Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the First Army at 9:30 a.m. had moved across 16 rows of railroad tracks into the smoldering ruins of Aachen, narrowing the German escape pathway from the city to a half mile. Fighting was house-to-house and hand-to-hand, but enemy resistance was weak as the doughboys moved to the eastern sector of the city.

It was believed that fewer than 10,000 civilians had remained behind in Aachen. It was difficult to discern between civilians and soldiers now masquerading as civilians, and so all Germans found in the city were being maintained under guard.

Along the Siegfried Line, forty miles south of Aachen, a sergeant from Pete's Knob, N.C., had captured 18 Germans and killed four others in an attack on a German pillbox, after a night during which he had spent maniacally yelling, before picking off the Germans utilizing his squirrel-hunting prowess obtained in the North Carolina mountains. In previous fighting, the 23-year old sergeant had knocked off 46 other German soldiers.

Apparently, he was attempting to make good the brag of four years earlier by Senator Robert Rice Reynolds, that the squirrel hunters of North Carolina could take care of the Germans quite adequately.

About a thousand American bombers out of Italy attacked Vienna, German Silesia, and western Hungary. Bombers from Britain and France hit positions along the Western Front, as the Ninth Air Force alone flew 1,300 sorties, 1,000 of which had been in the Ruhr Valley and against Aachen.

RAF Mosquitos attacked Hamburg and other targets in Western Germany, as well as targets in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia in support of the Russian offensive.

Russian tanks moved into East Prussia, nine miles northeast of Tilsit. Other forces had entered the eastern half of Riga in Latvia.

In Hungary, Russian troops were but 60 miles from Budapest, moving from the east, and even closer moving from the south. Surrender of Hungary was expected to come soon.

Marshal Tito's Partisans and Russian troops had entered Belgrade in Yugoslavia.

General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson announced that a major Allied landing in Greece was imminent, to complement the landing by a relatively small British force in late September on the Peloponnesus Peninsula permitting the liberation of Patrai, Corinth, and Pyrgos.

Admiral Nimitz confirmed the previous day's Japanese report that American carrier-borne planes had attacked Formosa, destroying 221 Japanese planes, sinking 16 ships, and damaging 19 others. The number of American planes in the raid, said by the Japanese to be a thousand, was not provided by Admiral Nimitz. It was the fourth successive day of raids on islands within 600 miles of the Japanese mainland, after the raids on the Ryukyu Islands and Marcus Island, as well as in the Philippines.

In the Essex village of Great Leighs, England, wherein lay Scrapfaggot Green, queer things had been happening ever since the bulldozer widening the road so that military vehicles could pass had inadvertently knocked aside the boulder on the Green from the grave of a witch.

Church bells chimed at midnight. Sheep wandered from exitless fields. The church clock, never wrong before, was now suddenly two hours slow. Things moved without explanation.

So said town Councillor Arthur Sykes who described himself as a "practical man", but one who could not ignore the evidence of such queer goings on as these he described to correspondent Alex H. Singleton.

The townspeople decided, after consulting an expert on witchcraft, that it was high time to drive a stake through the grave of the witch and roll the displaced boulder back to its original location on the Green. They meticulously measured, inch by inch, the ground of the grave and moved the boulder precisely to where it had been, then drove the stake dead center into the heart of the last resting place of the village witch.

Said Mr. Sykes, since doing so, they had obtained the best night's rest in weeks. No more bells chiming at midnight. No more slow clocks or sheep escaping the fields improvidently.

Ah, 'tis a queer law abounding on Scrapfaggot Green, Charlton Heston. 'Tis a queer law, C. C. H. L.

The witch though may have been nice looking, and so we best not make jest. She may have had nice legs. More's the pity.

Regardless, Time, in its October 23 issue, debunked the whole matter as a hoax on the part of Mr. Sykes to drum up business for his tavern. But, was his name Arthur, as the newspaper account reports, or Alfred, as Time tells? In resolution of that may be the determining fact of whether the case was genuine or poppycock.

Moreover, exists the burning question: was that moved a ponied stone slab or incensed bones' coppied rock?

Incidentally, we came across that anagram just today, erroneously omissive of two letters in plain view though it was. We were not even looking for it, but rather for Mr. Huntley's take on journalism at his retirement from the public eye. Strange, indeed.

