Another piece of evidence appears in a dispatch from Bonn in the Observer (London). Mark Arnold-Foster writes: ``People are leaving [West Berlin] because they think it is dying. They are leaving so fast that the president of the West German Employers' Federation issued an appeal this week to factory workers in the West to volunteer for six months' front-line work in factories in West Berlin. Berlin's resilience is amazing, but if it has to hire its labor in the West the struggle will be hard indeed.''

The handwriting is on the wall. The only hope for West Berlin lies in a compromise which will bring down the wall and reunite the city. State Department officials refusing to show their passes at the boundary, and driving two blocks into East Berlin under military escort, will not avail. Tanks lined up at the border will be no more helpful. The materials for compromise are at hand: The Nation, Walter Lippmann and other sober commentators (see Alan Clark on p. 367) have spelled them out again and again. A compromise will leave both sides without the glow of triumph, but it will save Berlin. Or the city can be a graveyard monument to Western intransigence, if that is what the West wants.

The removal of Stalin's body from the mausoleum he shared with Lenin to less distinguished quarters in the Kremlin wall is not unprecedented in history. It is, in fact, a relatively mild chastisement of the dead. A British writer, Richard Haestier, in a book, Dead Men Tell Tales, recalls that in the turmoil preceding French Revolution the body of Henry /4,, who had died nearly 180 years earlier, was torn to pieces by a mob. And in England, after the Restoration, the body of Cromwell was disinterred and hanged at Tyburn. The head was then fixed on a pole at Westminster, and the rest of the body was buried under the gallows.