WESTERN THEATRE: Visitors

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A shocked voice at the British War Office one day last week gasped: "Are you by any chance referring on a public telephone to the fact that a certain well-known personage has left these shores for a certain destination?"

A disgusted news correspondent at the other end of the line replied: "I'm talking about the King's visit to France . . . officially known to the press for two hours. Don't you know?"

The War Office's wish to keep the visit secret had been firmly overridden by George VI, who said: "My people have a right to know where I am, and I don't wish the first news ... to be reported by Lord Haw-Haw of Zeesen."

His Majesty crossed the rainswept Channel on the bridge of a destroyer, with destroyer and airplane escort, but care was taken that Lord Haw-Haw (Germany's super-accented radio propagandist who kids the English in English) and other Nazis should not know he had gone until after he landed. The British Government wanted no repetition of what occurred recently when the President of France "secretly" visited the front, saw—across the river on the German bank—a banner with letters ten feet high, reading:

"Bienvenu [Welcome], M. le Président!"

In a staff car with standard camouflage (netting over the roof), King George motored to the chateau, in a provincial town well back of the British lines in France, where lives Britain's field commander, Viscount Gort. The King was accompanied by his brother H. R. H. Major General the Duke of Gloucester, who is Lord Gort's chief liaison officer; also Equerry Piers Legh, Private Secretary Sir Alexander Hardinge, a Scotland Yardsman carrying the royal gas mask and red dispatch case. Lord Gort spent the next few days arduously escorting his sovereign house guest hither & yon through the lines for His Majesty's quick edification and for the pepping-up, which was real and welcome, of His Majesty's armed forces. It was planned that every Tommy should get at least a glimpse.

Dressed as a field marshal, his ungloved hands blue with cold, his boots splashed, King George, unflagging, visited airdromes and pillboxes, reviewed regiments, watched anti-aircraft rangefinders work, trenches being dug, marched in places through ankle-deep mud. As well as with soldiers, he chatted with newsmen, who were permitted to accompany him in rotating groups of five. To oldtime Correspondent Sir Philip Gibbs, he said: "I suppose you feel as I do that this war is a continuation of the last."

At one airfield, His Majesty spoke the order, "Go into it," over the radio-telephone to a triad of fighters standing alert with propellers idling. When the ships shot aloft and whizzed back over the field in tight formation, he telephoned to their pilots: "That was a beautiful take-off."