Of a cold February dawn, two months after Pearl Harbor, the Student joins the Army of the United States. Leaving Jill asleep at his parents' house, he walks with his father to the point of assembly, a roughly furnished store, and kisses him good-bye. He takes a trolley with his group to a downtown hall, where other draftees are congregated, including one of his work-worn students from the class he had just resigned at the University of Indiana -- his morale bucked up to see the Student -- and then they are bussed out to Camp Grant, West of Chicago.
There they are stuck with needles and scratched with vaccines, after which, aching and feverish, they are given IQ tests. They are given a "short-arm" examination for signs of venereal disease, and proceed to a psychiatric interview. The psychologist sits him on a stool and asks him how he feels.
"O.K."
"Is there anything bothering you, anything that you would like to talk about, some problems you think you are going to have."
The Student pondered for a moment: "Well.. nothing much.. I have a trick shoulder that might slip out, when I was thrusting a bayonet."
The guy gave him a puzzled look. "Anything else?"
"No."
So he followed the line that went over to a Sergeant in charge of assignment. He had large powers and sat at a big desk dispensing valuable futures. He was also Ernest Gaves, an acquaintance from the University. They exchange greetings, and the Sergeant reaches into his Santa Claus sack for the biggest plum he can find. "I can have you assigned to the Station Band right here at Camp Grant."
He can play the trumpet here, maybe for "the Duration." He can have his girl with him or go into Chicago every weekend. He would soon be a sergeant, but could get to be Warrant Officer. He says, thanks, no, to the greatest chance a man could have of being with his loved ones, doing what he can do well, and avoiding danger, and he says no. He is as crazy as the psychologist suspected, war-crazed. (The next time he blows a horn in earnest is three years later, on a fleugelhorn he appropriated from a blasted firehouse in Darmstadt, Germany -- wondering about his disappeared fellow-musician.)
So he is packed into some troops going to the laughably-named village of Paris, Tennessee, where a new camp is elevating itself from the winter mud, and there takes his "basic training." They do ask for volunteers with prior training, and he puts his name in, thinking he can teach something, but it turns out to be a joke of the non-coms, who put him on permanent Kitchen Police. But when that's over (because somebody gets wind of it), the officers decide to have him lecture to Battery A about what's happening in the world, so he tells the three hundred men dutifully gathered in the mess-hall that they are lazy stupid louts who have let Hitler and Musso and Hirohito practically take over the world, and this makes them feel educated. But he is lonesome for his girl and old life despite the lovable gang of unbelievable Hollywood casting-office types around him, and on a three-day pass takes a long trainride to Chicago, marries Jill, with his parents to witness, and barely makes roll call on Monday morning. He gets a form from the Charge of Quarters and puts her down as a dependent, which gives her a few dollars a month. His pay is $21 per month, of which $6.60 goes into life insurance (what a laugh!), about the same sum to his family, and he has most of the balance to spend (providing he has no deductions for the destruction of Army property), which puts him into the approximate position of the "Other Ranks" in the British Army song:
I've got six-pence, jolly, jolly six-pence.
I've got six-pence to last me all my life.
I've got tuppence to spend, and tuppence to lend,
and tuppence to send home to my wife.
No cares have I to grieve me,
no little jolly wench to deceive me,
I'm happy as a King, believe me,
as we go rolling rolling on.
He is given a certificate as a Barrage Balloon Chief -- for he has been to a school on balloons, gases, meteorology, winches, and drilling to raise and lower the tugging beasts. Hardly has this ended when he is dismissed to attend the Officer Candidates' School at Wilmington, North Carolina, ninety miserable days and nights of heat, mosquitoes, rifle and cannon gunnery, trigonometry, and the stiffest meanest kind of hazing and drilling. It was hard to tell what theory of leadership and warfare stood behind this inhuman inferno and its tightly disciplined facade. He meets there, too, friends from the University, Harvey Sherman who preceded him and was named an instructor, Bill Prendergast who followed him and felt he was about to expire.
After which he sees her for ten days, and wears his gold bars when not naked, and then surprisingly must return to Paris, Tennessee, all smiles at the noncoms who were expecting worse and visiting his pals Johnny Chingos, Chester Duvall, and especially Big Hank Danenberg. Before he can begin learning and teaching there, he is transferred to an automatic weapons battalion at Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas, which, his old-time non-coms tell him, used to be only for shit-kickers, as they termed the Cavalry, including the famous Regiment of Custer which the Sioux wiped out.
