Exasperating, Humiliating

Sirs:

I got into Cristobal this morning on the 14,000 ton Hamburg-American liner Caribia from Curac,ao by way of Puerto Colombia and Cartagena. It is one of the most exasperating and humiliating things that can happen to a human being in the world today--to travel on a German ship loaded with Jewish refugees. ... At first, you find yourself enraged at the Germans for being so inhuman but gradually you take a deeper and more abstract view of the situation and, while you develop a sense of shame for the Germans, you come to suspect that their treatment of the refugees is just another indication of a reappearance in Germany of that peculiar quality which in the end will always bring defeat on the German nation. . . .

The Caribia left Hamburg three weeks ago with 400 refugees aboard--first, second and third class. All had to pay their way so the ship cleaned up on passage fare. They were shipped out with $4 apiece spending money when they reached their destination. Most of them were bound for Ecuador and Guatemala and many of them were highly educated, charming ladies and gentlemen. The lines between the Germans and the Jews and between the Germans and all other foreigners on board were drawn long before I got on in Curac,ao. By the time I got on, the ship had divided into two groups with the Germans by themselves and all others on board--English, a few Americans, a few Irish, Venezuelans, Colombians, etc., all siding with the Jews. . . .

You should see what effect traveling on a German refugee ship had on the formal English. Within an hour, the English as well as the Jews were telling me about the voyage. Then I began to notice things myself. The Hitlerites did not show up at a gala dance in the saloon while the ship lay in Curac,ao--the Jews were there and the Hitlerites would not appear on the same dance floor. . . .

The Hitlerites would not swim in the pool with the Jews. . . . The Germans ate their meals in solitary Nordic splendor--all by themselves. . . .

The Germans were angered beyond measure when we went ashore with the Jews at Cartagena and Puerto Colombia. . . .

I never was so glad as I was this morning to put foot on American soil.

BEN CALDWELL

Cristobal, C. Z.

Milestone

Sirs:

Add to TIME'S necrology:

Died. Ferdinand Lindemann, 87, who in 1882 at the age of 30 in Freiburg, Germany first established the transcendence of rr (ratio of circumference of a circle to its diameter= 3.14159265. . .); that is, showed that rr is not the root of any algebraic equation whose coefficients are whole numbers; thereby proved the impossibility of the squaring of the circle, classical problem of antiquity: given a circle, to construct by the use of ruler and compasses alone a square of equal area.

J. L. WALSH

Widener Library

Cambridge, Mass.

>TIME'S thanks to Harvard's able Mathematician Walsh for his TIME-worthy milestone.--ED.

Knox's Limerick' Sirs:

Your delightful comments on Monsignor Knox of Oxford (TIME, March 27) include a "Hegelian limerick" to which he is supposed to have written a most clever retort. Can you explain the fact that The Week-End Book (The Nonesuch Press, London, 1931, pp. 217--18) attributes the original limerick to Knox and the retort to one anonymous? For smoothness and epistemologic soundness, I prefer The Week-End Book version which is as follows:

IDEALISM

There once was a man who said "God

Must think it exceedingly odd

If he finds that this tree

Continues to be

When there's no one about in the Quad."

Ronald Knox

A REPLY Dear Sir,

Your astonishment's odd;

I am always about in the Quad.

And that's why the tree

Witt continue to be,

Since observed by

Yours faithfully,

God.

DOUGLASS W. ORR, M.D.

The Menninger Clinic

Topeka, Kans.

Sirs:

No doubt you'll get letters in flocks

Re the limerick written by Knox.

You say 'twas Hegelian,

But the idea salient

Is Berkeley's. It's he that Knox mocks.

E. F. SHEFFIELD

Montreal, Que.

> Readers Orr and Sheffield are both right.--ED.

Goldfish

Sirs:

Your article on the current collegiate mania for swallowing goldfish, in the April 10 issue of TIME, leads me to call to your attention the fact that the Mayor of Grammont in Belgium has been doing this annually for 500 years, in the Fest der Krakelinge, as a reminder of a famine the town underwent in the 14th Century. Reference: the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung for March 23, p. 433.

ALFRED A. KOSBERG S

chenectady, N. Y.

Sirs:

TIME has been April-fooled. The goldfish record of 89, credited to Clark University, is spurious (TIME, April 10). With all due modesty and measure of penitence, I still claim the championship (66 goldfish and i polli-wog). I hereby retire from competition.

GORDON SOUTHWORTH

Middlesex University

Waltham, Mass.

> Gulper Southworth retired not a moment too soon. Last fortnight Neil Keim, of Wyomissing Polytechnic Institute (Reading, Pa.), swallowed 74 goldfish. University of Arkansas' John Goff bit off a 13-inch king snake's head, swallowed the snake. Oregon State's Marion Salisbury downed 139 angleworms. Lafayette's Justin Stolitsky ate a copy of The New Yorker from cover to cover in 25 minutes. Etc. ad nauseam.--ED.

Chilian Quake

Sirs:

... I spent six days, January 28 to February 3, in Chilian, Bulnes, Linares, Los Angeles, Concepcion, Penco and Talcahuano, and rode the first automobile from Concepcion to Chilian that got through after the earthquake.

