Island Diplomacy

Ordinarily in April the delicate scent of almond blossoms wafts across Stresa's azure lake, agreeably perfuming the beauteous little Italian town. Last week Stresa's 2,000 inhabitants were outnumbered by Fascist detectives, police and militia protecting the lives of Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald and his Foreign Minister Sir John Simon, Premier Pierre Etienne Flandin and his Foreign Minister Pierre Laval and Benito Mussolini, Duce del Fascismo e Capo del Governo who is his own Foreign Minister. All one could smell was fresh paint.

Brass Tacks. Either the Stresa Conference was going to induce Britain to stop vacillating and take a firm stand on Adolf Hitler and problems raised by his tearing up of the Treaty of Versailles (TIME, March 25) or endless temporizing must continue. As Sir John Simon was told to his face in the House of Commons by an irate M. P. just before he and the Prime Minister left England last week, "We have heard where France, Italy, Germany, Russia and Poland stand but we don't know where our own country stands!"

Signor Mussolini, impatient and contemptuous of the "exploratory voyages" of Sir John and Lord Privy Seal Anthony Eden (TIME, April 1 et seq.), sought to get everyone down to brass tacks. Observed Italian newsorgans which are under his thumb: "What have these explorations done except to leave Italy under the necessity of maintaining 600,000 men in arms? . . . When is procrastination to give place to action?"

Amazingly last week the British Delegation were sniped at in a manner definitely "not cricket" by hawk-nosed Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain. He suddenly took it on himself to say that the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister had no authority from Britain's Cabinet to make fresh commitments at Stresa last week or at Geneva this week when the League Council meets. Mr. Chamberlain hinted that Mr. MacDonald and Sir John could not be trusted not to exceed their authority and that he was therefore obliged to expose their real position. Next day they hotly retorted from Stresa that British foreign policy is not the business of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. This scandal unmasked the long-suspected Cabinet split which has made the Empire's foreign policy for months a policy of drift, got Stresa down to tacks so brassy that the Conference was said to have been wrecked at the start.

Out of the Wreck, Put-putting motorboats carried the French and British out from their hotel to Emperor Napoleon's erstwhile palace on an island where Benito Mussolini slept nightly last week in "the Josephine bed." Il Duce, once a reporter covering European conferences, kept the World Press fuming on shore, dashed off crisp communiques from the island in which he figured as "Head of the Government" (Il Capo del Governo) without bothering to specify which government. To their hearts' content Scot MacDonald and Lawyer Simon rambled idealistically on & on. Mussolini & Flandin urged the British to join them in direct demands that the League Council take punitive steps against Adolf Hitler's raising of a conscript army of 550,000 in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. MacDonald & Simon, though they had in effect told Chamberlain that he could go to the devil, were actually intimidated by the Chancellor of the Exchequer to the point of pleading with France not so much as to mention Germany by name but merely to fulminate at Geneva against treaty-breaking in general.

In his verbal rambles Sir John said Hitler told him at Berlin that Germany would join a pact of mutual non-aggression but not a pact pledging mutual assistance against an aggressor such as the proposed Eastern Locarno (TIME, Feb. 18). At this the Latins cut in last week with questions. How did Hitler feel, they asked, about a pact in which Germany would join other States in pledging non-aggression only, while the other States further pledged mutual aid to resist aggression?

His thin face flushing. Sir John replied: "My impression is that Reichchsfuehrer Hitler would consider such a plan dangerous and objectionable."

At this point Mussolini & Flandin, feeling the British "explorations" had evidently not covered the ground, urged that Britain's Berlin Ambassador at once ask Germany their question. When this was done, the answer of Realmleader Hitler was found to be not "Nein," as Sir John had expected, but "Ja."

Out of the Wreck. This meant that European diplomacy could set off again on its scrap-of-paper strewn hunt for the pact to end pacts. With such proceedings, Dictator Mussolini has small sympathy, but he and French Premier Flandin preferred to wind up the Stresa Conference handsomely and save everything possible from the wreck.

Wholly Pleasing. After a final, driving session with Il Duce in the chair, the put-putting motorboats carried ashore what was called a "pleasant surprise." Almost too smily as they landed and faced the Press and newscameramen, the English and French laughed, chortled, beamed. Apparently in the highest good humor, they announced "definite achievement" and "complete agreement" among the three Great Powers. Some things done at Stresa:

P:Too timid to arraign Germany by name before the League, the Conference shoved off that duty upon France (see p. 20) but vented its feelings thus: "It was regretfully recognized that the method of unilateral repudiation of the Treaty of Versailles] adopted by the German Government, at a moment when steps were being taken to promote a freely negotiated settlement of the question of armaments, had undermined public confidence in security of a peaceful order. Moreover the magnitude of the declared program of German rearmament, already well in the process of execution, had invalidated the quantitative assumptions on which efforts for disarmament had heretofore been based."

P:As to the nearest thing to making a commitment, MacDonald & Simon joined Mussolini in solemnly reaffirming the obligations of Britain and Italy as guarantors of the original (Western) Locarno Pact, supposed to nail down the frontiers of Germany, Belgium and France (TIME, Oct. 26, 1925).

P:Further negotiation was approved by the Conference toward the faint goals of an Eastern Locarno and a pact against "unprovoked air aggression."

P: As a sop to Austria, Hungary and Bulgaria, disarmed as was Germany by post-War treaties, the Conference agreed to "inform" all European nations of their "desires" (i. e. to rearm). As a moral lesson to Germany, the Powers intend to grant to the three disarmed nations, after "friendly negotiation," the kind of rearmament they rebuke Hitler for having "seized."

P:Finally, what conference could end without whelping another Conference? Place: Rome. Date: probably May 20. Subject: Austria. At Stresa it was found impossible for Britain to join Italy and France in an iron-clad guarantee to support Austria as a bulwark against Nazidom, but Il Duce demands that this be thrashed out, insists that His Britannic Majesty's Government make up their minds.

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