Temporary Retreat

Half of Belgium last week rose against King Leopold III, who had returned to the throne the week before. More than half a million workers walked out in a general strike called by Paul-Henri Spaak's Socialist Party. All Belgian steel mills, most coal mines and many industrial plants were closed. The great port of Antwerp was dead. Airline flights into and out of the country were canceled. Sabotage hindered railroad traffic and communications were interrupted. Electric power was cut off in many places.

In Brussels, streetcar motormen who defied strike orders were blocked by throngs on the tracks who threw bricks through the car windows. Taxis that ventured out were overturned. A procession of several thousand anti-Leopoldists marched towards Leopold's palace at Laeken yelling "Abdication!" and "A has la calotte [down with the cassocks]." Ex-Premier Spaak was at the head of the line. A woman ran up to him, stroked his plump face and said, "Aren't you tired? What are you going to do now? Camp?"

Inside the Laeken palace grounds, soldiers rushed to the entrance gates. They shook the hands of demonstrators, who cried: "The army is with us!" The crowd came face to face with lines of black-helmeted gendarmes, who thrust them back. When a caravan of buses and automobiles bringing pro-Leopoldists from Ghent approached the palace, it was met by a volley of paving stones and bricks thrown by the demonstrators.

In a Liege suburb, gendarmes tried to break up a strikers' meeting. When the strikers resisted, the gendarmes opened fire, killing three and wounding two, including the burgomaster, who was shot twice in the leg. Socialist strike headquarters began to organize a "workers' march" on Brussels.

Leopold tried to get Socialist Party President Max Buset to confer with him at the Laeken palace, but Buset scorned the royal summons. Said he: "People a good deal more eloquent and persuasive than I am have talked frankly to Leopold . . . with complete lack of success . . . Why should I waste my time?" But at week's end after the King ordered the army, including two battalions brought from occupation duty in Germany, to quell rioting, Buset went to the palace.

Leopold agreed verbally to delegate his powers to his son, Prince Baudouin, and to abdicate in September 1951, when Baudouin will become 21. When this agreement was handed to Leopold for his signature, he at first balked, but later consented.

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