Dares & Scares

Egypt festered ominously last week. With mobs continuing to scream "Down with England!" the combined British Navy and Air Force, concentrated in & off Alexandria's matchless harbor, staged a "midnight attack" with British battle planes thundering overhead.

In Cairo, under strongest British pressure accompanied by a $100,000 British loan, the Egyptian Cabinet appropriated $470,000 for rush work on a strategic railway designed to improve defense against a possible invasion of Egypt by Italian forces from Libya. Bloodshed of this sort was being taken for granted in British garrisons throughout Egypt and the Sudan. As if acting in great emergency and unable to wait a few days for a regular British transport, the War Office took over from Cunard the small liner Scythia to be filled with troops in England and rushed to Egypt.

In Berlin the military expert of the Tageblatt declared: "It might not be a feat of madness on Mussolini's part to invade the Nile Basin. We believe Italy could obtain the mastery of Egypt without the firing of a single shot in the Mediterranean."

Rear-Admiral Yates Stirling, Commandant of the U. S. Navy Yard in Brooklyn. N. Y., sounded off in similar, though more cautious, vein: "The rise of [Italian] air power . . . seems to have drawn the teeth from the League's Sanctions. . . . The British Fleet, the great arbiter of the seas [can] no longer be considered invincible, at least not in closed seas in near proximity to Italy's land-based air force. ... A massed air attack ... to accomplish the destruction of Great Britain's mighty war fleet . . . might succeed."

Britain & France. With the French Parliament reconvening this week. Premier Pierre Laval snatched a four-day holiday on his country estate, a medieval barony with castle, drawbridge and moat which this earthy son of a butcher has bought with the millions of francs he has earned as a lawyer.

While Squire Laval rusticated, the British Admiralty and the French made world headlines by announcing that "routine maneuvers" will put the navies of these two Great Powers virtually on a war footing by Jan. 20--the day the League of Nations meets to deliberate the Italo-Ethiopian question further. Then 92 French warships and 156 British will invest the Mediterranean. Obliging M. Laval thus offered his countrymen their choice of war, and in effect dared the Chamber and Senate to say whether they prefer it to his policy of peace at Ethiopia's expense. Resolved not to fight, students of the Paris Law Faculty demonstrated in behalf of Italy and against Ethiopia's French International Law Professor Gaston Jeze (TIME, Aug. 12 & Sept. 16), with such vigor that his classes had to be canceled. Then the Law Faculty had to be closed, "until the students could insure order."

Arriving from an audience with the Holy Father, Cardinal Verdier, Archbishop of Paris, declared, "This grand old man confided to me his agonizing anxieties. He reaffirmed to me that the eminently pacific policy of France remained on this earth his best and greatest hope." Declared United Press from Paris: "Premier Benito Mussolini has sent to Premier Laval his personal assurance that he will not quit the League and will not attack England."

Geneva. Another "peace scare" was started last week by Genevieve Tabouis and her set of Leaguophile correspondents who nowadays cannot sleep nights for fear a peace favorable to Fascism maybe made.

The Tabouis method is to scare the wits out of Communists and Socialists every few days by discovering that the Capitalists have a new peace up their sleeves. Last week Genevieve was afraid the Capitalists were about to persuade Emperor Haile Selassie to become the arch-peacemaker with the assistance of King Leopold of Belgium. The Belgian Government was to propose at Geneva that the League draft a new plan similar to but less obvious than the Hoare-Laval Deal, while public opinion is distracted by sending a League mission to Ethiopia at Italy's request "for the announced purpose of investigating methods of war."

Japan. To London last week from Tokyo British correspondents cabled that the leading Japanese dailies had suddenly started advocating in concert this idea: Japan should forthwith occupy "effete" Britain's territories in the Far East while her attention is monopolized by Egypt and Italy.

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