London, July 15.
The boom of maroons and the roar of sirens at midnight in Southampton and Portsmouth were the prelude to he most thorough air raid rehearsals hitherto undertaken in Great Britain.
The towns were completely blacked out. Even harbour and motor-car lights were extinguished.
People postponed their bed-time and were herded into shelters while imitation high explosive gas and incendiary bombs were scattered in the streets. Telephone operators and employees in other essential services donned gas masks.
"Casualties" were rushed to decontaminating stations, and fire parties dealt with imaginary fires.
Sir Samuel Hoare, the Home Secretary, arrived by air and, with Air Vice-Marshal Sir Philip Game, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and the chief constables of many cities, watched the anti-gas squads, first-aid corps and fire-fighters work.—Reuter. proposals were falling away from the standards of international law, especially the granting of belligerent rights.
In reply, Mr. Eden said the governments of Europe knew' that if nonintervention collapsed, the risks of a European conflict would thereby be inevitably increased, It might well be that we should be unable to avoid reaching that point, but every European. nation was reluctant to approach that abyss, If the British proposals were accepted by the Non-Intervention Committee, they could prove to be the means of making non-intervention effective and limiting the risks of the conflict spreading. Failure would mean that Europe would enter into an era of grave peril. The Government was convinced that Europe did not want this, and that -was ' why Europe charged Britain with the task which she sought to, discharge equitably and rapidly at the Comimittee's meet-ug. It would be for Europe to decide. The Government did not accept the doctrine of the inevitability of war. A war postponed might be a war averted, and in the light of that Mr. Eden asked the House to judge the Government's. policy in respect of the Spanish conflict—Reuter.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.