Calm in Crisis

For the first time in her pious life, plump Princess Juliana turned up at a Sunday football game in Amsterdam last week--to show her nervous countrymen how to be calm in a crisis. To show that the crisis was passing, the Army ordered that monthly four-day leaves be resumed after two weeks of complete mobilization.

If the crisis was not so acute as it had been two weeks earlier, there was no sign that it might not become acute again at any moment. More & more The Netherlands took on the aspect of an armed camp. With the entire country under martial law, the Army's commander in chief, Lieut. General Henri Gerard Winckelman, clamped down on the hitherto free press, ordered the licensing of publishers and sellers of all printed matter. A license, the General explained, could be considered automatically granted except for publications that "might interfere with the country's safety, political interests or military measures." In other words, newspapers, periodicals and pamphlets hereafter would print precisely what General Winckelman saw fit for them to print, or else.*

In their crisis the Dutch showed that they still knew how to maintain law & order. One E. J. B. M. Boenninghausen, Nazi member of the 'First Chamber of Parliament, took exception to two detectives who watched the Chamber's proceedings through a half-open door, tried to jerk the door wide open. One of the detectives rapped his knuckles with a revolver butt. The other slammed the door in his face. Purple-faced Nazi Boenninghausen demanded that the detectives be removed. Replied the Chamber's President Baron de Vos van Steenwyk: "You will be the one removed, if you do not calm yourself."

* In far-off Java the People's Council ordered watch kept on the activities of two Nazi newspapers in Batavia, and in Semarang a committee of "action against internal enemies" began military training. Of the 32,000 foreigners in The Netherlands East Indies, 7,300 are Germans, 7,200 Japanese.

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