WHEN ONE WAS TEN, nobody, least of all the boys of German stem, served willingly on the Kaiser’s side in war games. The little kids and younger brothers gunned Fokkers through the back yards and crashed flaming against the garage as Rickenbacker and his hat-in-ring squadron of Spads roared overhead piloted by the big boys. Then landing at the Allied aerodrome, which was quite a different thing from an airfield, and into the flight office (again the garage) swaggered they, tightbooted, helmet straps swinging free, demanding coggnack from the Frog wench behind the bar which without transition gave onto the office; while the de-Germanized younger brothers greased the planes, for this was also a hangar.
Shortly Richthofen might pay another call in his craft painted all checkers like a taxi, pitching to the tarmac a black gauntlet, showing a brief glimpse of grim but noble face, black-goggled, over the fuselage; mocking ailerons just clearing the high-tension wires at the field’s end but not the undercarriage, which was severed. Jerry now could not land; with nothing to lose, this dogfight was for keeps. Inside the glove, which a mechanic fetched in, a note in Teutonic script: “My compliments to your gallant command. I issue an open challenge.” Cross of Malta. Signed, Baron R. Aloft, fabric tearing in Immelmann turns, oil-line burst spewing goggle lenses with black slime, Browning jammed, you dropped the foe with your sidearm and looked down in long salute at his incendiary spiral into the chrysanthemum bed. Ave, atque, vale, brave adversary! I slew you as you would have slain me, your cause was hopeless but not contemptible, we share in that community which the whey-faced civilian regardless of nation cannot enter.
To be sure, not every enemy was a Richthofen. G-8 the master spy, commuting behind German lines in the limitless disguises from his armpit cosmetic chest, was certain to meet the pigface Hun, bayoneter of Belgian babies, violator of maidens; cabbage for a head, sausage-limbed, cheeks of ass like dirigibles kissing, he waddled in cruel insolence before the helpless or groveled in fright before his master. G-8, whose trunk formed a triangle standing on its apex, was right to destroy this creature if only for aesthetic reasons.
Reinhart’s paternal grandfather, who looked like one of G-8’s victims, with a somewhat better distribution of weight, was more charitably described as a double for Hindenburg, a sound man. He cut meat on weekdays and on Sundays read the Volks-Zeit-ung and decanted in the cellar a thin, tasteless homebrew of which he was inordinately proud. He could support a leg of beef at full arm’s length with one hand; he was a source of blutwurst slices on the sly; his place of work was floored with wood shavings and blood lay in pools on the butcher’s block and dripped from the joints on the hook. He had left the Old Country to beat the draft; he had reportedly thought the Nazis were fools and was fortunate to have departed the world before they could disabuse him. These, and a small store of mispronunciations, were all Carlo could remember beyond an enormous, kindly, mustached face that smelled of beer and pipe, that was less articulate in the general tongue than himself at nine, that seemed, for all its implicit power and the massive hands that could not touch his shoulders so gently as not to bruise, a distant presence.
When in adolescence Reinhart was suddenly overwhelmed with the purposelessness of the bleak journey from pablum to embalming fluid—not for himself, but everybody else; he would somehow, alone, escape and was now investigating the various modes of exit—he once asked his father, and querulously, because the reason he alone would escape was that he alone had the guts or intelligence to ask questions rather than weakly submit, just as the power of his will would protect him, alone, from eyeglasses, baldness, false teeth, poverty, a wife: “Why didn’t Grandpa ever go back to Germany?”
Could the Old Country, so remote, so rare, fail to exceed the here and now?
His father was shaving, or repairing the outside cellar door that hadn’t been true to its frame for a decade, or washing the automobile, and perhaps before the answer came had done each of these tenfold, because for him a question must be repeated many times, by reason of his apathy, which was a superb thing in its way and could have been heroic if behind him Rome were burning or half of London keeling over with the plague.
Finally, as he rose from whatever job, scant of breath, with stated or implied senility of leg, he replied: “Use your head. What was there for him there?”
