Baltic Belgians?

Pallid, big-boned, secretive Colonel Josef Beck, active Polish Foreign Minister who recently visited Sweden, then Estonia, was off again last week on another flying trip as advance agent for his proposed Eastern European Bloc. Idea of the Beck Bloc, it is rumored, is that all the little countries which lie in the area of a possible future war should form a neutral belt between Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia, should appear at Geneva before the next League Assembly and secure officially for themselves a recognized neutrality status similar to that of Belgium. They would ask to be released from what would otherwise be their obligation under Article XVI of the Covenant to join in applying sanctions which might be ordered by the League against an aggressor.

Colonel Beck flew from Warsaw to talk this over last week with the Foreign Minister of Latvia, brilliant young Vilhelms Munters, who emerged as a leading small-power statesman when he recently chair-manned the League Advisory Committee on the Far East. En route to Latvia, Colonel Beck created a great Baltic stir by becoming the first Polish Cabinet Minister ever to set foot on Lithuania's soil. On July 1 normal railway service was restored between Poland and Lithuania after a lapse of 18 years during which these two nations, created after the World War, had remained quarreling. Shortly, river transport on the Niemen will open between the two countries. Last week Minister Beck alighted at Kaunas, the Lithuanian capital, paused there for half an hour of salutes, handshaking before he flew on to Riga, the Latvian capital. He was expected to make a formal visit to Kaunas soon, will try to draw Lithuania into his bloc of Baltic Belgiums.

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