At his work of moving crates Federico has never fainted yet, but he must pause often for rest. He refuses to weigh himself to find out how much he has lost. His belt holes tell him all he needs to know.
Like many women and children, Federico's wife shows the effect of the blockade in her legs, which are blotched with a case of rickets. Although she waits many hours in consumer lines, she often finds that the day's supply is exhausted. Outside the ration system eggs cost 12 cents apiece, sugar is 65 cents a pound and butter $2.25. All are virtually unobtainable except in restaurants, which are better supplied than families.
A restaurant dinner, priced at 60 cents in the United States, costs $3.70. Official prices are deceptively low, rationed sugar, for example, being ticketed at 12 cents a pound. Actually, it is obtainable in needed quantities only by stealth. The small Spanish cigarettes are limited to forty weekly at a cost of 36 cents, and must be purchased between 3:30 and 5:30 Monday afternoons in Federico's city.
Only a handful of the wealthy who are able to afford a car can get poultry or potatoes because it is necessary to go to the country and persuade the farmers to sell behind the barn. The extra gasoline necessary costs $1.40 a gallon and is obtainable in quantity only by undercover payment of American dollars.
In the shops, finicky buyers get scant satisfaction. If questions are asked, goods are returned to the shelves because the storekeepers would rather keep their supplies than sell, fearing a time when they may have nothing marketable to offer.
Thousands of families from smashed villages have emigrated to the towns and big cities. Since their homes are unrepaired, they prefer to eke out an existence on urban food lines rather than return to their shattered dwellings.
400 CRAFT LAND; TROOPS STREAM TOWARD DANUBE
Total of 1500 German Planes Are Poised for Balkan Action
Bucharest, Rumania—February 15, 1941
The German Army celebrated the British departure from Rumanian territory by bringing almost an entire air division into Bucharest. Four hundred bombers, arriving in flights of 24 each, landed yesterday at the Chitila airdrome. (Attack planes for their protection had already been on hand about a fortnight.) They did not fly over the city, and the population remains uninformed of the strength of the Nazi forces, whose totals are estimated at three air divisions of 500 planes each.
Today the expeditionary forces are streaming south toward the Danube. Roads are carefully studded with German signs, hospitals being openly marked, military quarters in code. Rumanian censorship expressly forbids mention of the movements of the officially designated “forces of instruction,” on their way to new “classrooms.” The Giurgiu bridgehead has been protected with German anti-aircraft guns for more than two weeks. War materiel has been flowing steadily across.
Wearing the wings of the motorized columns that make even the plainest infantryman look like an aviator to Rumanians, the blue-clad, ruddy Germans came into Bucharest by truck from the north. Their officers, in ankle-length grey or green leather coats, led them in fast campaign cars, some of American make.
Everything is moving fast, and they stop in the capital barely long enough to eat one warm meal, go to the threat-and-scare picture on movie row, buy themselves one of the German cameras which cost much less here than in the Fatherland itself, take pictures of each other and the Rumanian soldiers and embrace the girls in a cheap bar. Then they are off again, clambering into the covered wagon truck, sitting in motionless and expressionless rows in the dark, without even rifles because the arms and ammunition are going south by train disguised as freight.
Bucharest looks fantastic to the young Germans. They don't understand the broad Slavic squares, the mixture of streamlined and gingerbread architecture, the deserted palace modeled after Versailles but bigger. And they don't know the police wearing tall astrakhans, or their new “comrades”—the brown-clad farm boys of the Rumanian army, in their ill-fitting greatcoats, who patrol the streets by threes, searching and questioning pedestrians.
As these cogs rolling down the assembly line of war reached the capital, they were photographed by German official photographers in intimate poses with their Rumanian colleagues, about 1,200,000 of whom will be mobilized by March 1. The officers are rarely used for propaganda purposes, however, possibly because many have an uncannily British look cultivated during Carol's regime.1*
Probably no two armies ever had less idea what they were supposed to mean to each other or where they are going. Who is the enemy? The Germans thought it might be the Bulgars, and now it is either the Greeks or the Turks, or both, and the British too, and possibly even the Yugoslavs.
