half-hours per day for five days!
These were specially selected youth, who had labored diligently all year to earn this
reward. They had been brought by special trains and by trucks, and had marched in with their
bands, shaking the air with songs and the great Zeppelin Meadow with the tramp of boots. For
five days and most of five nights they had shouted and sting themselves hoarse, making up in
their fervor for all the other forty-four political parties which they had wiped out of
existence in Germany. Only one party now, one law, one faith, one baptism! A temporary hall
had been built, accommodating a small part of the hundred and sixty thousand official delegates;
the others listened to loud-speakers all over the fields, and that served just as well, because
there didn't have to be any voting. Everything was settled by the Führer, and the million others
had only to hear the speeches and shout their approval.
Heinrich, now a high official in the Hitler Youth, had been among those admitted to the opening
ceremonies. He lacked language to describe the wonders, he had to wave his arms and raise
his voice. The frenzied acclaim when the Führer marched in to the strains of the
Hitler had reached the platform the standards were borne in, the flags consecrated by being
touched with the Blood Flag, which had been borne in the Munich civil struggle. Heinrich,
telling about it, was like a good Catholic witnessing the sacred mystery of the Host. He told
how Ernst Rohm had called the roll of those eighteen martyrs, and of all the two or three
hundred others who had died during the party's long struggle for power. Muffled drums beat
softly, and at the end the S.A. Chief of Staff declared:
Five days of speechmaking and cheering, marching and singing by a million of the most active
and capable men in Germany, nearly all of them young. Heinrich said: "If you had seen it,
Lanny, you would know that our movement has won, and that the Fatherland is going to be
what we make it."
"I had a long talk with Kurt," said Lanny. "He convinced me that you and he have been
right." The young official was so delighted that he clasped his friend's hand and wrung it.
Another Hitler victory.
II
Most of Irma's fashionable acquaintances had not yet returned to the city, so she employed
her spare time accustoming her ears to the German language. She struck up an acquaintance
with the hotel's manicurist, a natural blonde improved by art, sophisticated as her profession
required, but underneath it naive, as all Germans seemed to Irma. An heiress's idea of how to
acquire knowledge was to hire somebody to put it painlessly into her mind; and who could be a
more agreeable injector than a young woman who had held the hands of assorted millionaires
and celebrities from all parts of the world, chattering to them and encouraging them to chatter
back? Fraulein Elsa Borg was delighted to sell her spare hours to Frau Budd,
and to teach her the most gossipy and idiomatic Berlinese. Irma practiced laboriously those
coughing and sneezing sounds which Tecumseh had found too barbarous. To her husband she
said: "Really the craziest way to put words together! I will the blue bag with the white
trimmings to the hotel room immediately bring let. I will the eggs without the shells to be broken
have. It makes me feel all the time as if children were making it up."
But no one could question the right of Germans by the children their sentences to be shaped
let, and Irma was determined to speak properly if at all; never would she consent to sound to
anybody the way Mama Robin sounded to her. So she and the manicurist talked for hours about
the events of the day, and when Irma mentioned the
had been there. This "treasure" was the block leader for his neighborhood and an ardent party
worker, so he had received a badge and transportation and a permit to leave his work, also his
straw and two blankets and goulash and coffee—all free. Irma put many questions, and
ascertained what the duties of a block leader were, and how he had a subordinate in every
apartment building, and received immediate reports of any new person who appeared in it, and
of any whose actions were suspicious, or who failed to contribute to the various party funds, the
perhaps to give him information so that he could outwit some other block leader in an
emergency.
Elsa's "treasure" afforded an opportunity to check on the claims of Heinrich and to test the
efficiency of the Nazi machine. One of a hundred clerks in a great insurance office, Elsa's Karl
worked for wretched wages, and if it had not been for his "little treasure" would have had to
