Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [5]
“It always comes back to the same damned confusion,” General. What are we going to do with them?”
“Know the facts and believe in your country. You are here on this mission because our war begins when the shooting stops. Our bullets are ideas ... your folks are immigrants, aren’t they?”
Sean nodded.
“So are mine. My father, God rest his soul, came over by steerage after the Civil War and walked from New York to Iowa in the dead of winter.” The general took a swallow of whiskey and allowed himself the rare pleasure of a moment of nostalgia. “Black Hawk County, Iowa. We homesteaded a section of land. My father’s name was Hans Christian Hansen, after the Danish national hero. All of us were named after American heroes ... except my sister. She died from diphtheria in one of those damned Iowa winters. God almighty ... I’ll see my father to my dying day looking over the newly cut corn fields, standing there like a statue ... smoke coming from his pipe. He’d look at the leaves turning and put those two big leather hands on my shoulders and wouldn’t say much. At Thanksgiving he’d give a toast after he read the Bible and his eyes would fill with tears when he said ... God bless America.”
The tension between the men had passed. Sean thought of his own father and smiled. “My Dad would say, where else in the world could a shanty Irishman put three sons through the university?”
Andrew Jackson Hansen hit his hand on the desk. “That’s what I mean!” his gruff voice filled with enthusiasm. “We have to love America the way our parents did ... naive, sentimental, unsophisticated. The good Lord has been wonderful to our republic. He has given us the wisdom to fight wars with no thought of personal gain. But this time we cannot pack up and go home. We have come of age. We have inherited both the power and the responsibility of the world without seeking or wishing it But ...we must face up to it Our land has grown a magnificent liberty tree and its fruit is the richest ideal of the human soul. But, we cannot go on forever merely eating the fruit of the liberty tree or it will die. We must begin to plant some seeds.”
Damn Hansen, Sean thought. He could move you from anger to tears in a moment.
“My mother was a German immigrant, Sean. She saw a son fight her native country and die in the First World War. That killed her, too. I wouldn’t like the idea of my mother being shot as a hostage.”
Sean nodded that he understood. The long, hard, patient way would press them for a wisdom which they did not know if they possessed. He took the report from the desk. “I’ll do some rewriting.”
A. J. Hansen abruptly returned to the never-ending problems needing decisions on his desk, indicating without a word that the meeting was over.
Sean made for the door.
“By the way,” Hansen said, “do something about that woman.”
Chapter Three
THE TWO HUGE BUILDINGS on the right side of Queen Mother’s Gate were dark except for the light of two offices. A light in A. J. Hansen’s office was common. This light usually burned past midnight. No one really knew the number of hours A. J. Hansen worked, but he often remarked, “It’s a goddam good thing there isn’t a union to demand time and a half pay for generals or we’d bust the government’s ass in a year.”
He poured over the usual documents, appended the usual decisions, ate the usual sandwich, drank the usual glass of milk. Tonight it was the seizure of German banks, freezing assets, issuing occupation currency. Tomorrow? Maybe German railroads, maybe German textbooks. But once during each day the immediate problem became engulfed in the greater mission. All the reports were replete with highly worded ideals, but he wondered. Have we Americans lost the stuff? Are we too self-centered, too fat to understand and face up to what has happened to us? Sure, we will fight the war to its end. But what of it when the last shot is fired?
And these sick German people. Can we treat them with kindness? Will they understand it or mistake it for weakness? Indeed,