All Quiet on the Evros

A world which was once set afire by a spark in what is now Yugoslavia has learned to take seriously even the slightest rise in temperature in the Balkan tinder box. Last week diplomatic pulses in half a dozen world capitals thumped over a frontier fracas on a half-submerged sandbank in the unnavigable Evros River which, in one ten-mile stretch, forms the border between Soviet-dominated Bulgaria and U.S.-protected Greece.

All summer long, Greek and Bulgar soldiers had lurked along the Evros, taking potshots at one another. The most serious skirmishes occurred on three swampy sandbanks named Alpha, Beta and Gamma that lie in the lee of the wooded Greek shore. Then one day last month a Greek patrol on Gamma island, which is about the size of a football field, walked into a Bulgar ambush and lost four men killed and two wounded. It became painfully clear to the Greeks that the Bulgars, egged on by the Russians who have a tank army close to the Evros, were determined not only to annex Alpha, but also to grab Gamma, which has been attached to the Greek shore ever since the Evros River shifted its channel to the Bulgar side some ten years ago.

To the Evros last week went a task force of mechanized Greek infantry, supported by tanks, field guns and fighter planes. Third Corps Commander Stylianos Manidakis broadcast a 24-hour "ultimatum" telling any Bulgars who might still be on Gamma to get off or be blown off. A team of excited U.N. observers sent an alarmist cable to New York: "Big forces ready for action on both sides . . . Very dangerous situation may follow."

Next morning at 9:30, after waiting for Europe's famed Simplon-Orient Express to roar along the nearby tracks on its way from Sofia to Istanbul, the Greeks opened fire with machine guns and mortars. After 60 minutes' bombardment and no reply, four bedraggled Bulgars crept off the sandbank and sloshed across the river into the woods on the Communist side. By nightfall, despite a constant barrage of propaganda insults on the Bulgarian and Greek radios, and much continued fluttering at U.N., General Manidakis was able to report that all was quiet on the Evros front. Not this time was the tinder lit.

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