"What a Conflict!"

Early one morning last week bugles rang out on the sharp mountain air of Innsbruck in the western spur of Austria that is the Austrian Tyrol. Tyrolese in their Lederhosen watched with amazement as the garrison troops marched forth, climbed into buses and rolled off toward Scharnitz on the Bavarian frontier. Off went one regiment of Alpinists, two Viennese infantry regiments, two batteries of mountain artillery and one signal corps company. The good-hearted Tyrolese had heard many a rumor that an army of 8,000 Austrian Nazi exiles had massed on the Bavarian side of the frontier. The rumor crackled through Innsbruck, then spread with mounting terror through the Tyrol, through all Austria, that war had begun, the Nazi invasion was under way. From Vienna, Chancellor Dollfuss, delighted with his little war scare, announced that the maneuvers were merely the usual autumn field practice. He did not add that little Austria, which has just received official permission to increase its little army from 22,000 to 30,000 men, had last week 40,000 armed men on the Bavarian border. Supplementing the 22,000 regulars, the force is made up of drafts from the gendarmerie and the grey-shirted heimwehr. He did not add that twelve private airplanes contributed chiefly by members of Austria's Fascist Heimwehr organization were patroling the border to shoo back Nazi planes coming over with propaganda pamphlets. He did not add that every Chancellery but one in Europe knew what sword-handy Henry Berenger, president of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the French Senate, wrote last week in the Agence Economique et Financiere: "It is useless to temporize or quibble; Austria must remain outside Germany or there will be a European conflict--and what a conflict!--within a short time. . . . Will the Nazis take Salzburg by force? And if this coup takes place, however it may happen, will Europe let it occur without acting?" In Vienna last week Chancellor Dollfuss, like a chick trying to round up a brood of flustered hens, was trying desperately to get together a political consolidation to fight Naziism. President Wilhelm Miklas had shown him last week the Socialist petition signed by 1,250,000 Austrians, nearly one-third of the electorate, demanding the end of the Dollfuss dictatorship and a convocation of Parliament. To control Parliament or to ignore it. Chancellor Dollfuss last week had three choices. The first and, to him. the worst was to take into the Government some Nazi leader willing to accept the principle of absolute Austrian independence. The second was to abandon the Austrian Constitution and form a Fascist State on the Italian model. This would get the support of the Catholics and the Heimwehr whose leader Prince Ernst Ruediger von Starhemberg last week returned from a visit to Benito Mussolini. Third choice was to furbish up the present "Austria Over All" coalition of the Christian Socialists, the Fascist Heimwehr and the Agrarian League with the half-hearted support of the Socialists. Last week Dollfuss met long & late with his Cabinet to make a choice. Within the Cabinet Vice-Chancellor Franz

Winkler threatened to lead off his Agrarian League. The Heimwehr charged that Winkler was swinging toward Naziism. From the windows of the Chancellery the wrangling Cabinet members could look down into the Ballhaus-Platz, crowded with Dollfuss supporters. They were Austrian Catholics of whom 150,000 were in Vienna for the German Catholics' Five Day Convention. Come to see Papal Legate Cardinal Pietro La Fontaine, three other cardinals, 30 bishops and thousands of priests march in procession, most of them were members of Dollfuss' own Christian Socialist Party. To drum home to Austrians the fear he wants them to feel toward Naziism, Chancellor Dollfuss issued a Government "Brown Book" describing German Nazi terrorist activities in Austria: "It has become clear that the National Socialist leaders have resolved to put themselves above the law with revolvers, bombs, assassinations to keep Austria in a state of terror and panic." It was not long before taxi drivers, bus boys and waiters all knew that the little Chancellor's decision would be announced at a long-heralded celebration of the Dollfuss Government, the 250th anniversary of Vienna's liberation from the Turkish siege of 1683. Out to the great race track in the Prater went 60,000 people, many of them marching clubs in peasant costume, to hear the Chancellor's choice. Deftly worded, it seemed to point unmistakably to Choice No. 2: Chancellor Dollfuss was nearly ready to make a minor Mussolini of himself. "Meine Herren," he cried in his deep serious voice, "Parliamentarianism as such ended in Austria in March, and never will come again. . . .* A State without authority cannot rise." Last week the citizens of the border town of Aschach-on-Danube saw bobbing on the surface of the Danube the necks of a thousand wine bottles. One drifted to shore. A policeman broke it open. Inside was a Nazi handbill fearsomely vituperating the Government of Chancellor Dollfuss. The police swarmed out in rowboats and launches to harvest the wine bottles, each containing an anti-Dollfuss handbill. New thousands of bottles came bobbing down the Danube. Hundreds of citizens had to help the police to pick the Danube clean.

*Referring to the famed "suicide" of the Austrian Parliament, when in a mistaken effort to block Dollfuss legislation, the Socialist Speaker and the two Vice Speakers of the Nationalrat resigned, allowed Chancellor Dollfuss to proclaim that Austria was without a parliament.

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