“Dad keeps making that speech about serving the country,” Brinker said apologetically, “I wish
to hell he wouldn’t.”
“That’s all right.” I knew that part of friendship consisted in accepting a friend’s shortcomings,
which sometimes included his parents.
“I’m enlisting,” he went on, Tm going to ‘serve’ as he puts it, I may even get killed. But I’ll be
damned if I’ll have that Nathan Hale attitude of his about it. It’s all that World War I malarkey
that gets me. They’re all children about that war, did you never notice?” He flopped comfortably
into the chair which had been disconcerting his father. “It gives me a pain, personally. I’m not
any kind of hero, and neither are you. And neither is the old man, and he never was, and I don’t
care what he says he almost did at Château-Thierry.”
“He’s just trying to keep up with the times. He probably feels left out, being too old this time.”
“Left out!” Brinker s eyes lighted up. “Left out! He and his crowd are responsible for it! And
we’re going to fight it!”
I had heard this generation-complaint from Brinker before, so often that I finally identified this
as the source of his disillusionment during the winter, this generalized, faintly self-pitying
resentment against millions of people he did not know. He did know his father, however, and so
they were not getting along well now. In a way this was Finny’s view, except that naturally he
saw it comically, as a huge and intensely practical joke, played by fat and foolish old men
bungling away behind the scenes.
I could never agree with either of them. It would have been comfortable, but I could not believe
it. Because it seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities,
but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart.
Brinker went upstairs to continue his packing, and I walked over to the gym to clean out my
locker. As I crossed the Far Common I saw that it was rapidly becoming unrecognizable, with
huge green barrels placed at many strategic points, the ground punctuated by white markers
identifying offices and areas, and also certain less tangible things: a kind of snap in the
atmosphere, a professional optimism, a conscious maintenance, of high morale. I myself had
often been happy at Devon, but such times it seemed to me that afternoon were over now.
Happiness had disappeared along with rubber, silk, and many other staples, to be replaced by the
wartime synthetic, high morale, for the Duration.
At the gym a platoon was undressing in the locker room. The best that could be said for them
physically was that they looked wiry in their startling sets of underwear, which were the color of
moss.
I never talked about Phineas and neither did anyone else; he was, however, present in every
moment of every day since Dr, Stanpole had told me. Finny had a vitality which could not be
quenched so suddenly, even by the marrow of his bone. That was why I couldn’t say anything or
listen to anything about him, because he endured so forcefully that what I had to say would have