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Another item on Minister Cross's pad last week concerned 16 Italian colliers which lay at Rotterdam.
Turkey called into home ports all its merchant ships last week, evidently to keep them away from some sort of trouble. Observers watched to see if this foreshadowed extension of the Cross blockades to Russian tankers carrying oil for Germany from the refineries at Batum. Such a move—a logical next extension of the Economic War—might well mean fighting in the Black Sea.
"Germany is blockaded on one front but her back and side doors are open." That was another of David Lloyd George's cracks last week. No one knows better than Minister Cross how true this is: indeed he humbly asked for suggestions on how to shut off Swedish iron ore moving down through the Baltic. The German High Command celebrated the war's half-year mark last week by laughing aloud—for publication—at the Allied blockades, boasting of their Russian and Scandinavian and Balkan resources, pointing at the 700,000 Polish prisoners.
No one knows how vast are the reserve supplies laid by Economic Dictator Göring before war started. That they are enough to carry Germany at least through 1940, at full-out war speed, may be the reason why such gloomy wiseacres as U. S. Ambassador to Great Britain Joseph P. Kennedy were unsettling Washington last month with estimates that Germany has a 55-45 chance of whipping the Allies. Just how bad such a whipping would be, just what would constitute winning World War II, is something no wiseacre had yet attempted to say, in the first six months.
Meantime, as always happens at dark moments in history, an omen was found last week to shed light amid the gloom. In the French Province of Lorraine there is a "miraculous" spring which started flowing exactly three months before the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. It flowed again on August 10, 1918. Last week the Paris press was permitted to say that on Feb. 19, 1940, that spring began to flow once more.
* March is the month in which Hitler took back the Rhineland (1936), annexed Austria (1938), subjected Bohemia-Moravia (1939). The Führer's faith in March is said to be bolstered by five personal astrologers. But last week he unaccountably outlawed astrology in the Reich.
* Macon, substitute for Bacon, is cured mutton. Last week as macon died, so did its inventor, Frederick Alexander MacQuisten, M.P., ingenious apostle of "man's sacred right to make his own refreshment." He championed roads against railways, independent buses against combines. Of pasteurized milk he once cried (inaccurately) in the House of Commons: "If you give it to cows, they die. If you give it to rats, they fail to reproduce their species. It's a form of birth control!"