The Rumanians admit it may be any or all of these, but the idea they nurse hopefully is that it may be the Russians. If not now, then eventually.
The German officers, several of whom resemble American college boys, some lively professors, and a scarred, monocled minority who resemble Broadway Prussians, are quartered in the best hotels. The general staff, which will take over when the war operations commence, is housed at resort hotels, a few hundred yards from the palace where King Michael2† is living.
Along the chief country highway, field telephone corps are at work. German engineers already have unrolled the cables of a new system for the capital. In front of staff headquarters at the urbane Hotel Ambassador stands a sentry box striped with the German colors, the object of covert comment by anti-Axis Rumanians. Before other hotels stand mud-spattered cars, all sizes and shapes, with numerals omitted to baffle the supposedly numerous agents of the British intelligence service.
The columns of machine-gun motorcycles and hooded trucks that fill the capital's squares by night, replaced every few days, are kept under sentry guard, but there is an almost carelessly open style about all the troop movements. The probable German force here is about 510,000, and the speed of arrival about 6000 daily.
In January the German officers had orderlies check on the identity of their neighbors at tables in the large hotels, but now—as Rumania is whipped into the shape already made for Hungary—there is an easy air of behind-the-front.
In the countryside, where only German correspondents are supposed to go, the scene is more businesslike. The environs of Bucharest, one vast air field, are lined with hundreds of dark-grey attack planes and bombers. Barracks for 4000 flying troops are being finished, and they look exactly like cantonments seen by the writer in America in December. Rumanian soldiers still guard the railroad bridges, but never far from German observation.
Every room in every tavern along main highways is taken. At first, some conscientious attempts at concealing the size of the columns by moving them out of sight of the roads were made, but this has been dropped.
Hours of negotiations with the badly disrupted police secret service are necessary for even one villager to travel to the next village to sell his produce, and while in Bucharest life is imprisoned within the capital—so that none may visit the surrounding countryside—rural life is virtually frozen where it stands. Except for the Ploesti oilfields, and the endless lines of Reichsbahn freight cars bringing war shipments south, the only movement is the flying German columns, lines of hard-bitten motorcycle riders between them. When they come down the highway, every rude wooden telegraph pole of the Rumanian constabulary jumps instantly into the air. But where Hitler's men are bound, after Bulgaria, no one is sure.
It is still an army exerting more political than military pressure, because it has not yet found an antagonist.
BLAST OF HATRED FORCES
PRO-NAZI EDITOR TO RESIGN
Sofia, Bulgaria—February 19, 1941 (Delayed)
The name of Ilya Radelescu has disappeared from the masthead of the leading pro-Axis newspaper, in Bucharest, and although the circumstances still remain unknown to the Rumanian public, no one acquainted with them can deny that there exists a way to express public opinion in a totalitarian state.
Radelescu, a lawyer by training, an editor by profession, and a strong Axis adherent by fa
ith, is the publisher of the newspaper Parunca Vreme, the only out and out pro-Legionary (pro-Guardist) sheet which has survived the Antonescu purge. The paper was originally called merely Vreme, meaning “Times.” When Radelescu's five-year-old daughter, Parunca, whose name meant “order,” died tragically from the effects of an accidental pencil thrust in the eye, Radelescu was grief-stricken. He published her picture on his front page and incorporated her name into that of the newspaper: “Order of the Times.”
Premier Antonescu, the Army officers composing the military cabinet, the heads of the banned political parties, and the editors of all the Bucharest newspapers received this week copies of a letter addressed to the Iron Guard editor. It read:
Dear Mr. Radelescu:
When your daughter died, you published her picture to show your grief. I inform you, herewith, that I lost my eighteen-year-old son in the recent street fighting, on which day I do not know.