Jill comes down to begin the life of a camp-follower. She takes a room in a rancho owned by a woman of the place and likes it. Soon, however, the Battalion is ordered to convoy into California to join the Sixth Armored Division in the world's worst desert, the Mohave. Jill must go to Los Angeles and moves in with June and Bill King and their kids in Hollywood. He gets in to see her a couple of times by various unreliable conveyances. He likes the desert. He sleeps under his jeep, so a tank won't run him over.
A fancy order arrives from Washington, printed, sending him to Washington, D.C.; mysteriously barren of information it was, astonishing to the poker-playing desert rats who thought only God knew where they were. Once there, he finds himself assigned to a brand-new type of organization that has been designed for psychological warfare, a new term to him, but he can see how suitable his background is -- his social science education and his military education, both. (The Army didn't discover this; a Lt. Martin Herz found out about him from Brother Bus.) He and Jill hole up in a pleasant room where he plays records that teach one Italian; Mrs. Singleton, their landlady, is delighted with the secrecy attending her lodger: "You just know what all that Italian talk means!"
But now he must go to the Office of Strategic Services Center for espionage and intelligence agents at Camp Ritchie (now Camp David) in Maryland, to where his camp-follower proceeds as well and locates a charming set of rooms, and there, before they can ship him overseas, he unintentionally impregnates her (it was on Maryland Avenue that they first made love and in Maryland State they now conceived).
He helps to conduct a school for the rapidly filling ranks of the First Mobile Radio Broadcasting Company, a name masquerading all the equipment that the best of designers could devise for conducting propaganda operations in the field and the personnel to go with it. He teaches basics of military operations and propaganda to the world's weirdest outfit, a company loaded down with technical and communications skills. When the roll was called, he had to stifle a laugh at the ranks that came to attention. There was Peter Viereck, a poet whose father had been treasonably pro-German in World War I (it was said) but who was gung-ho for the Nazis' scalps now; present was Klaus Mann, whose alienated father was glimpsed by the Student when, with George Peck and Christine Palmer (newly Peck) they had visited the Mann daughter Elizabeth and her husband Professor Giuseppe Borgese, Mann's friend, during one of his escapades from the Mohave desert.
Hans Habe, best tailored private in the Army, responded jovially to his name, so Costas, so Fodor, so Guetta, so Coen, so Wallenberg, so many another who was well-equipped in one way or another to lay the hex upon the Italians and Germans. Also lined up were electronics technicians, compositors and printers, radio experts, truck drivers, and no experienced plain soldiers. He despaired for their future. The immediate bosses of the intelligence and propaganda group were Lt. Martin Florian Herz, with a background in finance, a soaring I.Q., and a serious disposition towards his mission, and Lt. Alfred de Grazia, from the University of Chicago. I need not mention here the managers of the portable radio stations, printing presses, loud-speakers and other paraphernalia that were to be the media for the messages of this crew.
They somehow managed to get this zoo landed in North Africa without casualties and then he was split off with a couple of others to go first to an Algiers HQ for Psychological Warfare and then with several English officers to Tunis, just as the German and Italian troops, about a half million of them, whizzed by on their way to surrender. Now this equally remarkable little group teaches itself about propaganda, tactics, Italy and Germany. Then they get on a landing craft of the British Eighth Army and motor into Syracuse Harbor, docking next to a burning hospital ship. They go to work at this "psychological warfare" and that's it for two more years, until, of an August day in 1945, he is stuffed into a corner of a ship packed with victorious troops suffering the pains of the dammed in hell to get back home.
All of this is told in euphemistic and scandalous detail, accompanied by a anti-clausevitzian critique of warfare, in another volume: of how he wandered about Sicily, Calabria, Puglia, Campania, Romagna, Abbruzzi and Umbria, spending his nights promiscuously in Catania, Palermo, Bari, Naples, Cassino, Anzio and Rome or their suburbs, performing one or more of the following operations and usually several at a time: seizing newspapers and radio stations and cinema productions, packing and firing leaflets at the enemy, broadcasting messages of urgent concern to the enemy, interrogating them, deriving intelligence from various sources as to the state of mind of the people and enemy troops on the other side of the line, evaluating the morale of our own allies and co-belligerents, and taking his share of knocks and good times, all the while keeping up an impressive correspondence with his wife who delivers to his name a daughter on December 28 (Chicago time), December 29 (his birthday, Cassino time) as the Battle reaches one of its three peaks.
