'As for your wife and baby in Italy-that's unfortunate, but you know, she'll be an enemy alien now." "Sir, we're not at war with Italy. Not yet." "Oh, that's inevitable. Hitler's scheduled to make this big speech today, you know. Everybody expects him to declare war, and old Musso will just follow suit, p.d.q. Your wife will be interned, but that's no cause for alarm. After a while she'll be exchanged. The Italians are civilized people. I'm sure she'll be all right." "Captain Tully, my wife's Jewish." The squadron commander looked surprised, and turned a bit red. He avoided Byron's eye. "Well now, that I didn't know." "My captain knows. I've told him. The Italians-and what's more to the point, the Germans-will class my baby son as Jewish, too." Blowing out a long audible breath, Tully said, "Okay. That's a problem. I still don't see what you can do about it. Our submarine operations in the Atlantic will be minor for a long, long time. Here's where we need you." He looked up at the ensign, who stood at attention, blank-faced. "However, Byron, I'm going to send a dispatch, recommending your transfer to Submarine Force Atlantic-as and when the Devilfish gets a replacement for you. Not before." Byron Henry showed no sign of the relief that filled him. "Thank you, Captain Tully." The squadron commander opened a desk drawer. "One more thing. Your commanding officer concurs in this, so congratulations." He laid on the desk before Byron a gold pin, the dolphins of a submariner. (from WORLD EMPIRE LOST) Hitler's Blowup On December 11, the final calamity occurred. Adolf Hitlerafter pausing for four days in which History herself must have held her breath-summoned the Reichstag and declared war upon the United States. Franklin Roosevelt, in his war speech to Congress on December 8, had not so much as mentioned Germany. And with good reason! The surge of war spirit in his country was directed one hundred percent against "infamous" Japan. As usual, the wily President did not stick his neck out one inch beyond the stretch of public opinion. For four anxious days it appeared to some of our staff that the Pearl Harbor attack might prove the great break of the war for us. Conceivably America might turn its back entirely on Europe to cope with Japan; the hysterical war pressure built up by Roosevelt would all vent itself ihto the Pacific Ocean, drying up Lend-Lease; and we would at last have the breathing space in which to strangle England and knockout the Soviet union, after which we could deal with the USA in our own time and fashion. However, the Fuhrer was under violent Japanese pressure to "honor" the so-called Tripartite Pact. A Pact Becomes a Trap This pact was mainly a propaganda sham, like the Pact of Steel between Germany and Italy. Japan joined the Pact of Steel in 1940, and so it became the Tripartite Pact, and the chimera of the worldwide "Axis" was born. It was a hollow bluff. Italy of course was a zero. Japan wanted to threaten the Americans with Germany, and Hitler wanted to threaten them with Japan. By uniting in a pact, the two poor nations hoped to paralyze into inactivity the rich notion that lay between them. But the earth is round, and another powerful notion lay between them in the other direction-the Soviet union. This was a different matter! Germany and Russia were linked by Ribbentrop's nonaggression pact. Therefore our diplomats had written a clause into the Tripartite Pact, saying that relations with the Soviet union would not be affected by the new treaty. When we began operations against Russia, the Japanese found this clause of ours a very lucky escape hatch. They politely cited it and the neutrality pact they had meantime signed with Russia, and declined to march. They might do so later when conditions permitted, they said-meaning, when Germany had done all the fighting and bleeding, and the winnings were about to be raked in. But with Pearl Harbor, global conditions suddenly reversed; and now Japan demanded that Germany come to her aid against America, though she had failed Germany against Russia! It is self-evident that Adolf Hitler owed the Japanese nothing. The pact obliged the partners to assist each other only if one was attacked by a third party. To call Pearl Harbor an "attack" by America on Japan was stretching language, even in Oriental rhetoric. Hitler certainly had the right to demand at least that Japan should now as a quid pro quo declare war on the Soviet union. The news of such a Japanese act would have raised the spirits of our snowbound troops in Russia beyond all measure. it might have changed the whole picture. But Hitler never made the demand. He allowed Japan to