After I waited three days for my son to come home, I went to the slaughter house. What I saw there I shall not forget the rest of my life. I saw human beings hung up like animals; I saw a little girl, five years old, suspended by her feet from the hooks where the calves are hung. Her entire body was smeared with blood.
I ran away at the sight. Then I went hunting for my son in the morgue. I saw hellish sights there, hundreds and hundreds of dead, who no longer resembled human beings. I saw men whose tongues had been torn out. I saw women's bodies torn to pieces. I saw children whose corpses were smashed beyond recognition.
I fell down in a faint. They took me to the Strada Roma (location of the Legionary headquarters) and there, finally, I found my son dead, with his head pierced with bullets.
Such was the end of an upright, eighteen-year-old young man, who, thanks to your activities, became a fanatical nationalist.
Dr. Ilya Radelescu, I say to you that not the bullets of the soldiers that killed my son are responsible, but you yourself are the murderer of my son; you, who for years on end have tirelessly fanned the flames of hatred, and through the shallow phrases of anti-Semitism led my son along the road of evil. For ten years you have been a tireless fighter against the Jews. I tell you that you are a liar. You published in your newspaper a fable about Jews and in it you insisted, among other things, that in the County of Muscel there are about 6,915 Jews.
Now I come from Muscel myself and I know that county very well. I know that in that county there are only two Jews, one a clockmaker and the other a tinsmith. Both are poor and work from early morning till late at night. I want to know where you got the other 7,000, or so, Jews. Out of your imagination, naturally. You lied so remarkably in this instance, I believe all your other stories are probably lies. But with this campaign of lies you have led the ignorant and inexperienced upon the high road which ended in the reign of fire of the Strada Roma.
It does not interest me in whose service you have done this. The one thing that interests me is that my child is dead. And in return for this I give you my curse for the balance of your natural life.
(Signed)
Ekaterina Paraskivescu.
CALLEIA AGRIVITSA 55.
The mother's letter was barred from publication by the censorship, but the wave of official disapproval in ministerial and journalistic circles was too much for Radelescu. On Wednesday he withdrew the use of his name from his own newspaper.
NAZI PILOTS FLY BRITONS IN BALKANS
Sofia, Bulgaria—February 25, 1941
With all rail communication in the Balkans placed by war conditions in the hands of the German Lufthansa, British journalists are faced with the dilemma of riding swastika-bedecked planes, with Nazi reserve officers as pilots, or missing the story. Usually they fly on the enemy's wings and are treated with total courtesy.
The Lufthansa crews seem to enjoy having an English passenger because it gives the male steward a chance to practice a particularly disconcerting form of the war of nerves. The other passengers are usually all German. The flying steward waits until the Englishman has dozed off to the drone of the motors, and then, approaching close behind him, says, in something as near to Cockney as he can manage: “Tickets, please, sir.”
A more serious hazard is weather, which may deliver the correspondent into the yawning mouth of a concentration camp instead of at his office. The perilous jump is from Belgrade to Budapest, which few Englishmen now dare. The plane, which has left Bucharest and Sofia early the same morning, continues to Vienna. Occasionally, however, the bad weather shuts down the Budapest field and it is up to the Nazi pilot, in midflight, to decide whether to turn back to Belgrade or to fly onward. If he turns back, the Englishman is safe; if he selects Vienna, the Briton goes to a concentration camp.
The Nazis bagged two Britons of subordinate diplomatic standing in this way several weeks ago, but after keeping them as guests for a few days, turned them back without even asking an exchange of prisoners.
While boundary regulations get more stringent, the Germans' conception of passenger rules is much less severe than that of American flying lines. Seat belts are almost never fastened at take-offs or landings, and the view from the windows of the cabins remains unobstructed even when, as in Rumania, flying over fields lined with camouflaged bombers and fighters and surrounded by aviation barracks.
