Lesson Unlearned

To anyone who was listening, Berlin proved one thing: Russia has no intention of yielding her grip on Germany -now or at any time in the foreseeable future. Hope of agreement died early in Berlin; the West must now press ahead with its long-postponed needs, chief among them German rearmament.

So thought the West's Foreign Ministers. In the House of Commons last week, Britain's Anthony Eden put it bluntly: "The House will see that the points of view could not have been more widely divergent. There was no possibility of a successful negotiation to bridge them." The only real question now "is not whether Germany will rearm, but how she will rearm -and we are quite convinced that EDC within NATO offers the surest method yet devised for the security of Germany, the security of Europe and even for the security of Soviet Russia."

Labor Split. Apparently the Foreign Ministers misjudged the amount of agreement they would get among their countrymen. In Britain, the obvious lesson of Berlin had indeed convinced Clement Attlee and his Labor Party leadership; but it made no impression whatever on a great number of his followers. Last week the issue split the Labor Party from top to bottom, came within two votes of overturning Attlee's leadership.

And giving the rebels aid and comfort was none other than that aging Tory warrior, Sir Winston Churchill (see below).

At its conference last fall, the Labor Party resolved that "there should be no German rearmament before further efforts have been made to secure the peaceful reunification of Germany." In Attlee's view, Berlin satisfied those further efforts. At a meeting of the parliamentary Labor Party last week, he proposed a resolution declaring Labor's support -at last -of German inclusion in Western defense. Up jumped young (37) Harold Wilson, Nye Bevan's right-hand man. The West had been no more conciliatory than Molotov at Berlin, he argued. He proposed an amendment postponing the questions of German rearmament at least until after the Geneva meeting in April.

The room was tense as the vote was taken. Only after a recount was the Wilson motion voted down by a hairbreadth: 109-111. The revolt, biggest since the war against the Labor leadership, was not confined to Bevanites. It included many victims of two costly world wars, who deeply distrusted putting guns into the hands of Germans; many who worried that the rearmed Germans might attempt to reunite with East Germany by force and set off another war; some who argued (like Bevan) that the West had gone to Berlin unwilling to bargain away the twelve West German divisions at any price.

"Bloody Silly." But afterwards, in the smoking room, Bevan was surrounded by excited followers urging him to resign from Labor's shadow cabinet. Bevan, who believes German rearmament is inevitable anyway, and has been trying to acquire a reputation as a solid elder statesman, was scornful. "This isn't a resignation issue, I tell you," he snorted. "Why the hell should I resign, perhaps only for a matter of weeks? It would be bloody silly."

But the split was real, and it extended far beyond Parliament. In the next few days, six major labor unions and Labor Party organizations in more than 200 constituencies backed the go-slow rebels.

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