"Mere News"

Easter Sunday, falling last week in Rumania according to the Orthodox Church calendar, was to be a great day for a cabal of Rumanian Army officers. Naturally King Carol, his fat little son Michael, his brother Nicholas and Queen Mother Marie, would go to worship in the 270-year-old Cathedral, which stands high above Bucharest's gardens and gilt cupolas. Someone would throw a grenade, another and another into the midst of the royal worshippers. Entirely rid of its eccentric royal family, Rumania would be ready for a military dictatorship. One chore would remain and that would be to go to the villa hard by the king's palace and kill red-haired Magda Lupescu, the Jewess whose company Carol cannot long do without, whose power over Carol the Army mortally hates and fears.

The Dictator the plans called for, according to the rumors and alarms that last week swept Rumania, was burly, granite-jawed Col. Pricup, Carol's old friend and the man who arranged his flying trip from Paris to Bucharest and the throne in 1930. His henchmen were Rumania's Fascist, Jew-hating Iron Guard. Forty of them had been on trial for the murder of Premier Ion G. Duca last December, had been acquitted. Col. Pricup noted that fact with interest. Carol had not rewarded him nearly enough since 1930. Lupescu intrigued against him. Two months ago he joined the Iron Guard and began organizing the boys.

It was Col. Pricup's thoroughness that tripped him up. He found supporters in nearly every garrison in Rumania. Emboldened, one of his men invited the Minister of Commerce in Premier Tatarescu's Cabinet to join. To clear his conscience, the colonel called on the King to remonstrate with him about Lupescu, turned a little threatening. He was thrown out. Last fortnight he put through an order to Sergeant Major Charles Savinau for a case of hand grenades. The sergeant major told his colonel that he thought the grenades were wanted for no good end; the colonel called in the police. Savinau delivered the grenades anyway, after taking the precaution of emptying out the powder. But when he arrived with them, his eyes popped as he met a sublieutenant also lugging in a case of grenades.

The police pounced on the sublieutenant, then began picking plotters out of the army like raisins out of a cake. They soon had 120 army officers and civilians ranging from General Schmidt of the poison gas department, a handful of colonels, a truckload of captains, down to a group of students who were supposed to start demonstrations in the street as soon as the assassinating had properly begun. Last week Rumania lay paralyzed by its worst assassination scare to date. The Government clapped on an iron censorship, pooh-poohed "a thing which usually should be regarded as nothing more than mere news." Police called in foreign correspondents who had slipped out "mere news" stories, lectured them and held the New York Times' correspondent Dr. Eugen Kovacs for six hours. The favorite substitute story was that the officers had intended to kill only Mile Lupescu, because of her "eternal intriguing."

Nevertheless, King Carol last week drew a ring of loyal troops around his palace. Queen Mother Marie asked him, please, to get rid of Lupescu and remarry his divorced wife Helen. The Cabinet formally asked him to send Lupescu away. Lupescu herself, badly frightened, offered to leave Rumania, if that was all his enemies wanted. But Carol assured her confidently that things were not so bad as that. On that one point he was every inch a king: he decreed that indispensable Mile Lupescu must not go.

It developed that behind the conspiracy was a mixed combination of malcontents. Some of them were men of alien Transylvania which the Treaty of Trianon took from Hungary to add to Rumania. Others were Iron Guardsmen, deputized by their mystical and formidable leader, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. Others were plain Lupescu-haters. Still others were merely against Premier Tatarescu. All that united them was hatred for the Sinaia Camarilla, the group of Lupescu's friends who meet with the King at the palace of Sinaia.

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