GERMANS IN BULGARIA AWAIT THE SIGNAL
TO DON UNIFORMS
Just Like Cinderella They Look Forward to the Witching Hour
Sofia, Bulgaria—February 27, 1941
The hour of the midnight ball has almost struck, the 8000 or so hobnailed Cinderellas who have crossed the Bulgarian borders from Rumania by airplane, train, ferry and pontoon bridge in tanks, armored cars, automobiles and motorcycles are all in their chimney corners, and it remains only for Hitler to pronounce the word and the magic transformation will begin.
The two jolly-looking young men who seem like tennis players except for their scarred cheeks, and beside whom one sat in the coffee house this afternoon, will appear in the same grey-green uniforms that fill the streets of Bucharest. The sober, erect gentleman of fifty with the top-laced boots, who tried to be polite when the BBC came in booming, will appear in the striped red trousers of the Reichswehr general staff.
Was that a naval officer for whom the Bulgarian admiral put on his dress uniform with all his medals this evening? Whoever he was, he forgot himself and gave the Nazi salute. When midnight strikes, as suddenly as the cheering section of an American college game shifts its cards upon signal, all the German traveling men are to become soldiers.
It is probably the most perfectly trained army in mufti that one has ever seen. In Bucharest, where they come from, their routine of greeting is complicated: first, Hitler salute, then handshake, the army salute, then Hitler salute again. Here, it is only a slight lift of the eyelash.
This business of being part of one large machine, and yet pretending to be isolated all day long, is a wearisome test for army nerves. About one o'clock in the morning, when a handful of other guests had taken their keys and gone up to bed, and even the American newspapermen, having given up looking in alleys and behind garages for the one uniform that would operate as a catalyst of the whole situation, have fallen asleep on their typewriters, the visiting firemen have retired to an old-fashioned German get-together down in the back room of the lobby.
What do these Germans talk about? What did the Greeks lying inside the Trojan horse talk about? Probably the moment when they would get out.
The tanks are in Bulgaria, the artillery is here, a few airplanes are at a new air field at Dolna-Orekovitza—at least they were last week—the munitions and food stores are ready, the motorized columns are waiting in the country roads, on the rolling uplands of the Danube to the snowy Balkan Mountains. The air is full of German radio messages. A huge army truck, dirty with miles of travel, its grey curtains flying wildly and the empty screws where its license ought to be, went hurtling through the streets at dusk, and the Sofia policeman abruptly found something wrong with th
e button of his glove.
A staff campaign car without side doors, bearing Reichswehr plates, got itself tangled in the narrow downtown streets, and acted as embarrassed as a fireman who falls through a skylight. At four o'clock this morning two German agency correspondents telegraphed Berlin that the invasion had occurred. This afternoon the German legation had a press conference for its own newspapermen and told them that nothing of the kind had happened, at least not yet.
The news of the death of Bulgaria's independence was greatly exaggerated. It was not midnight, but half-past eleven. All the uniforms went back into the suitcases again. The shoes put out in the hall tonight to be shined were the simple, sturdy kind, affected by army people in their civilian interludes. What will tomorrow night's boots look like?
About the only rights the Germans and Bulgarians are still ready to concede the British remaining here, is a question of etiquette. After all, decorum was always the Britons' forte.
How then, Mr. British Minister? Is this still a visit or is it an invasion? How many German officers, busily ignoring each other, are enough to make a diplomatic protest? If they get together stealthily late at night for beer, and if they all produced papers, would you say that they were nothing but arms salesmen?
The best witticism was coined at the German legation, when they called up the press department of the Foreign Office to ask the name of the so-called German officer who slugged U.S. Minister George Earle with a bottle. It must have been a mistake, the legation suggested. First, the assailant was not in German uniform. Second, there was no German officer with a bottle-scar on his nose, not, at least, attached to the staff at the legation.
And the buxom, jolly German lady of sixty, dressed in black, with spotless white linen, who arrived on the plane from Rumania just after Marshal General Siegmund Wilhelm von List (commander in chief of Nazi troops headquartered at Sinaia, Rumania)—who is she? Has she a uniform of some kind? What does it look like? Or is she just somebody's mother who came to see the show?
Weller's War Page 3