Foreign News: One Staff! One Flag!

This week the Czechoslovak Government is due to disclose the text of the secretly drafted Nationalities Statute which represents its reply to the demands of Adolf Hitler and the Sudeten Germans. In case this reply is deemed in’olerable by Germany, as predicted by Nazinewsorgans, it becomes automatically a specific and possible cause of war. Therefore interest centred upon secret proposals made by the Führer last week and secretly discussed by anxious statesmen in Paris while crowds light-heartedly cheered Their Majesties. To find out what had happened, the U. S. Ambassador and the U. S. S. R. Ambassador each called at the French Foreign Office. They were told nothing with great politeness. Correspondents were informed at the British Foreign Office: “Of all the rumors now being printed, about 99% are wrong.”

One could hear on good authority that Hitler had proposed the Czechoslovak Question be arbitrated by Britain, Germany, France and Italy. Or that, if Czechoslovakia would renounce her Soviet alliance, the Führer would offer her a non-aggression treaty such as he made with Poland. Or that Hitler proposed that Germany, Russia and France should join in guaranteeing to Czechoslovakia a neutrality status like that of Belgium. Germany was said to ask some reduction of Czechoslovakia’s armed forces, as well as maximum Nationalities Statute concessions to the Sudeten Germans.

Fortunately the confused reports in high European quarters had certain common denominators: 1) Everyone agreed that Chancellor Hitler, by means of an emissary, had assured Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain that Germany wants a “peaceful solution” of the Czechoslovak Question, not a war. 2) None doubted that in Paris the British had urged the French to help induce Prague to make to the Sudeten Germans the utmost concessions likely to avert war, short of destroying the sovereignty of Czechoslovakia. 3) It was certain that Mr. Chamberlain’s quiet aversion for the Soviet Union, plus his long standing resolve to draw Britain, Germany, France and Italy into a common accord at the first opportunity, made the inclusion or exclusion of Moscow from any pending Czechoslovak settlement the most difficult point in thediscussions at Paris last week. French Premier Edouard Daladier,although his personal estimate of the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin is much the same as that of Neville Chamberlain, considers that Russia is potent and that France must have, in addition to Britain, another potent ally.

This week, as emissaries continued to flit secretly between the great capital, the Anglo-French entente was reaffirmed even more strongly than it had been last week in the speeches of King George and President Lebrun. Britain’s dynamic Secretary of State for War Leslie Hore-Belisha had come over to France with an entourage of generals to hold at Amiens and then in Paris the most thoroughgoing staff talks in many years. Such talks are an indispensable technical preliminary if two nations are to be able to cooperate quickly and effectively in war. This was precisely what the French and British general staffs did intermittently from 1906 until the eve of the World War. In just about the strongest statement a British War Minister could take it upon himself to utter, Mr. Hore-Belisha cried, emerging from the staff talks: “It looks as though the two general staffs are as one. The French Tricolor and the British Union Jack seem as one flag.”

Presumably this meant that the staffs have now taken an action long awaited. The choosing of a small panel of high British and French officers, one of whom, in case of war, would be accepted by both these Great Powers as their generalissimo, while a second would command their joint air forces. When the next war comes, it may break so suddenly and impinge with such swift hurling of maximum forces, that a supreme command must be arranged in advance to be effective.