INTERNATIONAL: Watch on the Vistula

Step by step, like a long-harried elephant finally facing an enemy, Britain last week turned in her tracks. It was an impressive and world-shaking spectacle. Hard as it is for Britain to change, in one short week she turned her back on a longestablished policy of no military commitments in Europe east of the Rhine—turned, whole-elephant, and guaranteed that the British Fleet, along with the French Army (and the combined Air Forces of the two nations) would fight to protect the States of Eastern Europe from further Nazi aggression.

For Britain the step marked the end of a six years' effort, to get along with Adolf Hitler. Time after time Führer Hitler has torn up treaties, ignored agreements, threatened neighboring States with invasion. As many times Britain has looked the other way. When, three weeks ago, the Führer moved into a Czechoslovakia which he had already dismembered last autumn, even the most credulous of British statesmen were shocked. They recognized then that Herr Hitler had embarked on a policy of conquest aimed at nothing less than domination of Europe, if not the world. Last week they reacted.

Flush from the Czech seizure, the Führer began to threaten Poland. The German Army was already partly mobilized. Troops were moved toward the Polish Corridor and toward Danzig, the Free City on the Baltic, where Poland has large interests and investments. East Prussia had become an armed camp. Finally the Nazi Government submitted its demands: German absorption of Danzig, a German auto road across the Polish Corridor, a Polish signature on the German-Italian-Japanese anti-Comintern Pact.

Poland's hour of unequal struggle with the Nazi giant seemed at hand. Poland with a bigger population (34,000,000), bigger area (150,000 sq. mi.), bigger standing Army (285,000) than Czecho-Slovakia was too big a nation to let fall into Germany's hands. So fortnight ago the British Government hastily offered a watery anti-aggression pact, but the hard-boiled Polish Government insisted on strict military guarantees with no ifs, ands or buts.

Last week Poland got what Czechoslovakia had pleaded for in vain. Before a hushed, crowded House of Commons 70-year-old Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, former arch-exponent of appeasing the dictators, announced that Britain and France were negotiating with Eastern European nations (understood to include Poland, Soviet Russia, Rumania, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Greece) a tight system of military agreements to resist further Nazi aggression. In the meantime, moreover, the British Government was prepared to consider the Vistula, the river that flows through the Polish Corridor, just as much its frontier as it has long considered the Rhine. He added:

"In the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence and which the Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty's Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend all the support in their power. They have given the Polish Government an assurance to this effect."