WAR IN CHINA: Plain Talk

Last week Britain's Ambassador to China, Sir Archibald John Kerr Clark Kerr, set out from Hong Kong to have a talk with Chiang Kaishek. That is not an easy thing to do nowadays. Sir Archibald had to hire an airplane, fly five or six hundred miles inland over a maze of twisting rivers and search out the Generalissimo "somewhere in Hunan Province."

When proper Sir Archibald arrived at Shanghai he would say no more than that he had found Chiang "well—very fit and optimistic—serenely confident of ultimate victory." What he did not say—and...