“He’s developing into a real athlete,” he said matter-of-factly. “We’re aiming for the ‘44
Olympics.”

Mr. Ludsbury emitted a single chuckle from deep in his throat, then his face turned brick red
momentarily and he assumed his customary sententiousness. “Games are all right in their place,”
he said, “and I won’t bore you with the Eton Playing Fields observation, but all exercise today is
aimed of course at the approaching Waterloo. Keep that in your sights at all times, won’t you.”

Finny’s face set in determination, with the older look I had just detected in him. “No,” he said.

I don’t believe any student had ever said “No” flatly to Mr. Ludsbury before. It flustered him
uncontrollably. His face turned brick red again, and for a moment I thought he was going to run
away. Then he said something so rapid, throaty, and clipped that neither of us understood it,
turned quickly and strode off across the quadrangle.

“He’s really sincere, he thinks there’s a war on,” said Finny in simple wonder. “Now why
wouldn’t he know?” He pondered Mr. Ludsbury’s exclusion from the plot of the fat old men as
we watched his figure, reedy even in his winter wraps, move away from us. Then the light broke.
“Oh, of course!” he cried. “Too thin. Of course.”

I stood there pitying Mr. Ludsbury for his fatal thinness and reflecting that after all he had
always had a gullible side.

Chapter 9

This was my first but not my last lapse into Finny’s vision of peace. For hours, and sometimes
for days, I fell without realizing it into the private explanation of the world. Not that I ever
believed that the whole production of World War II was a trick of the eye manipulated by a
bunch of calculating fat old men, appealing though this idea was. What deceived me was my
own happiness; for peace is indivisible, and the surrounding world confusion found no reflection
inside me. So I ceased to have any real sense of it.

This was not shaken even by the enlistment of Leper Lepellier. In fact that made the war seem
more unreal than ever. No real war could draw Leper voluntarily away from his snails and
beaver dams. His enlistment seemed just another of Leper’s vagaries, such as the time he slept on
top of Mount Katahdin in Maine where each morning the sun first strikes United States territory.
On that morning, satisfying one of his urges to participate in nature, Leper Lepellier was the first
thing the rising sun struck in the United States.

Early in January, when we had all just returned from the Christmas holidays, a recruiter from the
United States ski troops showed a film to the senior class in the Renaissance Room. To Leper it
revealed what all of us were seeking: a recognizable and friendly face to the war. Skiers in white
shrouds winged down virgin slopes, silent as angels, and then, realistically, herring-boned up
again, but herringboned in cheerful, sunburned bands, with clear eyes and white teeth and chests
full of vigor-laden mountain air. It was the cleanest image of war I had ever seen; even the Air
Force, reputedly so high above the infantry’s mud, was stained with axle grease by comparison,