"Preventative War?"

"Preventive War?"

(See front cover) Not knowing what Adolf Hitler may do next, statesmen of all countries neighboring Germany were jangle-nerved last week, but Denmark's hulking pacifist Premier, auburn-bearded, cigar-rolling Thorvald Stauning, was absolutely frantic. Three years ago his Cabinet took the somewhat feminine position that Denmark, if attacked, had better scream for help rather than fight. Announced plump and placid Defense Minister Lauritz Rasmussen :

"Total disarmament and, in case of aggression, a protest to all the Powers--that is our best--our only adequate defense!"

Abruptly changing front last week, because of Germany's withdrawal from the League and Disarmament Conference (TIME, Oct. 23), Premier Stauning shouted, "Our German frontier in North Slesvig is the frontier of all Scandinavia! . . . It must and will be defended by every means at our disposal. I shall consult at once with Premier Hansson [of Sweden] and Premier Mowinckel [of Norway]. . . . The time is ripe for us to forge a united Scandinavian front!"

Observers agreed that, should Chancellor Hitler decide to pick a war tomorrow, fat little Denmark, a land of farmers as defenseless as their cows, would offer the easiest prize, especially since North Slesvig is swarming with Danish Nazis financed from Berlin. But the main danger was not last week that Germans may be so foolish as to start any kind of war in 1933. The longer Adolf Hitler waits, the keener his Reichswehr and Storm Troops become, the more arms the Fatherland secretly or openly acquires, the greater will be Germany's chance to strike with success. The danger last week was that Europe might not let Germany wait. In Paris, Warsaw, Prague and Brussels statesmen and strategists pondered anxiously what seemed to some of them the necessity of crushing Hitlerism by launching a "preventive war" against Germany before the Fatherland grows too strong.

"Ou est mon Weygand?" Every morning when the late great Marshal Ferdinand Foch reached his fusty little office he would lean his umbrella in the corner, adjust his spectacles and call out as he sat down to work, "Et Maintenant, Ou est mon Weygand?"

In would march brilliant little General Maxime ("Max") Weygand, a slant-eyed, bristling terrier of a man who was chief assistant to the Generalissimo in war and victory. "If a military peril menaces France when I am no longer here," said Marshal Foch on his death bed, "call on Weygand and you can be tranquil!" Two years ago France called General Max to supreme executive command of her army. This office has a highly technical title: "Vice-President of the Supreme War Council." Today no War Minister (who is ex-officio President of the Supreme War Council) would think of overruling Vice President Max Weygand. The little general, a bowlegged cavalryman and the blackest of Papists,* is cock of the French military roost but by no means inclined to crow a challenging cock-a-doodle-doo. It is with sincere, heartfelt emphasis that he says: "No soldier would start a new war!" Last week one of the strongest forces operating to stop France and her allies from launching an immediate "preventive war" was Frenchmen's knowledge that in 1934 they will complete a program of fortifications designed to make their frontiers impregnable, a program conceived by Marshal Foch before his death and worked out by the late War Minister Andre Maginot (died 1932), Marshal Petain and General Max Weygand.

"French Divisions by Request." From the English Channel to the Baltic, Europe's safety chain around Germany is forged of nine links: Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Lithuania. As they always have, Queen Wilhelmina's phlegmatic Dutch subjects rely on flooding the country in case of attack, though powerful fortresses protect Amsterdam, The Hague and Rotterdam.

Since the War spunky Belgium has revamped her shattered forts at staggering cost, rebuilt Liege and Namur and constructed the super-fort of Eben-Eymal -- a name the next war may make memorable. "In case of attack," Premier Count Charles de Broqueville has declared, "we would now have an army of 350,000 for use instead of the 40,000 we had in 1914. In addition to these forces a certain number of French divisions would be rushed immediately to help Belgium but only should our Government so request."

Since General Max Weygand was born in Brussels, in 1867. and had to be naturalized a Frenchman he seems to most Belgians in effect a Belgian. Who his father was he will not say. Rumor insists that General Max is a natural son of Belgium's late King Leopold II, would thus be a cousin of King Albert.

Luxembourg's homely Grand Duchess Charlotte has lumped her beauteous little realm with King Albert's. Luxembourg, the first land Germans invaded in 1914, will be defended as a unit with the Belgian provinces of Limbourg, Liege and Luxembourg.

"Go and See Verdun!" Behind Belgium and Luxembourg, whom France trusts, Marshal Foch and General Weygand thought it sufficient to scatter only small forts, backed by what they decided to call '"Flying Fortresses." These, a post-War innovation, consist of trainloads of motorized trench digging and barbed-wire stringing machines of Gargantuan size. In three days each "Flying Fortress" is supposed to turn out a complete system of front line trenches for the sector which it covers and within a week all the "Flying Fortresses" working together can dig France in from the North Sea to the Sarre.

Beginning at the Sarre and continuing to the Rhine (125 mi.) France has now dug, blasted and tunneled into the vitals of her soil the heaviest fortifications on earth.

"Go and see Verdun," is General Weygand's dry comment when someone suggests that high power artillery can pulverize the strongest fort. A single fort at Verdun, he recalls, withstood 120,000 German projectiles in the grand Boche offensive of 1916 that did not pass. Of this explosive avalanche 2,000 projectiles were of the highest power. To Verdun and other War-famed forts now reconstructed and equipped with guns that can easily fire into German territory, France has added two more monsters, Hackenberg defending the great industrial city of Metz, and Hochwald near the Rhine within easy shooting distance of Baden. Hackenberg is a marvel of underground mechanics, equivalent to ten dreadnaughts buried in a mountain, connected by poison-gas-tight tunnels and served by miles of subterranean railways on which projectiles and even guns can be rushed from point to point. Hochwald is almost entirely on the surface, a two-mile breastwork of cement and steel blocking German advance and called by General Max "The Giant's Trenches."