stay on neutral terms with Russia, while he plunged the German people into war with America. With this one mystifying blowup, the Fuhrer threw away his historic gains and the future of the Reich. Why? I myself was on an inspection tour by air of the Moscow front when the Fuhrer journeyed to Berlin to declare war. When I saw him again at Wolf's Lair in mid-December, he was very unconcerned and airy-fairy about the United States. In dinner table talk one evening when I was present, he calledAmerica a mongrel nation, half Jewified and half Negrified, incapable of making serious war. The United States would have its hands full just with Japan, he crowed, and would probably be defeated. There was no chance that it could intervene in Europe. So he said; but I believed then, and still do, that this was cheerful blather for his subordinates, or narcotic self-deception. Unlike the Japanese leaders, Hitler knew at heart the one crucial military fact about America: that nothing must be done to awaken and unite that confused, quarrelsome, luxury-rotted titan. Pearl Harbor had done it. This war was at bottom a chess game with men and nations played between two wills and two world views, which had been competing since 1933-between Adolf Hitler and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Hitler started with a handicap of rook and two pawns, as it were, in industrial plant, population, allies, and natural resources. These odds compelled his flamboyant and desperate style. The man in the wheelchair could afford the cautious game, waiting for his opponent to defeat himself by unsound gambles. Hitler appeared to outplay Roosevelt brilliantly, year after year. His bloodless victories before 1939, his swift conquest of Poland and western Europe, and his breathtaking seizure of European Russia in 1941, turned the game heavily in his favor. Adolf Hitler was within sight of checkmate, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. That was the break Roosevelt had been waiting for. " am well aware of the conventional explanation that Hitler felt we had a de facto war going with America anyway in the Atlantic, and wanted to beat Roosevelt to the punch with his declaration, for reasons of prestige. It is even contended that declaring war on America was a clever move to boost our morale, by taking the public mind Off our halts and setbacks on the Eastern Front. But these conjectures ignore the fatal failure to demand Japanese action against Russia, and also the text of the actual war declaration. This unstatesmonlike document is one long scream of despair and rage, all directed against Roosevelt. My judgment will always be that Hitler saw the game unexpectedly go glimmering, and In anger kicked over the board. Finis Germaniae Other writers follow Churchill and place the turning point of the war a year later, in the triple cluster of events-Stalingrad, El Alamein, and the North African landings-when the turn became visible in the field. But the true turn was Pearl Harbor. We scored our greatest successes, without question, and expanded our short-lived German empire to its amazing farthest reach only in 1942, long after Pearl Harbor and the halt atMoscow. Our U-boats almost mastered the Atlantic, sending whole fleets of British and American ships to the bottom. Our armies marched to the Caucasus Mountains,. the Caspion Sea, and the Nile. Our energetic ally, Japan, captured her East Asian empire in swift blazing victories. But one memory haunted me during all those victories: the airplane trip I had made to the Moscow front right after Pearl Harbor. From the air I saw German tanks, trucks, and gun carriages straggled over hundreds of miles of desolate plains, frozen in mud or bogged in snow under the gloomy low Russian sun. I saw dead horses lying in the snow, and our soldiers hacking at their frozen carcasses for meat to eat. We landed often among and boys shivering in ragged green-gray summer uniforms,buildingfiresundertheirveh(man) icles to keep the radiators from bursting and the oil from getting too viscous to flow. Endless were the complaints I heard then about the lack of boots, heavy socks, gloves, antifreeze, and the solve that was supposed to free the tanks' telescopic sights. When the telescopes froze stuck without the salve, the tankists could not see to maneuver and protect themselves. Pathetic were the shivering soldiers wearing ladies' fur coats and boas, collected by Goebbels and sent to the front. My trip took me within sight of Moscow's barrage balloons and antiaircraft flashes. There I tasted the full bitterness of that tantalizing halt, and there I first heard that we were at war again with