An Infinity of Mirrors (6 page)

“It isn't likely that will happen.”

“With lawyers, as with life, anything can happen.” He tapped his cheek with his forefinger. “If this face could only talk, Paule, it could turn your hair white. All you need to do is to agree that we must be prepared. It is an intelligence test. Do you agree?”

She nodded.

“Your husband is an army officer, and that is a particularly hazardous profession in Germany. If you were widowed it seems to me likely that you would wish to return to France.” He got up stiffly and walked to the glass door which faced the exotic garden. “Fortunately, you have no traceable property or income. On the day I attend your wedding in Berlin, I shall make arrangements with a Berlin bank to deposit the sum of fifteen hundred reichsmarks each month, a substantial sum which when added to your husband's pay will represent an unusually comfortable income for Germany today. You will have all of your clothes made here, of course, and that will be paid for here. For the rest, the only record will be safely in Nyon and Geneva, and we'll let the monstrous Germans whistle for their twenty-five percent should you ever choose to leave their insatiably destructive country.”

Six

Veelee was not a stupid man by any means, but he was not a brilliant man either. He had not been sent to France for his wit. The General Staff had selected him and had prepared him because of his knowledge of essential military matters and for his direct, even urgent, persuasive force. The General Staff had well understood the French conceits concerning French lucidity. They reasoned that Veelee would be baited—perhaps subtly, perhaps not—with unforeseeable conversational gambits, so in his defense they had had an expert prepare a gambit which would attack and confuse the French by enraging them, and Veelee had undertaken the assignment to learn this conversation piece by heart. He understood clearly that it was to be used, at his discretion, whenever a French adversary seemed to be becoming uncomfortably critical of German history or of the present German administration.

Veelee, Paule, and Maître Gitlin were on the Nord-Sud Express. The lawyer had begun quite brilliantly to compare France and Germany, however to Germany's detriment. Veelee's well-ordered mind had merely called upon his memory for the special exercise and, seeming to respond directly to Maître Gitlin's subtle insinuations, Veelee began to speak.

“We can thank geography and climate for the high competence of the German Army,” Veelee said, as the train moved through the Hercynian range, hurrying across Germany: the fifth largest state in Europe, composed of great plains, plateaus, and several old mountain ranges, a hodgepodge of lakes, moraines, channels and bogs left by the glacier. Veelee's native land touched nine sovereign states and two seas; it was Roman in the south, Slavonic in the center, and Scandinavian in the north. The train was moving across Lüneberg Heath, in the Old Valley zone; Berlin was ahead, and beyond Berlin, on the Northern Drift plains, lay Pomerania, Veelee's ancestral home.

Paule was knitting. She wore a wine silk Russian blouse, buttoned high at the throat, and a high black fox hat which attentuated the long, bony lines of her striking face. Her large eyes held Veelee with astonishment. She had never heard him express such a reflective facet of himself.

“Harsh winters drive our people to their hearths,” Veelee said dreamily. “Deep family unity is developed and headed by The Father, a harsh, demanding, uncompromising figure who forms our character and makes us obedient to authority and dependent upon regimentation. The family is the only educational system which forms the character.”

Maître Gitlin smoked a cheroot and stared at the shining brass fittings of the train compartment. He was thinking about the caps of the young train shunters at Osnabrück; peaked crowns of forage caps with stiffeners at the extraordinarily high fronts, giving the railroad yards a weirdly military look.

They were on the Nord-Sud Express's regular run from Lisbon to Leningrad. They had left Paris at two-fifteen
P.M.
on the previous afternoon and they would be in Berlin within the hour, at eight forty-three
A.M.
Someone rich must have joined the train at Liége because Car 724 with its barber shop, gymnasium, and shower bath had become part of the train. On inquiry Maître Gitlin had learned that it had been built thirty years before for members of the Russian nobility who were hurrying to lose fortunes at Monte Carlo.

