In the North

Like Russian Ambassador Maisky, Norwegian Minister Erik Colban was kept busy in London last week hot-footing it around to the Foreign Office to protest fresh indignities suffered by his country at the hands of Great Britain, in her course of trying to throttle Germany. British aircraft had flown over Norwegian territory scouting for German ships using Norway's coastal sea lanes. British warships had entered Norwegian water to sink German ships. One of them fired a shot across a German's bow and the shell landed ashore, albeit unexploded, near the Varhaug railway station on Norway's southwestern tip. Norwegians muttered that if British intrusions did not stop, Norway might stop leasing much-needed tankers and freighters to Great Britain.

Blandly the British Foreign Office took note of Minister Colban's protests, but did nothing about them. Last month Britain announced she would disregard the juridical role of the World Court at The Hague. Instead, she now recognizes the rule of reprisal: if Germany breaks a law, Britain will break one. Not yet have British submarines adopted the German policy of torpedoing even neutral merchant ships without warning, but Britain let it be understood that she would not be stopped by technicalities of international law so long as no neutral lives were endangered. And last week the Allies' chief spokesman to neutrals, Winston Churchill, phrased Britain's new policy toward Norway and others thus artfully: "When we are asked to take as a matter of course interpretations of neutrality which give all the advantage to the aggressor and inflict all the disadvantages upon the defenders of freedom, I recall a saying of the late Lord Balfour: 'This is a singularly ill-contrived world, but not so ill-contrived as that!' "

So British destroyers, heavy and light, and cruisers and submarines too, continued prowling in force along the three-mile sea limit of Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Germany as well as these neutrals was made to feel that they would not hesitate to dash in if they sighted a German warship. One German submarine, a 250-ton U-21-type with a boyish crew of 28 aboard (apparently for training) hugged the coast so closely that she went aground off Mandal, Norway's southernmost town. Her captain presented a huge sausage to the first Norwegian fisherman who came along, asked him to pull the U-boat free. The fisherman, after consuming the sausage and praising its quality, notified the nearest naval station and the Nazis were all interned at Horten, with a fine show of strict Norwegian neutrality.

> Norwegians fumed last week when the motorship Cometa, bound from Bergen to neutral Argentina, was reported torpedoed by a U-boat right in Kirkwall, Britain's contraband control port in the Orkney Islands. The Admiralty quickly denied responsibility, said the sinking occurred "hundreds of miles" from Kirkwall in the North Sea.

> Despite the Allies' tighter grip on the Skaggerak and Kattegat, into Kiel last week steamed the German prison ship Altmark, safe home after being grounded and robbed of her prisoners by the British destroyer Cossack in Joesingfjord (TIME, Feb. 26).

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