WESTERN THEATRE: Visitors

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France's President Albert Lebrun and Premier Edouard Daladier went out to the B. E. F. area and lunched His Majesty in a village restaurant. In deference to them he went without his usual midday Scotch & splash, drank wine with the meal (oysters, roast chicken, potatoes, peas, duck pâté, salad, ices, fruit). Another day he lunched in a corporals' mess room, another in a chateau used by Napoleon before, and by Wellington after, Waterloo. The King's comment to an artillery officer was quoted as his cheering verdict to all ranks: "As long as we keep on the way we are going now, we won't need to worry about the outcome."

A story the King could take home to his wife & children* was about a French schoolmarm, dating back to his great-grandmother's day, who expressed regret that she had not known sooner of his coming. Otherwise, she said, she would have taught her small charges "to sing 'God Save the Queen.'"

> After George VI was safe home in England, fact was released that he had: spent six nights abroad; gone within range of German guns; been told that, for this war's first time, British ground troops had (under French direction) engaged the enemy.

> Unescorted by the high command and the press, but only by an aide and a batman, another member of Britain's ruling family last week toured the British front: H. R. H. Prince Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David, Major General (formerly Field Marshal) the Duke of Windsor, 45. He traveled (and slept) in a caravan consisting of a trailer towed by a small coupe. Unlike his brother and successor on the throne, who was kept well back and whose trail he did not cross, he visited the foremost zones. His mission: to inquire into and report on the men's morale, quality of food and quarters, supply of toothbrushes, cigarets and the like, requests for reading matter. Every night, by a dim blue light in the trailer, he wrote a letter to his Duchess, who plans to run a war hospital on the French Riviera.