A Train of Powder Read Free Page B

American personnel, and walked up to a pretty stenographer and asked her to dance. The band was not playing, and there was a sudden hush. Someone told the band to strike up again, the floor was crowded with dancing couples, a group gathered round the Russian boy and rushed him away to safety, out of the hotel and into an automobile; and he was dumped on the sidewalk as soon as his captors found an empty street. It is encouraging that those men would take so much trouble to save from punishment a man of whom they knew nothing save that he belonged to a group which refused all intercourse with them.
    This sweetness of atmosphere was due chiefly to the American tradition of pleasantness in superficial social relations, though many of the exiles were constrained to a special tenderness by their personal emotions. For some of them sex was here what it was anywhere else. There is an old story which describes a native of Cincinnati, returned from a trip to Europe, telling a fellow townsman of an encounter with a beautiful girl which had brightened a night he had spent in Paris. On and on the story goes, dwelling on the plush glories of the restaurant, the loveliness of the girl and her jewels and her dress, the magic of a drive in the Bois de Boulogne, the discreet luxury of the house to which she took him, till it rises to a climax in a bedroom carpeted with bear skins and lined with mirrors. “And then?”
    “Well—then it was very much like what it is in Cincinnati.” To many, love in Nuremberg was just as they had known it in Cincinnati, but for others the life of the heart was lived, in this desolate place given over to ruin and retributive law, with a special poignancy.
    Americans marry young. There was hardly a man in the town who had not a wife in the United States, who was not on the vigorous side of middle age, and who was not spiritually sick from a surfeit of war and exile. To the desire to embrace was added the desire to be comforted and to comfort; and the delights of gratification were heart-rending, like spring and sunset and the breaking wave, because they could not last. The illusion was strong that if these delights could go on for ever they would always remain perfect. It seemed to many lovers that whatever verdicts were passed on the Nazis at the end of the trial, much happiness that might have been immortal would then be put to death. Those wives who were four thousand miles away haunted Nuremberg like phantasms of the living and proved the sacredness of what was to be killed. “He loves me, but he is going back to her out of old affection and a sense of duty to his children. Ah, what I am losing in this man who can still keep a woman in his heart, when passion is gone, who is a good father.” These temporary loves were often noble, though there were some who would not let them be so. There were men who said, “You are a good kid, but of course it is my wife I really love,” when these terms were too perfunctory, considering his plight and the help he had been given. There were also women who despised the men who needed them. Through the Bavarian forests, on Saturdays and Sundays, there often drove one of the more exalted personalities of Nuremberg, accompanied by a lovely and odious female child, whom he believed, since he was among the more elderly exiles and was taking exile badly, not to be odious and to be kind. She seemed to be sucking a small jujube of contempt; by waving her eyelashes and sniffing as the automobile passed those likely to recognize its occupants, she sought to convey that she was in company that bored her.
    Those who loved the trial for the law’s sake also found the course of their love running not too smoothly. This was not because they were uncomfortably impressed by the arguments brought forward by the declared opponents of the Nuremberg prosecutions. None of these was really effective when set against the wholeness of the historical crisis which had provoked it. It was