Honor Before Love

Last September, 37-year-old Flight Lieut. John W. Driver took off in a Meteor jet trainer from his base in Gloucestershire and headed the two-seater for Germany on a ferry flight. Everything went wrong. In bad weather he got lost, overshot the zonal boundary. Twenty miles inside the Soviet area the plane developed engine trouble. When Driver crash-landed, the Reds grabbed him.

At the same time, Sapper (engineer) John Bennett, a 19-year-old recruit, guarding a military train traveling between Berlin and the British zone, was accidentally left behind after the train halted in Red territory. The Reds arrested him too.

A few days before, Lieut. Alexandre Alexandrovich Bystrov of the Red army's 61st Mechanized Regiment had made a fateful decision: he crossed the border of Red Berlin and begged the British for political asylum. He got it. "My whole life in Russia," he said later, "has been one long fight against starvation."

By the time the Russians had learned where Bystrov had gone, they had trading material that looked good enough (to them) to get their man back where he could be dealt with. The Soviet proposition: give us Bystrov and we'll give back Driver and Bennett. The British reply, delivered last week, was sharp and to the point: "To surrender him [Bystrov] against his will would be contrary to ... the right of asylum . . . There is no connection whatsoever between the case of the Soviet officer" and the two Britons.

When the Foreign Office publicly refused the swap, Mrs. John Driver, 24, a bride of 18 months, spoke up: "I want John back dearly. But he would not want to be freed under the Russian terms. Nor would I want him to be." Said Mrs. Bennett, ailing mother of Sapper Bennett: "If the Russian were sent back, he would be shot or sent to a concentration camp. We don't want that."

Britons growled their approval, agreed with the London Daily Express: "There is a nobility in their attitude of which Britain may be proud."

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