(4 of 5)
In May, 1940 he learned his mistake. When Hitler's ambassador, Vicco Karl von Bülow-Schwante, arrived to announce the invasion on the morning of May 10, Spaak shut him off: "No, you are not going to read this to me. I know what it is ... I am the one who is going to speak, and what I have to say is—get the hell out of here." Spaak went to France when his country fell, escaped through Spain to London, after hiding from Franco's police in the bottom of an orange-laden truck.
"Sire," he informed King Leopold from London exile, "the war is not finished . . . Politics do not consist of always choosing the best card. It is sometimes necessary to know how to play a bad card. At certain times it is better to perish in beauty than miserably to survive."
After the war, the question of Leopold and the monarchy rocked Belgium to its commonsensible core. The Socialists were bitterly opposed to Leopold's return, the Catholics strongly in favor. A regency was set up under Leopold's Eton-educated brother Charles, an able, inoffensive prince who is interested in archery. Thanks to Spaak's efforts, the "royal question" was put well back on the shelf.
In 1946, Spaak was elected president of U.N.'s General Assembly, where the world for the first time noticed the big Belgian's political skill, his moving oratory, his practical internationalism. He hulked over the nations' quarrelsome confusion with patience, fortitude and humor (rumor had it that he read mystery stories during the duller speeches).
"The Hour Has Come . . ." Today Spaak lives simply in a modest bourgeois neighborhood, with his tall, good-looking wife, his son Fernand (who served in the British navy) and his two younger daughters. He used to be an inveterate tennis player, once was tactless enough to beat King Gustaf of Sweden ("Am I a courtier? I am a Socialist!"). Lately Spaak (a 200-pounder) has given up the sport, presumably haunted by the memory of his belt giving way on a Brussels court.
He invariably gets up at 6:30, often receives early callers in pajamas, works till late into the night. There is much to do. No man in Europe has had a greater part in preparing the way for Western European Union. Says Spaak:
". . . The hour has come to choose our friends. The problem is clear ... If Europe with her traditions of hard work, her artistic, intellectual and moral traditions, wants to make herself heard, she must organize. Men are ready to accept this idea of organization, but they find it difficult to execute because they have not always the necessary courage to accept sacrifices. Those who think of Western Union as a panacea are wrong, terribly wrong, so wrong they will never have the courage to succeed with this policy which is first based on sacrifices."
Spaak's Belgians are no more attracted by sacrifices than other Europeans. Certainly, they have no wish to see their economic standards reduced to those of Western Europe, even if the latter were thereby slightly raised. Rather do they hope that the rest of Western Europe will come up to Belgian standards.