"Tom Reamy - San Diego Lightfoot Sue" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reamy Tom)

FRITZ LEIBEH

to a dead halt for many decadesтАФwith what disastrous effects on the American character, turning its
deep simple faith in freedom to hypocrisy, it is impossible to exaggerate. I have published a sizable paper
on this subject in the Journal of Civil War Studies."

I nodded somberly. Quite a bit of this new subject matter of his was terra incognita to me; yet I knew
enough of American history to realize he had made a cogent point. More than ever before, I was
impressed by his multifaceted learningтАФhe was indubitably a figure in the great tradition of German
scholarship, a profound thinker, broad and deep. How fortunate to be his father. Not for the first time,
but perhaps with the greatest sincerity yet, I thanked God and the Laws of Nature that I had early moved
my family from Braunau, Austria, where I had been born in 1889, to Baden-Baden, where he had grown
up in the ambience of the great new university on the edge of the Black Forest and only 150 kilometers
from Count Zeppelin's dirigible factory in Wiirttem-berg, at Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance.

I raised my glass of Kirschwasser to him in a solemn, silent toastтАФwe had somehow got to that stage in
our mealтАФand downed a sip of the potent, fiery, white, cherry brandy.

He leaned toward me and said, T might as well tell you, Dolf, that my big book, at once popular and
scholarly, my Meisterwerk, to be titled If Things Had Gone Wrong, or perhaps If Things Had Turned
for the Worse, will deal solelyтАФthough illuminated by dozens of diverse examplesтАФwith my theory of
historical cusps, a highly speculative concept but firmly footed in fact." He glanced at his wristwatch,
muttered, 'Yes, there's still time for it. So nowтАФ" His face grew grave, his voice clear though smallтАФ"I'
will venture to tell you about one more cusp, the most disputable and yet most crucial of them all." He
CATCH THAT ZEPPELIN! 23

paused. "I warn you, dear Dolf, that this cusp may cause you pain."

"I doubt that," I told him indulgently. "Anyhow, go ahead."
"Very well. In November of 1918, when the British had broken the Hindenburg Line and the weary
German army was defiantly dug in along the Rhine, and just before the Allies, under Marshal Foch,
launched the final crushing drive which would cut a bloody swath across the heartland to BerlinтАФ"

I understood his warning at once. Memories flamed in my mind like the sudden blinding flares of the
battlefield with their deafening thunder. The company I had commanded had been among the most
desperately defiant of those he mentioned, heroically nerved for a last-ditch resistance. And then Foch
had delivered that last vast blow, and we had fallen back and back and back before the overwhelming
numbers of our enemies with their field guns and tanks and armored cars innumerable and above all their
huge aerial armadas of De Haviland and Handley-Page and other big bombers escorted by
insect-buzzing fleets of Spads and other fighters shooting to bits our last Fokkers and Pfalzes and visiting
on Germany a destruction greater far than our zeps had worked on England. Back, back, back, endlessly
reeling and regrouping, across the devastated German countryside, a dozen times decimated yet still
defiant until the end came at last amid the ruins of Berlin, and the most bold among us had to admit we
were beaten and we surrendered unconditionallyтАФ

These vivid, fiery recollections came to me almost instantaneously.

I heard my son continuing, "At that cusp moment in November, 1918, Dolf, there existed a very strong
possibilityтАФI have established this beyond question тАФthat an immediate armistice would be offered and