America. In my heart I knew that spelled, once and for all, finis Germaniae. Germany after 1941 was like a charging elephant with a bullet in its brain, trampling and killing its tormentors with its last momentum before falling. The bullet was Pearl Harbor. World Empire Lost With these comments, I conclude Volume I of my operational analysis of the Second World War, and a word of summary is in order. General George Marshall, in his 1945 victory report, called Germany, Japan, and Italy "three criminal nations bent on easy loot." But if we had won, as we almost did, the leaders who would have hung would have been Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Mr. Marshall. The criminal nations would have been the Allies, who tried to keep their plutocratic loot of previous centuries by murdering German and Japanese women and children from the air. Hitler did not order Hiroshima and Dresden! There is no morality in world history. There are only tides of change borne on violence and death. The victors write the history, pass the judgments, and hang or shoot the losers. In truth history is an endless chain of hegemony shifts, based on the decay of old political structures and the rise of new ones. Wars are the fever crises of those shifts. Wars are inevitable; there will always be wars; and the one war crime is to lose. That is the reality, and the rest is sentimental nonsense.
We went on following Adolf Hitler to the last, to unbelievable triumphs and unparalleled disasters, from Pearl Harbor to the fall of Berlin, because he was our national destiny. A romantic idealist, an inspiring leader, dreaming grand dreams of new heights and depths of human possibilities, and at the same time an icy calculator with iroti willpower, he was the soul of Germany. We are a romantic people, and Hitler was German Romance incarnate. No truthful history of our nation will ever be written which does not face that fact. He had his faults, including a definite taste for cruelty, a certain ingrained petit bourgeois vulgarity, an exaggerated opinion of his military acumen, and the well-known, regrettable tendency to anti-Semitism. Such were the blemishes of this worldhistorical individual, but no human being is perfect. TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Armin von Roon properly breaks his two-part operational analysis of the Second World War at Pearl Harbor. In the period covered by World Empire Lost, a European war like World War I raged, with much the same lineup; for that reason Winston Churchill co/led it a continuation after a truce, and both conflicts together a new Thirty Years' War. But all that time, the United States was out of it. After Pearl Harbor, we were in it up to our necks, and it become the Rest global war. That is another story. Roon's summaries from his second volume have recently appeared in Germany under the title World Holocaust. Analyzing mainly Germany's defeats and downfall, it has not been much of a success. His concluding estimate of Hitler overlooks one or two small points. This able and resolute homicidal maniac, using modern Germany as his murder instrument, directly caused between twenty-five and thirty-five million human deaths; the exact figure will never be known. To stop him cost the world billions, maybe trillions, of dollars. Had the German people shut this strange individual away in an insane asylum, instead of setting him up as their adored leader and throwing their full strength behind him for twelve years, these deaths and this waste would not have occurred. On the historical record Adolf Hitler was certainly the worst liar, doublecrosser, destroyer, and mass murderer in the world's amnals. Roon might have mentioned these facts among Hitler's blemishes.-V.Him door stood open to Natalie's bedroom, and Hitler's screeching Twoke the baby. In the sitting room Natalie had the radio turned low, but at the Fuhrer's sudden shriek-'ROOSEVELTI'-she and Aaron looked at each other in alarm, and Louis began sobbing. 'He is a maniac, after all." Slumped in an armchair in a bathrobe and muffler, his sunken red-shadowed eyes watering, Aaron Jastrow shook his head and lifted a trembling teacup to his mouth, as Hitler went on with his hoarse bellows, sneers, whispers, and yells. "Extremely clever, persuasive, and forceful, but a maniac. I confess I never grasped it before. I thought he playacted." With a faintly contemptuous glance at her uncle, Natalie went to the baby.
