* * * * A half-glimpse of a tremendous story
was given by the Sunday Express last Sunday, in the report of what an agency correspondent had just heard in Brussels from a Belgian Red Cross nurse about the abortive attempt at an invasion of Britain in 1940. Whether it was an actual invasion attempt or a large-scale rehearsal matters little. The R.A.F. appeared on the scene, dumped oil on the water, and set fire to it with incendiaries. The Red Cross nurse knew all about it because, after hearing rumours about thousands of German bodies washed up on Belgian beaches, she was one of a host of nurses summoned to help with the wounded in a German Red Cross train of some forty coaches drawn up 'in the chief station in Brussels—all of them badly, some terribly, burned. The date is given as September 17th. This sent me back to William Shirer's Berlin Diary. There, under date .September ath, Shirer tells how he arrived from Basle that morning at the Potsdamer Bahnhof in Berlin and found there the longest Red Cross train he had ever seen ; he goes so far as to say it stretched for 'half a mile, to beyond the bridge over the Landwehr Canal. It was sur prising, for in September, 1940, there was no fighting at all in th west ; the wounded had been unloaded, but a railway man told Shirer they were most of them suffering from burns. The c incidence of dates is significant. Shirer had already heard in Switzerland a stiiry that the British used a Swiss invention, a new type of wireless-directed torpedo which spread oil on the sea a simultaneously ignited it. If there is any truth in these stories —news Of what did happen could surely be released now.
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