Foreign News: Hands Across Europe

For months Benito Mussolini has been mightily displeased with Britain for refusing to recognize fully his conquest of Ethiopia. Sullen antagonism flared into open hostility four days before the Coronation when II Duce, hoping that for once the pen might be mightier than the sword, issued orders and Italian newshawks in London, like a well-drilled Fascist Legion, route-marched for Rome and the entire Italian press clamped down a boycott on British news (TIME, May 17).

Last week the direction of march was reversed. A battalion of Fascist newshawks was marching back to London— not the same men who had been writing vitriolic anti-British stuff until their recall last May, but a new, unsullied group.* Italian newsorgans meantime carried dispatches with London datelines, the first in three months.

Reason for these amenities was that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had sent Il Duce a dovelike message on the Spanish question. Mussolini sent a not less silky reply to London. The contents, though “secret,” were soon being discussed in every capital in Europe: Mussolini was highly delighted by the British “gesture of friendship.”

In Rome, meantime, British Ambassador Sir Eric Drummond, having sped back from a visit to his dentist in Vienna, called on Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano at the Palazzo Chigi, remained closeted for more than an hour.

Mussolini, no altruist, was clearly hoping that he would be properly rewarded for his friendliness. He would like nothing better than for the British Government to recognize his Ethiopian conquest, then to persuade the League of Nations to follow suit. As the week progressed these hopes looked less & less wild.

In Britain’s sedate Bath, famed for its “waters,” silk-bearded Haile Selassie, former Emperor of Ethiopia, has long been in exile working studiously on his memoirs. By last week the memoirs were nearly finished; arrangements had been made for their publication. Suddenly Publisher Michael Joseph announced that the Emperor had been “compelled” to forego publication on orders of his “political advisers.” London wiseacres nodded significantly; it would be a great embarrassment to the Government to find public opinion being whipped up for an Emperor who might at any moment be declared officially throneless.

* While Italian newshawks were filing back to London, Werner von Crome, chief London correspondent for the Berliner Lokalanzeiger, his assistant, Franz Otto Wrede, and Wolf Dietrich Langen, a German newsagency correspondent, were preparing to go back to Germany. They had been informed by Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare that their permits to remain in Britain would not be renewed. Declared Correspondent von Crome: “There was no reason given. . . . I deny that the action was taken as a result of complaints of espionage.” These three were believed to be the first German newshawks ever expelled from Britain in peacetime. This week Germany retaliated by asking the London Times to withdraw its Correspondent Norman Ebbutt from Berlin.