Royal-Carpet Treatment

An R.A.F. guard of honor snapped to attention as a tall, erect European stepped out of his plane at London's Northolt Airport. A Daimler with a British crown on its windshield whisked him off to the finest suite (101-102) at Claridge's. Next day, Winston Churchill welcomed him at lunch at 10 Downing Street; at week's end he drove to Buckingham Palace to spend a chatty half hour with King George VI. To make the honored guest feel at home in chilly London, the British government rounded up 200 of his fellow countrymen to take sherry with him at his hotel.

It was Britain's plushiest royal-carpet treatment, usually reserved for His Majesty's closest allies. Last week it was meted out to Konrad Adenauer, the first German Chancellor to cross the English Channel since 1931, when Chancellor Heinrich Bruening visited Labor Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald.

Adenauer was in Britain on a "goodwill visit." Although he discussed with Anthony Eden such Anglo-German problems as the release of German war criminals, his chief objective was to dramatize the public acceptance of "peaceful" Western Germany by her former enemies. "We hate war," he said earnestly to 150 coldly polite M.P.s who received him at the House of Commons. "The Germans hate war."

Yet the smell of old wars was never far away from peaceful Konrad Adenauer as, Baedeker in hand, he took the trail to the sights of London and Oxford.* In Westminster Abbey, Adenauer paused uneasily beside the tomb of Britain's Unknown Soldier, said nothing. At the British Museum he watched workmen repairing the great dome. "A German bomb hit us," explained a museum official. "We're still cleaning up." As Adenauer arrived at No. 10 Downing Street, left-wing pickets shouted: "Heil Hitler!" "No arms for Germans!"

But it was in Oxford's sedate cloisters that war came closest to the German Chancellor. At Balliol College, a plaque bearing the name of Hans Clemens August Adenauer caught his eye. Young Adenauer, the Chancellor's nephew, went up to Balliol in 1928. He was killed fighting against the British in World War II.

* Says Baedeker: both Oxford and Cambridge should be seen, but if there is time for but one, Oxford is preferred.

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