“This report was two weeks late.”
“Lot more involved than I figured.”
“What? The report?” Hansen thumbed through the pages, playing for fifteen seconds of tension-building silence, “You’ve got a real rod on against the Germans.”
“If the General will be specific.”
“The General will be specific,” he aped. He adjusted his specs for reading. “This choice morsel is on page fourteen, paragraph sixty-two. I quote Captain Sean O’Sullivan. ‘In the event the orders of the local military commander are not carried out by the civilian population, the commander is empowered to seize hostages from the German civilian population and execute them at his discretion until his will is enforced.’ ” Hansen closed the report and snatched off his specs. “That’s a hell of a thing for an American boy to write.”
“I didn’t know our function is to spread Americanism in Germany.”
“Nor is it to continue Nazism. Now by hostages, Captain O’Sullivan, I take it you mean to define between Nazis and non-Nazis.”
“If the General will tell me if the bullet that killed my brother came from a Nazi rifle or a non-Nazi rifle.”
“So in judging all Germans as being the same, you mean to take hostages who are two, three, or four years old.”
Sean balked. “Well ... perhaps we should limit hostages to Nazis.”
“There are fifteen million Nazis in Germany,” Hansen pressed.
“We’ll have room for them when we open their concentration camps!”
“Sit down, lad, and don’t get your Irish up on me. I want the explanation of the hostage paragraph.”
Sean unclenched his fists and sunk into his seat once again. Eric the Red meant business. “In my following comment I said it would never be necessary to use hostages because the Germans are orderly people and will respond to whoever represents authority. You know damned well, General, I’ve said over and over they won’t conduct guerrilla resistance. Quote Churchill. The Germans are at your throat or your feet. They’ll be at our feet when we finish with them.”
“Then why did you find it necessary to put this hostage thing in?”
“Because they’ve got their own little special missions sitting in Berlin writing their version of the same manual. You know their versions? All Germans, get under American protection at all costs where kindly GI’s will supply you with cigarettes, chocolate, and short memories. We have to put that hostage rule into the record just to let them know it’s there.”
Hansen grunted. He opened the bottom drawer of his desk. His stubby fingers produced a bottle of rye whiskey and a pair of glasses. He poured two oversized drinks and shoved one of them to Sean. He knew again why he had picked O’Sullivan for the Special Mission.
“I lost a brother too. Mark Twain Hansen. First World War. Belleau Wood. We can’t go through this with those people again. They’re sick. They have to be healed. Becoming Nazis ourselves isn’t the way.”
“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, can idealism be a practical solution to a people who have only understood force?
It came to that time of night when a shot of rye and a quick snooze was needed. He stretched out on the couch and covered his burning eyes. He thought of how he mentioned his father to young O’Sullivan today. Was it strange at all? With each passing day he was reaching back to his beginnings to find answers....
Andrew Jackson Hansen was second in line for the throne, the family farm, and as he put it, “didn’t give a lusty crap for farming.” He became the first of the Hansen family to strike out with his father’s reluctant blessings. He supported himself through the University of Iowa, in a classical way, waiting on tables, mopping halls. In the summer he lumberjacked some in Wisconsin and was a roustabout in the tent shows which pocked the Midwest after the turn of the century.