Purgatory

The dillydallying in the truce tents continued, like drops of water in the old Chinese torture. It was eight months since the U.N. and Communist negotiators had sat down to turn the war that is not a war into a peace that is not a peace.

On the U.N. side of the battle line, 450,000 men--much of the cream of U.S. military manpower--burrowed dismally into the Korean snow and mud, to wait for they knew not what. On the other side, 900,000 of the enemy did the same. Occasionally, on either side, a man died--a bullet in the brain, a mutilating date with a mortar shell, a ride to earth in a jetpropelled funeral pyre. But the dying settled nothing.

In the truce tents at Panmunjom, nothing was settled either. A dismal pall of petty complexities had settled over a mission that once seemed pressing and simple. Daily, the truce delegates marched into their stove-warmed tents for the usual round of long, surly wrangles or ridiculous little meetings of a few minutes (one last week lasted only 120 seconds) at which neither side would speak. The issues were the too familiar ones--the Reds' insistence that Russia is a fit neutral to police the truce, the U.S. insistence on "voluntary" repatriation of prisoners, the usual exchanges of insults over mishandling of P.W.s. To cloud the air further, Peking and Moscow burst out with ludicrous charges that the U.N. forces were busily dropping germ-infected insects, cotton wads and leaflets behind Communist lines. It was a typical Red attempt to explain away a reported outbreak of typhus, cholera and bubonic plague among their armies.

Whether it was to be a truce or more fighting, even the top men in the U.N. command did not seem to know. General James A. Van Fleet guessed aloud that the Communists would not dare to try an offensive this spring. If they did, said he, his forces could stop them: "It would be a good thing if we could get those people out of their foxholes and dugouts, to mow them down the way we did last April and May." But actually, the U.N. command was not so bold. To break through the enemy successfully, they said, they would need at least another two divisions, and it would cost 25,000 fresh U.N. casualties, perhaps more.

Gone, too, was much of the confident talk about knocking out Red China by air attacks on her mainland industry and communications if the war is resumed.

And so, last week, men of East and West continued to suffer in modern civilization's clumsy but efficient imitation of purgatory.

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