69 from 223

There was scarcely more agreement among delegates at the Paris Peace Conference. In their first 48 fight-filled days at the Luxembourg Palace, the peacemakers had agreed on only 69 of the 223 clauses in the five peace treaties. Last week they began working nights to meet their new Oct. 20 deadline. Otherwise, they would clash once more with the twice-postponed U.N. General Assembly, now definitely set for New York City on Oct. 23. Only optimists thought they would make it.

The East-West struggle for Germany and Austria, the heart of Europe's peace problem, was being waged in Germany and Austria. Paris was only haggling over the peripheries of the peace--Italy, Finland, the Balkans. But they were rough edges, and the Big Four had left many a major issue unsettled in the treaty drafts: the Italo-Yugoslav and Greco-Bulgarian borders, the exact status of Trieste, reparations, Danubian free trade, the disposition of the Italian colonies. Of these problems the delegates of the 21 nations at Paris had not yet solved a single one.

"You Can't Do That!" For one thing, it was hard to pin down the Russian bloc. When the Western majority moved to consider Greek claims in the Bulgarian Political and Territorial Commission, Chairman Kuzma V. Kisselev of Byelorussia hastily adjourned the session and rose to leave the room. "You can't do that!" cried Australia's Colonel William R. Hodgson. "You are a servant of this Commission." Kisselev kept going, was dutifully followed by the delegates from Russia, the Ukraine, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The Western quorum stayed to pass a vote of censure. This week Russia abandoned its attempt to give Bulgaria a slice of Greek Thrace.

But the Russian bloc was still raising its ante elsewhere. Foreign Minister Molotov, who had agreed to an internationalized Trieste at the Big Four meeting, proposed a new ten-point plan that would put Trieste in Tito's vest pocket. Tito's Vice Premier Edvard Kardelj demanded more Italian territory, barked that otherwise Yugoslavs would "fight for their rights." At week's end Molotov declared that, despite the Byrnes speech, Poland would keep its present western frontiers.

But the outcry from Rome over Andrei Vishinsky's charge that "everybody knows Italians are better at running away than at fighting" (TIME, Sept. 16) brought one graceful Soviet concession. Vishinsky explained that he had really meant to say: "belauded Italian generals such as Graziani and Messe were more used to running than to fighting."

At Lake Success, L.I., delegates heard with alarm loud Russian cries of "Munich!" During the debate on Greek policy and the presence of British troops in Greece, Ukrainian Delegate Dmitri Manuilsky rose to shout that he had been accused of "propaganda aims." Said he: "In the light of the experience which we have lived through, we now know that behind all this noise about propaganda was concealed a preparation of an aggressive war. ... It would seem little likely, but it is a fact, that the shadows of Munich are rising again. ... A wall of votes against the Soviet Union is being organized. . . ."

Cried Manuilsky: "The Soviet Republic desires to have on its borders not hostile, but friendly neighboring states."

The question was: how far was Russia prepared to march to find those friendly neighbors?

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