BOOK ONE: YESTERDAY than Berthold. Vogelsang was wily. But Berthold was plucky and tenacious. He sat brooding over the books which dealt with his sub- ject, Tacitus, Mommsen, Dessau. Had Arminius the Cherus- can actually accomplished anything? His victory had been precious little use to hirn. Only two years later, the Romans were across the Rhine again; they recovered two of the three lost eagles of their legions. The whole thing was only a colonial war, a kind of Boxer rebellion, which the Romans soon settled. Arminius himself, when he had been conquered by the Ro- mans, was slain by his own countrymen. His father-in-law looked on from the Emperor's box while Arminius's wife and son walked in chains in the Roman triumphal procession. What can we learn from Arrninius the German ? General considerations were no use to Berthold, He had to have strik- ing pictures: The fight. Three legions. A legion means about six thousand fighting-rnen. With its baggage-train and other appurtenances, ten to twenty thousand. Swamps, forests. It must havebeen very much like Tannenberg. A camp of forti- fied baggage-wagons, the thickening fog. Above all, the Ger- mans hated the Roman law-makers. They temporarily spared their lives so as to put them to death later on with exquisite tortures. The Germans, Berthold read in the book by the nationalistic historian Seeck, believed that common law was inimical to personal honour. They did not want any law. That was the chief reason for their rebellion. It was essential to know what Arminius had looked like. That point had struck Berthold at once. Again and again, with concentrated effort, he tried to get an idea of him. The monu- ment in the Teutoburg Forest, a tall pedestal with a conven- tional statue upon it, didn't help at all. "Look here, man, that Arminius of yours was DO fool," Heinrich Lavendel said to hirn. "Those boys must have had a different kind of intelli-

THE OPPERMANNS gence frorn ours, a sort of American Indian point of view. He was a cunning devil, that's certain." No doubt he had that Nordic craftiness, Berthold rneditated, about which everyone talked nowadays. Dr. Vogelsang had it too. Berthold lay awake during the night, he often did now. He had only the small lamp on his bed-table switched on. The wallpaper had a delicate design, repeated a hundredfold: an exotic bird sitting on a drooping twig. If one half closed one's eyes, the line wh ich forrned the bird's breast, taken with the line of the suspended twig, produced the contour of a face. Ab, now he had it, That was the face of Arminius. A broad fore- head, a Hat nose, a big rnouth, a short but strong chin. Berthold smiled. Now he had got his man. Now he had got the better of Dr. Vogelsang. He went peacefully to sleep, Up to now, Berthold had not confided his difficulties to any- one except Heinrich Lavendel. From then on his taciturnity left hirn. Only in the presence of his parents did he keep silent. They noticed that the boy was excited about something, but they knew from experience that if they asked hirn what it was, he would only get stubborn. So they waited for him to speak of his own free will. But Berthold talked to a good many others, and collected a good rnany opinions. There was, for instance, that experi- enced man of the world, the chauffeur Franzke. For hirn, the battle in the T eutoburg F orest held no problem. "The whole thing is clear," he decided; "in those days there might have been some justification for National Socialism." Jaques La- vendel, on the contrary, declared that the barbarians had made the same mistake at that time that the [ews made seventy years later, that is to say, they had blindly revolted against a brilliantly organized stronger power. "That sort of thing never succeeds," he concluded, putting his head on one side, and drawing his lids far down over his blue eyes. Much more sympathetic to Berthold than this sober inter-