An anagram for "newt" is "went".

On the editorial page, "Logical John", commenting that Governor Dewey had gone so far in claiming Republican progressivism that he would likely soon contend that the Republicans saved the gold standard and rejuvenated the Supreme Court, finds the logic lesson imparted by vice-presidential candidate John Bricker to be questionable if not altogether specious. He contended that the President was to blame for the failure to fortify Guam.

There was a grain of truth in the charge, the 1938 Naval Appropriations bill which had sought a million dollars for the purpose having been defeated by a coalition of Democrats and Republicans, the 1939 bill, increasing the proposed outlay to five million, also failing for the fact in part that the President had vacillated on the matter and left it unclear whether he supported fortification of Guam. The President had indicated that the situation with Japan might change so rapidly as to make unnecessary the fortifications, that having it as a threat, however, could be utilized in negotiations with the Japanese.

But Governor Bricker had charged that the President had quaked at offending Japan, had sought only five million for harbor improvements, not the amount necessary to render it impregnable, and so the failure could be laid at his doorstep.

The editorial begs to differ for the fact that, of the 205 House votes defeating the 1939 bill, only 64 were from Democrats. Only 15 Republicans had voted for the bill.

So, Governor Bricker was complaining that the President had not sought more for which he could be turned down by the Republicans.

"Boss Man" finds Musicians Union head James Petrillo to have the country, including the President, where he wanted it, in his hip pocket. He had refused to lift the ban on recordings, extant since August, 1942, unless RCA and Columbia signed the same contract with the union which had been signed by 105 other record companies. The contract provided for a nickel to a quarter royalties to be paid to the American Federation of Musicians for each record. The sum of the royalties was a half million dollars per year, expected to reach three million after the war.

"Pal Joey" tells of Josef Stalin having twice toasted during the week at the Moscow conference with Prime Minister Churchill the friendly Anglo-American-Soviet relations and the Russians' undying gratitude for Lend-Lease. The editorial finds the gesture sincere and instilling of hope for an amicable future.

"The Sitter" finds the premature death at age 30 of Avon O. Foreman to be lamentable. Mr. Foreman, who had died while loading a coal truck in his native Baltimore, had been the champion flagpole sitter at age 15, had been responsible for the craze in 1929, which extended through the Crash on Black Tuesday in October and into 1930. He had sat for ten days, then thirty, and before it was over, thousands of others had likewise climbed flagpoles across the country.

Drew Pearson comments on the President having confided to advisers that he would expect no speeches in his behalf to come from Secretary of State Hull, who disliked speeches and wished to remain aloof from politics, from Republican War Secretary Henry Stimson, and from new Navy Secretary James Forrestal, the latter wishing to keep the Navy out of politics.

Samuel Grafton, still in Los Angeles, says that he had been checking into the turnout of the Dewey crowd at the Coliseum, had found that a fifth to a fourth of them had been bobby-socksers who turned out to see the movie stars in attendance.

Marquis Childs, also still in Los Angeles, laments the passing of Wendell Willkie on Sunday. Though as a candidate in 1940, he had made his share of mistakes, afterward he had renounced partisanship, visited Britain, campaigned for Lend-Lease, adhered generally to principle, not party lines.

Mrs. Beatty writes again a letter, responding to some of the criticism hurled her way by Dewey devotees, indicating that the New Deal had provided her husband with the ability to start a business after they had lost everything during the Depression. They didn't bellyache, however, when, because of war restrictions on production of new cars, her husband lost his automobile dealership. They still stood firmly with President Roosevelt.

Hal Boyle, reporting from Belgium on October 7, states that the greatest "booby traps" in Belgium were not those left behind by the Germans. Rather, they were those created by the Dutch and Belgian children to elicit the dispensation of chewing gum, cigarettes, and candy from the American troops.

And as soon as a sip passed the lips of the G. I., the call would go forth to the fields, and out would swarm all the children of the department, yelling the familiar refrain, "Bonbon! Chocolate! Shooing gwum! Cigarette pour papa!"

The hapless target would then dig into his pockets and fling the goods as far as he could, enabling him, as the children scrambled for the loot, to make good his escape on down the road.