"Rouse the World!"

Czech and Slovak leaders, with the hardness and tenacity of their races, were busy last week ably playing the weak cards dealt to them at Munich. But in Prague, this unpleasant New Deal for Czechoslovakia had four anguished Britons pathetically wringing their hands.

The Lord Mayor of London, kindly Sir Harry Twyford, whose instant reaction to Munich was to start a charitable subscription for refugees from the Sudetenland, arrived in Prague beaming with the news that his British fund already had almost $200,000 in hand. Sir Harry was shortly told by Jewish, Communist and Socialist leaders among the Sudeten refugees that money was "almost no use" in the dire emergency they faced. Within 48 hours after a Sudeten refugee arrived in what remained of Czechoslovakia last week, he could count on being flung back into Germany.

"I ran over such a man--a Sudeten German Social Democrat--who stepped in front of my car," radioed John T. Whitaker of the Chicago Daily News from Prague. "His head was badly cut, but when I insisted not only on taking him to a hospital, but in giving the police a full record of the accident, he pleaded 'the police will be compelled to send me back and I will be beaten to death.' He explained, this mild, reasonable little Socialist, that the Czech authorities had no choice. 'If too many Sudeten German refugees collected in Prague, Hitler would use that as an excuse to take the capital city over, too.'"

To Prague had gone two British Labor Party henchmen, Messrs. Gillies and David Grenfell, especially to succor Social-Democratic Sudetens. "These people must be saved if we have to rouse the whole world" said Gillies and Grenfell in a joint statement. "The Czechs will now forfeit within a few days the claim to the worldwide sympathy they have deservedly won if they drive back to torture and death at the hands of the Nazis these front-line Soldiers of Democracy...."

Sir Harry Twyford and Messrs. Gillies and Grenfell were joined by Sir Neill Malcolm, the League of Nations High Commissioner for German Refugees, who appealed to the Czechoslovak Premier, tough, one-eyed General Jan Syrovy. "We Czechs are determined once and for all that there shall be no repetition of what we have suffered on the grounds of 'German minority questions'" the Premier-General told the High Commissioner.

New Deal. Every unemployed Czechoslovak male aged over 18 was last week ordered to register for Labor Service, a program created by the Syrovy Cabinet to conscript in effect every jobless Czechoslovak to build new railways, highways and other projects necessary to get the dismembered Czechoslovak Republic reorganized and on its feet. As fast as they are mustered out of the Czechoslovak army, great numbers of recruits will be mustered into the Labor Service, and stern punishment was decreed for the new Czechoslovak crime of giving a man a "fake job," thus exempting from Labor Service.

Virtually every Masonic lodge in the Republic was shortly announced from Prague to have gone into "voluntary self-dissolution." The Communist editors of Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag) gave their paper the new name Die Welt am Morgen (The Morning World) and announced that they stood for Democracy. Enrolled Communist Party members in Slovak areas (where the Party was dissolved fortnight ago) rapidly disbanded their organizations, and in Czech areas they also disbanded this week.

The new Premier of Slovakia, which fortnight ago was given autonomy within the Republic, is Dr. Jozef Tiso, a Roman Catholic priest. Last week, after being wildly cheered by Slovaks who paraded through the streets of Zilina all night, Premier Tiso cried: "We Slovaks will be able to lead the foreign policy of fighting against Communism....We believe in peaceful solution of all difficulties."

Difficulties & Chvalkovsky. The No. 1 Czech trouble shooter in the new Prague Cabinet is Foreign Minister Dr. Frantisek Chvalkovsky, who used to be Czechoslovakia's envoy to Germany, later to Dictator Mussolini. Last week smart Dr. Chvalkovsky conferred in Berlin with German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, gave out that he had "asked" and the Nazis had "agreed" that no plebiscites would be held in finally determining how much of what was Czechoslovakia is to be German. In Berlin the British-French-Czechoslovak-German-Italian commission set up at Munich therefore last week proclaimed, that there would be no plebiscite; thus, subject to extremely minor revisions of detail later. Germany gets in all some 11,585 square miles.

Under the Godesberg demands Germany would have gotten approximately 12,000 square miles without plebiscites, and, in case all the plebiscites had gone Germany's way, a grand total of 14,200 square miles. Thus Dr. Chvalkovsky was seen to have played his weak hand not badly in Berlin (see below).

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