His Roman days are marvelous from the dawn of its Liberation to the day of his departure, put to purging the film industry of Fascists and initiating a film about the Italian Partisans; there were Steve Pallos, Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante (whom he had rescued in the mountains), Naval Captain Gianni Makaus who joined the Allied intelligence force enthusiastically, Bianca and Paolo Moffa, Clara Unghy, and his British gang, "D" Section, led on by Ian Greenlees. New types came pouring in fresh from London and Washington, so he volunteers for the next expedition, playing the fool.
Now the same functions are repeated, commencing with D-Day in Southern France, from San Tropez on up, Bouche de Rhone, Vaucluse, Gare, Hautes Alpes, Franche Compte, Burgundy, Alsace, Lorraine, and into Germany to the Saar, the Rhineland, Mannheim, Heidelberg, (where he invaded the closed precincts of the University, prowled its halls, found refugees hidden out here and there, explained to the several soldiers with him the greatness of the place).
Augsburg, Munich and a dash through the Brenner Pass into Italy through the rear of the surrendering Germany Army, then, by now commander of Psychological Operations for the U.S. Seventh Army, he takes his well-worn, well-used, well-decorated company to disassemble it at the new PW Ops HQ at Bad Homberg, spending a period of luxury with baths, linen tablecloths, and schmaltzy violins. They should be teaching each other how to run Germany and spending their time learning the language, but they do neither. Now is when he should really go in for the high times to come, but leaves Berlin to veterans like Hans Wallenberg and the newly arrived, like Tom Stauffer, who, a good Beta, is taking in theatre amid the Reichian ruins.
He opts to cash in his multitudinous points (garnered according to the Sam Stauffer Opinion Polling technique), and is granted return to the motherland by the most miserable accommodations and conveyances available to the Army -- an old French wooden camp, a steam engine drawing World War I commuter cars, a sluggish converted cargo boat -- in order to arrive at three-thirty in the morning in a strange flat to the howls of an outraged aroused infant and her welcoming mother, his wife, she who has probably exceeded the all-time record for letters to a soldier, over a thousand pages, the best of American prose, reciprocated by somewhat less from him, both in quantity and quality, and through which flow of correspondence he has been duly informed of who among their friends had joined up (Tom Kelly, Ed de Grazia), avoided service (Cousin Howard and Stud Ruml), were sick (George de Huszar), keeping the home fires burning (most of the girls from the Midway, it would seem), broke (nobody), making money (Brother-in-law Walter), writing (John Hess from his Tank Battalion in France), unheard of (Martin Greenman), met one another (Harvey Karlin and John Hess), killed or disabled (Brutus Reitman), a prisoner (Emmett Deadman), married (Hank Danenberg), stopping by (a mob of folk), changing jobs (everybody), wanting news (like "saw Adele Rose who wants to hear from you how Bill McNeill who is stuck in the West Indies can get over into your theatre of operations and your kind of mischief"), and thus he could be a veritable ghost of the campus; there was all of this plus rare surprising encounters with someone related through the University, as happened on the dismal morning of the first day of January 1945 in a blizzard and retreat at a crossroads, when the hooded and icy-breathed M.P. directing the mass of traffic coming at him from every side, one side being the Student's convoy, revealed himself to be philosophical and gentle Fred Pera, his friend, who then said, why, yes, we can get your convoy through pretty soon now, "I'll be seeing you," and they went their ways. And Bob Merriam, on a short leave in Paris, who was writing a history of the First Army.
He exchanged letters with L.D.White, Gosnell, Leites, Sam Stauffer -- who told Jill that there must have been a bungle when the draft was first drawn by lot because of the numbers that showed up, not a chance in a million that they would -- and, of course, Earl Johnson.
