The stock question which reporters ask and diplomats evade is: "War?"
In Washington at a State Department press conference last week correspondents nearly fell out of their chairs with astonishment when aged Acting Secretary of State Robert Walton Moore, a diplomat of the old school who normally would be the last person to become loquacious about War, suddenly offered to let himself be quoted on it at length.
"I decline to believe that any war involving the leading European nations is about to occur," cried Mr. Moore with an emphasis which suggested it took effort to decline to believe. "I decline to believe," vehemently continued the Acting Secretary of State, "that any such adventure in suicide is imminent! On the contrary, I am convinced that the leaders of those nations, knowing what a perhaps fatal blow another extensive war would be to the fabric of European civilization, will find some common-sense method of adjusting all controversies. Of course all the world would be glad to see the civil strife in Spain wholly localized.''
Since between the British Foreign Office and the U. S. State Department many intimate personal and individual ties exist, Secretary Moore, as some of his quoters wrote in their dispatches, was perhaps doing his personal best to encourage Britain and France, discourage Germany, Russia and Italy with regard to the efforts of these five states last week in Spain's "Little World War," as diplomats were now calling it. During the week journalists of the French Radical Popular Front, which supports the Cabinet of Socialist Premier Léon Blum, launched daily rumors that German troops were arriving in Morocco at Ceuta, only 14 miles across the Straits from Britain's Gibraltar and "within canonading range''. In London these rumors had galvanic effect. The nervous Duke of Windsor's nervous intimate friend, British War Secretary Alfred Duff Cooper, who has said in a public address that he considers it his duty to "frighten people out of their wits" with the dangers of War (TIME, June 22), promptly bolted from London over to Paris. There he conferred with burly, square-jawed French War Minister Edouard Daladier, an ambitious politician whose critics have for years implied that he wants to make himself France's Radical Dictator.
After M. Daladier had received Mr. Duff Cooper and the Englishman had read in virtually the entire French press increasingly alarming reports of "Blond Moors" (Germans) at Ceuta, he was reminded at the French Foreign Office that not only the Treaty of Versailles but many another bars Germany from Morocco. Simultaneously a French Foreign Office spokesman, not permitting himself to be named, told correspondents that "France will go to any lengths to protect her interests in Morocco!" To Morocco soon will go M. Daladier and generals of the French G. H. Q.