There had, of course, been so much for him here. He hadn’t even owned his own butchershop, but was wage-slave in a native American’s, a man twenty years younger. He built a brick house in an end of town that shortly thereafter suffered an encroachment of lower-class cotton-pickin’ refugees from Kentucky, know locally as Briarhoppers, with their rusty cars and back-yard shacks and incestuous five-to-a-room, brought in by an absentee landlord named Horace Remington, who everyone was sure had changed his name from Levy, although they had never seen him—any more than they had seen for themselves that the earth was round. Grandma, native-born, whom he had carried off from a ten-dollar-a-week job at the pencil factory, survived him one year, and left material holdings of the house and two hundred fifty dollars. His one son, the man Carlo watched return with steel wool to the corroded hubcaps, was far from a raving success. This car, for example, was bought used with the two-fifty bequest—which showed how far back it went. And as to the house, it had gone to join its neighbors in the pocket of “Remington,” who, despicable though he was, paid a third again as much as any other offerer and therefore was able to seduce even the good people into aiding his effort to destroy the respectability of such areas. Now if one passed the old homestead he heard guitar music and saw degenerate faces at the windows.
Carlo left his father at the task—he would have been glad to help on request, but would not volunteer; he received fifty cents a week in allowance, for which his obligation was to cut grass in summer and shovel snow in winter—and went indoors, to the dark cavity at the end of the basement, which was really not so much cellar-end as dead space, a kind of tomb, under the front porch. Here in a cardboard box soft with moisture were his grandfather’s few effects, having for half a decade been in chemical mixture with the insatiable air: a twenty-five-cent pipe, “real bruyere” stamped on the shank; a straight razor, broken; a dollar watch, scarred chromium, its intestines locked in rust; cufflinks with the Oddfellows’ paralytic eye. A letter postmarked Berlin-Something, Berlin-Smear, April 12, 1927. My God, three years after Carlo was born; he was still astonished at evidence that the world had been up and around when he was so young. Inside, handwriting that not only was in another tongue but also in an alien alphabet, even the figures were queer. Finally, a single book, the leather of which some dry past time infected with an eczema that the basement damp had treated with a salve of blue mold. Nürnberger something, the golden letters just visible on the granulated cover. Within, it was all pictures of that splendid medieval town of towers, castles, moats, rivers flowing through buildings, dolls’ dwelling places hung over sallyports, and ironbound doors, four feet high, for dwarfs’ abodes in the bottom of the city wall; labyrinthine ways among steep houses with a little extra roof sprouting over each attic window, the general roofs themselves nowhere true, everywhere splaying, overshooting, cutting back, growing dormers and loggias and lookouts and hexagonal capsules, restrained from soaring off their timbered plaster only by the weight of these execrescences and a million tiles fine as the scales of a trout.
Magic and fabulous—no, it was not so much these as the Ohio street outside his own window, with its covering of smooth tar down which if you rolled for ten minutes you would pass a flat, dun high school, a raw Presbyterian church without a steeple, and fifty lawns so level and unobstructed that you could some Sunday push a roller from one limit to the next and squash nothing but a row of homeowners trimming the edges. In Nürnberg female angels ringed the city fountain gushing water from their breasts, but what was extraordinary was that America could be so ugly-dull; that was the fairy tale, along with radio programs for the housewife, movie cowboys who never kissed a girl, public drivel about shut-ins, mothers, flowers, the favorite prayers of celebrities, ministers being tough guys and businessmen wise ones, the stupid arrogance of newspaper reporters who wrote “grass roots” and “with the arrival of spring, usually blasé New Yorkers set aside their sophistication and frolicked gaily as children.” And sports. At the end of his sophomore year in high school he was the largest boy in the building and was invited to come out for football by the coach, a witless man adored by his teams apparently because he cursed them at half-time. He took Reinhart’s refusal in good grace, and was clever to do so; Carlo had some time before sent away to York, Pa., for a set of dumbbells and was already more muscular than the coach, except in the head. In Europe they did such things as weight lifting and gymnastics, although he was a touch too unwieldly for the latter.
He thought about Harvard and Amherst, places of old stone and vines and fireplaces in each room and tutors, as at Heidelberg and Leipzig, but it was revealed to him his last year in high school that he must go to the nearest state university, on account of the free tuition. At this institution he was permitted neither a lodging in town nor a single in the dormitory; with the unction peculiar to the tribe, the dean of men said he must mix and placed him with a roommate who hung pennants on one side of their metal-and-concrete cell, worked a water wave in the front of his hair, and crooned popular songs in idle moments. When shortly he applied again for a single, he discovered it was already on the way: the roomie had reported that Reinhart didn’t mix.
