Coal & Lemons

ITALY-GERMANY

Pale, lantern-jawed Chancellor Heinrich Bruening, plump German Foreign Minister Julius Curtius, and millions of swarming grasshoppers descended upon Rome last week. In the Campagna frightened peasants set fire to their fields as black clouds of the insects dropped from the sky, ate wheatfields to the dust and vineyards bare to the stalks, then hopped and whirred away. Gardens were ruined in the city. Streets, roofs and windows were gummy with grasshopper bodies and their brown "tobacco juice."

Germany's peripatetic statesmen found the Eternal City bleak but enthusiastic. They had come from Berlin in an ordinary sleeping car. At the Brenner Pass they found a special train of six cars put at their disposal by Premier Mussolini. At the station in Rome, Il Duce was waiting for them, beaming with pleasure, poking his Fascist yes-men in the ribs. The German statesmen were whisked through streets lined with Carabinieri in full dress, past cheering crowds to the Grand Hotel on the Piazza delle Terme. There was only one untoward incident. A group of German tourists on one corner suddenly bellowed HOCH HITLER! as the cortege passed. At the hotel a frock-coated manager proudly told the Chancellor of Germany that he would have the honor of sleeping in the same room once used by the late John Pierpont Morgan.

Correspondents were a little uncertain of the exact significance of the Briining-Curtius visit. Officially it was a "visit of courtesy" to thank Mussolini for his quick acceptance of the Hoover Moratorium, to discuss general European conditions. Imaginative reporters were quick to whisper "anti-French alliance."

No signs of such an agreement appeared. The statesmen saw the sights of Rome. They ate a great deal of food at a great many banquets. They had tea under the towering cypresses of the Villa d'Este at Tivoli. Carefully the statesmen avoided any talk of a political alliance, any mention of the repressed German-speaking minorities in the South Tyrol. Finally came news. Chancellor Bruening and Premier Mussolini made a trade agreement. Germany agreed to lift certain of her emergency restrictions on the purchase of foreign currency to allow Italy to market her surplus crop of oranges and lemons in Germany. Italy agreed to purchase from Germany the same amount of coal she had been receiving as part of her share of reparations. Il Duce arranged liberal German credits. There was much talk about the forthcoming disarmament conference, about which Germany and Italy are supposed to see eye to eye, but an attache at the German Embassy admitted to a reporter friend that these talks had actually been much more indefinite than newspapers had reported.

One of devout Catholic Bruning's last duties in Rome was to pay a formal call on the Pope. It was successful but slightly disorderly. Somebody removed Chancellor Bruning's silk hat from the German Embassy just as he was about to leave for the Vatican, leaving in its place a tiny topper that balanced precariously on his domelike forehead. At the Vatican the Swiss Guards were wrongly informed of the hour of his arrival. Parti-colored men at arms were still scurrying about the courtyard of San Damaso when the German automobile drew up. Foreign Minister Curtius, who is Protestant, paid a separate visit some hours later.

After the much-travelled Germans had left Rome to return to Berlin, Premier Mussolini received German correspondents, spoke encouraging words:

"All peoples have passed through times just as hard as these, and the present is not in itself so bad. It appears to be so because remedies call for certain phenomena of a vital nature which are determined chiefly by moral factors and by increasing independence of the world's financial currents. . . . Italy will continue to contribute co-operation with all her strength."

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