Reckless Tranquility

In most of the liberated countries of Europe last week there was, if not political peace, a political hush. Even in Greece the civil war had been halted by a truce (see below). Elsewhere there were no mass demonstrations, no riots in the streets. No crowds baited the police or shouted threateningly under government windows. What had caused this reckless tranquility? TIME Correspondent Harry Zinder, following the Allied forces as they slowly pushed back the Belgian bulge, reported one reason:

"Always, everywhere we went, there were refugees. Some strode with determined gait back to their little villages, hugging the mountainsides, their belongings on their backs. Others, little family clusters, carried tin-tubfuls of crockery, clothes and fine old tablecloths filled with ragged effects. One group we saw trying to cross the river at Marcourt were slipping and sliding down the broken wooden girders of the dynamited bridges into the icy water and wading across. In this family there was a girl of ten crying bitterly. She wore a thin red cotton sweater with a thin cotton dress underneath and the Belgian approximation of bobby socks in scuffed shoes. Her mother, wearying under a heavy bundle, spoke sullenly and bitterly when we asked what was wrong. 'Elle a froid. C'est tout. Elle a froid.' ('She's cold. That's all. She's cold.')"

Voleurs! Assassins! "One bulky elderly Belgian with a cane in his hand was forcibly restrained from smashing it over the heads of two German prisoners by MPs. As they jumped into a British truck to be taken away for interrogation, he cried: 'Voleurs! Assassins!' He told his story determinedly. Three days ago in Marcourt--just across the river--German soldiers rounded up all the young girls and drove them like cows from soldier billet to soldier billet where they were forced to service the troops. One man--the speaker's brother-in-law--hid his two daughters in the cellar and covered them over with blankets. When the Germans tore him out of the cellar, he called out to his daughters, 'Save yourselves!' and the daughters ran out. The Germans shot him dead in cold blood outside the church. We saw the two daughters. One was about 16, the other about 14, and they spoke with animated excitement in curiously high-school French that didn't change tone or pitch when they said: 'They shot papa. He died right away.'"

The involuntary tranquilizer of liberated Europe was Field Marshal Karl Rudolf Gerd von Rundstedt. His unexpected sweep into Luxembourg and Belgium had sent a chill through every nation from which the Germans had been recently driven. While the chill lasted, liberated Europeans might be expected to bury their deep civil differences in that common grave which held the latest victims of German savagery. At least for the moment, some of the Left and some of the Right seemed to have grasped the fact that so long as the common enemy must still be fought and defeated, they must forgo the luxury of fighting and defeating one another.

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