YUGOSLAVIA: When Soldiers Meet

There was another meeting of minds last week in Europe—between the Mediterranean world’s two leading neutralists.

Steaming up the Adriatic aboard ex-King Farouk’s former pleasure boat (now renamed Freedom), Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser arrived last week at the beautiful Yugoslav seaport of Dubrovnik, accompanied by his wife, three sons and two daughters. Yugoslavia’s Communist Marshal Tito, an old pro among neutralists, was patently pleased to have the hero of the uncommitted Arab masses dropping in just when the Kremlin was waging such heavy propaganda war on Tito.

Family Party. Resplendent in white from the peak of his fedora to the toes of his buckskin shoes, Marshal Tito was at dockside to pump Colonel Nasser’s hand. Handsome Mme. Tito, buxom in blue silk, embraced Nasser’s wife. Bands and cannon boomed. Then, past an honor guard on a street festooned with flowers and the flags of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia and the United Arab Republic, the two Presidents rode in an open Rolls-Royce, followed by their wives in a yellow Cadillac convertible, to the presidential guest house, the cliffside Villa Sheherazade.

There the families stayed while Tito led his guest off to the Bosnian Mountains to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the climactic battle between Tito’s partisans and the German invaders in World War II. It was the two dictators’ fourth meeting. The 40-year-old Nasser is obviously much impressed by the 66-year-old marshal, who so skillfully plays a fancy in-between role in the cold war, gaining alternately from both sides.

Battle Hymn. High among the wild, beech-clad uplands, not far from the cave where a German bomb wounded Tito in 1943, the old campaigner of the Balkan Mountains and the younger conspirator of the Cairo barracks spent the night together in an army tent. Tito regaled his guest with the story of how his desperate 19,000, surrounded by a ring of 120,000 German and other troops, buried their hard-won field guns, slaughtered and ate their packhorses, and then, losing nearly half their number in the charge, fought through the supposedly impassable Sutjeska River canyon, broke through to the safety of a great oak forest beyond the German lines.

Next afternoon, with Nasser at his side, the Yugoslav leader told 50,000 cheering old partisans gathered on the Sutjeska battlefield: “No one can break us.” Nasser himself, by visiting Tito at this point, was making the most audacious affront to the Soviets he had ever risked. According to Cairo scuttlebutt, Nasser returned from his recent 17-day state visit to Russia bored by too many banquets and somewhat unimpressed. He also came home with no more Russian rubles, though reportedly the kind of Russian help he likes most—complete diplomatic backing in his troublemaking—costs Russia not a ruble. Long ago, Tito, from painful experience, warned Nasser against ever letting himself get too financially dependent on Russia. Old Pro Tito’s current advice is said to be that Nasser should steady down, and not risk the peace so often with propaganda and subversion.