Although the architects had designed the few single rooms to be a constant punishment for the social deviates assigned them, Reinhart lived happy in his. He had loathed the college before he saw it and after a month’s residence knew his prior feeling as too mild: it was in sum a flat green mall overrun with round pink faces saying “Hi!”
He had read much as a boy, but only in the literature of the imagination. Expository writing was rough, almost impossible going; he had never been easy with the language of documents and directions on packages, and was not now with that of the natural and social sciences. Philosophy was somewhat better because it didn’t, and didn’t really pretend to, get anywhere. English was a book of contemporary readings about, on the one hand, the underprivileged and, on the other, initially irresponsible people coming to a sense of social obligation: there was a story, in the form of a letter to her parents, about a rich girl who married a labor organizer, the compassion going all one way—inward, to the letter-writer and spouse—and no passion at all. And German, that hard and very real tongue, proved difficult and dreary, with twelve cases for each noun, insanely irregular verbs, and perverse genders that made a door a female and a maiden a neuter, defying even that principle of nature by which, according to a neighbor in psychology, projecting objects seen in dreams are male sex symbols and receptacles female, for the pen was in Deutsch as feminine as the box was not.
For these reasons he grew fond of his little room, last floor back, next to the toilets, with an air conduit passing first over the ranges in the kitchen four stories lower, and came not to hear the staccato flushings and smell the lemon sauce for the semolina pudding. He sometimes hid out there all day, cutting classes on the motive of the little ills—sinus, swollen Achilles tendon, foreign matter in the eye, etc.—for which the dispensary would write a note, eschewing meals with the aid of Oreo cookies and those stale, soap-flavored cheese-cracker sandwiches one buys at the drugstore, and reading books of his own choice.
He had now grown to six-two, still an inch below his grandfather—which he might yet attain—and as much above his father as that mark exceeds five-nine. The set of dumbbells had given way to a barbell with changeable weights; in the “clean-and-jerk” lift he could handle two hundred pounds, five more than he weighed, yet he was inclined to solid beef rather than the sharp definition of muscle permitted more wiry types; and he was clumsy, tripping over roots on tardy runs to eight-o’clock classes, tending to enter a doorway with poor aim and collide with its frame, sometimes splintering the wood. A recluse, but when he emerged, a recipient of good will and that friendly fealty paid to large men in jabs-in-the-ribs and blows-on-the-upper-body, which along with the strain of trying to better his mark in the clean and jerk every afternoon kept him always sore of skin.
The books of his choice were The Invisible Man, which he was at any given time rereading; a volume printed at the author’s expense called A Life in the Field, by an Englishman who had towards the end of the nineteenth century scouted both in Matabeleland and along the Big Horn River in Montana; and Middle European short stories in English translation, in which the characters tended to live in the mountains or the valleys between them, walking to school on rutted cowpaths, sometimes getting lost in the forest—or had departed all this for the garish, quick life of the cities, which had gone to ashes in their mouths, and now yearned for the pastoral long ago forsaken; had a quiet but desperate passion for a girl who did not know they were alive or held them in sororal affection; attended day school, oppressed by a severe master and a fat bully; kept a faithful dog. Always a single sensibility, sometimes misunderstood, usually not even taken account of, by the insensate many; and in an atmosphere of mist, distant sounds, and if in the mountains, of course the silent, imperturbable snow, deceptively serene and treacherous, and on the glacier, a frozen rainbow. The stories were to be found in collections under one rubric or another but could take place in any of a variety of Central European areas at any given time under diverse political registrations: Bohemia, the Burgenland, Silesia, even Switzerland, anywhere that had a Germanic color and preferably a castle on some steep over placid water and in the foreground a cottage with a roof of straw.
