New Partnership

Eduard Benes had a tedious journey. Weather held up his plane at Bagdad and again farther along the line. Finally, at Moscow, he found a station festooned with flags and spread with red carpet, a welcoming delegation headed by Foreign Commissar Viacheslav Molotov, Marshal Klimenti Voroshilov, a guard of honor.

For shrewd, patient little Mr. Benes, President of the Czechoslovak Government in Exile, Moscow was an end to months of anxious waiting, a fulfillment of great hopes, a beginning for postwar Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe. The day after his arrival, he stood in the Kremlin beside his friend and patron, Joseph Stalin. Together they watched while Molotov and Czechoslovak Ambassador Zdenek Fierlinger signed a treaty of friendship, mutual assistance and postwar collaboration--a pact that may serve as Russia's basic plan for other Central and Eastern European nations.

Publication of the details was delayed until this week. But the root fact of the treaty was already known: it embodied a common policy of unyielding resistance to any new German aggression, a common approach to the reshaping of Europe. Prewar Czechoslovakia had divided its dependence between Russia, Britain, France, the Little Entente (with Yugoslavia and Rumania). All failed her. Postwar Czechoslovakia, in the person of Eduard Benes, looks first to postwar Russia.

The U.S. State Department looked unhappy. Secretary Hull was not quoted. Reporters who knew the Department's hostility to such alignments in Europe roared with laughter when a spokesman intoned: "It [the Treaty] is not to be understood to be in conflict with the general framework of worldwide security."

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