The Fuhrer's speech, starting with the usual complaints of injustices endured by Germany and himself, had worked up to the naming of the one supreme war criminal responsible for all the bloodshed and misery that he, the Fuhrer, had worked so hard to avert, the insane hypocrite who had sold out his country and himself to the Jews, thwarted Germany at every turn, and loosed destruction on mankind. After a strangely long pause, came the wild scream that woke the child: "Roo-oo-ss-felt!' And this bitter hate-filled animal cry somehow woke Aaron Jastrow, too. In recent years, Jastrow had listened to few Hitler speeches. They bored him. He was a historian, and history's pages were crowded with such flamboyant tyrants who had strutted their brief seasons, done their damage, bunt their grandiose monuments, and passed away. So it would be with Hitler, he had once written after a visit to Germany, in a cool meditative essay in Harper's entitled "Der Fuhrer: Thoughts Before Midnight." In this essay, Jastrow had pigeonholed the Nazi boilup with other brief violent mass upheavals which through the ages had come and gone. Sometimes they changed the order of things, like the Crusades and the French Revolution; sometimes they left only destruction, like the flashflood massacres of Alaric and Tamerlane. Perhaps this weirdly glorified little beggar had something to contribute to the world. His call for a new unified order in Europe made a certain sense. He might start a world war; he might win it or he might lose it; but in any case he wouldd at last die, and the world would wag on. God-Jastrow used the term with arch irony to denote the blind drift of events-like a good roadside juggler, did his act with whatever objects came to his hand. If Hitler triumphed and brought a tyrannic German unity to Europe, or even to the whole earth, lasting a century or two, perhaps that meant he had been needed at this time on our tiny earth. What happened, after all, was only what had to happen. There were no dice in, heaven. The human spirit in its unending quest for freedom would either soften and tame its Teuton masters at last, or would crack the prison Of tyranny, as a grass blade cracks a concrete pavement. Having thus boxed the German dictator away in some neat paragraphs, Aaron Jastrow had mentally shelved the man. Hitler broke from Aaron Jastrow's mental box on this day, with his scream of Roosevelt's name. As the dictator went on with his long, almost raving, yet mordant comparison between Roosevelt and himself-he the poor son of struggling parents, Roosevelt the pampered only child of a millionaire; he the common soldier of the First World War, enduring rain and gunfire and muck for four years, Roosevelt the highborn insider, enjoying a safe cushy desk job in the Navy Department; he the gassed veteran, lying penniless in a hospital, Roosevelt the tricky postwar financial speculator doubling his inherited wealth; he the restorer and rebuilder of a defeated, prostrate nation, Roosevelt the economic tinkerer, the wrecker of a rich country with his crackpot New Deal schemes; he the valiant fighter of old wrongs, the messianic unifier ofEurope, Roosevelt the master war cnal, seeking to stave off the future and preserve the world hegemony of the Jews -listening to this ferocious, crazed, queerly coherent fantasy, Aaron Jastrow wavered in his philosophic stance, and finally became scared. The Italians had already cancelled the exit visas of Americans. The charge had told Jastrow that this was just a precautionary move, and that they should still plan to leave on the fifteenth if meantime war was not declared. For days Jastrow had slept and eaten little. Now Hitler's speech, as he listened, seemed to be clanging shut an iron door. "Well?" Natalie said, carrying in the blanket-wrapped squalling baby. "Is there any hope?" "He hasn't declared war yet. Not in so many words." In an absent practiced way, without much effort at modesty, she opened her sweater, suit jacket, and blouse, flashed a white breast, and drew the brown sweater over the baby. 'y is it so much colder in this room? It's icy, and the more-"- Jastrow put a finger to his lips. Hitler was whipping himself up to a crescendo. His audience, hushed for a long time, broke out in applause, cheers, and roars of 'Sieg Heil!" "Now what was that, Aaron?" Jastrow raised his voice over the raucous noises of the crowd. "I'm afraid that was it. He said he's called in the United States diplomats and given them their papers. That started the cheering." "Well, all I can say is, I couldn't be less surprised." Natalie stroked the baby's cheek with a finger, and dolefully smiled as it quieted and began sucking. "You're just hungry, monkey, aren't you?" Her uncle said 'Mussolini still has to talk. We'll know in another hour or so." 'Oh, Aaron, what choice has he?" He shut off the radio. "Well, that's that. I believe I'll have a glass of sherry. You, too?" "No, no. I'd better keep my wits about me today, what's left of them." Jastrow poured and gulped a glassful, then took another, and shrank in his armchair, sipping it, looking vacantly around at the high long frigid room paed with suitcases and wooden boxes. The hotel was silent and the street outside was silent. 'Don't despair, Natalie. In 1939 E Duce did manage to squirm out of it, you know. He's no use to Hitler militarily. The Italians are sick and sour and beaten. If he declares war against the United States, he might be assassinated, and Hitler surely doesn't want that. Besides, he's wily.