“Schools only garnish character,” Veelee murmured. “In Germany everything we have we owe to the demands made on us by our fathers, then to the abnegation of the mother to this symbol, then from having the symbol itself prove the merit of the system by bowing to the authority immediately above him. To a child it is confusing at first, but later he sees the unity of authority and the need for it. We are obedient and law-abiding. We allow experts to do our thinking where possible, because this lengthens the step forward for all Germans.”

“We have experts in France, too,” Maître Gitlin said, “but they don't rule us.”

“I didn't really mean they rule us either.”

“We are not a subservient nation,” Gitlin insisted.

“The English have discipline, too, of course,” Veelee said, moving into the second phase of the talk which had been prepared to disconcert Frenchmen. “I know less than nothing about the family-unit side of their education, or about their schools or other adversities, but they seem to pour their obedience into something outside the family. Into the monarchy? No. I think it must be that the diffusion they acquired from colonizing the world from such a tiny island taught them the need for obedience, if only to set an example. They
are
this island, and that has made them homogeneous. In learning to live so densely packed upon such a small island, they compartmentalized themselves into classes which recognized codes of obedience to each other. They are a family of many classes, and their classes fight for each other when they face the world and only fight against each other through their politics. We admire them.”

“I take it you do not admire the French?” Maître Gitlin asked.

“If we were weaker we would, of course.”

“You are saying it is a question of politics?”

“Germans don't understand politics—and I don't say that as a soldier. We are trained in politics and we know nothing. Politicians, who are rarely trained in our politics, know even less.”

“I quite agree with you.”

“It is amazing, really. For all the unity we have when we are strongly led, we cannot seem to figure out a way to create leaders who emerge from a unified people. But in time, in good time. That is Hanover out the window. I am a Pomeranian. When I was a boy a conscript from Hesse never spoke about joining the army, but of joining the Prussians. We haven't been a nation long enough, you know.”

Gitlin snorted. Paule stared at Veelee with total wonderment, struck with this incredible contribution of intellectualism, in addition to everything else he had.

“Still,” Veelee said, “we are better off for it than the French, who understand politics so well that they pimp for it and send it out into the streets to prostitute its meaning, until only the basest Frenchmen are willing to pursue such a career—mongrels and manipulators and the wearily cynical who fondle governments as they shuttle past. It is a kind of perversion.”

“Better a perversion for politics than a perversion for war, if I may say so.”

“Please!” Paule said. “No more of this. And don't tell me that you two are just fooling.”

“Just an abstract discussion, darling.” Veelee looked at her and shrugged, and for an instant she had the feeling it was all over his head, too.

“Of course,” the Maître said. “The art of conversation is not necessarily dead. That's all, Paule.”

“It would be nicer if you practiced on music,” Paule said. “Saint-Saëns versus Wagner, or a conversational theme like that.”

“We were discussing education, which is even more harmless,” Veelee said, moving up his next set of gambits into the firing line, his memory serving him without flaw. “The French attitude toward their politics, I think, is the fault of their basic education—in the family unit, that is, where it counts. The ability to deceive self, then to deceive life, begins with the family unit. The goal of the French family is not obedience but animal gratification and Saturnalian existence. With such goals how can they find unity? Each man's sensual gratification differs from each other's. And that is anti-family—that is the cult of the individual. That is the total service of self and only of self. A family is a group of people, just as a nation is a group of families, and if the group has divisive goals there is no more group. What France needs is a stern and demanding father. Your revolutionary slogan has come to mean Libertinism, Equal Rights to Self-indulgence, and the cold, anti-social Fraternity of self having intercourse only with self.”

In reply Maître Gitlin's voice answered almost too precisely, adding paragoges to the ending of each word, so that the effect was a caricature of precision. “Frenchmen live to live, not to die,” he said.

“And I envy that, Maître,” Veelee answered. “I even think it is true to an extent—at least to the extent that each country's solution will contrast with the other's because of the basic differences in our education.”

“I hope you are right, and for that reason,” the Maître said. “Thank God for the difference too, I say.” He stood up. “Please excuse me. I must get some air.”

Veelee stared at the slammed door of the compartment. “I'm sure I've offended him,” he said, not having the slightest idea how he had done it, “but these long train rides are so dull.”

