Refugee Newspaper

A frankly pro-French newspaper is the Belgian daily, La Meuse, published for the last 85 years in Liege. It survived World War I, saw German troops fight their way across Belgium, limp back over the frontier in defeat four years later. But when Adolf Hitler's columns rolled toward Liege last month, La Meuse's editors knew they would soon be lodged in concentration camps, doubted whether their paper could survive World War II.

White-haired, white-mustached Editor in Chief Olympe Gilbart, 65, made a bold decision. Rather than face the German invader again, he shepherded 50 members of his staff, their wives and children, into a fleet of five automobiles, two trucks, smashed La Meuse's plant, set out for Brussels.

In Brussels that evening Editor Gilbart found a plant, managed to get out one edition. Next morning, with his flock, he fled from Brussels as the German drive pushed on. Over roads choked with refugees and troops, bombed and machine-gunned by Nazi planes, La Meuse's party struggled toward the French border.

On May 14, unharmed, they rolled into Paris. Two days later La Meuse was on the street with its first Paris edition, printed on the presses of Paris-soir. Its circulation last week was down to 73,000, from a peacetime average of 100,000 to 120,000. But with something like 2,000,000 Belgian refugees scattered over France, Editor Gilbart expects to print as many as 400,000 copies a day before war ends.

Only Belgian paper published in France, La Meuse now fills its columns with names and addresses of refugees, directions for cashing checks, exchanging money, finding food, shelter, clothing. One Belgian of whom La Meuse could give no news last week was its owner: 37-year-old Chevalier Jean de Thier, a lieutenant in a Belgian motorized division, fate unknown.

In France, the first known casualties of the war among newsmen occurred on a road between Verdun and Paris. An Army truck ran broadside into a press car carrying John Elliott of the New York Herald Tribune, William Henry Chamberlin of the Christian Science Monitor. Elliott was hospitalized with cuts from flying glass, a broken bone in his foot. Chamberlin escaped with a few small cuts.

Correspondents were leery of the Chicago Tribune's Alex Small, called him "a human albatross." Since the day he arrived in Toledo, Spain in 1936, every warring city to which Newsman Small has gone has been bombed a few hours later (except Brussels, bombed a month after Small got there). As he passed through Lille and Tournai last fortnight, they were bombarded. Nazi planes followed him along the roads. Said another newsman, when he arrived in Paris last week: "Get the hell out of here, Alex, or we'll be bombed." Immediately sirens began to wail an airraid alarm for the first time in a fortnight, bombs fell (see p. 24).

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