He may well find some weaseling formula, and we may yet be on that plane on the fifteenth." 'Oh, Aaron, quit it, for God's sake. He'll declare war." Jastrow sighed heavily. 'I suppose so. Natalie, I'm sorry, deeply and tragically sorry." She held up a hand, palm out. "No, no. Don't. What's the use?" "let me have my say. I simply can't bear the way I've involved you and your baby. I've never-" "Aaron, I did it myself. Don't rake it over now. Don't. I can't stand that." A long silence, except for the baby making loud sucking noises. Jastrow sipped the sherry, glancing at his niece with a hang&g expression. "I might telephone the embassy, my dear, and ask if there are any plans afoot for the diplomatic n." "That's a good idea, if you can get through. Otherwise we'd better go there." "I'm planning to," Jastrow said, "in any case." He made the call, but the embassy lines were busy. Pouring more sherry, he spoke slowly, coughing now and then. "One thing wrong with being a historian is the way it distorts one's view of the present. I seem to see current events through the wrong end of a telescope. The figures look small and comical. The happenings seem so trivial, so repetitious, so banal! I can read the past fairly well, I think, and I also have some clarity about the future. Only in the present am I so dense. Hitler and Mussolini don't have the resources to last, my dear. This gaudy shabby militaristic madhouse in central Europe will fall. Russia and America are awesome, and between them they will crush Nazism. The only question is how soon. Well, I'd better dress." "Yes, do that, Aaron." "I'll just finish my wine first." Natalie impatiently arose and took the baby into the bedroom to avoid a row with her uncle. She had no store of kindness left for this garrulous, vain, cranky old man, whose Olympian irony and willfully blinkered optimism had mired her and her baby in this peril; though in the end-she always came back to this-she herself was most responsible. Natalie Henry had thought and thought about her predicament until she could no longer bear the self-probing. Where had she committed the fatal stupidity? In coming back? in marrying Byron? In not taking the German plane out of Zurich? In not following Herb Rose to the Palestine ship? No, something deep was wrong with her; she was in some Ultimate sense, for all her apparent cleverness, a terrible fool. She was nothing and nobody; she had no real identity; all her life she had been floating like dandelion fuzz on the wind. She was 'Jewish," but the label meant nothing to her beyond the trouble it caused. She had had her first love affair with an intellectual heathen Gentile. She had married a Christian without giving the dash of backgrounds much thought; his youth and lack of learning had bothered her more. What a queer, random, disjointed chain of happenings had created this sleepy blue-eyed little living thing at her breast! In the past weeks, Natalie had started dreaming at night that none of it hadhappened. In these dreams time reeled back, sometimes to Paris, sometimes to college, most often to her childhood on Long Island. Relief and joy would fill her in her sleep at finding that she was out of the nightmare; cold sinking sadness would follow when she woke to discover that the wrong side of the dream-line was the real side. But at least on this side the baby dwelled. The baby was becoming her anchor to life. At the moment the most real tung on earth was the warm little mouth at her chest: alive, sweet, and sublimely good. Beyond it-in the hotel suite, in Rome, in Europe -all was squalor, danger, uncertainty, and darkening horizons. The diplomatic train was the very last chance. Natalie tucked the infant away when he dropped asleep, and dressed to go to the embassy. 'Ah, my dear, you look very well." In the sitting room Aaron now reclined rather grandly on a couch, in the handsome blue cape that the Searles had given him for his sixty-second birthday, his best dark suit, and a large bow tie. He was still drinking sherry. 