Harry made a motion, flexing his thumb and forefinger together. Lee mimicked this, squeezing the ball. It let out a small, quick, bleating sound. Boy slept, but Nanette’s ears popped upright and her still-rheumy eyes popped open. Then, gradually, they drifted shut. For the first time, her tiny body, with its football belly, had gone stiff with interest. And now it relaxed.

“As I have said, Corporal. She is a very good dog.”

27

In the first week of November 1918, rumors came. The Kaiser had resigned (false); the Social Democrats had sunk the royal yacht (false); the German navy had mutinied and joined the socialists at the town of Kiel (true). General Ludendorff had been sacked (true), Hindenburg assassinated (false), the Kaiser assassinated (false). Germany no longer controlled its armies, Bolsheviks had infiltrated every government office, the workers were uniting under red flags flying in Bremen, Hamburg, and Cuxhaven. The Kaiser had left Berlin and was taking a holiday at Spa.

The last rumor was true. The Kaiser and Kaiserin had taken a cottage that was covered in roses at the end of an old brick path that was slippery with moss. There was a birdbath in which late autumn sparrows bathed. He requested that there be no demands made of him. Instead, he made tea with the mint from the garden, and sat in the afternoon facing the sun, which was weak and shrouded in November mists. His wife played old, sad songs on the upright piano, and neither of them sang along.

Countries were still declaring war on them. Once upon a time, the Kaiser had greeted each day’s list of new adversaries, scoffing. The Duchy of Grand Fenwick? Latecomers! Seychelles Islands? Phaf! Nicaragua, Costa Rica? Let them man their leaky boats and cross the ocean.

But then came the Onondaga Nation. They delivered their sovereign declaration of war against Germany.

He had no quips about them. The Red Men, the unstoppable, implacable creatures of the forest who showed no mercy and no weakness. He understood trench warfare and evolution of gases, clash of tank against tank. But it did not seem possible that his soldiers could fight against wraiths. It had been a hard war, and his closest subordinates had already noted the perspiration, the palsy, the sudden interruptions of council meetings to demand that the music—there was no music—cease.

So he went to Spa for twenty-four hours. In the evening, he asked that newsreels be shown. The films seized from American couriers made him chuckle at first: Pershing’s Crusaders was clumsy propaganda. The sight of himself watching a parade juxtaposed with a few dozen tin-plate-hatted doughboys bayoneting his effigy struck him as perfect comedy. Not one of those men knew him. Neither did the man who ran the camera, or the man who had put the mustache on the dummy. He, Wilhelm, was just the necessary villain, a role as ritualistic as Pulcinella’s in commedia dell’arte.