Wanted: a Plan

Belgian women had scarcely ceased weeping over the coffins of the victims of Rundstedt's Christmas drive. Belgian political factions had scarcely interrupted (but never really stopped) their quarrel in face of the threat that the drive implied. Last week in Brussels crisis loomed again. The five Socialist members of his Cabinet threatened to withdraw their support from Premier Hubert Pierlot. His Government seemed to be tottering.

But the Belgian crisis was not merely Belgian. The problems of the little kingdom, whose King Leopold III is a German prisoner, seemed like a desperate distillation of the problems of much of liberated Europe. Behind these problems lay hunger (the physical absence of sufficient food), cold (the physical absence of fuel in one of Europe's bitterest winters), the war-induced collapse of the economic system (which was unable to produce vitally needed consumers' goods or to give jobs to people who vitally needed them).

Greater than these physical hardships was a creeping despair--despair over the world of the past (which had made World War II possible), despair over the war (the successive agonies of German invasion and occupation), despair over the future (for which no plans seemed envisaged that would make such sufferings impossible and give security in every sense to the greatest number of people).

It was a despair that infected all classes, from the Queen Mother Elisabeth (once the wife of World War I's beloved King Albert) and her Regent Son Charles to the poorest peasant on the Flanders plain or the meanest miner in the coal-rich Borinage. The upper and middle classes felt a mounting insecurity before social dislocations. The lower classes felt insecurity in everything--and their resentment found a scapegoat in Premier-Pierot, who had spent the war years as head of the Government in Exile in London.

Waiting to take political advantage of this general despair was a dynamic party with a plan for ending it. The Communist Party's demonstrations had touched off the Belgian unrest which British intervention prevented from reaching crisis proportions last fall. The Communist Party had had a determined hand in continuing to give the social discontent a political form and drive. The one thing that gave pause to the recalcitrant Socialists last week was the fear that if they withdrew from the Government, Communists might increase their strength.

This crisis might pass. But unless the Government had a solution for Belgium's troubles, or unless the U.S. or Britain quickly produced a plan to solve liberated Europe's problems, those who had a plan, however bad, would soon get a chance to try it out. And not only in Belgium.

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