“My mother country is America, Dirk, same as yours. As I see it, you’ll be sorry you threw in your lot with the Nazis when America enters the war, and you’re branded a traitor.”

Dirk had set down his beer glass with a smirk. He had begun to grow a mustache and to wear his hair cut and parted in the same slicked-down style as Adolf Hitler. Neither attempt in this early stage to emulate the Third Reich leader appeared successful. Dirk’s hair was too bristly to respond to Brylcreem and his upper lip too narrow to support but a thin bushy line that looked like a clinging caterpillar. In time, though, Chris thought that Dirk could pass for another Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, “the fatty in the dove-gray suit,” so his detractors dubbed him.

“We’ll see who will be branded a traitor when the war is over—the Germans in America who remembered the country from which they came, or the Germans who forgot,” Dirk said.

“I never knew Germany well enough to remember,” Chris said. “Neither did you.”

Chris had glanced into the yawning, empty cavern of the vast banquet hall. The tables had been set for guests who had deliberately accepted dinner invitations only to decline them at the last minute to state their rejection of the political leanings of the guest of honor and his family. The Drechslers would have done better to have hosted a backyard barbecue. Chris would have been among the absent guests if the gesture had not been done in poor taste. He had hoped his mother took notice of the price to be paid for being too pro-German in New Braunfels, Texas. Already her luster had faded in the eyes of the townspeople, though they still patronized his father’s shoe repair shop, if only because it was the only one in town.

Chris didn’t know if Dirk was being stupid or brave to go against the tide of feeling against Adolf Hitler. Misguided was more like it. At the time, he’d wondered if his former best buddy had considered that one day he might face his Texas friends as the enemy. Chris wouldn’t be one of them. He still felt shame at being rejected for enlistment into the military services on grounds of “a physical defect.” He was as sound as any man and eligible for general duty in every way other than his thumbless right hand that the army held would prevent him from managing a weapon. He was single, young, fit, and educated. He was a teacher and coach at Stephen F. Austin High School in Austin and was earning his master’s degree in education at his alma mater, the University of Texas. He’d planned to begin his doctoral program this year, but Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and the Axis powers declared war on America. He’d gone immediately to sign up.