In 1918 the most notable refugee of World War I reached safety in The Netherlands, just in time, settled at Doom. Last week the world was significantly reminded that Adolf Hitler regards World
War II as the continuation of World War I when, at his special orders, his mechanical cavalry wheeled their Blitzkrieg harmlessly around the green parks of 8 1 year-old Wilhelm II, who from 1888 to 1918 by the grace of God was German Emperor and King of Prussia. Fuhrer Adolf, ac cording to some reports, would like to see Wilhelm II return to the Reich, live out his days as a Hohenzollern Junker; but the ex-Kaiser, while accepting the protection of Hitler's own guards, kept on chop ping wood at Doom.
Other big and little wigs in the path of Hitler's onslaught did not fare so well.
∧ Far from sparing The Netherlands' Queen Wilhelmina, Nazi invaders dashed straight for her capital, drove her to refuge in England. Taken to London by a British destroyer, she was met and kissed by King George, welcomed to Buckingham Palace's Belgian wing (so called because Leopold I always stayed there in Victoria's day).
Juliana and her children, who had preceded the Queen, departed for the west of England, while Prince Bernhard returned to fight fellow Germans in Zeeland. The Dutch Ministers took up residence at London's Grosvenor House.
∧With bullet marks on her limousine, Grand Duchess Charlotte of Luxembourg was one of the week's first refugees to reach Paris.
∧Quick on her heels tumbled Otto von Habsburg ("Otto the Last"), who, after his anti-Nazi pronouncements in the U. S.
last month, could scarcely expect such consideration as Wilhelm von Hohenzollern got. With Otto fled his dynamic mother, the former Empress Zita, five lesser Habsburgs.
∧ First duty of Belgium's Leopold was to emulate his father, lead his Army in the field. His three children, nephews and niece of Italian Crown Prince Umberto, were reported to have gone to Italy. Small Princess Josephine Charlotte resumed the study of Latin with her tutor. Monsieur Du Pare.
∧ In Norway, indomitable old King Haakon, a refugee within his own country, broadcast another appeal to his people to resist, gave no sign that he would flee abroad.
∧ The Due de Guise, 66, refugee for 66 years, must have known what was up. For bidden by law to set foot within the Third Republic, and normally resident at Manoir d'Anjou, Belgium, the Bourbon pretender to France's vacant throne turned up this week in Morocco.
After the rulers went the people -by thousands. The older ones said it was just like 1914. The wiser ones felt it was coming, had either packed or departed when it all began.
A few hundred rich and lucky Dutch men, including many of Amsterdam's famed diamond-cutters, escaped across the North Sea to London. Some traded their cars for small boats, and fled that way.
Not many succeeded, and first arrivals saw few friends or relatives on later incoming boats. One youngster asked a photographer to take his picture, saying: "My mother and father might see it and know I got away "