(2 of 7)
Quinine & Free Trade. Although Kaiser Wilhelm II made a great show of himself as The All-Highest War Lord, historians generally consider Albert of the Belgians the only King who during the War actually directed his armies on the Western Front. To Marshal Joffre years afterward, His Majesty confessed that the expert jargon of strategists and tacticians. had sometimes proved trying. "I listened to the generals and it seemed to me a great responsibility to decide between their different plans," said King Albert, "so I would just pick out the one that I thought made the most sense." Aged only 13, Crown Prince Leopold was permitted to enlist in the Belgian Army as a private, and before the War was over had fought in the trenches under fire. His redoubtable father, when a treacherous chauffeur attempted to kidnap King Albert to the German lines, drew his royal pistol and executed the miscreant.
After the War, touring the U. S. with his parents, Crown Prince Leopold greatly surprised correspondents on the royal special train by his democratic willingness to play poker, surprised them still further by quietly trimming them most of the time, always refused to say who taught him the game—a suspect being General Pershing.
Dowagers and daughters found that the 17-year-old Crown Prince would answer any question addressed to him, and that was all. Not until he was several years older did he wake up and start courting in his own way Her Royal Highness Princess Astrid.* Completely eluding news gossips who kept marrying him off to other princesses, Leopold would set out from Brussels traveling third class and carrying a small satchel as if going only for a short trip, would arrive at a country station in southeastern Sweden to be met by nobody and walk off with his satchel up to the rambling country house of his prospective Swedish father-in-law. In the nine years of Astrid's married life she gave Belgium three royal children: Princess Josephine Charlotte, now 10; Crown Prince Baudouin, 7; and Prince Albert, 3. Significant of the deep bond known to unite Astrid and Leopold was the insistence of the palace chamberlain on talking to her the night he telephoned to a resort hotel in Switzerland the terrible news that King Albert had been killed by a fall while mountaineering in one of the few rocky districts of low-lying Belgium. Leopold had answered the telephone, put Astrid on at the chamberlain's request, and afterward she broke the news that stark tragedy had made him King.