Hess on the Heather

The British still had not got their Hess story straight last week. From somewhere in Scotland a U.S. newsman cabled that he could watch Rudolf Hess as the No. 1 Nazi Abroad gazed from his hospital window across the highland heather. Parachutist Hess, he heard, was a cheery fellow, ready at talk with the nurses, quick in praise of the mountain scenery.

With his fractured ankle now well on the mend, he stumped about, a dour Scottish captain dogging his trail. But London reports had him mum and sullen, complaining at being given ordinary food, demanding "extras" for which he said he had money to pay, piqued because no Cabinet ministers had yet visited him.

A week's official hush and hesitancy brought no further explanation of the Hesscapade. The celebrated riddle--did Hess seek peace with the British, or peace from Hitler?--had already vanished into the back pages. The Nazis called the affair closed, though rumors of arrests in Germany persisted. If the British had found the answer, they kept it to themselves. Winston Churchill declined to make a statement. Air Secretary Sir Archibald Sinclair simply denied that the boxing, flying Duke of Hamilton, whom Hess said he came seeking, had even corresponded with Rudolf Hess.

Pending the true account of the strange flight of Adolf Hitler's Deputy, Britons were inclined with the rest of the world to view the incident as still another, if the screwiest, of World War II's inscrutable mutations.

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