PEACE APPEAL.

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 197, 22 August 1939, Page 9

PEACE APPEAL.

BY SMALLER POWERS.

Parties To Oslo Convention To Meet At Brussels.

USELESS WASTAGE OF WAR. United Press Association.—Copyright. (Received 9.30 a.m.) BRUSSELS, August 21. A special Cabinet meeting decided to propose that the signatories to the Oslo Convention, Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Norway, Luxemburg, Denmark and Finland, should jointly appeal for peace.

King Leopold is inviting seven Foreign Ministers to Brussels for a conference on Wednesday.

The appeal will be addressed to the Great Powers, urging the utmost effort to avoid a war which would lead to untold sufferings of their own peoples, and also those of smaller nations not concerned in their quarrels.

Norway, Sweden and Denmark have already agreed to attend the conference. \ The Belgian Foreign Minister, M. Hubert Pierlot, will preside at the Brussels Conference. The aim will be the co-ordination of the attitude of neutrals towards certain problems, for instance, transportation of food supplies, the care of wounded, and sheltering of refugees. The peace appeal is being drafted. King Leopold will not mediate. He is a supporter, not the inspirer of the conference. says a later message. While the echoes of rolling gun wheels and marching men permeate Central Europe, the reactions to the Oslo Powers' conference have not yet become fully audible.

Comments range from a Wilhelmstrasse spokesman's remark that the conference will be successful "if the participants talk sense to Poland and persuade her allies to return to the principles of the Lansing Note, to French inclination to cold shoulder any efforts directed to "changing the name of Munich to Brussels."

The Wilhelmstrasse spokesman adds that Germany is not making any concessions.