Meanwhile he was almost flunking out in his course of study in German. For one thing, it was at eight o’clock, and he was most nights up till three, reading; for another, the language as taught had no relations to the tales, being at first Herr Schmidt exchanging the time of day with his neighbor and then simple scientific excerpts for the premedical students, which the instructor decided it wouldn’t hurt the few general people to read, either. At the end of the year he just, but made it in German and the other courses, low C’s with the exception of zoology lab, where in the interests of a moody, fitful romance a girl friend had made his dissection drawings, upping him a grade.
Simultaneous with Reinhart’s entrance into junior year in high school, the Wehrmacht had invaded Poland; at the end of the term they took France; upon his graduation, entered Russia; just before his first-year college Christmas holiday, were at war with America. By one means or another, he was aware of these events although he never read the papers. He was furthermore aware that wars were wrong and foolish and the official ways of nations, always stupid and often wicked; that propaganda, regardless of side, was an absolute lie: for example, as everyone knew, the German “atrocities” of World War I were fabrications of the British and French, who moreover did not let up in the ensuing twenty years, thereby giving Hitler some excuse for his silly ravings. Hitler held no appeal for him, having an unmistakable aroma of the tramp and no dignity, and, discounting their portrayal in Hollywood movies, the Nazis were preposterously vulgar; but opposed to the little, venomous, weak French and the British, thin and effeminate, they could hardly be assigned the exclusive evil in an intestine European quarrel over markets and territories.
Yet when America came into the war, it was a man’s place to go soldiering, and the ideals concerned were not public ones dreamed up by journalists and pompous bores in high office but private matters. He felt himself a kind of German, yet he would cheerfully have slain the whole German army in fair combat and exposed himself to the same fate. On this principle he almost presented his person to the enlistment office early Friday morning, December 12, 1941; doubtless would have, had there been such a bureau in his little college town; but there wasn’t, and the closest city, the place he crept alone every weekend to oppose his harsh weekday regimen with whiskey and coke, was eight miles off—it was impossible to hitchhike there, enlist, and get back without missing classes.
His second thoughts were confirmed three days later when the mincing dean told the assembled men that being educated people they could better serve by pursuing their studies with renewed vigor. It was not only his idea, he averred, but that of the Armed Forces, who as reward would commission every man to graduate. However, six weeks later, when the first fine fire had cooled and it was too late to volunteer from a position of enthusiasm, the male students were reconvoked. Now anyone wishing to stay out of the Army must enlist—in the reserve.
Reinhart called at the dean’s office posthaste, already having been the target of remarks in bars, inarticulate grumbles by gray-sideburned potguts on the theme of why so much meat was not yet sacked in olive drab. The dean’s secretary, one of those tight-rectumed persons whose every little motion is spite against some subject so long vanished that every other human being has taken on his-her appearance, after consulting the records told him with much satisfaction that the Enlisted Reserve Corps had a certain academic standard to which he failed to measure up. He cut classes and went to town and got stinking, which was not easy to do in an otherwise deserted tavern on Wednesday afternoon with no music. A fortyish waitress named Wanda some time in the next six hours told him I knock off work at eleven and at eleven-thirty, in a one-room apartment where a leaky faucet dripped a quick rhythm to which no one could have kept stride, displayed unusually kittenish ways and a pair of thick thighs marbled with blue veins. The First Time he had ever really Got In; as usual the popular consensus, which in his dormitory held that the experience was persistently overrated, was a lie; indeed, it had been in all his years the lone achievement; a pity that our society offered no male career in that direction.
In the late spring, just before the end of the year, another alteration in his university’s theory of the reserves. If they limited membership to the bright students, the campus would soon be depopulated by the draft; so now a simple passing grade became a ticket of entry. Reinhart was permitted to sign up and given a little wallet-card signed by the Secretary of War as an assurance that he would do his service in the classroom. Actually, he was still ahead of time, was still not old enough to register for the draft. He had been a clever fellow in grammar school, doing eight years in seven, before the rot set in, and was yet only seventeen.
Sophomore German was Wilhelm Tell, tough to read, maudlin of sentiment. Reinhart now had a lodging in town and in consideration of the low rent went without maid service; a gemütlich sty except on those monthly occasions when his nihilism grew strong enough to annihilate itself temporarily and he borrowed the landlady’s carpet sweeper. He read The Sorrows of Werther on his own, in English of course, and went so far as to get lent the German text by his professor, who after the fashion of the kind supposed that only good students had such ambitions and was at once wary, impressed, and all the more condescending for the pretense that he was not. But it was far too tedious to go line for line with the original; he pooped out on page two.
