New Power

Last week a new, intangible power leaped to take first place in Europe's power politics. It was invisible. It had no colonies, but it exerted more influence than the greatest Empire; it had no ambassadors, no foreign ministers, no consulates, but it spoke more sternly than the firmest diplomat. Hourly for two weeks it grew stronger, until it overshadowed the tangible world of money and man, fleets and maps; hourly its influence spread, reaching into the minds of Generals and Premiers. Apparition born of war, fading like some ghostly continent sinking beneath the sea as war continued, for its brief span it ran the Chancelleries, changed the plans, wrote the communiques. It was the speed of Germany's advance through Poland--not the fact of German victory, but the pace of German arms.

Like the bombshell of the German-Russian Pact (TIME, Aug. 28), it changed everything. The overworked boys in the German Propaganda Ministry, shipping outworn drivel about Polish atrocities, felt its influence. Russians behind their frontiers watched their new German friends approaching, mobilized, advanced with full arms to meet them (see p. 28). At Copenhagen the Prime Ministers and Foreign Ministers of Sweden, Norway and Denmark hastily met. The wool-importing firm in Amsterdam, driven to the wall (see p. 19); the Greek Permanent Under Secretary of State flying to Rome; the correspondent in Turkey writing feverishly of "a situation baffling to the keenest-minded diplomats"; the Canadians, at first indifferent to the war, electrified at its new menace (see p. 21); Japanese, signing an armistice with Russia, launching a new. offensive in China (see p. 24)--all these no less than Germans felt its power. It reached into libraries, discredited books; reached into general staffs, discredited strategists; reached into Chancelleries, discredited experts. But more than anything else it knocked sky-high the picture of World War II following the pattern of World War I.

Difference. Observers patiently comparing the weeks of September 1914, with the weeks of September 1939, got nowhere. People who had expected war's outbreak in terms of London raided, Berlin bombed, poison gas, bacteriological war, H. G. Wellsian Shape-of-Things-to-Come war--beginning in terror, developing in devastation, ending in anarchy--found the drama otherwise than their imaginations had pictured. People who recalled troops going off to battle in World War I remembered singing crowds, enthusiasm, cheers, tears, flowers, flags, and were puzzled at the stoic silence, the grave efficiency, that marked the moves of this war. But as the German-Russian Pact was followed by German-Russian military action in Poland, World War II revealed its great difference: it was a war in which diplomatic moves, propaganda barrages, economic agreements, were planned like military campaigns; in which statesmen acted like Generals and Generals acted like statesmen.

Italy. It was raining in Rome when news hit the city that Soviet troops were moving in on the rear of the Polish Armies. Quizzing citizens, U. S. correspondents met profound gloom, not from sympathy for Poles or hatred of Russia, but because Italy's precarious neutrality was threatened. Next week, asked Italians, would the Soviet Union claim Bessarabia that she lost to Rumania in World War I? Or the week after? What would Turkey do? Would she take what she had got from France and Great Britain and join Russia? Would there be an offer of peace by Germany? Or would Italy join Russia and Germany in some sudden, staggering move as explosive as the midnight announcement of the German-Russian Pact?

Timed to the minute came a story from Berlin: Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini would propose peace. German divisions released from the Polish front, together with the bulk of the German air force, would be sent to the German-Italian frontier--prepared to move across Italy with Italian troops if France refused peace; prepared to move against Italy if Italy refused to offer it.

Turkey. Lights burned all night in the Foreign Ministry at Ankara, where Foreign Minister Shokru Saracoglu (pronounced Sarro-joe-glue) was preparing to visit Moscow. Announced before Russian troops invaded Poland, the trip grew in importance as the week advanced, as the significance of joint Russian-German aggression swept over the frightened Balkans. A 55-year-old lawyer, nervous, clever, quick-witted Shokru Saracoglu be gan his public life at 40, when Turkey's Kamal Atatuerk was consolidating, his power, when Russia on the north was far from strong. A lusty, exuberant Moslem (married, with two children) Shokru Saracoglu has gone through many reputations in Balkan and Western eyes: once people spoke of his freshness and enthusiasm; once people said he had grown headstrong, his cleverness inspired distrust. There was a time when Westerners muttered about a hard-living "rounder" somewhere in the Near East whose lack of scruples made diplomatic stability impossible, but that time passed when, as Turkey grew stronger, Saracoglu's reputation grew bright. Last week none of this mattered: only what Stalin could say to Saracoglu, what Saracoglu could say to Stalin; whether Turkey, breaking with Britain and France, would join with Stalin and Hitler in another move for "peace" as devastating as the German-Russian Pact had been. Said the astute Associated Press, employing the language of Metternich: Turkey, while committed to Britain and France, had reaffirmed "her warm friendship for the Soviet Union, whose troops are massed along her frontiers."

National Defense. In Rumania, where Russian troops had reached the northeastern frontier; in Hungary, where a Nazi invasion or a Nazi coup d'etat had been expected for so long that stories of a two-week delay seemed hopeful; in Bulgaria, where dreams of getting a slice of Rumania flourished under the belief that Russia had embarked on an aggressive policy; in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, the countries most directly threatened by German-Russian collaboration, the meaning of Germany's drive through Poland was clear. No historical precedent justified a fear that such ill-assorted partners as Germany, Russia, Italy, Japan, Turkey, Spain could embark upon, or long sustain, secret agreements to be disclosed like bombs, and followed by grandiose military campaigns that were like mopping-up actions. But the fate of Poland, and the way it was destroyed, planted that fear, made every country apprehensive of every alliance, made Germany and Russia distrustful of other alliances without being more confident of their own.

Over the whole broad earth, as the meaning of the swift drive through Poland became clearer, the nations seemed to be withdrawing into themselves like coiling springs wound ever more tightly. With its daily and hourly revelations of deficiencies, allegiances, loyalties, its drastic breaks with the past, with traditions and plans, with cherished projects, World War II assumed a magnitude at its beginning that World War I did not assume until its end. But it was a different kind of war--a war of diplomatic assaults and economic raids, in which the troops of aggressive nations only moved upon nations that had already been defeated.

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