South Wind

Like a dank whiff from a tomb, the news from Italy flowed over the Alps and oozed across the Reich. People high and low glanced at one another, calculating.

The best-fed Nazis were the first to rationalize. Good riddance, they said, but they knew better. Among the little Bonzen there was furtive pocketing of lapel pins.

Outside the Party there was a quickening. As a great wave passes beneath a ship, the news surged under Festung Europa. To millions of plain people it seemed to foreshadow an end to killing and to hunger.

To the shrewd ones, however, an end to war would spell a beginning of something else. The Junkers, the big industrialists and the professional soldiers are schooled in the belief that unconditional surrender need not be catastrophic--unless imposed by the Russians. Once before, they might recollect, a timely yielding had proved surmountable. They would reason that a new Versailles dictated by Western powers would scarcely rob them of their skills and the ability eventually to use them again.

Thus a fissure widened between the men who cannot escape the Party label and those who stand ready to assert that they merely endured it. For the former the cue now was: hang on and hope for a stalemate; for the latter: get this war over with as quickly as possible--and make sure the English-speaking armies march into Berlin first.

As the paralysis wore off, the supple, the plain and the shrewd looked to Italy for signs of their fate.

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