PARIS—When the ancient Greeks said “multiple death is not death” they meant that death's qualitative agony could be drowned in quantitative shock. The hecatomb loses poignancy compared to the single succumbing marathon victor's pain.

Classical times could never comprehend, from the sheer absence of mass, the ultimate meaning of multiple death as it was to become known in a later era of instant communication. Vet even in recent times, dying is not acutely understood when its scope transcends certain limits.

The leaden horror of Hitlerite and Stalinist concentration camps recedes into a coma of human incomprehension unless regarded through the innocent eyes of Anne Frank or Solzhenitsyn's famous Ivan Denisovich.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are vividly remembered by the mind's eye primarily because of the novel means that brought holocaust to those cities. Statistically comparable disasters in Hamburg and Dresden are more easily forgotten; they were produced by what we already then conceived of as “conventional” methods.

Against this background one must view the appalling catastrophe of East Pakistan whose scale is so immense that it exceeds the dolorimeter capacity by which human sympathy is measured. No one can hope to count the dead, wounded, missing, homeless or stricken whose number grows each day.

“Classical times could never comprehend, from the sheer absence of mass, the ultimate meaning of multiple death as it was to become known in a later era of instant communications. Yet even in recent times, dying is not acutely understood when its scope transcends certain limits.”

Bengal has traditionally been an area of suffering and overpopulation. The gifted Bengali people have had little luck in guiding their own destinies along a hopeful road and the partition of India twenty‐four years ago marked no great turning point.

What it achieved, in fact, was the artificial division of the Bengalis according to religion. The predominantly Moslem population of East Bengal was placed under the control of another Moslem state in the Punjab and the predominantly Hindu population of West Bengal was placed under the control of a Delhi regime far to the north.

The fish‐eating, Bengali‐speaking, rice‐growing overpopulated area that became East Pakistan represented, in fact, the westernmost stretch of Southeast Asia. It had nothing but religion in common with the meat-eating, Urdu‐speaking, wheat‐growing underpopulated area one thousand miles away that became West Pakistan and represented the fringe of the Middle East.

This was the genesis of today's continuing tragedy, a tragedy that aimed toward secession, developed into civil war, and resulted in mass slaughter, mass emigration, mass epidemics and multiple death. The world at large is appalled by the disaster which, thanks nowadays to the single eye of ‘television, can at least dimly be comprehended.

Yet there is ‘a ‘limit to what the world at large can do to help. Funds, medicines, doctors, aircraft have been rushed to India to care for the rising tide of refugees and offered to a Pakistani Government whose writ in East Bengal seems to alternate between brutality and chaos. However, unless there is proper organization at the receiving end, charity and outside aid can glut facilities available to use them.

Neither the United Nations nor the great powers have shown themselves able to halt the killing, to curb the flood of refugees, or to insure that Bengal's apocalyptic horsemen may not ultimately embroil the entire Indian subcontinent.

Even if cholera can be restrained and even if civil conflict can be halted, the poison of hatred seems fated to spread. It is almost inconceivable that Hindus of East Pakistan who have been able to escape to India will easily be induced to return and one can imagine the anxiety of India's own Moslems.

Moreover, not only will East Bengal remain a sullen satellite so long as the martial Punjabis of the west govern that province; the whole concept of Bengali nationalism, not bounded by religion but by language, again stirs in India itself. One wonders whether West Bengal and its huge capital of Calcutta can avoid the emotional consequences.

The Bengalis of East Pakistan may have lost their first battle but they may also have started another partition of the enormous Indian subcontinent, a development whose historic consequences are even harder to forecast than those of the first partition in 1947.

The world's heart is already almost paralyzed by the multiple death. that has stricken Bengal; the world's mind may soon be even more hopelessly bewildered by the problems spewed up by this hecatomb.