INTERNATIONAL: Springtime in Europe

Last week fine spring weather spread warmly over a sunlit Europe. In Norway, where the nights now are like dim, water-green, translucent twilights; in England, where the potato crop is doing well thanks to the rains in May; in Switzerland, where the yodeling festival is a high spot of the Zurich Fair; in Paris, where they are singing One Fine Day from Madame Butterfly and dancing to Chopin’s Seconde Étude played as a tango; in Warsaw, where the officers called up are whiling away the time between crises learning to play bridge; in Belgium, where they are polishing their bicycles preparing for the 28th annual cycle tour next week; in Stockholm, where midnight concerts are about to begin and crowds are flocking to see Bette Davis in Dark Victory; in Rome, where they are laughing at a boy-meets-girl comedy called Two Dozen Red Roses and singing a tuneful song called It Was Folly; in Russia, where football squads are drilling for the summer season; in London, where the most popular song is Deep Purple. Over the crisis-worn continent last week the people were moving under cloudless skies; the wheat was up, the fishing was good, and a wave of celebrations, fairs, festivals, holidays, anniversaries, colored the old towns from Liége in Belgium to Brashov in Rumania.

The big antarctic whalers were nosing up the fjords to Oslo; Norwegian fishermen were pushing out in their eight-oared boats after mackerel; hay was springing up in the valleys that lie in bright green patches between the mountains. This week in Sweden the ten-day fair opened in Goteborg; the Swedish Parliament celebrated its 504th anniversary; preparations were under way for midsummer eve on June 23, when there is no night in Sweden and the people dance around the maypoles. In England last week 500,000 people saw Blue Peter win the Derby; cars were leaving London at the rate of 48,000 an hour; railroads put on 2,500 special trains for Whitsunday; a £5.000,000 South African loan was subscribed in 15 minutes; unemployment had decreased by 395,000 since February. In weather so exceptional the Derby was called Heatwave Derby, all young men between 20 and 21 registered for the draft, and labor’s periodic stirring, signalized by recent rent strikes that involved 40,000 in Birmingham, grew as it grows each spring.

In Paris they are reading a novel about an undersexed brother who tries to keep his sisters from enjoying their love affairs. They are hustling to see Jean Cocteau’s play involving a mother in love with her son, a son in love with the father’s mistress, and a maiden aunt in love with the father. Spring, a week late, hit Paris with an intoxicating sequence of superb days. Out in the country, wheat, barley and oats looked good; the 1,500,000 vineyard owners had their spring shoots in the ground; fishermen were beginning to pull in their annual 5,000 tons of fish from France’s inland waters. In Brittany it is the time for spring pardons—the old, unique, Breton folk custom that permits the peasant to approach the Deity through various saints, and which means a season of blessings, benedictions, reunions, torchlight parades, holidays, betrothals, marriage contracts, singing, wine and forgiveness.

In Warsaw it rained early in the week. Waiting for the opening of the $1,000,000 Slujec Race Track in a few days, young bucks were spending their zlotys in swanky hotels like the Bristol and the Europejski, at cabarets along the Nowy Swiat, where thinly clad Czech performers were popular, and a Silesian polka called Trojaki was a hit. On the flat dark lands of Poland, rye, owing to the spring rains, looked like a record crop. Over the Carpathians in Rumania the 3,078,820 peasant families —more than 1,000,000 of them living in plain clay huts, more than 500,000 living with cattle in the same room—watched their crops of wheat and rye, mustered what enthusiasm they could for the ninth anniversary of King Carol’s accession to the throne next week: 2,000,000 of them had no cow, 1,600,000 no pig. But as the high waters of the Danube receded, Rumania’s 60,000 professional fishermen prepared to gather their regular harvest of carp and sturgeon trapped in canals and streams. And as spring surged up the Danube groups of young men in national costume moved from place to place, dancing in each village, in a four-week jaunt that dates from the days of the dancing priests of Attis. Over the white, dusty plains of Hungary, where white oxen and long-horned cattle range on the tough grass, the 3,000,000 peasants were out in their fields and the movement of people through the countryside was under way—a seasonal awakening as regular and as mysterious as the migration of sturgeon from the Black Sea each year.

Spring came to Germany a month late, and in Berlin, rainy and cold, people were singing a sprightly song called Bel Ami, crowding Hitler’s favorite show, Melody in the Night (although Miriam Verne, U. S. dancer who caught Hitler’s eye, had gone to Munich to play The Merry Widow). The Rhine suddenly rose, flooded machine-gun nests, concrete pillboxes and subterranean construction on Germany’s great western fortifications. In the midst of spring fervor, Nazi health authorities publicized an unbelievable figure: 75% of all young men between 20 and 29, they said, proved, when examined for military purposes, jobs, or party membership, to be suffering from syphilis—a declaration that opened the door to lurid descriptions in Nazi papers, agitation that all healthy citizens be made to carry passes certifying their freedom from the disease. But throughout Europe, though Italians feared late rains would cause wheat crop rust and Belgians that late fro.st would damage their potatoes, news turned on word of health rather than richness, movement more than stagnation, growth and not decay. Sunny days attended Queen Wilhelmina’s visit to the Liege Exposition in Belgium, where Wuthering Heights packed them in and unemployment dropped 3,000 in a month. In Tallinn, walled capital of Estonia, night clubs were open all night; in Kiev, at the Park of Culture and Rest, huge, heavy-looking trees brooded over the Dnepr and over the cleared spaces where, on the warm evenings, dances were held. Planting and raising things, betting on games, going to fairs, the people of Europe last week stirred as spring ripened, made the most of the precious days of peace.