Locarno Found Wanting

INTERNATIONAL

Locarno Found Wanting

"Belgium today is completely open to invasion and her situation is very much more critical than in 1914."

Defense Minister Comte Charles M. P. A. de Broqueville was speaking last week in Brussels before the Belgian Chamber. There were those before him who remembered that he spoke, in 1912, as Premier, to much the same effect. He was heeded then, and Belgium embarked (1913) upon a five-year program of armament. But the Germans came within a year. . .

Last week, Comte de Broqueville continued: "Belgium would be helpless before another German invasion. . . . The weakness of our present frontier is notorious. . . . The Government must regretfully propose the construction as rapidly as possible of a system of fortresses built on entirely new lines to resist the impact of modern war machinery. . . ."

U. S. correspondents in the gallery of the Chamber felt like rubbing their eyes. Were they back in 1912? Is not Germany disarmed? What of the League, and Locarno ?

Comte de Broqueville continued crisply: "The war of tomorrow will above all be a war of industry and chemicals. The rapid, not to say prodigious industrial development of Germany, a nation of 70,000,000 people, is well known. . . .

"We are told that the German Reichswehr numbers only 100,000 soldiers. But one must include 200,000 reservists who have served in the Reichswehr and would augment this perfectly drilled army overnight. . . .We are told that Germany plans only to defend her own frontier with these forces. I warn you that the German war theory now, as before the War, involves swift attack and the occupation of a large portion of Belgium. German military philosophy may be summed up in three rules: Work fast, attack, and carry the war into the enemy's territory."

On the very day of this speech by Belgium's War Minister, the German War Minister, Dr. Otto Gessler, said before the Army Budget Committee of the Reichstag: "The intentions of our neighbor states are not unknown to us. ... They are planning a quick and deep penetration into Germany in the first days of the next war. . . . Our only security is to compose our present army exclusively of men capable of filling officers' ranks at a moment's notice."

Returning to the Belgian Chamber, what seemed to be the true attitude of the Belgian Government, as opposed to the professionally alarmist views of the War Minister?

M. Vandervelde is the outstanding Socialist of Belgium--and the Belgian Socialist party slightly outnumbers any other. He was about to speak for the laboring class. More, he would speak as one of the authors of Locarno, as the Belgian representative on the Council of the League, as the man who has attended more international conferences for peace than any other living Belgian statesman.*

Erudite and pacifist, Emile Vandervelde said: "I cannot deny that Germany would be able to place an effective fighting force of several million men in the field within a few months after declaring war. . . ."

No sooner were these words telegraphed to Paris than the "inspired" French press launched a thoroughgoing preparedness scare (see FRANCE). It almost seemed that Parisian editors must have had their editorials ready in advance. Perhaps they had. The relations between the French and Belgian Governments are so close that what is going to be said by the Government at Brussels is often known in advance and sometimes dictated by the Government at Paris. What is the foreign policy of Belgium?

Belgium is a sturdy old gentleman of mixed Franco-Teuton stock who has hundreds of highly industrialized factories, and many more intensively cultivated farms. His foreign policy is international, easy to state, based squarely on self-interest, hard to attain. It is Peace Throughout Europe--for Belgium is the unhappy cockpit in which European wars are fought.

The old gentleman has had a military convention with France to protect him since 1920. Until Locarno (TIME, Oct. 12, 1925, et seq.) he was trying desperately to get a similar military convention with Britain--failed. Then at Locarno he seemed to have obtained all he wanted, security.*

Article II of the "Locarno Pact"/- reads: "Germany and Belgium, and Germany and France undertake to settle by peaceful means ... all questions of every kind which may arise between them. . . ."

That is unequivocal. But Article V goes further and absolutely binds all the Locarno Powers to enforce arbitration of Franco-German and Belgio-German disputes upon those three powers, whether all three want to fight or not.

The great and staggering significance of what was said in the Belgian Chamber officially last week is that the most pacific nation in Europe doubts that the Locarno Pact will keep the peace, and prepares to re-arm ("defensively," of course) for another war.

Belgium and Sweden, sentimentally united by the marriage of Crown Prince Leopold and Princess Astrid (TIME, Nov. 15), were drawn yet closer, last week, as the Swedish Parliament debated a treaty bringing Belgium into the group of nations (Denmark, Norway, Finland) absolutely pledged to peace with Sweden.

*Not long ago Foreign Minister Stresemann of Germany publicly declared (TIME, Dec. 20) that M. Vandervelde's personal mediation between the statesmen of Europe was an important factor in rendering possible the entry of Germany into the League.

*It is amazing, significant, that at Locarno, with Belgium's whole fate supposedly depending on the signing of the Pact, Foreign Minister Vandervelde was obliged to refuse to shake hands with Premier Mussolini. His Belgian Socialist constituents forbade him to take the hand that they considered had oppressed and murdered Italian Socialists. Aside from this incident--hushed up of course--M. Vandervelde furthered Locarno with his uttermost efforts.

/-The Rhineland Security Treaty.