Clem Brazenstar raged, “Say, for God’s sake, are we going to start another all-night race-discussion?” and settled comfortably on the couch for same.

“Not for me. I never want to hear about our blasted race again!” proclaimed Ryan Woolcape, also making himself comfortable.

Neil said hastily, “Before you get entirely off the subject—” Somebody laughed. “—I would like to have your comments on a letter I got, months ago, from a classmate serving in the South Pacific. May I read part of it?”

Their grunts apparently meant Yes, he might, and he droned:

“I’ve been having a sticky job as an army criminal investigator lately and I’ve been surprised to find how differently I feel now about Negroes. They are very unpopular. The white G.I. has more friendliness toward the members of any alien race, because the Negro does not extend to white soldiers the same cheerful courtesy that the whites extend to one another, and that is important where men live so close together. No doubt there are excellent Negro soldiers. But in every stockade the Negro prisoners outnumber the whites three to one, on a percentage basis, and they are in for AWOL, disobeying direct orders, sex crimes, stabbings, and stealing from other soldiers, and in all these cases they are given to lying, freely and volubly. So our boys who before the war had no contact with Negroes will go back into civilian life with a great deal of prejudice.”

* * * * *

Neil expected rage, but he was answered only by a silence with no particular emphasis in it, and the belligerent Sergeant Ryan Woolcape commented uninterestedly:

“Your friend is a typical cop. He isn’t interested in finding good soldiers, only bad ones. He doesn’t know one thing about the innumerable colored outfits—like, say, the 761st Tank Battalion—that had great records. But I will hand it to him he probably knows the effect of the story that guys like him spread all over Asia and Europe—that all of us colored fellows have tails! Did that make us cheerfully courteous!”

They laughed, and Clem Brazenstar ruled, “Come off the soap-box, Ryan, and let a professional talk!… Cap, what that fellow said is part true, and the truer it is, the more you whites have to do something drastic, for your own sake.

“The old Uncle Toms lifted up their voices in hallelujahs if they got treated as well as the livestock, but not the young tribesmen. They’ve read a book. Get it clear—the New Negro demands every right of the New White Man, every one, and he doesn’t whine for them now; he’ll fight for them. You white Iagos have built up a revolutionary army of thirteen million Othellos, male and female. Of course the colored boys are impolite to the white gemmuns, in a war they never wanted to fight. Their own war was closer.