As to the other courses, American history was worst, debunking all the colorful legends and filling the vacuum so made with a thick Cream-of-Wheat of—as usual—economics; tariffs and taxes and indentured servants and land grants, and a general agreement that every one of the wars could have been avoided had these items not been mishandled by well-meaning but inept statesmen.
At the end of the fall term Reinhart made I-for-incomplete in history, as an alternative to the F he would have received had he not one morning in February absentmindedly cut his toenail too deep, inadvertently generating a wound which kept him from the exam. Presently the I stood for infinity: along about the beginning of March his gorge rose for the last time and would not come down; he went to the campus headquarters of the reserve and signed on for active duty.
His parents protested in their pallid way, finding everything a rejection of them and at a loss to see that their weak representations made self-counsel necessary; as if an impalpable father were not enough, he had a mother with whom nothing succeeded like failure. She would have preferred his staying in school, especially now that he was flunking. He tried to convince her that the Army life held promise of far more squalid drudgery than did college, that it was likely a person of his delicate constitution would collapse in training, and she was to a degree mollified.
Of course he didn’t really say this; he seldom talked to his parents at all, simply, on his holiday visits home, communicating silently through the shoulder blades, a language he had learned from his father. When he was a small boy Reinhart had often wished for a temporary catastrophe from which he could rescue his folks—an unarmed burglar or minor fire—not only to show he cared but also to see if they did, if they could honor triumph as well as defeat, but the occasion never came, and just as well, for it might have come during one of his frequent illnesses—at which time, anyway, he had their interest.
They were German too, one generation closer than he, and celebrated the fact in their tastes—must have, because they could hardly have invented them on their own: heavy, flavorless food, limited ambitions, disapproval of the maverick, funeral-going, trust in people with broad faces, and belief in the special virtue of a dreary breed known as the German mother. “German” as a lifelong malady that was without hope but never serious; as the thin edge above want and far below plenty; as crepe-hanging; as self-pity—yet from these compounding a strange morality that regarded itself as superior to all variant modes. He had been encouraged since infancy to think of himself as an average man, but in a harshly restricted community where some were less average than others; if wealthy, had immorally taken too much from the world; if very poor, were immorally lazy; if taking pleasure in the material, ostentatious; if ascetic, holier-than-thou. But never “German” as the lofty vision, the old and exquisite manners of prince and peasant, battlements and armor, clear water splashing down from high, blue rocks, wine named for the milk of the Virgin, maleness, the noble marriage of feeling and thought.
But they sent him to college, on an insurance policy which his father, being an agent, had sold to himself, and the premiums for which, lean year in and out, had claimed all their unencumbered money, and Reinhart had first opted for Liberal Arts instead of Business Administration and now left even that. As he departed for camp he carried, along with his toilet articles and change of socks in a miniature suitcase, an acute suspicion that he would come to nothing, and... a marvelous sense of relief.
At the induction center an interviewer saw the B in zoology on the record and put him down for a medic, asking him first, though, for as a volunteer you had some faint choice. And he agreed, suddenly finding his bloodthirsty fancy had paled; a superior and sensitive person deplored violence; it didn’t, as every retroactive commentator on past wars insisted, “settle anything.” He personally had made himself so strong with the weights that no one bothered him, and if they did, he generally gave way in the conviction that not only were they probably right but that also anger and hostility were degrading. Under the Geneva Rules medical troops were all but neutral, and in recognition of this were not intentionally shot at and if captured were obliged to go on treating wounded, theirs or the enemy’s, it made no difference; they were above the taking of sides.
