Frontiers of Order

Last week Vidkun Quisling was interrupted at his business of forcing Adolf Hitler's "new order" on winter-chilled Norway. Suddenly there were terrible reverberations in the western mountains, and whole mountainsides, loosened by rain and snow, roared down into the valleys. Masses of mud and rock clogged roads and highways, smashed houses and bridges, snapped telephone poles, blocked the vital Oslo-Bergen railway at ten different places.

Certain papers stated that the ruinous slides had been caused by cloudbursts. But the Stockholm Dagens Nyheter suggested that the wet looseness of the mountain earth had made it easy to send it tumbling with small dynamite charges, that the slides had been the work of a network of Norwegian saboteurs bent on breaking military supply lines to coastal air bases used in the bombing of Britain. The suggestion gained credence from the fact that Nazi armored trucks were rushed to the landslide districts, many arrests were made, a state of siege declared. Nazi police and soldiers stopped and searched all automobiles. Paul Joseph Goebbels suddenly arrived from Berlin on an "inspection trip." Many Quislingists made loud demands for full German rule over Norway.

At another extreme of the Axis, the Italian disciples of "the new order" were quite definitely having sabotage trouble as well as other kinds. While they retreated from the Greeks through Albanian mountain passes around Corizza, the Italians were sniped and raided by rebel Albanian guerrillas. Many little groups of four or five guerrillas in the frigid, snowy hills were said to add up to a large force commanded by former Albanian Major Ali Mehmed, who fled his native country when the Italians took over in 1938. Major Mehmed was reported to have returned to Albania quite recently by parachute from an unidentified plane.

Norway's and Albania's rumors and events gave special interest last week to remarks by Pundit Walter Lippmann of the New York Herald Tribune. Said he: "The 'new order' proclaimed by the Axis is merely a fancy name for the territory that the German Army is able to occupy. . . . There is no single example of the voluntary participation of any nation in the new order. . . . [It] displays not one single attribute of an order--not custom, consent, legitimacy, legality, moral authority, or even a mere partnership of give and take. The nearest analogy to it is the temporary empire of Napoleon Bonaparte, and yet that empire at its zenith was more nearly like a new order than any thing which Adolf Hitler has yet constructed. . . . Yet within a few years this imposing empire had collapsed. ... It was not a true order, and therefore it was destroyed by resistance, defection and rebellion."

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