'Balderdash. If I ever get home safe, one of my first orders of business will be to burn this damned dress, and I'll never wear brown again." Waving his half-full glass at her with stiff jauntiness, Aaron laughed merrily. "It's grand that you've kept your sense of humor," he said, although Natalie had been quite serious. "Sit down, my dear. Don't pace." 'Aren't we going to the embassy?" She perched on the arm of a couch. "Tell me, Natalie, did you ever meet Father Enrico Spanelli?" "That Vatican librarian? No." He gave her the squinting teasing smile that appeared in late evenings when he had taken too much brandy. "But I thought we all had dinner one evening together." 'We were supposed to. Louis got sick." "Oh yes. I remember now. Well, Enrico is coming in a little while to drive us to the Piazza Venezia. He knows all the newspapermen, and we'll hear and see Mussolini from the press section." 'What! Good Lord, I don't want to go there with the baby in that Fascist mob! What about-" Jastrow held up a cautionary hand and began scrawling on a pad, talking at the same time. "Well, my dear, it's visible history. Since we're in a tight spot, we may as well have the good of it." The sheet he passed to her read: If it's war he'll take us straight to the embassy. That's the idea. We'll be out of the hotel, where we might be picked up. She wrote underneath, Why do you trust him? They did not know for certain that microphones had been planted in their suite, but they sometimes wrote notes as a precaution.
Jastrow blinked at her, took off his glasses, and polished them with a handkerchief. This was his unconscious signal, long familiar to Natalie, of a harangue. Softly he said, "Natalie, do you know that I am a Catholic?" "What! What do you mean?" "Ah, then you don't know. I thought perhaps you were being tactful, all these years, Well, it's quite true." Aaron often made odd remarks over brandy or wine, but he had never said anything this strange. Puzzled and disconcerted, Natalie shrugged, "What am I supposed to say? Are you serious?" "Oh, very. It's the family skeleton, my dear. I'm a bit surprised that they never told you. I converted when I was twenty-three." He gave her a red-eyed, twisted, sheepish grin, scratching his beard. "It never took. I fear I'm the wrong blood type for that or any religion, At the time the act was sincere." Aaron now told her about a Radcliffe girl whom he had tutored in history and aesthetics, a girl of a wealthy Catholic family. After a stormy year and a half the love affair had collapsed. He had left Cambridge and finished up his doctorate at Yale, to put behind him the girl and his memories. His conversion had been a very private matter. He had been discreet and stealthy about taking instruction, for many Jewish friends in Boston had been kind to him and he did not want to upset or argue with them. By the time he departed from Harvard, he had decided that the conversion was a mistake, having painfully worked his way to the skeptical naturalism that was his settled view. Thereafter, whenever the question of his religion came up, he had mentioned his self-evident Jewish origin and said no more. He had done nothing further about the Catholic episode; he had simply let it lapse from his life. But he had made one bad mistake, very early in the affair. He had discussed it with his family. What I've always regretted," he said gloomily. "It Probably shortened my father's life-my mother by then was dead -and your parents certainly never got over the shock. We were estranged for good, though I once told your father that that phase was over, that I considered myself a non-practicing Jew and nothing else. It didn't help. They dropped me. 'When the Book-of-the-Month Club chose A Jew's Jesus, Louis did write me a stiff little letter. His rabbi wanted me to come and lecture at his temple. He phrased it so that I could hardly accept. I thought his letter was cruel. I replied very warmly, but I declined. That was that. I never saw either of them again. I've only discussed this with one other person beside Yourself in more than thirty years, Natalie, and that other person is Enrico Spanelli. "I told him in September, when I was turned back from Switzerland.
