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Since Old Paul hates motor cars and likes his guests to hate them, the usual thing is to drive out to Neudeck in an old-fashioned landauer. But for Royalty would this do? For Siam's little King, who dotes on the picturesque and is forever filming it with a Leica still camera and a Bell & Howell cinemachine. a landauer would have been just the thing. But swank Col. Oscar von Hindenburg insisted on a Mercedes. As the big car swept up to Neudeck an entire company of Reichswehr troops stood at wooden-soldier salute, flanked by peasants in bright, old-fashioned East Prussian costumes. Whrrrr went His Majesty's camera while the peasants roared: "Hoch Siam! Hoch Siam!"
Sliced sausages, always a favorite dish of Junkers on their country estates, were set before Their Majesties at luncheon. Cooking at Neudeck is of the simplest, with an emphasis on boiled potatoes, home-made cheese and common greens. Oranges for dessert are rated a treat, served peeled and sliced. As is usual when the President has foreign guests, Old Paul blinked, smiled, nodded and said little. King Prajadhipok and Queen Rambai Barni stayed two full hours. As a send-off they got a fine goose-stepping Reichswehr march past and more shouts of "Hoch Siam!" Then they motored to the most imposing medieval stronghold in East Prussia, famed Marienburg Castle, onetime seat of the "Teutonic Knights,' a motley crew who left off crusading for the pious work of converting pagan Prussians. Coming from the Near East, they brought with them Oriental ideas of architecture. Last week Their Majesties spent a whole afternoon minutely examining a vast moated palace as grotesquely strange as some of the temples of Siam. "Really, you know." said King Prajadhipok. "I am very interested." In the visitors' book His Majesty dashed off a modest squiggle. less than a third the size of the eight-inch-wide VON HINDENBURG written by the President with a special monster pen which he carries for public autographing.
Beloved Storm Troops. Back in Berlin, meanwhile, Chancellor Hitler had cheered up Vice Chancellor von Papen whose son and daughter, members of Berlin's smart younger set, went about chirping, "Papa is all right now." He was not quite all right. Unidentified Nazi enemies in a last effort to get something on von Papen moved fast and secretly one night while he was out. The Government's muzzled Press disclosed nothing, but Frau von Papen told friends, "They searched the whole house, even the kitchen!"'