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Terms of the arbitration formula applied chiefly to how to stop fighting. A neutral military commission was appointed to survey the actual position of the armies on their 530-mile front, to set the armies back from it. Firing was to stop when the commission arrived at the front. A twelve-day truce was to be extended again & again as required. Armistice begins when the armies withdraw to their assigned positions, begin to demobilize to 5,000 men apiece, while the neutral commission patrols the strip between. Meanwhile, under the eye of the neutral peace conference, Bolivia and Paraguay will try again to settle their territorial argument by talk. Assuming that they fail again, the controversy will automatically go for arbitration to the World Court.
Peace. One noon last week the planes of the commissioners soared over the foothills' front. The commanders in the trenches below signaled "Cease firing" to their troops. The little brown men dropped their guns, picked up drums and horns to serenade one another. In La Paz and Asuncion, the women conning the casualty lists for the last few days of the war, had plenty to read. In Bolivia the Government, faced with the return of soldiers who had been led to defeat, looked shaky.
Results: Killed, as far as could be determined in a conflict which has had less honest press coverage than any war of modern times, have been about 100,000; wounded about the same. The mysterious Gran Chaco has at last been explored, even to some extent developed and colonized. Economically, Paraguay is no better off than Bolivia; both are financially exhausted. Simon Patiño's mine stocks were up last week. And last week in Asuncion there was earnest talk of rewarding Paraguay's able General Estigarribia with the rank of Marshal, a title last held by the great Tyrant López, as well as a life income of 1,500 gold pesos and his regular pay as a General.
*The fantastic theory of most Latin Americans was and is that the U. S. was behind Bolivia; Great Britain behind Paraguay. To complicate this nonsense, Englishmen and Germans rallied to the Bolivian cause, Frenchmen and White Russians to the Paraguayan cause.