The literature of the First World War, to begin with that one, illustrates a tragic paradox: The most destructive of human enterprises can nourish the most creative. Probably no single event in history allowed the transformation of so many intense personal experiences—often presented for outspokenly didactic reasons or as cries of impotent frustration or as necessary therapy—into works of art that transcended the limited circumstances of their birth. No responsible account of this century's imaginative literature could omit Robert Graves's Good-bye to All That, Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, William Faulkner's Soldiers' Pay and A Fable, Emest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, William March's Company K, Henri Barbusse's Under Fire, Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier: Schweik, Arnold Zweig's The Case of Sergeant Grisha, or the lyric poetry of Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, and Charles Hamilton Sorley. To this list might be added such seminal works of modernism as T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Ezra Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room. These are not “war poems” or “war novels,“ in any narrow sense, but they clearly would not exist had there been no war.

Italy's thirty-sixth government since 1944 resigned on June 10, 1974. On June 14 the Italian President, Giovanni Leone, who must accept such resignations, refused to accept this one. The resigned Rumor Fifth Government had to reform and carry on. The Rumor government was the shortest of all previous governments (eighty-nine days), and its resignation came at what seemed a time of deepest crisis. Leone probably made his unprecedented move because little other alternative existed and the crisis would not wait. The Italian President is charged with consulting and arranging new governmental coalitions, which must receive thence a majority support in parliament to survive. If this is impossible, new elections must be called. For the moment the continued Rumor government is a hopeful interim, but much depends on the Socialist Party and the way it views the current crisis.

To say that this is now Dr. Kissinger's world is more or less indisputable. But to say that his world includes the whole of the globe is inaccurate, In all Africa below the Mediterranean fringe there is not one leader who can refer to “our friend Henry.” As Dr. Kissinger admitted in his confirmation hearings as Secretary of State, he had, after a quarter century as one of our leading academic authorities on foreign policy, not yet formulated any “philosophy” of African-American relations. He spoke vaguely of calling some of our ambassadors to Africa back to Washington “to give me their judgment on what the best U.S. philosophy should be in that area.”

The debate now going on in Israel over government policies, attitudes toward a political settlement, and the Palestinian question is bound to have an important effect on the future of Israel and on the Arab-Israeli conflict in general. It is politically important to understand that there has been a tendency within some Arab circles to mistake Israel's situation. The Arabs have understandably come to value unity very highly, although they have so often found it elusive, and they therefore view the deep splits in Israeli politics as a sign of weakness. After all, even in Beirut—the freest city for ideas in the Arab world—a newspaper editor was indicted on charges of attacking the King of Saudi Arabia and another kidnapped for displeasing a political faction. But Israelis view their disagreements in print and in parliament (the Knesset) as a sign of nealthy democratic life and a welcome change from the stifling consensus of the Meir years.

Five years ago (Worldview, “The Middle East Conflict: A Christian Perspective,” July-August, 1969) I laid out what seemed to be the absolutely essential components for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East. These included the continued existence of Israel as a free and independent state within relatively secure and defensible boundaries, the expression of Palestinian nationalism within some form of national entity, and the development of a scheme for joint Arab-Israeli sovereignty over the city of Jerusalem. In the light of conversations with Israelis and Arabs over the last two years, some modifications are in order.

Thanks to England's 1944 Butler Education Act, in the immediate postwar years a generation of gifted working-class youngsters like Martin Burgess Green (b. 1927), Raymond Williams, and Richard Hoggart made their way from the English provinces to Oxford and Cambridge. Green, author of The von Richthofen Sisters: The Triumphant and the Tragic Modes of Love (Basic Books; 395 pp.; $12.50), was one such scholarship boy—one of the “école de Butler,” as the ever kindly Evelyn Waugh would put it—who in 1945 went to Cambridge and read English, and who experienced the university's pervasive ethos of gentlemanliness as a form of domestic colonialism. He soon entered the circle of Downing College's brilliant F.R. Leavis, editor of the influential literary quarterly Scrutiny.

Martin Niemoller, a German pastor, experienced what he called his “second conversion” while imprisoned by the Nazis during World War II. Niemoller had so despised the atrocities of the Hitler regime that he came to hate the prison guard who brought him his food each day. Seeing the Nazi insignia on his uniform, all the indignation and outrage Niemoller felt toward that evil system was directed against that guard. Then one day Niemoller suddenly realized that Jesus Christ died on the cross for that guard, that Christ loved him that much. Niemoller knew that he was bound to love that guard, and to love every man. The atonement of Christ took on a whole new meaning for Niemoller. Its implications were revolutionary.

In the fall of 1939, in my native city in Vietnam, the now sadly famous imperial capital of Hue, a young poet, Luu Trong Lu, published his “Tieng Thu” (“The Sounds of Autumn”). Overnight he became our idol. He wrote of the “murmurs of autumn leaves,” of a “startled golden deer walking on dry yellow leaves,” of a “front-line soldier's silhouette in the heart of his lonely wife.”

I was then in the last year of high school. My classmates and I were all enchanted by his verses. We copied them in our notebooks to read during our mathematics classes. We had enjoyed a relatively peaceful year and a bountiful harvest, although some among us sensed that the war in Europe might soon affect us. But we did not care. We loved our poet all the same.