SOUTHERN THEATRE: Instructors in the Balkans

In the centre of Bucharest, just across the street from one of the grandiose new palace wings with which Carol II busied his last months as Rumania’s King, stands the Athenee Palace Hotel. It is a six-story, 200-room structure with a clean face of white stucco. Some call it the laboratory, some the lavatory, of Balkan politics. Its bar buzzes with political gossip and its marble-pillared lounge teems with blondes, top hats, beards, uniforms and monocles. Being the best hotel in Bucharest, it has always been the favorite hangout of the British.

Last week the British in the Athenee Palace were not cheery. They gathered in private rooms or quiet corners and exchanged pessimisms. They said: Doesn’t all that heel-clicking sicken you? Did you know that barges have started down the Danube with ack-ack equipment, tanks and ammunition? Did you hear that German girls threw flowers at the Jerries as they marched into Sibiu and Seghisoara? Isn’t it awful that the Nazi G. H. Q. is to be in the building where Carol’s guards used to stay? Wasn’t it typical of the Germans to fly the whole Rumanian Air Force over our heads today, as if that would frighten us?

They were still able to laugh. These Germans, they said, are certainly inventive. First they flooded the world with “experts,” incredible numbers of them expertising all the wray from China to Chile. Then they sent out “tourists”—40,000 of them supposedly rubbernecking in Spain right now. Then there were “refugees,” leaving Bessarabia when Russia moved in and taking up strategic refuge all over the Balkans. Then there were “official photographers”—22 of them recently reported in full Nazi uniform in Bulgaria. And now “instructors.” In order to instruct the Rumanians in the arts of combat, the Germans were said to be sending three whole army divisions: 50,000 teachers equipped with $82,500,000 worth of war material. Rumania would learn a lesson from them which she would not soon forget. “Instructors” were also reported going into Bulgaria and Hungary to teach men how to fall from the sky under parachutes and in dive bombers.

The Britons felt pity, too—for nice old Sir Reginald Hervey Hoare, Britain’s Minister. A distant cousin of Sir Samuel Hoare, he used to be quite a figure of a man—tall, with a handsome white-haired head, careless in dress and indolent of speech, kindly, dry, hospitable. He was a great friend of Carol, and used to converse with the King in Rumanian with a splendid British accent. But his health had gone, his retirement was long overdue, and the driving out of Carol left him at 58 broken and bitter. Last week he scurried about trying to avert a break in British-Rumanian relations long enough to burn his Legation’s secret papers, and to insure the safety of six British oil executives whom the Rumanians had arrested, suspecting sabotage. His only triumph—and since he likes Rumania even this one made him sad—was being able to announce to the Bucharest Foreign Office that Britain, like the U. S., had frozen all Rumanian assets.

There was little for Britons to do but evacuate. One of the young Legation men summed up many British defeats when he said: “If this turns out to be a virtual occupation, it would be hardly decent for us to stay on.”

Beside the Po. One day while these things were happening in Rumania, a trimotored bomber with a very determined-looking little Italian at its controls landed at San Nicolo airfield, on the Lido near Venice. Out jumped Benito Mussolini and into an automobile. He drove to ancient Padua, which Attila the Hun sacked and burned in 452 A.D., and there reviewed the motorized Turin division of the Army of the Po. He saw 10,000 soldiers, but 150,000 civilians were on hand to look at him. After reviewing the troops he stood up in a camouflaged armored car and led them all in patriotic songs. Then, in monstrous high spirits, he strode into a troopers’ canteen and, sitting on a log like the lowliest man, stuffed himself with hardtack, spaghetti, broccoli. Later he returned to his plane, pulled his flying togs over his uniform, and took off.

For five days the bounding warrior reviewed his troops along the Po. He stood on platforms, in automobiles, on hills. He reviewed veterans and boys who had been trained from the age of six. He showed Italy’s might before the German, Japanese and Spanish Ambassadors, the Hungarian, Bulgarian and Rumanian Ministers. He made no speeches, just shouted over and over: “We are ready!”

