BOOK ONE: YESTERDAY vance carefully, with Nordic craftiness. Vogelsang suspected adversaries all through the sehool. He elassified them. Out of the entire Lower Sixth, he eould find, for the time being, only two boys fit to join the ranks of his Young Eagles, Max Weber and Werner Rittersteg. Werner Rittersteg had a pale and unhealthy complexion and a high, piping voice. He was the tallest boy in the Lower Sixth. His classmates had nieknamed hirn "Long Lummox." 'He had found Dr, Vogelsang an impressive figure from the start, He had fixed his bulging eyes on the new teaeher with such doglike submissiveness, that the latter had at once no- ticed' hirn. Bernd Vogelsang approved of blind subjection to authority, he interpreted it as manly loyalty. He considered the boy Rittersteg worthy of acceptance into the ranks of the Young Eagles. The only son of wealthy parents who wanted their boy to go far, Werner Rittersteg had never hitherto, in spite of his height, distinguished hirnself among the rest. Of average intel- ligence, slow of judgment, he had not got on weIl under senior master Heinzius. His reception into the Young Eagles was the first great success of his life. His narrow ehest swelled. It was he whom Dr, Vogelsang had chosen, and he had, with one single exception, rejected the others. There was no doubt that the air of secrecy which hung over the Young Eagles, over their blood-brotherhood, their extraor- dinary, mysterious rites, their secret court was extremely at- tractive to the other boys, so that they envied Weber and Rit- tersteg. Even the level-headed Heinrich Lavendel, when he heard of the enrolment of these two, had said, "Lucky clogs!" The Lang Lummox wished that I-Ieinrich Lavendel had said more. It was precisely that boy, arnong all his companions, upon whom he would have liked to make an impression. He envied and admired the strength and skill with which the other was able to whirl, turn, and twist his short, sturdy body

68 THE OPPERMANNS about. In a groping, clumsy way he constantly sought to win Heinrich's approval. He had actually learned English in his honour, But even when he had greeted him, one day, with the words: IIHow are you, old fellow?" Heinrich had remained perfectly cool. It was a torment to Rittersteg that even his great success did not alter this indifference. Apart from the appointment of the two Young Eagles, noth- ing sensational occurred in the Lower Sixth. The boys quickly came to terms with their first Nationalist teacher. He was not particularly popular and not particularly unpopular. He was a master like any other, nobody got excited about hirn any longer. Soon the phenomenal performances of Heinrich La- vendel at football again became more interesting than Dr. Vogelsang's occasional Nationalist utterances. Rector Francois, too, calmed down. He sat rnildly and peace- fully in his big study between the busts of Volta ire and Fred- erick the Great, Nearly three weeks had now passed without the occurrence of any untoward incident. There was only one thing that worried him, Herr Vogelsang's frightful German, that stiff, trite, editorial, Nationalist New German. At night when he retired, he would sit on the bed, carefully unfastening his suspenders, and larnent to his wife: "He is ruining every- thing I've given the boys. Thought and speech are identical. Wehave struggled for seven years to get the boys to use straightforward, lucid German. Then the Ministry of Educa- tion lets this Teuton loose on them. You can train the skull of a new-born babe to any shape you like, make it lang or broad. Is the careful speech of our boys sufficiently drilled into them to withstand the influence of this cramped, affected, early- Germanie jargon? It would be a pity if the boys were to go out into the world lacking clear ideas as well as clear speech." His kindly eyes gazed with a worried look through the st~ong lenses of his rimless glasses. "Those are not the things to worry about now, Alfred," Frau Franccis declared in a resolute tone.