Dictators have bulletproof railway cars and last week Carol Hohenzollern, royal dictator of Rumania for the last two and a half years, barely escaped alive from his country as lead spat against the armored sides of his speeding private train. The loyalty to this Hohenzollern of a simple Rumanian stationmaster at Timisoara was all that saved Carol II from the wrath of his bitter people.
As the royal special careened from Bucharest toward the frontier of Yugoslavia, armed members of the Iron Guard (Ku Klux Rumanian organization) roughly asked the stationmaster whether the train would stop at Timisoara. "Yes, I swear it," he replied, but slyly managed to dot-dash from his station a warning to Carol II that his only chance was to run the gantlet of the Iron Guard.
During the ten-year reign of Carol Hohenzollern two premiers were shot out from under him. The proud, nervous, chain-smoking King, who committed the supreme political folly of trying to give Rumania a regime of royal totalitarianism with no base among the masses, knew he faced death. If the train failed to stop it might be dynamited or derailed. Taking this chance, Carol ordered his engineer to stop for nothing. He roared through Timisoara station amid a hail of bullets which smashed many of the windows, missed occupants of the train who flung themselves on the floor, deeply scarred the armored sides of the royal private car, wounded the fireman in the locomotive.
Enraged, Iron Guardsmen swarmed aboard another locomotive in the Timisoara railway yards, forced the engineer at pistol point to chase the Hohenzollern special. Like Keystone cops, other Guardsmen piled cursing into Timisoara taxis, bounced off full speed in a wild chase to head off the train at Jimbola on the frontier.
A troop of Rumanian soldiers held Jimbola, and Army discipline was decisive. The soldiers stopped the taxi gunmen and the pursuing locomotive. Scared Carol got over the border into Yugoslavia with some 30 of his palace clique. He took with him in freight cars attached to the royal train three handsome motor cars and 30 truckloads of valuables.
It was officially denied in Bucharest that the train had been fired on. Officially the Iron Guard announced that it had wanted to kill, not Carol II, but only his "Jewish Pompadour," Mme. Magda Lupescu. But in the Balkans nobody was fooled. An unsuccessful dictator had been driven from his country.
Premier Mussolini sent a pilot train full of Italian police to lead the Hohenzollern Special across Italy from Yugoslavia to Switzerland, and at Lugano station Carol was cheered by Swiss as he alighted smiling and took Magda to a swank hotel overlooking the lake. They dined sumptuously with the Rumanian Minister to Switzerland, sitting at table until after 10 p.m., applied to Vichy by telegraph for permission to settle on the French Riviera. The Vichy Government hemmed & hawed. The Axis might not like it.