The Germans honored this convention—that was admitted by the most rabid. For after he had been in the service a few months, Reinhart began to seek reasons why the Germans, while wrong—they warred against the U.S., for one thing, and it was probably true that Czechoslovakia and Norway and Holland, little harmless Holland!, had inoffensively not deserved invasion; true as well that, even discounting for cheap newsmen and their “copy,” there had been regrettable brutalities by the extremist, Nazi units, although in view of the Belgian babies of World War I you should go cautiously here; they were surely wrong to torture Jews, who he had discovered in college were, at least in their American branch, a pretty good bunch of fellows given certain peculiarities, and who apparently had not during the German inflation of the twenties enriched themselves while gentiles starved, as alleged by Hitler & Co., although one must be careful here, too, in simple justice, for anyone who had ever traded in a Hebrew haberdashery knew the Jew as far from a naïve man—he had come under an obligation to find reasons why the Germans, though mistaken, though bullies, though bad, if you will, were yet not bad, were not to be allowed that case which the greatest writers assure us even Satan has.
The Army, oddly enough, was filled with superior people, the universities being then in the process of emptying to that purpose. Every barracks had its circle of cultivation, and while its membership was still outnumbered by the gross herd playing cards, shooting dice, and shouting incessantly fuck this, fuck that, it in the strength of unity read newspaper editorials, went on pass to hear the nearest city’s philharmonic, and discussed international political events. At every post where Reinhart served, this circle in fact had been semi-officialized, meeting at least once a week with the authority and encouragement of an intellectual officer. Since he was channeled in that direction by cultural imperatives and nobody else seemed interested in him, Reinhart willy-nilly frequented this society, attending a few concerts, where he felt unpleasantly conspicuous as the middle-aged civilian audience beamed benevolently on the display of high-minded soldiery, and sitting in on some discussions, quaking with terror that he might be called upon to add his half-cent. If that sum were indeed low enough to symbolize the content of his head as he sat surrounded by his frighteningly articulate comrades.
The prevailing sentiment was, as one intense, red-haired, hollow-cheeked PFC (they were all privates and PFCs) put it, “just left of center, like FDR.” Reinhart literally did not know what this meant, except that while in grammar and high schools, when he took his father’s cue in politics, he had detested Roosevelt, had at campaign times worn little buttons against him, one for Landon pinned to a sunflower head of yellow felt, another reading simply: “We don’t want Eleanor either.” And still, even after he lost all interest in that sort of thing, carried a vague distaste for the man which was renewed at every picture of the teeth, the cape, the cigarette holder, the dog, the wife melting in good will, the sons drooping in false modesty, the desk ornaments, and Sarah Delano R., the grim progenitor of all these. Yet it was not subsequently hard to swallow that he had been an improvement on old Hoover, starched-collar, pickle-faced, the personified No. And whatever left-of-center now meant—he had always supposed it a kind of radical creed presided over by kindly-looking cranks like Norman Thomas who were understood to be not serious and a more extreme variety represented by Earl Browder with his mustache and dark shirt and faintly alien air, which might be sinister if it ever got its most improbable chance—what it meant now could only be something respectable, if somewhat strangely motivated, for these young men professed a constant concern for victims of one social outrage or another, in which company they themselves could not be counted, so that it was not a demonstration of self-interest.
Reinhart was impressed, even cowed, by their easy yet earnest assurance and disturbed by the shrinking of his hitherto supposed wide horizon. How he had wasted his faculties to date! Even if his sympathies had been all along on the right side: these people too were opposed—and from a far more intelligent point of vantage—to the double-breasted, cigar-smoking deities of business, the devotional poems in Sunday supplements, Mother’s Day, Congressmen, and the suburban imagination. In college he had been too apathetic to find this out, confined in the circle of self as he was then. Beneath the surface pall there was meat in the political and economic disciplines; as approached by these acute young men, they were adventurous and splendid and, he soon saw, were far fitter areas for the mature moral effort than the gross physical projects he had earlier honored.
For example, one’s build. These men, by his earlier standards, were usually physical wrecks, if small, skinny, if large, flabby, shoulders slumped, belly, if they had one, bulging, the whole man hung with garments as a point of merit shabby as the Army would allow. And no pride of carriage even in the shower, where if he met one of them Reinhart was thrown into confusion: embarrassed by his undulating biceps as he soaped the scalp, yet unwilling to loose the arm’s tension if there was also present one of the common sort of soldier who didn’t applaud intellect.
