The Winds of War

now one of mankind’s richest deposits of cultural achievement, Byron, whatever your momentary disgust from overexposure.”

Byron shrugged. Leslie Slote said, “Is your father a clergyman?”

“His father’s a naval officer,” said Jastrow.

“Really? What branch?”

Byron said, “Well, right now he’s in War Plans.”

“My goodness! War Plans?” Dr. Jastrow pretended a comic flutter. “I didn’t know that. Is it as ominous as it sounds?”

“Sir, every country draws up theoretical war plans in peacetime.”

“Does your father think a war is imminent?”

“I got my last letter from him in November. He said nothing about a war.”

The other three exchanged odd glances. Slote said, “Would he, in casual correspondence?”

“He might have asked me to come home. He didn’t.”

“Interesting,” said Dr. Jastrow, with a little complacent grin at Slote, rubbing his tiny hands.

“As a matter of fact, I think there’s going to be a war,” Byron said. This caused a silence of a second or two, and more glances.

Jastrow said, “Really? Why?”

“Well, I just toured Germany. You see nothing but uniforms, parades, drills, brass bands. Anywhere you drive, you end up passing army trucks full of troops, and railroad cars loaded with artillery and tanks. Trains sometimes a couple of miles long.”

“But, Byron, it was with just such displays that Hitler won Austria and the Sudetenland,” said Jastrow, “and he never fired a shot.”

Natalie said to Byron, “Leslie thinks my uncle should go home. We’ve had a running argument for three days.”

“I see.”

Jastrow was peeling a pear with elderly deliberate gestures, using an ivory-handled knife. “Yes, Byron, I’m being mulish.” The use of the word was accidental, for he grinned and added, “Being a hybrid of sorts myself, I guess. This is a comfortable house, it’s the only home I have now, and my work is going well. Moving would cost me half a year. If I tried to sell the house, I couldn’t find an Italian to offer me five cents on the dollar. They’ve been dealing for many centuries with foreigners who’ve had to cut and run. They’d skin me alive. I was aware of all this when I bought the villa. I expect to end my days here.”

“Not this fall at the hands of the Nazis, I trust,” Slote said.

“Oh, hell, Slote,” Natalie broke in, slicing a flat hand downward through the air. “Since when does the Foreign Service have such a distinguished record for foresight? Since Munich? Since Austria? Since the Rhineland? Weren’t you surprised every time?”

Byron listened with interest to this exchange. The others seemed to have forgotten he was at the table.

“Hitler has been making irrational moves with catastrophic possibilities,” Slote retorted. “Anybody can pull a gun in the street and shoot four people down before the cops come and stop him. Until now that’s been Hitler’s so- called foreign policy brilliance in a nutshell. The surprise of an outlaw running wild. That game’s played out. The others are aroused now. They’ll stop him in Poland.”

Jastrow ate a piece of pear, and began to talk in a rhythmic mellifluous way, something between meditating aloud and lecturing in a classroom. “Leslie, if Hitler were the Kaiser, or a man like the Charles the Twelfth, I admit I’d be worried. But he’s far more competent than you think. Fortunately the old ruling class is destroyed. They unleashed the World War with their dry-rotted incompetence, those preening, posturing, sleek royalties and politicians of 1914, those bemedalled womanizers and sodomites out of Proust. They never dreamed that the old manners, the old paperwork, the old protocol, were done for, and that industrialized warfare would shatter the old system like a boot kicked through a dollhouse. So they went to the trash heap, and new leadership came up out of the sewers, where realism runs and change often starts. The early Christians haunted the sewers and catacombs of Rome, you know,” Jastrow said to Byron Henry, clearly relishing a fresh audience.

“Yes, sir, I learned about that.”

