Spring Always Comes

Britain last week lifted a ban on the railway transport of spring flowers. From Scotland the first boxes of snowdrops went south. The first gorse glinted gold on the Chiltern Hills. London's Hyde Park was carpeted with purple crocuses which lovers crushed, unmindful of the grunts of passersby.

Botanists haunted bomb cavities for London rocket (Sisymbrium irio), which flourished after the great fire of 1666. Already 95 types of flowers and shrubs unknown for decades before the blitz have been found in holes where nitrates from burning bombs have enriched the soil.

From two different villages on the Isle of Wight came reports to the "Nature Correspondent" of the Times of the first spring cuckoo. In the National Gallery an exhibit entitled "Rebuilding Britain" showed flea-sized houses with modern flying buttresses. Britons looked, muttered: "No scullery, no privacy."

Mud & Typhus. The northern spring pulled back the sheets of snow and revealed the dead in Norway (see cut). Cleanup squadrons found hundreds of bodies daily in rubble of Stalingrad.

There was mud in Russia, and typhus and a fear that the Germans, thrown back in the winter, would return on the dry fields of summer. Again the Russians hoped for a second front.

When the sun dried a patch of sidewalk, Moscow children played hopscotch. Peasants brought the first pussywillows to the markets. Hothouses dispatched their first onions and radishes to hospitals and children's homes. In the zoo a baby hippopotamus was expected.

Tulips & Terror. Hollanders forsook their tulips for daisies, wore them in their buttonholes, painted pictures of them. The daisy was their badge of allegiance to the House of Orange and exiled Princess Juliana, whose new daughter was named Margriet (Daisy). In Berlin the Sunday promenaders on Unter den Linden strolled past the bomb-pocked buildings and the windowless houses left by Allied bombers.

In France there were no balloons for sale at the Rond Point on the Champs Elysees, but youngsters still sailed their boats on the Luxembourg Gardens pond. In the southern provinces housewives hung wooden-bead curtains over the doors to keep out the flies.

Spaniards with money and Falangist affiliations ate well in Madrid. Their women sported silver-fox furs and Parisian hats. Other Spaniards sullenly starved.

The Balkan woods held their first anemones. Peasants spanned their plows, knowing that guns sow no seeds but that the men of war must eat. In Czechoslovakia eleven underground workers were executed. In Yugoslavia there were reports of 30,000 war-orphaned children roaming, singly and in packs, over the countryside, starving, dying, turning into fierce hooligans.

Sun & Suffering. Blinding clouds of yellow dust off the deserts swirled into India. Pukka memsahibs began their annual trek to the cool mountains. Trains were jammed with passengers, parrots, dogs. In New Delhi the exodus threatened American officers with a shortage of women companions. Flowers wilted. Vultures lazed. Kites dived down and stole cakes from terrace tea tables.

Chinese guerrillas watched spring send up the first sprouts of kaoliang (sorghum), whose endless square miles of six-foot stalks will soon hide the soldiers from Japanese planes. Central China's spring is a short bridge between winter and summer, but those sheltering in Chungking dreamed of the peach blossoms of Soochow, the budding willows in Peiping. This was the sixth spring of war for the Chinese. They fought on, knowing that there will always be another spring. Some year, there will also be peace.

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