IN THE spring of 1946, after a long and very troubled winter
in his Soviet occupied realm, the then twenty-four-year-old
King Mihai of Rumania astonished most of his countrymen,
disgruntled the Opposition, pleased the Communists and
the Russians who had installed and kept them in power, and
severely jolted the American and British governments by
hanging his country's highest noncombat decoration on Dr.
Petre Groza, the pomp-and-circumstance-hungry, big busi-
nessman prime minister of Rumania's Communist-dom-
inated government.

A king, if pushed hard enough, can turn. The conviction
slowly grew that King Mihai had done just this. It was
strengthened when a little later the young King, who had
previously been so careful to make plain his at least equal
attachment to his Russian and his Western conquerors,
failed to invite the American and British military repre-
sentatives on the Armistice Control Commission into the
royal stand at the military review which traditionally is the
center of Rumanian Independence Day events. Soviet repre-
sentatives were invited in full panoply, to stand by the
King in his marquee and later to take the salute with him
from the reviewing stand. Brigadier General Cortlandt Van
Rensselaer Schuyler, U. S. Army, and Air Vice-Marshal
Stephenson, R.A.F., feeling it to be their duty to their

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