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Belgium was suspiciously alert last week but denied having taken yet her most drastic defense step of all: pulling plugs in the Albert Canal to impede any German advance with a flood. The Dutch, however, did say they were flooding their country, at least experimentally, around Utrecht. Much weaker than the 'Belgians in fortifications along their frontier, the Dutch prepared if necessary to open their Zuider Zee dikes and inundate most of their central provinces, abandoning their entire northeast to the invader and taking national refuge in the Rotterdam-Utrecht-Amsterdam triangle. To give their waters time to rise, the Dutch mined all roads and bridges entering their country from Germany. They erected tank obstructions and traps, leaving only one lane open for normal traffic on each highway bridge. Their Army stood mobilized at about 650,000 under Lieut. General I. H. Reynbers, 60, a short, jolly infantryman who was the personal appointee of Queen Wilhelmina five years ago.
> Italian dispatches described bulletproof metal vests, arm and leg armor and full-faced helmets worn by German soldiers sent out to cut wire.
> French accounts agreed with Polish, that most German pilots captured were youths of 19, 20, 21. The seasoned Nazi Condor squadron of Spanish Civil War fame was reported to have reached the Western Front from Poland. French pilots claimed to have proved that their U. S.-built Curtiss pursuit ships will outfly the Nazis' much-touted Messerschmidts.
> As the War's third week ended, the French reported severe German counterattacks on the Blies Valley salient to relieve French pressure on Zweibrücken. A mass of fast light German tanks was said to have been smashed up at the French wire by anti-tank fire, the wreckage of 20 of them blocking the passage of heavier German tanks. German counterattacks in the Bienwald east of Bitche were evidently more successful. At the northwest end of the line, the French advance from Perl in the direction of Trier progressed yard by yard. Then, this week, along the 80-mile Rhine front from Lauterbourg to Basle, the guns of the Maginot Line and the Westwall thundered at each other the first shots in that sector since the war began. As this activity lengthened into the night of its first 24 hours, throngs gathered on the Swiss shore of Lake Constance, awed at the fireworks of a French aerial foray, apparently against the Zeppelin plant at Friedrichshafen, now devoted to building airplane engines. Onlookers counted 30 bombs, watched Nazi tracer bullets seek out the enemy. Berlin denied any appreciable damage to the plant, claimed eight French planes had been downed.
*Berlin sources said that the German High Command, convinced that the war would be a long one, planned a monster G. H. Q. on a mountaintop, strong enough to withstand any bombardment.