Aside from Verdun, Hackenberg and Hochwald, the entire Sarre-Rhine frontier of France is studded every kilometre (nearly five-eighths of a mile) with "pillboxes" and groups of pillboxes, each one a small fort 30 ft. by 36 ft. and rooted 60 ft. deep in earth so that poilus in the lower chamber can rest in comfort. "Comfort," as Marshal Petain has said, "is of utmost strategic importance. The combative efficiency of the soldier is at least doubled when he can recuperate in comfort." Ergo, nearly every pillbox is equipped with electric lights, electric stove, a well, beds, running water and glistening latrines. On his visit to the forts last August Premier Daladier cried: "The shield is in place! It is of good metal!" Impressed by the amazing camouflage of many of the forts Foreign Minister Joseph Paul-Boncour shook his tousled white head, questioned ecstatically, "The art of War, now more than ever is it not to remain invisible?"

Next year was set by France as the deadline for completion of her forts, because from 1934 to 1938 the young men called up at 20 for military training in her conscript armies and in those of her allies will be less numerous, less robust than normal. They are the "War babies," born in 1914-18 when the birth rate necessarily declined and food to nourish mothers and babes was scarce. In the small German Army, composed of robust volunteers who enlist for a period of twelve years, the ''War baby" defect cannot arise but the mighty ranks of brownshirt storm troops swarm with callow "War babies," now barely ripe for Armageddon.

"Indispensable Poland!" Because of her Alps, Switzerland is a natural fortress, but the Swiss Government takes no chances. President Schulthess put through appropriations to re-equip the Swiss Army fortnight ago. Last week the appropriations were jacked up higher. In Austria embattled, bantamweight Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss has had his army on a basis amounting to mobilization for months (TIME, Sept. 18), massed along the German frontier and ready to repel Nazi attacks. Last week Czechoslovakia and Austria laid their heads together as Chancellor Dollfuss received in Vienna "Europe's Smartest Little Statesman," famed Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Eduard Benes, a power in the counsels of Skoda, the Czechoslovak munitions trust "which makes guns for everybody" including Japan. Skoda is linked with the French munitions octopus, Schneider-Creusot, and the Czechoslovak Army is one of the best equipped in the world. Neither Czechoslovakia nor Poland flank Germany with a chain of pillboxes as does France, but both have heavily fortified frontier cities and the Polish General Staff are confident that Dictator Pilsudski's troops could cut and plow their way in three weeks to Berlin. Just now the heaviest massing of troops in Europe is along both sides of the Polish-German frontier. At the drop of a steel helmet, Poles would join France in a "preventive war," especially since the French Commander-in-Chief is Max Weygand, "Savior of Poland."

After the War, when Red troops seemed about to take Warsaw, Marshal Foch sent Man Weygand rushing to Poland not with an army corps but with only himself and five other French staff officers. In three weeks Weygand's strategy had helped Marshal Pilsudski to drive the Red Army once and for all in headlong flight from Warsaw, but Pilsudski did not take Weygand's advice without high words. "General Weygand!" he once shouted, "you forget that you are talking to a Marshal of Poland. Only a Marshal--only Marshal Foch--can talk to me like that!" "Marshal Foch was accustomed to accept my suggestions and advice," purred General Weygand. "He did this because he was not only a great General but a great man." "Proceed," snapped Pilsudski. After Warsaw was saved General* Weygand said, "My role was merely to fill up the gaps. It was the heroic Polish nation itself which won the victory and saved the Polish State--a State the existence of which is indispensable to France."

"Though I Go to Ruin!" Though Germany announced her withdrawal from the League of Nations when she withdrew from the Disarmament Conference, Chancellor Hitler did not send her actual resignation--not effective until 1935 under the League Covenant--until last week. In Geneva, suave League statesmen remained silent, but Disarmament Conference President Arthur Henderson exploded in a radio broadcast heard by all Europe: "The choice before us is co-operation or conflict, peace or war, progressive disarmament or a mad race to increase weapons. . . . We cannot let world law and order be undermined by international anarchists, whatever the pretext on which they propose to flout the law!" In this case "the law" is the pact which the U. S., Britain and France urged Germany to sign (TIME, Oct. 16), to provide a four-year standstill during which time no European State would increase its armaments, and after which time Germany would receive arms equality with France. Still truculent last week. Chancellor Hitler told a British correspondent in Berlin that Nazi Germany will not wait. "I will never," he cried, "set my signature to a treaty that as a gentleman in private life I also would not sign--though I go to ruin thereby!"

* "Weygand," said Clemenceau, "is sunk in priests to the neck."

* When he took the chair of the late great Marshal Joffre in the French Academy last year General Weygand arrived wearing the gold-frogged Academic uniform of the late, great Marshal Foch which fits him perfectly.

Custom decreed that Weygand, the protege of Foch, must eulogize Joffre, the enemy of Foch, on taking Joffre's seat. "Messieurs!"' cried General Weygand in such ringing parade-ground tones that even aged, deaf Academicians had no need to cup hand to ear. "Messieurs, I had prepared a speech of more than six pages to thank you for the honor you have done me, but I left it on my study table and my dog ate it." When the gale of Academic laughter had subsided, General Max spoke a few words extemporaneously in praise of Joffre, avoided by the stratagem of his "dog'' the hypocrisy of having to pronounce the usual 20-page eulogy.

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