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Last week many political experts wrote many long--and contradictory--opinions on the Balkan situation. The big problem was the exact meaning of last fortnight's non-aggression pact between Bulgaria and Turkey. It was, some of the experts said, a brilliant political stroke by the Axis, a sign that Turkey had no intention of opposing a Nazi seizure of Bulgaria. On the other hand, others said, the pact meant that if Bulgaria was walked over by Germany, Turkey would not grab at Bulgarian territory--and Turkey's alliance with Britain was intact. Turkish Foreign Minister Suekrue Saracoglu reaffirmed the alliance but left Turkey's specific intentions diplomatically vague.

Adolf Hitler, as usual, was moving rather faster than the political experts' thoughts. While they ruminated on the Balkan subtleties, Hitler's grab of Bulgaria was in full swing--Turkey or no Turkey.

Over the Yugoslav railroads sealed freight trains carrying German war machinery kept rumbling toward the Bulgarian border. The German forces in Rumania were said to total 600,000, and across the early swollen Danube between Rumania and Bulgaria Nazi engineers had already thrown a network of pontoon bridges.

Bulgaria itself was crawling with Nazi officers in civilian clothes, studying railway facilities, bridges, roads. On these roads there presently blossomed new, brightly painted signs--in German. Nazi General Staff officers, their boots glistening black under their raincoats, suddenly turned up at Sofia's best hotel. Later they stood at the hotel windows and stared at a mob of student patriots who were shouting slogans against Nazi occupation. At Sofia's biggest theatre Nazi diplomats gave a party for Bulgarian Premier Professor Bogdan Filoff and his Cabinet. What the Nazis showed their guests were films of Hitler's conquest of France--the same kind of films the Nazis showed in Norway, The Netherlands and Belgium a few days before taking those countries over.

Bulgaria's thousands of Soviet Russian sympathizers were being told by grapevine to "resist the German invasion by noncooperation propaganda, but not by force." But it seemed that things would go hard for any resisters. Right after the Nazi officers arrived in Sofia the police arrested 50 Communistic leaders.

Last week, also, Nazi scouting planes were daily soaring over Greece. It was rumored that Germany had invited Greece to accept an "honorable" peace rather than endure Nazi invasion, that the bearer of the invitation had been handsome Queen Mother Helen, divorced wife of ex-King Carol of Rumania, mother of young King Mihai and sister of Greece's King George. Since Carol left Rumania she has been doing what ruling is left for the royal family to do, conceivably would have been willing to do her Nazi regents a favor. But in whatever fashion the peace overture might proceed, it seemed clear that Hitler's Bulgarian grab would soon be succeeded by a wide Eastern Mediterranean push. At week's end, the great question was whether Britain's Imperial Army of the Nile, whose whereabouts have been unreported since the fall of Bengasi, was being convoyed under the guns of newly fortified Lemnos across the Mediterranean to meet the challenge.

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