It was stupid, perhaps mean, to be a good soldier in any manner, although he had been right to get appointed to the medics on motives of nonviolence. All these people had been drafted, so that they had no choice, but they would have chosen the medical department. Some even had friends immensely admired who would not serve in anything but conscientious-objector enclosures; some others confessed that while that was going too far for them, it was a thing most noble for a man to hold fast at any sacrifice to what he believed right and true, against the mob, by which they certainly did not mean the people, who were always r. and t, but rather the crowd who ran things. Reinhart would earlier have supposed the latter meant Roosevelt and his entourage, with everything but Maine and Vermont, four terms without hindrance, no end in sight, but he soon found this a misapprehension, the situation being precisely the reverse, with all such good folk victims. Indeed, the persons to be admired were invariably victims, and the degree of their victimization was the degree of one’s approval. The unfortunates even included some staggeringly rich men, who however were “liberal” and therefore smeared, earning the herohood into which poor men were enlisted at birth.
Reinhart had never used his head for much but dreams, he knew, and this new employment of the brain was exciting as well as good, for neither did it ignore the heart as it surveyed the vast panorama of the evil that men had made in the world and recommended sensible alleviations. The underfed coolies of Asia alongside the oversated warlords; the black and twisted miner deep in the earth’s entrails, considered with the flabby oyster of a mineowner in his house on the hill; the poor little have-not, next to the arrogant, pudgy have. These contrasts were inexcusable in a world where education should be within everyone’s reach, where it was now technically feasible for every man to be served by the machine rather than vice versa; they were wicked and what was worse, silly, most of the wrong people not wishing to be bad so much as not understanding what was good.
You take the Germans, for example, or really to test these intelligent new ethics, take Hitler. You at least had to grant that, terrible as they were, he had stuck to his ideals. If that awful energy could have been diverted into virtuous channels, if he could have stopped after solving the problem of unemployment and building the wonderful net of highways!—No, you most assuredly did not take either the Germans or Hitler; and if you did, there were strong grounds for popping you in the booby hatch. At least, so said without words the faces of the others to whom Reinhart, breaking his long silence, introduced this application of the theory they had so generously trained him to use. The trouble was that they had forgetfully omitted one clause from the grand code: no Germans need apply.
Reinhart was quick to know the justice in this, too, for, awakening from his long sleep, he had begun to see the terrible landscape of actuality. It was false to think that the Nazis were an accidental, noxious but temporary weed upon a permanently rich German ground of the essence, which might one day be cleared. No, go as far back as you would, the wars of 1914-18 and ’70 against freedom-loving, culture-cradle France, the rise of brutal Prussia, way back to the war lasting thirty years and further to the razing of the magnificent Roman civilization by the tribes which Tacitus had earlier observed as being without mercy. Martin Luther overthrew the wickedness of popery; Frederick the Great sponsored the culture of the Age of Reason; Goethe was spokesman for the liberties of the heart and mind; Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, revolted by their time’s cruel and shallow materialism, drafted prescriptions for the free personality—even these were but masks for more Germanic creeds, or the same old one, of tyranny, militarism, suicide, irresponsibility, and madness.
When in the last months of the war American troops went choking through the fell streets of Buchenwald and other camps, passed the vast trenches of slack human skins, the bones inside all loose from their connections, and oven-grates of gray human ash, took in their nostrils that bouquet of burned man which for recognition it is unnecessary ever to have smelled before, and for sleep impossible to forget after—when the pictures and accounts were published, for Reinhart as usual was not there—the most malevolent indictment by the anti-Germans had not been enough, the righteous people who wished to reduce the land to a pastoral community were too mild, perhaps not even another Flood would suffice. For the outrage had been done to him, Reinhart, who had trusted in his origins.
There is no native American but the redskin; we others are something else at a slight remove, which cannot be changed; our names and looks and surely some complexion of the corpuscles themselves are to some old line peculiar, else we should blow away without identity. So he believed—his only belief, along with an idea of the possibility of simple decency—and thus, with his deep relation to what the superior, bright young men in the discussion groups were pledged to destroy, he disqualified himself from their company and took up instead—well, what was fun, booze and snatch and other pursuits generally pointless and amoral, and was forever delighting such people as Marsala with his adaptability.
His one secret was that he liked the Army, where the petty decisions were provided and the major ones ignored, and where you could live as if you had been born the day you put on the uniform.