I thought it might prove useful. He's an excellent fellow and a fine classical scholar, though rather weak on early Byzantium. Well, he has beer, Marvelously sympathetic. He never argued my religious position, but simply wrote to the United States for verification. He's got the documents, and I have copies. So-we have friends in the Vatican, my dear. I hope we won't need them, but it is a sort of insurance." Natalie, who could think only of the possible effect on her baby, was pleased and amazed. This was like finding a forgotten rusty key to a dungeon cell. Aaron's youthful religious flip-flops were his own business; but the technicality might indeed bring help and refuge, or even escape in an emergency! This disclosure also explained, at long last, her parents' peculiarly strained and glum attitude about Aaron. Deep down, she herself felt a small involuntary stirring of disdain for her uncle. She said, "Why, Aaron, I'm gasping a bit, but I think it's most amazingly clever of you to have stopped being a Jew more than forty years ago. What foresight!" "Oh, I'm still a Jew. Don't make that mistake. So was Paul after his conversion, you know. You're not disgusted with me, then, as your parents were? How nice." A satirical smile wrinkled her mouth. "A jew's Jesus, indeed. You fraud." "He was a Jew's Jesus." Aaron Jastrow straightened up inside the heavy cape and raised a bearded proud chin. "I insist on that. The book is the fruit of a bitter wrestle with myself. I was frankly swept away by the whole opulent Christian structure of thought and art that I discovered in college, all built on what that Palestinian fellow called a murdered Jew. We Jews pretend that structure doesn't exist, Natalie-that is, Jews like your parents and mine do-but that won't wash, you know. It's there. In the end I probed past the religious metaphors and came to grips with Jesus as he was, trying to grasp the historical reality. That was the essence of my wrestle for a year. I found an extraordinarily winning and magnetic personality, a talented and tragic poor relative of mine, who lived in Palestine in olden days. So the book really-" The telephone rang. "Ah," Jastrow said, pushing himself out of his chair, "that's bound to be Enrico. Get the baby, dear." Natalie hesitated, then said, "All right. Let's go." At the wheel of a rusty, faded little car outside the hotel, a man wearing a clerical hat, and an overcoat with a ratty fur collar, waved a smoking cigarette at them in a thick peasant hand. "Professorel" The librarian/priest had a face strangely like Mussolini's-prominent brown eyes, big curved jaw, and wide fleshy mouth. But glasses and a sweet placid expression under the flat black hat, as well as his indoor pallor, much reduced the ominoui; resemblance. "You look tired, Professors," he said, after greeting Natalie in charming Roman Italian, and admiring theheavily wrapped, almost invisible baby. The car started with rheumatic wheezings. "I've not slept well." The priest's glance was Mild and kind. 'I understand. As you requested, I've made inquiries about your taking refuge in the Vatican. It's not impossible, but the concordat pathetically limits our freedom of action. I would offer you one word of caution. Such exceptional expedients can have negative results. One calls attention to oneself. One becomes a special case.", He drove carefully down the almost deserted boulevard and turned into a street where people were crowding toward the Piazza Venezia, with placards swaying above their heads. "The trouble is," said Jastrow, 'I already am one." The priest pursed His lips and tilted his head in a most Italian way. "True. Well, your cloudy nationality might be an advantage. If you are actually stateless, then clearly you are not an enemy alien." Spanelli glanced around at Natalie with drooping eyes. 'This is not true of your niece, naturally. One assumes your embassy will somehow provide for her-" "Father, pardon me. Whoever gives me refuge must take her in too." The priest pursed his lips again and was silent. The crowd thickened as they neared the piazza: quiet sad-looking people in shabby winter clothes. The blackshirts carrying the placards were trying to hold up their chins and glare like 11 Duce. 'These I signs are viler than usual," Jastrow said. Beside the car, a fat red-faced blackshirt marched with a crude cartoon of Mrs. Roosevelt sitting on a chamber pot, squawking obscenities about her husband. Ahead of the car, on another sign, a bag of money with a Roosevelt grin walked on crutches, smoking a cigarette in an uptilted holder. 