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Hero Prince. Reich War Minister von Blomberg last week stole Austria's greatest war hero. In all German garrison towns was read a proclamation setting forth, on the 200th anniversary of the death of great Prince Eugene of Savoy, that Eugene was a Pan-German hero who had saved Germany from the "predatory greed" and "plundering, burning and murdering armies" of France's Louis XIV.
To Austrians, proudly celebrating the same anniversary in Vienna last week, this was a cruel cut. Eugene of Savoy, neither German nor Austrian, was born in France and raised in Louis XIV's court. Louis despised Eugene's big-nostriled face, crooked little frame, cold, dogged stare.' refused him a French commission. Eugene at 20 helped the Austrians turn back one of the last Turkish offensives in Europe and remained to become, at 34, Austrian Imperial Field Marshal. Allied with Britain's Marlborough and with the Germans, Eugene thoroughly spanked the armies of his onetime sovereign on such famed fields as Oudenarde and Malplaquet. Thus his career can be counted, according to necessity, for France, against France, against the Turks, for the Austrians or for the Germans.
*When Hitler offered one to General Erich Friedrich Wilhelm von Ludendorff, that eccentric old soldier refused it on the ground that such an honor was possible only in wartime and from the hand of a Sovereign. Germany's only other surviving field marshals are General August von Mackensen, Duke Albrecht of Württemberg and Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria.