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National Actionists in Greece went armed and carried British Army passes certifying their "confidential work." Their enemies, the hunted men of EAM, lived in peril of arrest and beatings. In Rome, the first Italian democrats to meet in parliamentary Assembly since the murder of Matteotti set themselves to restore integrity and hope to a broken nation. The withdrawal of A.M.G. from Italy was indefinitely postponed; in liberal opinion, to protect Rightists and Monarchists.
In Paris a man's suit cost $500. A correspondent stopped to get his jeep repaired in Neufchâteau. The garage operator, a brawny Frenchwoman, immediately questioned him about American soldiers sleeping with German girls. "C'est incroyable" she mourned. "Yes, some French girls slept with Germans when they were here. But only bad girls. We do not understand why you Americans do it. You are not bad but you still sleep with Germans." An American sergeant lounged at a nearby corner watching the thin traffic in Neufchâteau's one big street; he turned loose barbaric French at passing girls; they giggled, and swept on. Wearily he jerked his, thumb towards the hilltop graveyard on the edge of town. He said: "My division liberated this joint. A lot of the boys from the 79th are lying up there. And for what? To have these people spit on us now?"
French nuns and children sifted garbage against the lean chance of bits of food fit for children or nuns or pigs to eat.
Even in Marseilles, the sky muted its Mediterranean blare. Along the wide streets the plane trees turned pale yellow. In the still unmended tenements of Madrid, before long now, a people whom victory had passed by would be shuddering.
Man's hope, man's fate contested in the subtle autumn light. Winter stood just at the shoulder of the gentlest of seasons.
Man's Hope. Europe had emerged from history's most terrible war, into history's most terrifying peace. Europeans said, again & again, that their aspirations were for liberty. They showed, again & again, their desperately seasoned respect for security. Now the struggle between liberty and security was engaged.
In London the Council of Foreign Ministers achieved only the disconsolation of all in the world who desired peace, not power. Eastern Europe was a Russian bastion; western Europe coalesced toward a "family" which, to the Russians, would be a bastion against the Soviet Union. Within nations, as among them, political forces jockeyed for power.
The totalitarian socialists, by far the most astute professionals in the field, moved toward their goals by methods which equally disturbed scoundrels and honorable men. The democratic socialists, maintaining that full liberty and full security can be combined and made enduring, were embarrassed by their new responsibilities in Britain, and by those problems of relative inefficiency which confront all democrats. Only in Czechoslovakia, one of the less unhappy nations in Europe, were socialist prospects very promising. But that country's fortunes depended chiefly on friendly relations with the Soviet Union; and democratic and totalitarian socialists are not notable for lifelong friendships.