Paule continued to stare at Veelee with new, awed eyes. He had revealed a casual brilliance which she had never imagined he possessed. It was to be many years before she could convince herself that he was not an intensely mental man.

Lieutenant-Colonel Wilhelm von Rhode, Herr auf Klein-Kus-serow und Wusterwitz, had been a part of the German Army since he had entered the cadet school and his first uniform at Berlin-Lichterfelde when he was nine years old. He could have been educated at a grammar school, but old-timers among the senior officers, such as the formidable von Seeckt, all thought the Kadettenanstalt background to be much more stylish.

It was indeed a military school. Even the chaplain wore spurs under his robes and held the rank of captain. Before each meal the Officer of the Day would shout, “Let us—
PRAY!”
A barracks order read:

After the night prayer the Officer of the Day will command: “GO TO SLEEP!” The cadet will undress as quickly as possible, place his clothes in the regulation place, go to bed, place his right arm under his head, left arm over the blanket, and fall asleep immediately
.

A company of one hundred cadets slept in each barracks and the lights burned all night long to protect the younger boys from the older ones and to permit the NCO who cleaned boots to do his work and to beat off older boys. The cadets were always under supervision. There was not a door which could be locked so that a cadet might be alone for the briefest period. Two hundred cadets dined at each session; thirty cadets were assigned to each classroom; ten cadets studied together in each living quarter. In the extraordinary instance of leave being granted to attend a funeral or a wedding, the cadet was required to report at once to the garrison commander nearest his destination. Riding was the only excuse for being out of uniform. Part of the system was to starve the Cadet Corps; cadets were not allowed to receive parcels from home. This tightened disciplinary efficiency; one of the severer penalties was barring the cadet from lunch or dinner.

Veelee never told his father how he hated the Kadettenanstalt because he assumed that his father would expect him to hate it, as his father had hated it. He had twenty-five minutes for recreation each day which he could squander on walks or spending the five marks per month the cadets were allowed for stamps, supplies, and everything else. The Kadettenanstalt was a fortress of unreality which conditioned the future officers for a place in its extension, the palace of unreality which was the German Army. It was an army which honored suicide when circumstances might have marred the community's illusion of what an army officer was and how he lived. Blunders marred that image, and it was the duty of a brave soldier and an honest fellow to kill himself to wash the stain away. If an officer was insulted by an inferior—such as a civilian whom he could not, in any case, challenge to a duel—suicide was the only way out. Veelee was taught when he was eleven years old that if a drunk came around a corner and there was no reason to deduce why he should not become offensive, the officer should cross the street quickly before the drunk could reach him. However, if the officer moved too late and the drunk struck him or cursed him, the officer must either draw his sword and hack the man to pieces on the spot or kill himself. If neither, and the encounter were witnessed, the officer would be cashiered from the army.

By graduating from the Kadettenanstalt into the army, the cadets could grow to men while still remaining boys at their games, and they could predict the contours of their lives. Veelee spent nine years as a cadet. In the fall of 1914 he graduated in the top eleven percent of officer candidates in his class. He passed his examinations for the general certificate for higher education six months earlier than the general rule, partly because of the outbreak of the war and partly because he had volunteered for service at once in order to escape.

Because Veelee was qualified as a cavalry officer, under the mysterious logic of armies he was not assigned to cavalry. He found himself in the renowned Preussisches Jegerregiment 2, which held the elite of the Prussian Army and was equal, in the service, to the Guards. Eighty percent of the officers in the regiment commanded by Colonel Prince Ernst von Sachsen-Meinigen were of aristocratic stock. It was a regiment of Rangers, part of the Alpine Corps, and within four months of having been posted, Veelee distinguished himself in the Rumanian campaign of 1915 and was promoted from ensign to sub-lieutenant. He was then decorated with the Iron Cross, second and first class, for distinguished service during the battle of Hermannstadt in September 1916. He was made lieutenant in February, 1918, when he was twenty years old, and posted to the staff of the Marine Corps in Flanders, stationed at Bruges, where he served directly under Captain Wilhelm Keitel of the General Staff. They were assigned to maintain liaison with the navy.