British In

Since the war began, Paris correspondents of U. S. newspapers have been predicting a big German offensive with agonizing regularity. This is not merely wishful thinking by writers weary of stretching a 50-word communique into a column, but is a reflection of the edginess of the average Frenchman, who thought a real war would end the war of nerves. Last week dispatches to the U. S. were again full of ominous signs: unusually large forces had been spotted across the Moselle from Luxembourg; a cold snap had frozen flooded areas in The Netherlands, making a mechanized offensive possible; Germans attacked three French outposts on the Rhine-Moselle front between the Warndt Forest and the Saar River, captured ten prisoners.

While this activity might be a forecast of real action in the west, it was more likely that the Germans just wanted to know what was going on. After taking prisoners they retired. All that was going on, on the Allied side of the lines, was the replacement of a French unit by British troops, bringing the British into contact with the Germans for the first time in the war (TIME, Dec. 18). That these British troops threw back a German attack last week was scornfully denied in Berlin. "Curiously," snorted a communique, "the German troops know nothing of such an event."

Moving of the British into the front lines was good news for many French soldiers, who muttered that the English would now earn their pay. Although the British nave made much of the fraternizing of the two Armies (one journalist said he gained the impression of "something that was nothing less than brotherliness between the French and English soldiers"), reports from the French Army have been different. One French soldier, on leave in Paris, told of numerous fist fights, not only between individuals but between groups of French and English. Chief gripe of the French is that the English get paid so much more (58-c- a day to the Frenchman's 2 1/2-c-). "Les femmes," said the French soldier bitterly, "sont toutes a eux!" ("They get all the dames!")

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