As the War wound down preparatory to the big blast at Hiroshima, Sebastian wrote him: he was back on campus: "I got permission from my boss ["Wild Bill" Donovan] to change jobs once the European Theatre was about over with and am now teaching the political parts of Social Science II in the College. It's been sort of odd being back home here after 4 years in Washington.. and seeing some of the hangers-on who have vegetated or less during the past war years...Everyone here always asks about you. I guess they got used to seeing us together. Ed is now staying with us and attending Soc I and II and Humanities I lectures. In addition he has a job at the bookstore five hours a day five days a week. So he's set until he is called up for [Air Force] reassignment which I hope takes a long time. Little by little he's developing into a fine lad. Vic, too, is coming along, but is at present a little too involved in le jazz hot to consider his fortunes in any but that light. I hope to bore from within on that front. The rest of the family is fine with everyone getting fat." He, Miriam, and Joey III are living at the reconstructed Kenwood Gardens!
That leaves Robert Maynard Hutchins to place in time. He and Maude are fighting as always, and he wishes that he might find a job worthy of him. Adler is always coming up with some trivium, by which is not meant the medieval type. Benton cannot find him a proper job in Washington. His buddy Bill Douglas accepted the appointment to the Supreme Court that he had once hoped for. Roosevelt seems a little irritated at his wit, and his reluctance to become a part of the team. What does the man want? Why did R.M.H. hang on during the whole of the war and continue afterwards? He had been trying to find a job for several years. He could have gone to war in a number of capacities; he didn't have to copy Paul Douglas, who was in much worse shape physically and coaxed his way into the ranks as a Marine private. (But, nota bene, Hutchins served in the ambulance corps in World War II while Paul was a Conscientious Objector.)
Hutchins would have made an excellent Military Governor in the Far East or Europe, but, of course, he would have had to bend to the will of the Military Chiefs on occasion. He could have become a constructive critic of the war effort, a kind of Harry Truman, but better, for there was a world of rottenness to expose, analyze, condemn, prosecute. He could have organized the University Presidents to this end. He could have led a drive to improve and expand the correspondence courses that the Student worked at before going into service; ten million Americans and a huge number of foreigners abroad needed such courses, and so did the American population that went educationally untended during the war.
In effect he let the University be used to blow up the world, but did little in that same period of time to educate and pull the world together. If he had been exerting his magical charisma from a public position, or from a special program of studies at his own University, to unite the world, as its very leaders were promising to do and might have been forced to do, he would have been applauded and followed and then might have accomplished his highest ambitions. He did little of this. When he struck out for world unity, it was after the War, it was too late, and it was as a private party, a modest committee, Common Cause, and, at that, its driving force came almost entirely from Giuseppe Borgese. If Mr. Hutchins had raised the flag of world unity then and there, the Student would have joined the cause immediately upon getting out of bed with Jill.
So there went four years of the Student's life. He learned some math as an artilleryman, some mechanics for all the vehicles, about meteorology and gases for the balloons, and of guns and explosives for firing -- all of this being formal training -- and then heard all kinds of briefings, explanations etc. as he got into one new situation after another. He reciprocated by teaching others all of these things and more. Friend and enemy, too because some of the most instructive material in the world was put into the hands of the enemy by air drop, artillery shell, loudspeaker, and radio, like "How to save your life and get home to your frau," and "Here is the true news on the Russian Front," and a million German soldiers became trusting readers, because they practically always heard the truth. (It's easier to tell the truth when you are winning, and to be modest.)
In camps and at war (reading is almost as good as praying to discount noise and anxiety, and it stays with you longer) he read about 200 books (he read Mann, Borgese, Waugh, Dos Passos, Silone, Boccaccio, Saroyan, et al.), several years of the New Yorker (sent by airmail in a small-print edition), the Army's Stars and Stripes, which was picked up by the rations truck, probably well over a thousand bulletins and reports -- on current events, how to do this or that, plans, enemy conditions at the front and at home, etc. a daily short-wave radio roundup that his company prepared for the HQ and their own use in their camouflaged monitoring truck, which was also picking up nearby enemy installations. Then there were those 1000 pages from his wife in which a total of 104 proper names were introduced; 74 of these were connected in one way or another with the University of Chicago.
