Salute to General Ike

A stringed orchestra in London's ancient, bomb-scarred Guildhall had just finished playing My Old Kentucky Home. In the sudden silence came the sound of an honor guard presenting arms outside, then the loud voice of an announcer near the door: "The Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force!" The crowd came to its feet with a roar. Down the aisle, behind slow-walking officials in fur-trimmed blue, came General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower, his battle-dress pressed to Regular Army perfection, his face betraying his emotion. As he climbed to the dais, jammed with the great men of England, the applause went on & on.

All the way to the Guildhall, where he had come to receive honorary Freedom of the City,* General Ike had heard such applause. In accordance with custom he had come through the old, battered City (London's financial district) in an open, horse-drawn landeau, and the crowds were waiting for him all along the sand-strewn streets.

As he walked to the microphone he grinned, and the applause went up again. But he looked pale and nervous in the glare of the floodlights; when he began to speak his voice almost failed. He had worked on the speech for days, had reworked it the night before in his suite at the Dorchester, and had committed it to memory like a high-school valedictorian. For a few minutes he sounded like one. But as he went on, he got better, and the crowd began to realize that Ike was doing all right.

Sisters Under the Skin. They gave him a big hand when he said: "Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in the blood of his followers and the sacrifices of his friends. . . . But--a fact important for both of us to remember--neither London nor Abilene, sisters under the skin, will sell their birthright for physical safety, her liberty for mere existence. . . ."

The Guildhall ceremony over, Ike Eisenhower was entertained at lunch by the Lord Mayor. He received the Order of Merit from the King, was later granted an audience by the Queen Mother, who astonished him by offering him a cigaret, taking one herself. Winston Churchill, beaming with professional admiration, clapped him on the back and said of the speech: "Well done, Ike, very well done." London's press beamed too.

Eisenhower's red-letter day in London was only one day in the week's outpouring of honors. Two days before, Soviet Russia had sent Marshal Georgy K. Zhukov to Frankfurt am Main to present Ike with the top Soviet military decoration--the

Order of Victory, glittering with thousands of dollars' worth of diamonds and rubies.

Cheers on the Champs-Elysees. France still awaited him. Five years to the day after the German entry into Paris, General Ike received the Cross of Liberation from General Charles de Gaulle. Then, saluting from an open car, he was driven between roaring thousands down the Champs-Elysees. To his collection of precious souvenirs, France added a gold-hiked sword which Napoleon had worn as First Consul, a gold cigaret case encrusted with five sapphire stars.

At week's end General Ike called in correspondents in the French capital for a farewell interview, answered dozens of questions on the strategy and conduct of the war (see below). As he had all week, he spoke again of his hope for peace and fairness in the world of the future: "The peace lies, when you get down to it, with all the peoples of the world, not just for the moment with a political leader. . . ."

Then, after three and a half years of war--with the dust of Africa, the heat of

Sicily, the mud of Italy, the fire of Omaha Beach, the anxiety of the Bulge, and the triumph of the Rhine behind him--he started for home.

* One perquisite: the privilege of being hanged in special robes if found guilty of murder.

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