Restless spring had come at last to Europe, and last week Europe's peoples were on the move. The tall fighting people of Germany marched into Denmark and Norway and some of the peaceful people of those countries—refugees, frightened liberals, Jews—fled to Sweden. From Malmö in Sweden, a short ferry ride from German-held Copenhagen, Swedes who had not seen war in their lifetimes moved inland. Well-fed Dutch burghers in cities near the German frontier packed up and went to Amsterdam; from Eindhoven a thousand women and children took the broad, flat road to Utrecht. Refugees from once-German Eupen and Malmédy had already fled toward Brussels. In the Danube Valley and the Balkans, Serbs, Croats, Magyars, Rumanians, Bulgars and Greeks, trapped on all sides by war and threats of war, would have liked to move somewhere, if only they had somewhere to move to.
Not a spot on the continent of Europe, large or small, was safe. Not since the first decade of the 19th Century, when Bonaparte was on the prowl, had panic so seized Europe. Caught in the relentless pressure of power politics, the politicians of the smaller nations were as helpless as their people. The fate of their countries was in the hands of belligerents and near-belligerents; neutrality no longer seemed possible.
Tragically significant for Europe's people were the words that came out of Italy. Darkling Fascist Grand Councilman Roberto Farinacci, a onetime Socialist often used effectively by Benito Mussolini to sound off to the Italian masses, wrote in his Cremona paper Regime Fascista: "Now we can speak high and loud. . . . It is absurd to think that our country . . . shall not participate in the transformation of the map of Europe and perhaps of the world." In a broadcast to Italian troops at week's end, Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano's mouthpiece, Giovanni Ansaldo, said: "No people in Europe can isolate itself from conflict." Italy, Mouthpiece Ansaldo went on, has been preparing herself "for the occasion and the moment which will be most opportune for it. This occasion and this moment . . . may be much nearer than is believed." Only six days earlier Il Duce had cried at Orvieto: "Whatever may be the happenings which this late spring brings us, Italy will face them."
At any moment war might strike again, from the North Cape to the Peloponnesus.
In the North. Three years ago at a dinner in Lund, Sweden's Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson made this statement: "No earthly power can prevent Sweden's fighting on the side of a Denmark in distress." Long before Denmark came to distress last week it was plain that Sweden would not fight side by side with anybody against Germany, unless Germany forced her to do so. Sweden's cultural and economic ties with Germany are too strong for political differences to break, and she is bound even closer to Germany by her mortal dread of Russia.
Adolf Hitler thoughtfully spared Sweden such a decision as Norway had to make last week (see p. 22). Evidently Herr Hitler believed he could knock out Norway, then lay down the law to Sweden.