One Week

In a midsummer week of full moon, history overworked. Who did not know before that he lived in an age of gigantic events (although not of giants), knew it last week.

World War I, the 20th Century's parent catastrophe, echoed faintly when Friedrich Wilhelm, the Hohenzollern crown prince of old Germany, and Henri Philippe Peetain, Marshal of France, died within four days. They had faced each other across the mass slaughter at Verdun; each, after his own fashion, had tried to make his deal with the mass brutality of Naziism that came after, and each died disgraced.

In the Middle East, where order threatened to burn away in a fire of nationalism, an old king and an old politician went, down before assassins' bullets. In Belgium, the crowning of a young king promised to heal the disunion of his nation.

In Spain, the U.S. made a brave and momentous act of leadership, and the man who took it to action, Admiral Sherman, went on to Naples to die of the weight he and other men had borne in the years beneath the sword.

In Korea, war waited through the week while Communists tried to find a "maybe" between a rock-hard U.S. demand of "yes" or "no."

In Warsaw, the greatest among the Kremlin's servants came out of the shadows--Zhukov, victor at Stalingrad, and Rokossovsky, conqueror, still master of Poland. Beside them stood Molotov, with a sharper threat than the Kremlin has yet voiced. He told the puppets from Russia's satellites that Tito could not be permitted to last long. When and by what means the U.S.S.R. would act was not disclosed in a memorable week of midsummer.

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