On the Bum

"In all Washington," moaned poverty-stricken Slobbovia's accredited representative to the U.S., "is no udder Ambassador gotta work nights in a hash-house he should kipp alive."

More than once the miseries of Cartoonist Al Capp's (Li'l Abner) mythical, snowbound Slobs, "dropping dad from all kinds starwation," have found not too exaggerated counterparts in reality. In eastern Europe there were at least two genuine foreign envoys in straits almost as dire as the Slobbovian Ambassador's.

Returning hopefully to Warsaw after a brief rest in Washington, His Excellency Arthur Bliss Lane, U.S. Ambassador to Poland, found his stylish, three-story embassy still occupied by the eight Polish women and one man who have squatted there since last March. Under Polish law the squatters cannot be evicted until "satisfactory " accommodations have been found for them. So far they have turned down all proffers. Meanwhile Ambassador and Mrs. Lane have been forced to set up diplomatic shop in a two-room suite in the drab Polonia, once a third-rate commercial hotel.

Ambassador Lane receives state callers in his living room while his wife ducks discreetly into the kitchen-bedroom, where she also cooks the meals on a hot plate. Meanwhile some Embassy personnel work in Quonset-like huts in Warsaw's bomb-scarred lots.

In Soviet Russia, Austria's spanking new diplomatic mission to Moscow, consisting of slim, distinguished Minister Karl Waldbrunner, Counselor Karl Braunias and a female secretary, has been in even worse case, homeless and flat broke. Reason: the Russians would not fix a legal rate for converting their schillings into rubles. The diplomats had to wash their own socks and underwear. Never sure where their next meal was coming from, they scurried from one hotel to another as bills came due. On top of it all the secretary turned out to have been pregnant when she left Vienna; after she went back home, the Minister and Counselor even had to type their own letters.

Doughty Waldbrunner stuck it for weeks, then fled to Vienna, where he announced his resignation. While Austria's Communists seized the incident to accuse the Government of "abandoning" its emissaries, Braunias held on in Moscow. To keep going, said his wife tearfully in Vienna, he was selling his very clothes, now a jacket, now a pair of trousers.

And in Italy, just to make diplomatic humility complete, Socialist Foreign Minister Pietro Nenni had forbidden his departing mission to Sweden to take their tails or dinner coats.

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