For your information, the last paragraph in the article on the earthquake in TIME, Feb. 6 issue, is the product of somebody's imagination. The cracks in the earth caused by the earthquake were not wide enough or deep enough to bury bodies in. Practically all of the 30,000 bodies were buried without identification in trenches built outside the cemeteries in each of the cities. The earthquake occurred during a dry season. It had not rained for three months prior to the date of [TIME'S] statement. Also, there were no cold winds down from the Andes. It was warm enough for me to sleep in the park and in the open hangar at Chilian. . . .

For the first time in the history of aviation major operations were performed above the clouds. The Argentines provided a surgeon and five nurses and a plane which evacuated the wounded from Chilian. In this plane was an operating table, which was frequently used. Three Pan American planes were commandeered and during the first five days the American pilots and the two American bombers carried out 598 wounded from Chilian to Santiago. . . .

COTTON MATHER

Atlanta, Ga.

Colobus abyssinicus

Sirs:

I have regarded Hitler as Colobus abyssinicus and Mussolini as either Gorilla berengei or Pithecia monachus but your recent photograph of Il Duce with his king [TIME, April 3] gives fresh point to wags' comments: "Mussolini--the duck."

Thanks for the hilarity-rousing picture of II Duce's legs.

E. THOMAS

Flagler, Colo.

None Under 40

Sirs:

War possibilities are in every thinking mind, as you know. . . . Most of us, whether old or young, have come to feel that if the U. S. should get into war no one less than 40 years old should be drafted for service. Of course, any person physically fit should be free to enter service but no young person should be forced to do so, as in the World War. . . .

1) Modern warfare is not a matter of brain and brawn, of military genius and manpower. It is a matter, among other things, of diabolical cleverness and high-powered explosives, of murderous attacks on non-combatants and of irresistible poison gas. It needs the seasoned judgment of older men rather than the fresh vigor and enthusiasm of younger ones.

2) Medical science has succeeded in lengthening the human life span. The average man past 50 seems to feel that he is much better able to endure the strain and hardship of war now than he was when he entered the World War more than 20 years ago.

3) Our national birth rate has decreased alarmingly since the last War and its resulting Depression, as is shown by the startling decrease in school enrollment below high school. The country cannot afford further sacrifice of potential fathers.

Naturally, we all hope our country can keep out of war. Failing that, it should let the older men bear the brunt of the sacrifice. Fathers would infinitely rather offer their own lives than their sons' lives, for the horrible carnage. And as conditions will be, the fathers' service would probably be more efficient. When France prepared for possible war last year it was the older, not the younger, men who were to be drafted. That is sound reasoning.

MARY JOHNSON

Long Beach, Calif.

Coast Defense

Sirs:

In TIME of April 3, p. 22, Canada, "Something Missing" you mention the "appalling state" of Canadian defense. Among other items you state, "her coastal defense guns date from before the War, and are so small [presumably also short range] that enemy battleships could anchor unharmed 30,000 yards off Halifax or Vancouver and demolish either city."

This arouses my interest in our own coastal defense guns. How many weapons have we in the forts of New England that shoot 30,000 yards ? Are they manned and ready to shoot ? From an article in your companion publication LIFE I gathered that most of our coastal guns were pre-War and short range, on the Atlantic coast. . . .

A. B. TENNEY

Boston, Mass.

> The number and range of U. S. coast-defense guns is an Army secret. But, as every foreign intelligence service probably knows, the U. S. East Coastline could never be adequately defended by existing forts. Best U. S. coast defense is the U. S. Navy. Says the Army: "That's what will keep 'em at 30,000 yards."--ED.

Death of Durand

Sirs:

... A quiet young man, tall and quite good-looking, weighing about 175 Ibs. ... A young man who had for years eaten the meat of wild game he had killed thinking it his inalienable right, was dragged into court, tried and sentenced to what seemed an interminable time in jail for what was in his philosophy no more a crime than raising a garden. There he was badgered and told that he'd be put over for years for killing the range cow which he killed, by the way, because the wardens were hot on his trail for killing the elk. . . .

The unnatural confinement and the contempt in which he was held drove him to an intense resolve to escape. He did escape but not by shaking Riley like a puppy [TIME, March 27], rather by batting his head with a milk bottle. He made Riley drive him home, where he prepared in an excited fever to leave for the mountains. The bright lads, Baker and Lewis, rushed heroically in, as the Hitleresque agents of all majorities against all minorities inevitably do, contrary to the pleadings of his mother, and others who knew him, to let him cool off, get out of his cloudland of primitive fear and excitement. They didn't listen. They got shot for their self-righteous pains.

That started it. There was no cooling off then, no backing out. The rest was all down hill. For a solid week they chased him, during which he made monkeys out of from one to two hundred of them . . . including a detachment of National Guardsmen with trench mortars and a pair of bloodhounds. Yesterday it came to a fantastic climax [TIME, April 3]. ... He walked nonchalantly into the bank, started shooting over the heads of the people there, out the windows, talking, joking, laughing hysterically. He hardly tried to escape, but roused the whole town. Damned fools were shooting into the sides of the buildings neither knowing nor caring what they hit. A guy across the street in a filling station, the nominal hero, by the way, unlimbered a deer rifle, waited for someone to come out. . . . The door finally opened, four men started out, the bullets and the shot filled the air, a bank clerk fell mortally wounded, Durand fell wounded. He shot himself in the head and ended the horrible fog of terror and hate and screaming tautness.

I dislike labels but let it be said at least that he was in a way a victim of the noble white man's justice. He had the courage to war with what didn't seem quite justice to him. You might envy him just a little. I do. What the hell.

DEVERE HINCKLEY

Cowley, Wyo.

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