The following pages are based on the last six months of 1948 which the writer spent in England, France and Italy. During this period Marshall aid had begun to bear certain fruit. On the other hand the international situation, already bad at the opening of the period, had deteriorated cumulatively as time passed. The Berlin deadlock, a symbol of the will of East and West, continued as before; and not even the beginning of a solution was reached at the United Nations assembly in Paris in die autumn. All over Europe people were preoccupied widi the economic crisis; but also by the direat of a new war. A military committee composed of Great Britain, France and Benelux was formed in the autumn under the chairmanship of Marshal Montgomery. There remained problems about this committee's effectiveness as well as about the extent to which other proposals for Western union were practicable at present. While in each country in Western Europe common people and politicians are talking more about union than ever before, in practice separatist tendencies in each shrunken western nation are still at work and travel to, or independent contact with, neighboring countries is a far more difficult business today than it was in 1939.