LUXEMBOURG: Ruffled Ruritcmia

Last week Robert Joseph Casey was back in Luxembourg sending alarming dispatches to his paper, the Chicago Daily News. Round-bellied, globe-trotting Bob Casey knows his Luxembourg better than any other reporter in the business. He first went there as an artilleryman in 1918, loved it so well that he stayed on to write the first of his 15 books, The Land of Haunted Castles. No alarmist is he. Last autumn, when Paris correspondents were worrying about German concentrations opposite Luxembourg, Reporter Casey coolly tooled through the German lines in a taxicab. Last week he had this to say:

“The war is squarely on the doorstep of Luxembourg. . . . The bugles were sounding this morning across the [Moselle] river and there was infantry on the road in massed columns. . . . There are cavalry maneuvers in the grassy meadow downriver a few miles from Remich. . . . The roads are jammed with Army trucks. . . . Every path that comes down from the main road into the meadow has a terminus in a wooden jetty. . . . No attempts are made to conceal the pontoon sections lying alongside. . . .

“For the first time in six months Allied anti-aircraft fire began to work effectively in this sector. . . . The long arm of the French heavy artillery . . . became a serious threat to the German pontoon-building operations. . . .

“According to the best local information, Adolf Hitler has 36 divisions massed in this section of the front, including shock troops and mechanized units. . . . The present arrangement of his forces seems to indicate that he planned a sort of crack-the-whip movement, pivoting on the Luxembourg corner and sweeping through Holland and Belgium.”

If Reporter Casey was right and Herr Hitler’s very apparent preparations were not a dodge to deceive his enemies, the Low Countries had good reason to be nervous. Nervous they were. Belgium called back all men who had been released from the reserves because of age. The Netherlands extended martial law to the entire country, for the first time since 184,8. Luxembourg, which has an Army of 475 (gendarmerie included), cannot defend herself and will not try to, but the Luxembourgeois, who stood four years of occupation in World War I, know that far worse things are in store for them if Hitler crosses the Moselle.

Beautiful Princess. Luxembourg, a half-size Delaware, is the portal between Central and Western Europe; six miles east is Imperial Trèves (Trier to the Germans), from which the Romans ruled their Western Empire. Since Roman days no war in western Europe has passed Luxembourg by, and each war has given the country a new hero or martyr.

Last time it was Marie-Adélaïde, 20-year-old Grand Duchess. Legend persists that when the Kaiser’s Army entered her country she placed 1) her automobile, 2) her person across the road by which it was advancing. Actually she did neither; she made the correct diplomatic protest and prepared to sit the occupation out. For not being more disagreeable about it she eventually lost her crown.

The French were mad at Marie-Adélaïde, claimed that she was pro-German because she had received the Kaiser at tea. Toward the end of the war stories about Luxembourg’s high-spirited young ruler began to circulate in the Grand Duchy, and the Luxembourgeois, who were hungry and broke and sick of the Germans, believed many of them. There were riots in Luxembourg City as the Germans retreated across the Moselle and the French started to move in. Pershing beat them to it, and for a while in 1918 Luxembourg was under the protection of the U.S. Army. It was a hotbed of local and international intrigue. France wanted to give it to Belgium (“A land of Boches and priests,”snorted Clemenceau) but Belgium did not want it. Whoever got it, France was determined that Marie-Adélaïde must go and the Luxembourgeois agreed. A plebiscite gave the crown to her sedate sister, Charlotte.

Marie-Adélaïde refused the hand of Prince Xavier of Bourbon-Parma, became an unhappy wanderer. She lived in Switzerland, then Italy, almost penniless. In 1920 she entered a Carmelite convent as a novice, but did not take to a life of contemplation. She joined the Little Sisters of the Poor, gave that up, went to Munich to study medicine. In 1924 she died at Hohenburg, a broken old woman of 30.

Plain Princess. Under the Grand Duchess Charlotte and her husband, Prince Felix of Bourbon-Parma (Xavier’s younger brother), Luxembourg prospered again, until at the outbreak of World War II it was a thriving little country of rich peasants, rich merchants, rich industrialists. It banks for much of Europe, is headquarters of Orbed, big European steel cartel, ranks as tenth steel-producing country of the world. It manufactures also leather and beer. Were it not for its fear of both friends and foes—which can hardly be told apart—Luxembourg would be a perfect Ruritania.

Probably the best friend Luxembourg has is the U. S., though few U. S. citizens have ever been there. Those who go there find it an expression of their most sentimental instincts: a tiny Switzerland with lofty mountains and beautiful valleys through which wander the Sure and the Alzette. Its tolerance extends to all sects and races, including Jews. On Sunday mornings a band plays in the main square of the capital and the people stroll round & round. The highest officer in the Army is a captain. Prince Felix’s proudest possession is The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin Roosevelt, personally presented by President Roosevelt last autumn. Luxembourg’s canny, genial Foreign Minister Joseph Bech (who resigned as Premier because he thought he had held the job too long), likes to swap stories with newspapermen. The newspapermen like to hang out in chess-playing Herr Klopp’s hotel at Remich and watch the Germans across the river.

For nine years Luxembourg’s best friend-in-residence has been the U. S. Chargé d’Affaires, George Platt Waller, who bestows on the dynasties of Central Europe that tender, familiar worship that the true Southern aristocrat can give only to royal families and his own. Visiting U. S. journalists address him as “Mr. Minister,” enjoy equally his Martinis and his conversation. He likes to have them in Luxembourg because, if the Grand Duchy is invaded again, he wants neutral witnesses of her rape. No alarmist either, it was he who undoubtedly facilitated Reporter Casey’s quick passage to the scene last week as the German Legation warned local newspapers to handle Allied news with caution, to “keep entirely to the truth-loving communiqués of the German High Command.”