Blood for Blood

RUMANIA Blood for Blood

Behind the elegant veneer of Bucharest society, Rumanian politics are murderously tough. The assassination of King Carol II, for instance, was recently all set to take place at a swank turf classic, according to Bucharest police. Nabbed by detectives in time's nick, the nonchalant plotters were said to have been caught preparing hand grenades, boldly confessing, "We were going to toss them into the Royal Box while everyone was watching the big race of the day." Significantly, Lloyd's of London not long ago refused to write insurance on the life of strong and healthy Rumanian Premier Armand ("Little Hercules") Calinescu. Last week this actuarial judgment proved sound as foul murder and bloody vengeance erupted right in the middle of Bucharest, within five minutes walk of the Royal Palace.

Premier Calinescu had courted assassination by suddenly starting to arrest throughout the kingdom, as "plotters against the State," German sympathizers with the Rumanian Fascist Iron Guard, an old-line band of native anti-Semite terrorists organized soon after World War I, repeatedly accused by "Little Hercules" of now receiving funds from the newer German Nazis. One afternoon last week, as the Premier was being driven home to lunch, a young woman suddenly shoved a cart in front of his car, which was forced to stop with squealing brakes. At the same moment up swooped two cars from which leaped masked gunmen. They rapidly blazed away at Little Hercules. His bodyguard went down under the fusillade, his chauffeur collapsed, and the Rumanian Premier toppled forward riddled with bullets.

Jumping back into their cars, the assassins roared away. Soon afterward a group of Iron Guards rushed the Bucharest radio station, shot the doorman in the leg and burst in upon a young woman radio announcer who swooned as they shouted into her microphone for all Rumania to hear: "Attention! Calinescu has been assassinated. The action was carried out by Iron Guards." It so happened that the Premier's wife, who was staying at their country place, was listening to this broadcast, which she at first took to be a hoax. She set out for Bucharest with her 16-year-old son. On arrival, she was told that her husband was dead with five bullets through his body and one through an eye.* At the sight of his body she fainted, the boy suffered nervous collapse.

Meanwhile, the King's police went out in typical Balkan fashion to get blood for blood. They began a man hunt for Iron Guards in every part of Rumania, but in Bucharest they put on a grisly show. The assassination had occurred at 1:30 p. m. and punctually at 11 p. m. the same night seven young Iron Guards who had confessed to the murder of Little Hercules were brought to the spot where the assassination had taken place, forced to reenact it under police floodlight and then executed, in situ. The executioners were seven Rumanian soldiers, each of whom drew a pistol and killed one of the seven Iron Guards. The bodies slumped to the pavement, gushing blood and sprawled grotesquely next to those of two Iron Guards who had committed suicide, to lie there in the street for 24 hours. This object lesson was captioned by a huge banner draped by police clear across the street: "Let this be an example to all assassins and traitors in the country."

Military Dictatorship. To keep a tight grip on Rumania and pursue the Iron Guard to extinction, King Carol quickly formed a new Cabinet headed by General George Argeseanu, Commander of the Second Army Corps, as Premier. His Majesty's close personal friend, General Ion Ileus, became War Minister and General Gabriel Marinescu was put in charge of the police as Minister of Interior.

All three of these generals are rated in Rumania exceptionally stern disciplinarians and quite nonpolitical. As they got busy, thousands of Rumanians suspected of being Iron Guards were flung into concentration camps and the Government officially admitted that 320 had been executed, in camps and in town and village public squares, where their bodies were left sprawling for all to see as in Bucharest.

Good Appetites. The best that could be said for such wholesale butchery was that King and Generals not only feared they would be assassinated themselves at any moment, but faced last week the armies of Soviet Russia, Bulgaria and Hungary, all mobilized along their frontiers with Rumania. Each of these States lost huge slices of territory to Rumania by the peace treaties which wound up World War I, and each was all set to take advantage of any collapse at Bucharest.

Hungary probably would not soon dare to grab back Transylvania from Rumania, but Bulgarians joyously remember a report that Joseph Stalin recently told a Bulgarian delegation in Moscow he would help their country grab back Dobruja. In Tsarist times Russia always posed in the Balkans as "Protector of the Slave." It was this role which brought her into World War I against Austria and then Germany. In World War II, the Soviet Government has been rapidly swallowing Polish territory while describing itself as "neutral." Last week Moscow, in an official declaration to Bucharest, declared that so far as Rumania is concerned Russia will remain "neutral." Many Rumanians believed that the speed with which the U. S. S. R. nipped in and took southern Poland before Germany could do so, thus keeping the Reich from getting a common frontier with Rumania, also nipped what may well have been German Nazi plans for surging into Rumania synchronously with the assassination of Premier Calinescu by Rumanian Fascists.

Partition Rumania? Still open was the question whether J. Stalin is minded to join A. Hitler in partitioning Rumania at leisure. Well King Carol knows that after the vast province of Bessarabia was carved out of Russia at the end of World War I and given to Rumania, two Great Powers refused to recognize this Allied Deal, namely the U. S. S. R. and the U. S. President Wilson thought the deal too raw because Russia was not represented at the Peace Conference. Bessarabia consists of 17,000 square miles of marshland, forests and rich black earth inhabited by some 3,000,000 Ukrainians, Moldavians, Tartars, Ruthenians, Bulgars, Germans and Jews. In 1920, and several times since, the U. S. S. R. demanded that a plebiscite be held in Bessarabia to settle to whom it shall belong, but up to last week Rumania had always nose-thumbed such proposals. In Soviet schoolrooms moppets find in their geography books that Bessarabia has never ceased to belong to Russia and unquestionably J. Stalin has an even heartier appetite for it than he has for gobbling Polish territory.

*When four years old, the future Premier lost the use of his left eye when his clumsy nurse, thinking she was administering eye drops, poured acid into it, caused him to wear an opaque monocle for most of his life.

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