Pierlot Assassin!

The Belgian crisis reached a new climax. For three miles through Brussels' streets stretched an army of Belgian Resistance groups, demonstrating against their Government's order to surrender their arms. In front of the Chamber of Deputies and the office of Premier Hubert Pierlot police scuffled with the demonstrators. Sticks and stones thudded, grenades exploded, rifles cracked. Casualties (as reported by the Resistance forces): four demonstrators killed, 38 wounded.

For a week Belgium's Communists and other leftists had inflamed the Resistance forces to defy the Government. Now they had got what they wanted--martyrs and a lethal slogan: "Pierlot Assassin! Pierlot Assassin!"

Cried Fernand Demany, leftist leader of the Resistance, who had resigned from the Government the week before: "Until yesterday it was a misunderstanding. Now it is a drama, a brute struggle. Now it is a crisis."

To meet the crisis Premier Pierlot rushed back from his country house to Brussels. From Paris, where he had gone for economic talks, rushed Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak. The cabinet met in emergency session. Cried Resistance Chief Demany: "There can be no compromise. . . . Since the Germans were driven out, two traitors have been shot out of 60,000 collaborators arrested. Now in one day we have four patriots killed by the police. That is the score--two traitors and four patriots! . . . We must not have a revolution. But we must have a succession of evolutions until we achieve a new, young government. This Government of Pierlot's is old and out of touch."

Warning from the East. Moscow's Pravda sounded a warning: "Strange reports are coming from Belgium. . . . Patriots consider that Belgium will be finally freed when she is rid of her fifth column . . . inspired by General van Overstraeten [Chief Aide-de-Camp, close friend and adviser of King Leopold] ... an active agent of Nazi Germany. . . . The fact that he is at liberty while patriots are being disarmed is ... remarkable."

In Paris, plump, balding Assemblyman Jacques Duclos, onetime pastry-cook's apprentice, now boss of the French Communists, echoed Pravda: "There are some hundreds of people in France who must be shot and some thousands who must be removed from their posts. By creating delays, some emigres in the Government . . . risk falling into the plight of the Belgian Government, whose emigres also learned nothing. The Pierlot Government ... is doomed sooner or later by prostituting itself and calling on foreign aid against the people."

Purges and Purposes. What did the Communists want? Part of the answer was that they wanted to keep the armed Resistance forces as revolutionary armies in being. Part was given by N.A.N.A.'s shrewd French Commentator Pertinax, now in Washington:

"The 'purges' being carried out in France and Belgium, as the Soviet Government conceives them, ought to include the prominent men who some day may recover enough authority to lead the attack against the semi-revolutionary regimes of today. . . .

"Russian policy expects from the 'purges' what it expected in 1935-36 from the 'popular fronts' set up in several countries . .. [by] the Comintern. . . . The aim of the Comintern was to eliminate . . . politicians who were prone ... to act against the Soviet Union. . . . The Comintern has disappeared from the scene,* but not the purpose it tried to fulfill. . . . The Moscow policy is to make it impossible for an anti-Soviet coalition to develop in Europe and the rest of the world."

* The Communist International (Comintern) was the central organization of all the world's Communist parties, with headquarters in Moscow. In deference to his Allies, Stalin abolished the Comintern. The Communist parties that composed it continue to function as before.

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