The War of the Worlds

Cool and confident in his superior strength and wisdom one day last week, Henri Villette, a 67-year-old barrelmaker of Alencon, clapped an unwanted kitten into a musette bag and set out for the Sarthe River to drown it. On the river's bank he slipped and fell. The kitten crawled to safety. Henri's drowned body was found later by local firemen.

Some distance away toward the south, in a field near Limoges, Hunters Louis Autef and Jean Riffort bowled over a rabbit with a long shot. As Autef stooped to pick up the beast, the rabbit kicked the trigger of his shot gun and sent a load of shot hurtling into the shoulder of Hunter Riffort. The hunter was rushed to a doctor. The rabbit hopped off.

Whales on the Beach. Throughout the world last week there were signs that the age-old war between man and his less-educated cousins was proceeding with unwonted vigor. Britain's Ministries of Food and Agriculture joined forces in an offensive against rabbits of all nationalities, by lifting rationing restrictions on the sale of imported rabbits in Britain's butcher shops, and issuing free poison gas to Britain's farmers for the extermination of the domestic variety.

In the air over Scotland's Renfrew Airfield, a 7-oz. plover with Kamikaze tendencies flew head-on into a London-bound British European Airways Dakota and brought the big aircraft to earth for repairs. In Suffolk, meanwhile, an armed task force of 100 British countrymen so far forgot their sporting instincts as to go after rapidly multiplying British foxes with guns.

British officialdom was ready with instructions to cope with any emergency that might arise from the conflict. In the case of seaborne invasion, the British Museum had issued a neat booklet telling Britons what to do if they should find a whale on their beach. The prescribed procedure was simple: fill out a form (N.H.M. Form 136 tidily enclosed in the booklet), and mail it to the Keeper of Zoology. Question No. 1 on the form read: "Is the tail horizontal?" Since all whales have horizontal tails, the questionnaire continued sensibly: "If the answer to this question is 'no,' it is not necessary to fill up the rest of this form."

Ants on the Mountain. As usual, the state of war brought with it a tightening of nerves. In response to radio and telephone alarms in Indianapolis, Ind., policemen took to their squad cars in search of a black panther reputedly terrorizing their city with mournful rapacious howls. The search was called off only when the menace was identified as a mooning but amiable Newfoundland dog.

In Italy, a species of ants known as Myrmica scabrinodis, which for centuries past at this season have come to mate in nuptial flight and die by the billions near the shrine of the Madonna of the Mountain of the Ants, largely forsook their Madonna and swarmed and died instead at a Communist festival in a village on the slope. "It is," cried one Communist, "the effect of the Pope's excommunication decree."

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