Neutral Preparedness

Some years before World War I, the Kaiser took Queen Wilhelmina--a plump, sweet-faced young matron--out to his Army maneuvers. Intending to impress his little neighbor with Germany's military might, he pointed out to her a strapping unit of the Prussian Guard.

"They are all eight feet tall, Your Majesty," ominously observed the Kaiser.

"The streets of Amsterdam can be flooded nine feet deep, Your Majesty," observed the Queen.

Last week the heroine of this legend was once more thinking of the German Army and The Netherlands' floodgates. Nowadays you can stop an army by flooding just over its hub caps, and Lieut. General Baron J. G. G. van Voorst tot Voorst, Commander in the Field of the Dutch Army, had already splashed around on his horse through some flood-test areas (see cut). Lieut. General and Queen were ready to flood some more. Though it had rained heavily off & on for three weeks, The Netherlands opened additional dikes to perform what was described as preliminary "saturation," to get the soil of her primary defense areas ready to hold a flood. Water was kept within a few inches of the tops of canal banks. And martial law was declared throughout eight of The Netherlands' eleven provinces.

All this was in reply to Germany's continuing to concentrate troops along her Dutch border. Dutch soldiers, standing to their arms about 500,000 strong, removed all road signs in frontier districts, to confuse an invader. Bridges and key roads remained mined. At the same time, to release them for work at home, the Government demobilized the Class of 1924. No one really expected a German push, especially if the Dutch canals and rivers do not freeze solid this winter (as they did last).

>Belgium's defense was in final readiness, and correspondents were shown that country's new defense against tanks: mobile, steel-girder "gates" on rollers, which can be pushed across country, two men to a gate, or dragged in long lines by tractors. Chained together, the gates form a resilient wall which impedes tanks butting it yet is not easily broken by shellfire. Tanks slowed down by the bending wall would make easy targets for defensive fire. Belgium was said to have enough such gates for a continuous wall all along her German frontier.*

>Luxembourg barred nonresidents from a triangle between Remich, Modorf and Schengen in her southeast corner. She shut down her big radio station, lest she be blamed for propaganda broadcast by others on its wave length, and banned the playing of radios and phonographs in public. On All Saints' Day, the Grand Ducal Army (1,000 men, plus 350 recruits and 200 gendarmes) paraded in review in its new khaki uniforms, with helmets like the old Austrian Army. Said its commander: "This is quite a change from our old army in lollipop uniforms." The pre-World War uniform was sky-blue, wasp-waisted, gold-buttoned, with gold band on a high-crowned pillbox hat.

* An anti-tank defense favored by the U. S. Army is "concertina rolls"--heavy wire coiled like a spring which is stretched across roads to foul the wheels and tracks of advancing trucks or tanks. Says the Infantry Journal: "In a recent test a 1 1/2-ton truck hit a series of concertina rolls at 22 m.p.h. It took two mechanics four hours to free it enough to be towed. The wire . . . is so heavy that it cannot be cut by ordinary wire cutters. It takes bolt cutters to do it."

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