He was one of the best informed officers in the Allied or Enemy Forces, in sum. No more than a few hundreds out of twenty millions could have had his facilities and used them. Would he then have known of the death camps and of the Holocaust? He did know that the concentration camps were deadly, and that the German troops were committing innumerable atrocities in the East of Europe and the Balkans and that outbreaks were occurring in Rome, Paris, Lyon, Antwerp, and elsewhere in the West. He understood that Jews who could not flee the Front and were caught in the German net would probably be killed. Several key soldiers of his company were refugees; they were quite alert. He urged that the Gestapo and Special SS troops be executed in group judicial processes as soon as they came to hand, while granting a blanket of amnesia to the German population as a whole instead of indicting them. But official policy came to be non-fraternization with all Germans and judicial prosecution of individual captured offenders. He and his comrades did not realize that a systematic extermination project had been accomplished -- 80% of it at Auschwitz, far to the East -- that which came later to be called the Holocaust, until they entered the camps. He was one of the first to enter Dachau and come upon the mounds of corpses. He let some of the stronger prisoners mangle a stout guard who had fallen into their hands.
When he was being examined by a board of colonels to become a cadet officer, he was asked by one of them how big a ditch a man could dig in a day. He didn't know, the other colonels didn't care and the matter was laughed off save by himself, who could not only think to ask what kinds of dirt and stone composed the earth, with what tools, and how strong the man, but also --all such quibbling aside -- how much could any given man dig and shouldn't an officer of the line know the answer, or an approximation thereto, and where would you go to find out. In this sense he was not prepared for a command, for the question, while not absolute, was indicative, i.e. a good exam question. After all, he would be expected to know the statute of limitations on a case in law or the method of drawing a random sample of voting precincts, or how to detect the strength of a speaker from his voice, or the hints of appeasement in a speaker from the contents of his speech. After observing officers for a while and as an enlisted man, he wrote a letter to Sam Stauffer, saying inter alia that, in order of acceptance by troops and leadership ability, the best officers seemed actually to be West Pointers, then those from Officer Candidate Schools who had been in the ranks, then the Reservist Officers from the campuses of a lot of schools around the country, and lastly the officers who had been in the National Guard units.
He pondered for four years whether what he learned at the University was useful in war and vice versa. Of course there were a thousand answers possible, depending upon what one learned in what school, and what were one's experiences in what army in what campaign in what branch of service. Any conclusions he reached would be most difficult to substantiate and could not be universal. That said, now recall his experience. He had the rarest type of experience, except for those who got it serially; for instance, John Hess ended up with experience both as an enlisted man and an officer, with barracks experience and combat experience, with line experience and staff experience. (It's no wonder he ended up writing M-A-S-H scripts.) In comparison, the Student had the EM-O experience, the barracks and the combat, but then his line and staff experiences were 80% combined and performed at the same time. He would be both acting against the enemy and performing intelligence functions (the housekeeping functions of managing troops going along with both and occurring about 50% of the time). He operated this way with four armies, the British 8th army, the American 3rd, the 5th, and the 7th, and he also was attached briefly to "Super"-Headquarters at Washington, Algiers, and Bad Homburg. He saw most types of unit of all three services in action, navy, air force,and army, and under all conditions from the most backward of rear echelons to the most forward, even inside enemy territory.
All of this is to advertise and support conclusions that he arrived at early, some of which he wrote to Earl Johnson, to wit: that an education in sociology and sociological method, in the new political and administrative science of the Chicago school, was a first rate preparation for military staff work in any service. It was also an excellent preparation, along with other needed qualities, for moving from one to another position and changing from one skill to another. (I am reminded of Pericles' famous funeral oration to the Athenians, when he says that the great virtue of Athens -- for which read the University Community of Chicago of the 1930's -- was that it turned out people who could adapt to circumstances and be effective, more that the people of any other city, whether in war or in the arts or in commerce.)
For a combat officer -- here speaking of infantry, tank, and artillery, but especially of the "Queen of Battle" -- although he had some education and experience in geography and communal living, he lacked most electrical and mechanical skills. But social psychology and clinical psychology were always important and so, too, the sociology of organizations. The standpoint of the ordinary soldier was less complex: his primary virtues, he observed, were patience, a slightly depressed and pessimistic character, a deliberateness of movement, an edge of irritability, that could be fanned into aggressivity, and a disinclination to think about the future, most scenarios of which are despairing for the infantryman. He should be put -- how often the Student brooded over this -- into a mental disposition of one who is going to have grave things happen to him, the certain death and disablement of his buddies, his own death, sickness, disablement (but distinguish this from the pleasant fantasy of a lucky wound), humiliation, captivity, cowardice, and disastrous bungling. What is this mental disposition? Realism. Fatalism. But without losing the will to take care of oneself and the aggressivity for combat.
