INTERNATIONAL: Peace?

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Last week the correspondents who have been raptly following the great reversals of a staggering month brought a new, sardonic note into their stories. They had something concrete to write about. There were the German-Russian division of Poland (see p. 29), Russia's quick Baltic grab that snipped off Estonia and threatened Latvia (see p. 28), the second German-Russian "friendship" and economic pact. But, as the geese flew south over the ruins of Warsaw, and ice formed on the remote Finnish lakes, a wintry blast of cold scorn crossed the Atlantic with their cables.

It appeared in the what-kind-of-a-war-is-this? reports from the first batch of correspondents to reach the Westwall (see p. 31). It appeared in accounts of the mighty invasion of the Russian Army into conquered Poland, in which correspondents, ostensibly praising the Army, declared it had reached that high degree of technical proficiency achieved by the armies in the U. S. Civil War. Of its mechanized might, they said trucks were numerous—so numerous that seldom had so much broken-down machinery been blamed on bad roads. Scorn snowed through stories of impossible Chinese peace proposals from Chungking, in stories of the suppression of the French Communist Party, no less than in the mysterious report that Adolf Hitler might put an abrupt and disconcerting end to the Stop Hitler movement by abdicating. But the scorn burned warmest in the stories that dealt with the likelihood that those great pacifists, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, had united in the drive for Peace.

The Pact concretely provided only for German credits for Russian supplies and for "consultations" if peace should be refused. In Berlin, inspired stories promised Russian planes on the Western Front; in London the dominant reaction was relief; in Rome it was uneasiness. But in Moscow, Times Correspondent George Eric Rowe Gedye, noted readers waiting in their queues—more than a quarter-mile long—to buy Pravda, read the German-Russian peace proposal, gripped with "fear that they were about to be dragged into war."

Eight weeks ago Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano spent three days with Führer Hitler and Herr von Ribbentrop, returned with news that plunged Mussolini into profound silence. Last week Count Ciano saw them both again. He also was going to talk "peace." But of this visit little notice was taken; Count Ciano stayed less than 24 hours, returned to Rome having discussed, according to authoritative sources:

¶The possibilities of the future in Europe, including Italy's share in what may or will happen.

¶Germany's conception of various spheres of interest in Eastern Europe.

¶The possibility of giving effect to the German thesis that the European war should be ended now.