INTERNATIONAL: Bastions of Peace

For statesmen to talk about peace is good, but last week many people in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Rumania were inclined to think, mistakenly perhaps, that their statesmen were doing something better.

These three countries form an uninterrupted strip of territory stretching 800 miles clear across Europe from the Baltic to the Black Sea—with Communism on their eastern borders. They could beEurope’s “Bastions of Peace,” interposed between the antagonistic realms of Stalin and Hitler, and last week newsorgans in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Rumania were giving great play to this slogan, “Bastions of Peace.”

Specifically, the terse, determined Polish officer who has for some months past, been settling himself in a Dictator’s saddle, Marshal Edward Smigly-Rydz (TIME, July 27), was host in Warsaw last week to the Chief of the Rumanian General Staff, swart, secretive General Nicolas Samsonovici. While these two great military figures conferred, Polish and Rumanian diplomats finished up three weeks work, the effect of which is to revive in full force the 1921 treaty of mutual assistance between their two heavily-armed states, each larger than Italy and nearly as potent.

Marshal Smigly-Rydz, on a series of recent trips to France and other countries who have a natural stake in maintaining the “Bastions of Peace,” has now managed indirectly from military quarters to mobilize considerable loans. Last week Polish arms plants were starting work on large orders for Rumania, and recently King Carol paid a state visit to Prague, placed similar munitions orders for Rumania with the great Skoda works. Not only was His Majesty feted discreetly by “Europe’s Smartest Little Statesman,” President Eduard Benes of Czechoslovakia, but the Archbishop of Prague permitted his flock to eat meat that Friday with abandon, and the electric works furnished current at reduced rates to citizens who strung up lights on their houses in honor of Carol II.

In Warsaw last week everyone recalled that the Treaty of 1921, now revived and strengthened, was based on a Clemenceau conception of Russia as a politically infectious area around which should be drawn a “sanitary cordon.” In Bucharest the immensely tall, Mongoloid statesman who in a struggle of many years weakened this conception and secured mutual diplomatic recognition of each other by the Soviet Union and the Rumanian Kingdom (TIME, June 18, 1934) was M. Nicholas Titulescu. His influence recently waned, he was forced to resign as Foreign Minister. An invalid on the French Riviera, he has claimed that secret agents of an unspecified power poisoned him.

Next month Polish Foreign Minister Colonel Josef Beck goes to Bucharest to arrange all details of a state visit by His Majesty King Carol to Warsaw early next year—His Majesty has not made plans to attend the Coronation of George VI.* To Warsaw last week hurried the Governor of the Bank of Rumania, George Constantinescu about munitions loans. All up and down the “Bastions of Peace” in hundreds of factories rumbled and belched Rearmament.

* Up to last week no king was scheduled to attend the British Coronation, only crown princes and such, although it was believed that Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was now minded to increase the scope and expense of the festivities. Thus far they are not to include even Indian top potentates.