wirth’s Circus at feeding-time.

All this time, the assembled native audience were listening, and they decided that now was the time for all good men to come to the aid of the British Empire.

So the crowd declared to the Cuffew cop, who finally dispersed them, their in tention of putting their names down on a roll of volunteers for overseas service in the event of war involving our country.

E.G.