“Of course you did. Well, Hitler’s a vagabond, Mussolini’s a vagabond, and Stalin’s a jailbird. These are new, tough, able, and clever men, straight up from the sewers. Lenin, another jailbird, was the great originator. He made it all up, Leslie, you realize — the Jesuitical secret party, the coarse slogans for the masses and the contempt for their intelligence and memory, the fanatic language, the strident dogmas, the Moslem religiosity in politics, the crude pageantry, the total cynicism of tactics, it’s all Leninism. Hitler is a Leninist, Mussolini is a Leninist. The talk of anti-communism and pro-communism is for fools and children.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Aaron—”

“Just a moment, now! Lenin was all prudence and caution in foreign affairs, and that is my whole point. Glory, and honor, and all those tinselly illusions of the old system that led to wars, were to Lenin the merest eyewash. So it is to Hitler. He has never moved when he couldn’t get away with it. The outlaw running wild with a gun is the exact effect he wishes to create. I’m surprised that you’re taken in. He is really a very, very prudent man. If he can make it in Poland without war, he’ll do it. Otherwise he’ll not move. Not now. Perhaps in ten years, when he’s built Germany up enough. I shall be very content to live another ten years.”

Slote pulled at his moustache with lean nervous fingers. “You really lose me, Aaron. Can you be serious? Hitler a Leninist! That’s a coffeehouse paradox, and you know it. The Russian Revolution is a radical change in history. The abolition of private property has created a new world. You may like it or detest it, but it’s new. Hitler’s socialism was a sham to get a mob of gangsters into power. He’s frozen the German economy just as it was, smashed the labor unions, lengthened the working hours, cut the pay, and kept all the old rich crowd on top, the Krupps and Thyssens, the men who gave him the money to run for office. The big Nazis live like barons, like sultans. The concentration camps are for anybody who still wants the socialist part of National Socialism. Don’t you know that? The 1934 purge was nothing but a showdown between the socialist element of the Nazi Party, and the army generals and rich conservatives. Hitler shot his old Party friends like partridges. That you rely on this man’s prudence for your safety, and for Natalie’s, strikes me as grotesque.”

“Does it?” Jastrow glanced at his watch and sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m impressed with Hitler’s ability to use socialist prattle when necessary, and then discard it. He uses doctrines as he uses money, to get things done. They’re expendable. He uses racism because that’s the pure distillate of German romantic egotism, just as Lenin used utopian Marxism because it appealed to Russia’s messianic streak. Hitler means to hammer out a united Europe. If a nonsense jumble of racist bunkum, socialist promises, brass bands, parades, uniforms, and weepy songs is what welds Germans into a blunt instrument, he gives them that. The Germans are stolid, clever, brutal, and docile, and they will vigorously execute any command barked at them with a loud enough voice. He understands them, and he may just succeed. A unified Europe must come. The medieval jigsaw of nations is obsolete. The balance of power is dangerous foolishness in the industrial age. It must all be thrown out. Somebody has to be ruthless enough to do it, since the peoples with their ancient hatreds will never do it themselves. It’s only Napoleon’s original vision, but he was a century ahead of his time. The old crowd was still strong enough to catch and put him in a crate to die. But there’s nobody to cage Hitler.”

Byron blurted, “Dr. Jastrow, when I was in Germany I saw the signs on park benches and in trolley cars about the Jews. I saw burnt-out synagogues.”

“Yes?”

They all looked at him. He went on, “I’m surprised you talk as calmly about Hitler as you do. Being Jewish, I mean.”

Dr. Jastrow smiled a slow, acid smile, showing little yellowish teeth with one gold crown. He stroked his beard and spoke deliberately, the classroom note strong. “Well! Your surprise doesn’t surprise me. Young people — young Americans especially — aren’t aware that the tolerance for Jews in Europe is only fifty to a hundred years old and that it’s never gone deep. It didn’t touch Poland, where I was born. Even in the west — what about the Dreyfus case? No, no. In that respect Hitler represents only a return to normalcy for Europe, after the brief glow of liberalism. The hostility simply moved from the church to the anti-Semitic parties, because the French Revolution changed Europe from a religious to a political continent. If Hitler does win out, the Jews will fall back to the