Foreign News: Troph

In a dim-lit bay of the Hôtel des Invalides, along with flintlocks and drooping battle flags, stands the most famed, most tatterdemalion taxi in all France. It is one of the fleet of 600 creaking lizzies that carried troops from Paris to war in September 1914 and helped win the first Battle of the Marne.

Last week the tired old invalides (wounded veterans) who act as museum attendants began to clear a space next to the shabby taxi de la Marne for one of the costliest, fanciest automobiles ever built. The new exhibit: the supercharged, chromium-plated German Mercedes limousine, 18 ft. long, with bulletproof windows 2 in. thick, in which Adolf Hitler drove through Paris in June 1940.