A Spectator's Notebook
I HAVE MORE SYMPATHY with Dr. Adenauer in his griev- ances against the British press after reading its handling of the Sennelager affair last Saturday. A well-to-do Ger- man farmer heard intruders on his property and, thinking they were robbers, fired in their direction with a small-calibre pistol. In fact they were British soldiers who had gone out of bounds on a train- ing exercise, and one of them was wounded. It was the sort of mishap that could happen any- where, and little more would have been heard of it if the colonel in charge had not decided to take the law into his own hands by ordering the local police to arrest the farmer and, when they refused, threatening to cordon off the farmhouse with his troops until they did. It is easy to imagine what the press reaction would be if, say, an American colonel in similar circumstances here ordered the local police to arrest an English farmer, and cor- doned off the farmhouse: there would be a spec- tacular outburst of anti-Americanism. The Ger- man episode was slanted the other way; such headlines as 'German fires on British troops' and `Soldier wounded when farmer attacks convoy' carried the implication to anybody who did not read on till the end of the story that this was a calculated anti-British outrage.
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