A Train of Powder Read Free

town is a place where there is nothing to buy with money; and in Nuremberg, as in all German towns at that time, purchase was a forgotten faculty. The Nurembergers went to work in shabby streetcars hooked three together; so presumably they paid their fares. They bought the few foodstuffs available to them in shops so bare that it was hard to associate them with the satisfaction of an appetite. They bought fuel, not much, as it was summer, but enough to cook by and give what they felt to be, much more urgently than might have been supposed, the necessity of light. In the old town a twisted tower leaned backward against the city wall, and of this the top floor had miraculously remained roofed and weather-tight. To get to it one had to walk a long way over the rubble, which exhaled the double stench of disinfectant and of that which was irredeemably infected, for it concealed thirty thousand dead; and then one had to walk up the sagging concave exterior of the tower, and go in through a window. It would seem that people who had to live in such a home would not care to stay awake when darkness fell; but at night a weak light burned in the canted window. Such minuscule extravagance was as far as expenditure could go, except for grubby peddling in the black market. One could not buy a new hat, a new kettle, a yard of ribbon, a baby’s diaper. There was no money, there were only cigarettes. A judge’s wife, come out for a visit, said to a woman staying in the same villa, who had said she was going into the town, “Will you buy me some silver paint? I want to touch up my evening shoes,” and everyone in earshot, even the GI guards at the door, burst into laughter.
    It was hysterical laughter. Merely to go into a shop and buy something is to exercise choice and to enjoy the freedom of the will; and when this is checked it hurts. True, the Allied personnel in Nuremberg could go into their own stores and buy what they wanted; but that was not the full healthy process, for they knew with a deadly particularity every item in their own stores, and the traveller does not feel he has made terms with the country he visits till the people have sold him their goods. Without that interchange he is like a ghost among the living. The Allied personnel were like ghosts, and it might have been that the story would have a supernatural ending. If Allah of the Arabian Nights had governed this dispensation an angel would have appeared and struck dead all the defendants, and would have cried out that the rest of the court might do what it willed, and they would have run towards the East, towards France, towards the Atlantic, and by its surf would have taken off from the ground and risen into the air on the force of their desire, and travelled in a black compact cloud across the ocean, back to America, back to peace, back to life.
    It might seem that this is only to say that at Nuremberg people were bored. But this was boredom on a huge historic scale. A machine was running down, a great machine, the greatest machine that has ever been created: the war machine, by which mankind, in spite of its infirmity of purpose and its frequent desire for death, has defended its life. It was a hard machine to operate; it was the natural desire of all who served it, save those rare creatures, the born soldiers, that it should become scrap. There was another machine which was warming up: the peace machine, by which mankind lives its life. Since enjoyment is less urgent than defence it is more easily served. All over the world people were sick with impatience because they were bound to the machine that was running down, and they wanted to be among the operators of the machine that was warming up. They did not want to kill and be grimly immanent over conquered territory; they wanted to eat and drink and be merry and wise among their own kind. It maddened them further that some had succeeded in getting their desire and had made their transfer to peace. By what trickery