In Syria

Despatches from Syria spoke of preparations by General Sarrail (TIME, Aug. 17) to launch a great French offensive against the Druse tribes, which have been fighting valliantly to oust the French Mandate and set up a pan-Arab Government at Damascus.

Part of the news was cabled by George Seldes,* correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, who was chased out of Rome last month by the Facisti (TIME, Aug. 10).

After describing the concentration of French troops, planes and armored cars at Suedia, (on the seacoast due west of Aleppo) and the raking of Druse villages by French 75's, Correspondent Seldes added specific details. He spoke of "pagan tribesmen riding horses like mountain goats" and of "a Druse gendarme who welcomes Americans because he had relatives who rode in Barnum's circus." Beside a Greek ikon in a native stone hut, he found "a faded lithograph of Lillian Russell/- in tights."

'Brother of Gilbert Seldes, famed aesthete and onetime Editor of the Dial.

/-Late wife (she died in 1921) of Alexander Pollock Moore, present U. S. Ambassador to Spain (See SPAIN, Page 16) whom she married in 1912. Famed showgirl, early exponent of tights, and sometime co-star with Weber and Fields, Mrs. Moore (nee Leonard, not Russell) made her last public appearance at the close of the War with Raymond Hitchcock in Hitchy-Koo.