'When the pot boils, the scum comes to the surface," said the priest. He slipped the car through narrow side streets, parked in a rubbishfilled archway, and guided them down an alley into the Piazza Venezia. The thronged square was surprisingly still. People stood around saying nothing, or chatting in low tones. The sky was gray, the wind strong and cold. Flag-bearing schoolchildren were huddled in front of the balcony in a docile mass, not laughing or playing pranks, just holding their flapping flags up and fidgeting. The priest brought Jastrow and Natalie into a roped-off section near the balcony, wherephotographers clustered with reporters, including a few Americans, as well as the grinning happy Japanese correspondents Natalie had met at the party. Somebody produced a folding chair for her. She sat holding the sleeping baby tightly in her lap, now and then shuddering, though she wore a heavy sweater under her coat. The raw wind seemed to cut through to her skin. they waited a long time before Mussolini ruddenly stepped out on the balcony and raised a hand in salute. A crowd roar cascaded and reechoed in the square: "Duce! Duce! Duce!" It was a strange effect, since all the people were looking up silently, with blank or hostile faces, at the tubby figure in the gold-eagled, tasselled black hat, and the black and gold jacket, a getup more like an opera costume than a uniform. Under the balcony, a few blackshirts were diligently manufacturing the cheers, huddled around microphones. A tall man in the uniform of the German Foreign Service appeared next, with a Japanese in a cutaway coat and high hat. They flanked the dictator, who was even smaller than the Oriental; and Mussolini looked as though he were between guards come to arrest him. The blackshirts quit their noise and turned their oval, sallow faces up at the balcony, a pack of waiters and harbors, Natalie thought, in sloppy pseudomilitary masquerade. The brief erh was belligerent, the tone was belligerent, the gestures were very familiar and very belligerent, but it all came out ridiculous. The sound did not fit the gestures Mulini Hailed his flet when he dropped his voice, and shouted fiercely some inn()cuotis prepositions and conjunctions, and at the most inappropriate-. points he griinned The old ptif.Fv dictator, already defeated in CTeece and shorn of much of his North African empire, seemed to be having a highly irrelevant good time, as he declared war on the United States of America. While the blackshirts at random moments cheered and shouted "Doo-cha-vi' the crowd began to leave. Mussolini bellowed his last sentences at thousands of departing backs-an incredible sight in this dictatorship-an old ham actor scorned by the audience: 'Italians, once more arise and be ivorthy of this historic hour. We shall WIN!" And again he smiled. To blackshirt cheers, the three figures on the balcony withdrew; Mussolini came out twice to bow, but the mob was dispersing as though a cloudburst had started. The little knot of Americans stayed together, talking excitedly in low tense tones. Though the thing was no surprise, it felt strange now that it had happened; they stood on the soil of an enemy country. The debate among the correspondents, who kept glancing at policemen hovering nearby, was whether to go to their offices to clear out their desks, or head straight for the embassy. Several decided for the office first, arguing that once in the embassy they might be holed up for a long time, perhaps even until the diplomatic train left. This put Aaron Jastrow in mind of his manuscript. He asked Father Spanelli to take them to the hotel before going on to the embassy. The priest was agreeable, and Natalie did not argue. She was in a shocked state. The baby was beginning to cry, and she thought of picking up some diapers and supplier, for him. They' returned to the car and drove to the Excelsior, but the priest suddenly braked, a block from the hotel; and he pointed through the windshield at two Police cars pulled into the entrance driveway. Turning large, moist, worried brown eyes atAaron Jastrow, he said, "Of course the manuscript is precious, Pr'ofessore. Still, all things considered, had you not better go to your embassy first? If the worst comes to the worst, I can get your manuscript for you." "The embassy, the embassy," Natalie said. "He's right. The embassy." Jastrow nodded sadly. But again, a couple of blocks from the embassy, Spanelli halted the car. A cordon of police and soldiers stood in front of the building. Across the street a small crowd of spectators stood waiting for some melodramatic occurrence. At the moment, from this distance, all looked quiet. "Let us walk," said the priest. "You should pass through that line with no trouble, but let us see." Natalie was sitting in back of the car. Jastrow turned to her and put a comforting hand over hers. His face was settling into a stony, weary, defiant expression. "COme, my dear. There's not much choice now." they walked up the side of the street where the spectators were standing. On the edge of the crowd they encountered the Times man who had taken Natalie to the ............