This complex was hardly contemplated and studied; training programs were only freakishly built up to produce this mental state. The military educators -- we are to be allowed this word, for educators have forever been equally incompetent on the average -- worked it the other way around, teaching people optimistically, to be aggressive and savage, to take care of themselves physically, sleeping comfortably, drinking clean water, avoiding mines, etc., a thousand procedures, utilitarian in themselves, but all from the standpoint of the happy warrior when there is no happy warrior, or at least not for very long! The same lessons should be taught the fatalistic warrior. By the same reasoning, physical proficiency is valuable, not because modern warfare needed strength and agility, but because competing in games and training for them gives advantages in combat even in staff work, consisting of patience, submission to rules, endurance both psychic and physical, and acceptance of bad luck and good luck, and especially of a lack of control over everything, the principle, "Murphy's Principle," that if anything can go wrong, it will." The traits of and requirements for the athlete are beneficial to the soldier and officer so long as they survive the chance components of disaster in war, which are commonly ignored in training or education, even though all agree it is necessary to teach "what to expect."
The mistaken conventional ideal is to train warriors to remain effective, intelligent, and combative in a situation where control over what happens to one can be assured, whereas such control can rarely be assured, except perhaps on one occasion in ten. From the highest headquarters to the lowliest sub-squad, and in all areas from the satellite to the ruined cellar, and in all branches from the navy to the infantry, and in all functions from the logistical to the combative, warfare should be taught (if it has to be taught at all) as the means of making the best of situations that have gotten out of control. (And, who knows: perhaps all collective human endeavors should be taught from this premise!)
To conclude, the Student spent much time in being a formal student, much time in being a formal teacher to his own men and to battalions of soldiers pulled out of the line for rest, his time being whenever he was available and nearby, whenever he was not chasing about on some imposed or self-imposed mission or moving the detachment or some part of it from one place to another on the map of Western Europe, that one day could be flagged at a thousand pinpoints to say "The Student shat here." There were all too few of Chicago types in the Army and they were usually grabbed or volunteered for the adjutant general's office, for the quartermaster, for the massive bureaucracy in Washington and in every theatre of operations and for the general staffs everywhere. Indeed, it was only by mistake of the military or of the individual person that any University of Chicago guy got within earshot of a bomb, much less a rifle. My personal opinion is that they would have made excellent combat officers, but then I am speaking from the standpoint of the Student and am prejudiced. And I am not taking in account the desire of a large majority of people to avoid an early death.
The Student, while he may have been so proud to have been educated at the University and have thought his training of great use in winning the war, nevertheless or because of this, felt intermittently a jealousy of the students who stayed behind and avoided service, the students who got soft jobs in the bureaucracy in industry or government and made lots of money (much of which they had to save because of rationing), and the new faculty members who were coming in because the old ones were leaving or retiring or impotent.
On the way from the Mohave Desert to Camp Ritchie (David) he stopped in Chicago, against regulations, pretending to be driving when in fact he grabbed a plane precisely to give himself and his wife a few days in Chicago at home and on the Campus, and he walked shiny uniformed in his most ramrod manner through the campus and past the Law School and came upon a lot of lolling cadets and got not a single salute, not the merest note of his passing. He felt indignant. He stopped before the main entrance to the Law School. "Attention!!" he bellowed. The cadets looked startled, but they had obviously heard somewhere of the word. They pulled themselves to their feet. He repeated "Attention!" and they stood a little stiffer. (He was adept at this.) "You!" he yelled at a man slightly slacker than the others. "Stand at Attention! Shoulders back..gut in.. chin down.. feet together. Attention! Have your never heard the word?" By this time they were all responding to his barks, and you would think this sad sack was an exception to the whole slack lot of them.They were ready to dump him overboard.
Then while they stood their stiffly on the long stone steps, he sang out in beautiful Periclean prose a paean of the University, how great it was, how lucky they were to be there, and how they should use every minute of it to become better officers and gentlemen, and maybe if they were going to be killed they might remember with due affection what large benefits had been bestowed upon them beforehand!! They had become dead sober. They would have cheered if they had dared. They were now inspired patriots, those sons of bitches. He commanded "At ease!" and walked off to the Social Science Building.