"Long Live the Nation"

On the White House lawn last week Franklin Roosevelt shook hands with a king. It was the first time since 1939 that the President had entertained one (Great Britain's George VI). This king was George II, nationless monarch of Greece.

He had arrived to try to arrange Lend-Lease supplies for Greek forces in Palestine, and to raise food for the dying, despairing population of his conquered country. It was a new, sober life for the tall, handsome, 51 -year-old, once easy going ruler.

But exile was no novelty to George II. In & out of the pepperpot politics of pre-World War II Greece, he had spent twelve years in more or less bored exile in Bucharest and London--a small-scale royal life of fast cars, lovely ladies, Mayfair clubs and divorce. In 1935 he was taken back to his throne in Athens. Five years later war rolled down his rocky peninsula. George stayed with his people to the end, fled only at the last moment.

A seaplane carried him to Crete. Nazi soldiers, dropping out of the sky, drove him on again. He and his party fled once more; guided over the mountains by Capitan ("The Goat") Volanis, a fierce little Cretan guerrila. At the seacoast, he embarked on a British destroyer. From Cairo via Capetown he reached London, set up his Government-in-Exile.

For Greek refugees, exiles, the thousands doomed to starve in Athens, guerrillas like Volanis, George II had spoken words of hope and faith as he was fleeing from Athens: "Have courage--good days will come again. Long live the nation!" Last week, a grimmer, saddened king, trying to joke merrily on the White House lawn, still had that hope.

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