Delegates to the Western Union conference of Foreign Ministers at The Hague last week got a small practical demonstration of the need for Western Union. On the Étoile du Nord, the international luxury express which makes a daily Paris-Brussels-Amsterdam run, they had to show their passports, railroad tickets or cash 16 times to 16 different officials in the three countries. At a Dutch border town the train was held up for an hour while inspectors made sure, the passengers had not bought too many U.S. cigarettes during the 20-minute stop at Brussels.
In France, the delegates could lunch on the train and pay in French francs. In Belgium a little later they could eat the same lunch, but the Belgian rate of exchange made the meal cost three times as much. If a delegate had a cup of coffee while the train was in France, he got one lump of sugar. In Belgium, he could have two lumps. In The Netherlands, he got as much sugar as he liked—not because the Dutch have more sugar, but because they have a different tourist policy.
The conferees had weightier matters than lumps of sugar to discuss, but the sugar symbolized how little progress toward real unity their five nations had made since signing the Brussels pact last March. In four months Western Union had gone a little way toward military integration, but hardly a step toward economic or political unity.
Measuring with the Feet. Grim was the only word for the two-day meeting round the green-clothed, rectangular table in Room No. 49 of the Dutch Foreign Office. Britain's Ernest Bevin was unsmiling and the nervous twitch at the right corner of his mouth was more pronounced than ever. France's Georges Bidault (about to lose his job, partly because he had lost popularity by going along with the U.S. on a program of German recovery) made his points tensely, striking the table with the edge of his hand. The Dutch host-chairman, Baron van Boetzelaer van Oosterhout, fiddled nervously with his papers. Luxemburg's
Pierre Dupong was fidgety. Belgium's Paul-Henri Spaak was poised but gloomy as he gazed at an ornate gold clock on the wall which had stopped at 5 minutes past 2 nobody knew how long ago. The Berlin crisis had reminded everyone that it was later than they had thought.
An almost wartime secrecy encased the meeting. Black-jacketed, blue-breeched Dutch state police in peaked caps reached for delegates' passes with their left hands, kept their right hands close to their revolver holsters. In hotel lobbies plainclothesmen sipped Bols gin, eyed everyone coming through the revolving doors. Remarked one stolid Dutch cop at the Hotel des Indes: "I don't know what we're watching for, but whatever it is, he won't get away with it."
The conference even had a code name —"Metric." Said a disappointed French delegate after the conference: "We regarded it as a hopeful sign that the British, who usually insist on measuring things with their feet, invented this code name 'Metric'; we thought they were coming over to continental ideas. We came here with the idea de bousculer les Anglais. We should know by now you can't light fires under the British."