At the unholy hour of five fifteen yesterday morning, the State Department wrote finis to a China experiment devoted to the noble ideal that men would rather talk than shoot out their differences. It speaks highly of General Marshall that he was able to withstand as much disappointment and betrayal as he did and still keep on working for peace. When he left Shanghai with no agreement in sight it was almost a certainty that the withdrawal of the peace teams was in sight. The surprise is not that the Marines are coming home, but that they are coming home so soon after their chief became Secretary of State.

Since it is now official doctrine that the liberal elements within both the Communists and the Kuomintang must stop the struggle between extremists of both parties, the rapid withdrawal of American troops servicing the Peiping Headquarters of the Marshall mission, is tantamount to announcing that further American intervention will merely compromise their efforts. Pulling out now is only a tacit admission of what the Communists have claimed all along, that the U. S. troops were not to help in mediation, but to spearhead the Kuomintang "forces of reaction." The charge will be all the more difficult to meet because some elements within the Kuomintang themselves triumphantly voiced the same opinion.

From the very day that the Marines piled out of their transports into Tsingtao and heard their first "Ding hoa!" from the same irrepressible urchins that dogged GI footsteps all over Cathay, the reactionaries and a good proportion of the men themselves thought that they would never leave until the Communists were put down. The general opinion was that they were there to help the Kuomintang, not to "repatriate prisoners" as headquarters was claiming. With the comfortable feeling that whatever happened, good old Uncle Sam would never let them down, the reactionaries could be just as tough in dealing with the Leftists as they wanted. When the nationalist army was transferred to Hulatao in LST's, and Lend-lease material continued to flow in long after the war was over, they had good reason to believe so. In no time at all, of course, the Communists developed the reverse side of the medal, that the Marines were only in China to oppress the people--in spite of the fact that they were helping repatriate Japs by the thousand. In such a situation the moderates had no chance to exploit the advantage that mediation by a third party presented. Truces were signed, properly witnessed, passed on to troops in the field, and backed by teams of all three interested parties--only to be broken time and again by the trigger-happy commanders to whom a truce was for the other side to keep. Both factions came to look upon American efforts as strictly partisan, not to be taken too seriously, and the whole scheme of mediation broke down under the onslaught of self-interest.

Now that Peiping Headquarters is going into history, the liberals that General Marshall was speaking about will have a chance to convince the hot heads that peace is less risky than a protracted struggle between two relatively even forces. The withdrawal will have the merit at least of shaking the reactionary view that American guns will always be handy to back their troops. In any event, the Marshall mission was a whole-hearted attempt to keep civil war from adding more dead bodies to the already full canals--perhaps more than more man was necessary.