Toward the Big Peace

London's Little Peace Conference wound up in a festive blaze of cocktail and dinner parties. Preparations for the imminent Big Peace Conference began with a less festive scrubbing and whitewashing in Moscow's Moskva and Metropole Hotels. But the prospects for the meeting on which all of Europe's peace depends were not bright. The report to the Foreign Ministers, which the deputies turned in after a spell of predeadline frenzy, was largely a list of deadlocks.

Some progress had been made on the Austrian draft treaty (such as an agreement "in principle" that Allied troops should be withdrawn 90 days after the treaty's signature). But still unsolved were the most important issues: Russia's demand for a free hand over anti-Communist D.P.s in Austria and her insistence that Austrian property which had been seized or absorbed by the Nazis be surrendered to Russia as reparations (TIME, Feb. 17).

Concerning Germany, the Deputy Foreign Ministers were to consider only the procedure of drafting the peace, not the peace terms themselves. Even within this limited framework, they failed.

The procedural deadlock meant that the Foreign Ministers at Moscow would have to go over the same ground again before they could tackle the problems of Germany's future. Nevertheless, Washington still hoped for progress in Moscow, thought agreement on reparations and perhaps Germany's boundaries might be reached as a first installment of the peace.

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