Ready for What? All these preparations were for something. Official explanations of the German infiltration into the Balkans were not convincing: “There are no troops in Rumania, only instructors. … If there are any troops, they are to guard the Rumanian oil wells against an attack by the British. . . .” Nor were the dispatches of correspondents promoting a fight between Germany and Russia convincing. These made much of “massed troops” in Russia’s Northern Bukovina, the partial evacuation of Cer-nauti on the Rumania-Russian border, rumored movements of Soviet tanks and motorized units, the visit to Bessarabia of Russian Commissar of Defense Semion Timoshenko. The principal business of Marshal Timoshenko was to visit his home town and chat with his rickety brother. One extremely indirect report told of the sinking of Rumanian Monitor No. 6 by the Russians; but another version called it a Yugoslav tanker sunk by a Rumanian mine. Proponents of the Nazi-Communist war pointed with delighted alarm to the gathering of 330,000 German troops far north in Norway against the Finnish border, to which Russia has a right of way. But it seemed highly dubious that either Germany or Russia wanted that conflict —yet.

Germany’s peaceful invasion looked smaller by week’s end than it had at first. The reported entry of 50,000 troops dwindled to 15,00°. tnen to 5,000. It was not yet a major drive. But it might be the prelude to a major development in Axis grand strategy.

Arrow Cross v. Double Cross. The strategy might be a purely Balkan one. Just as Napoleon turned back from the English Channel to Ulm and Austerlitz because he feared treachery at his rear, Adolf Hitler was perhaps just consolidating the ructious minor countries of the southeast. There was certainly plenty of consolidating to be done.

Horia Sima, leader of Rumania’s Nazis-tic Iron Guard, last week made a public speech accusing Hungarians of butchering 447 Rumanians in North Transylvania, of cutting out tongues, burning, torturing. The limit, said Guardsman Sima, had been reached.

Hungary, on the other hand, seemed ready for an upheaval of its own. Hungarian counterpart of the Iron Guard is called the Arrow Cross. This Naziphile group, whose cry of greeting is “Kitartds!” (“Hold Out!”), is led by a jail-whitened onetime Army officer named Ferenc Sza-lasi. Last week Leader Szalasi called for a Nazi Government in Hungary. His Party, he declared, “does not wish to cooperate” with the present Hungarian Government. “Complete responsibility can only be based on complete power.”

Berlin to Bagdad? The new Axis strategy might be something more grandiose: it might envisage a huge campaign for the control of the Mediterranean, especially for control of the Suez Canal and British oil fields in Iran and Iraq. This would be an ambitious program, a major campaign which would take German troops 2,000 miles from home. Greece rehearsed for war with noisy haste last week, and Turkey warned that 2,000,000 bayonets would block any attack across the Anatolian peninsula.*

Such a drive, if it came, would be timed with the Italian drive across Egypt from Libya. This attack was still on its haunches at Sidi Barrani last week. If the attack on Turkey was really planned, the Italians might remain at Sidi Barrani quite a while longer, so that the pincers would converge on Suez at the same time.

Whatever the grand strategy, an attack on Greece was likely. Greece is the last Anglophile nation on the European continent. A drive against her would be a necessary preliminary to attack on Turkey, and would also serve to scare and divide the Balkans. Defeat of Greece would make a Balkan Sweden of Yugoslavia, surrounded but unattacked. That would please Signor Mussolini, who likes to use his troops mostly for reviews.

This week the Second Colloquy of Brennero was two weeks old. Three weeks after the First Colloquy brutal history was made in the North. As the pathetically eager pupils of the Balkans submitted to their “instructors,” the rest of the world braced itself for a new lesson in grand strategy. A growing number of nations hoped that this time Adolf Hitler would learn the slow, cold lesson of Bonaparte: At some point in the triumphant spread of power, the lines grow too long, the conqueror overextends himself, returns diminish, and an empire won in blood is lost in more blood.

* An exaggeration. Turkey has at most 200,000 regular troops, 700,000 reserves.