How Russia Was Invaded

BLIND DATE WITH MARS--Alice-Leone Moats--Doubleday, Doran ($3).

When Germany's Panzer divisions were hurled across the Russian border, Collier's Correspondent Alice-Leone Moats was waiting for them, repartee in hand. Asked, at a dinner in Moscow's Italian Embassy, if she knew how Italian officers drank toasts, "Moatsie" snapped: " 'No. All I know about Italian officers is that they pinch girls' behinds.'. . . The others broke into a guffaw."

U.S. Ambassador Steinhardt would have liked to see Moatsie get out of Russia. But Moatsie's "cold grey" eyes showed her determination to "fight to the last ditch." She had come a long, tough way. At Tokyo's Imperial Hotel the roughness of the bathtub had left, she said ruefully, a "waffle design" on her posterior. Later, she had caught influenza. Her lipstick had run out. She was without holeless silk stockings. But when Steinhardt told her she had been "spoiled rotten by [her] parents" she replied "with gibes even more cutting."

So Moatsie stayed in Moscow, but for two weeks "cried [herself] to sleep every night and couldn't keep any food down." Moatsie kept going. Russian women enviously fingered her American corset. "A naughty gleam" came to the eye of a fellow correspondent when Moatsie was shown wounded Russian soldiers lying naked in healing mineral baths, and she cracked: "I am prepared to testify that the Germans aren't hitting below the belt."

The American Embassy still seemed suspicious of her. She was prevented from dancing with three nice Russian boys, was left "smiling wistfully" at them. The head of the British Mission refused to let his officers speak to Moatsie--"the most shameful thing that has ever happened," confided a British colonel.

As the Germans advanced, Moatsie and the other correspondents were evacuated to Kuibyshev. She made Correspondent Quentin Reynolds sweep the floor of her compartment. But things were no better in Kuibyshev itself. The plumbing was terrible. Moatsie shampooed her hair, and the Iranian Ambassador had his servant fetch water from the Volga to rinse it. Moatsie gave in. For months she had struggled against the sex prejudice that had tried to get her out of Moscow. Now, she exclaimed to the press bureau chief: "Do you think I am crazy enough to stay on in a place where there isn't a bathtub, where bedbugs have bitten me ... where everything smells awful?"

Moatsie got back to New York and Publishers' Row, where loquacious young women who have been to Moscow are rare indeed and take on something of the stature of Marco Polos or C. M. Doughtys.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.