International: Whose Candle?

On Midsummer Night, along the rivers of Holy Russia, the peasants used to dance and sing around the bonfires; each man floated on the water a wreath of wild flowers and grasses upon which he placed a candle, and whoever's candle burned the longest would, during the coming year, be the most fortunate one in the "village.

The summer solstice, the year's shortest night, seemed short indeed to the diplomats and Parisian socialites passing the illuminated Vendome column. They pressed into Chez Paquin, where a fashion show and ballet celebrated a fateful meeting of the Big Four Foreign Ministers. The night seemed long to newsmen hanging around Suite 116 at the Hotel Meurice, watching the champagne buckets go by toward the room where Secretary Byrnes was entertaining Minister Molotov. In time the buckets came out empty—but no news came with them. Two U.S. Army privates guarded Byrnes's door, and just to be sure, Molotov had brought his own guard—a Red Army lieutenant general, epaulets and all, who paced up & down in front of the G.I.s.

Point of Rest. Whether the champagne was buoyant enough to lift agreement from the bog of stubborn deadlock, none knew at week's end. But the attitude of both U.S. and Russian delegates indicated that at Byrnes's private dinner U.S. policy was expressed more firmly than it had ever been before. In this lay such hope of agreement as there was. For the West at last realized that, if Hitler's repeated prediction of a deadly clash between the Eastern and Western allies was to be avoided, success would not come through appeasement of Russia's expansionist drive, but by finding a point at which the forces could rest with some mutual security and confidence.

Trieste was the test. Byrnes had been stubborn on one point: the city would not be handed over to Tito. But at the meetings Byrnes showed great flexibility on details ; although opposed in general to internationalized cities (too much like Danzig), he was even willing to see Trieste put under international control for five or ten years. Molotov waited quietly for word from his Vozhd (boss) in Moscow.

"Equality of Dissatisfaction." Since Stalin had probably promised Trieste to Tito, any solution would have to save face all around. France's Georges Bidault, doing a magnificent job as conciliator in the midst of his other troubles (see FOREIGN NEWS), hit on just the right phrase: "We are striving here for an equality of dissatisfaction."

To contemplate a settlement in which everyone was dissatisfied, yet satisfied that his dissatisfaction was balanced by that of the others, may have been a brand new idea to the Russians. At first, the smallest and vaguest deals were blown up into diplomatic triumphs. The N. Y. Herald Tribune joyously reported "the first break in the log-jam." What was it? Merely that "a private meeting appointed a committee to study a plan to postpone the [Italian] colonial question for a year."