“Berlin?”
“That’s right, Berlin.”
Sean collected his wits and asked shakily, “Is the General implying he wishes me to remain in the Army?”
“I am implying that his country needs him more than his mother and father or his own personal desires to find peace of mind.”
The blood drained from Sean’s lips. He tried to envision it. Berlin! A monstrous prison. The piles of rubble and the pall of gray devoured his beautiful green campus and the haunting lonely eyes of his father.
Sean shook his head slowly. “No, sir. I don’t want to go to Berlin.”
“Neither do I, Sean,” Hansen said with deliberate slowness. “I’ve been looking for peace of mind for thirty years. I don’t want to go to Berlin, either.”
“But my father!”
“Ask your father!” The general got to his feet and began to pace. “Oh Christ, yes. The campus is cozy and warm. A handsome Irish buck like you will go right to the top. Pat the ass of the president’s wife and smile with those big brown eyes and the world is yours by the nuts on a downhill pull. And think of the nice young stuff you can sort, stud, and train to your exact liking. Hell yes, Sean, anybody give up that green campus for a friggin’ rock pile like Berlin would have to be nuts. None of the ugly things like Schwabenwald and sick Germans and rubble to contend with. Just discuss them in a scholarly manner. No decisions to make there, lad.”
“Lay off, General. I don’t know why the hell I’ve suddenly become the indispensable man in the Army.”
“I’ll tell you why! America is committed to the world, only America doesn’t know it or believe it yet. We would all like to make a retreat to the campus, but the comforts of home and hearth are henceforth to be denied unborn generations if our country is to survive.”
“You are obviously speaking about the Russians.”
“You’re reading me loud and clear.”
“I’m not one of these automatic liberals who takes a fixed position, but let’s lay it on the line, General. You’re a Red baiter from the year one.”
“Hear me out and see if I’m a Red baiter.”
Sean had stepped into Hansen’s trap! What if Hansen proved his case? The general knew all along there were senses of duty and points of logic that Sean would respond to.
“I don’t want to hear it, General.”
“They have men of fanatical devotion beyond our comprehension of dedication. They have them by the hundreds of thousands who perform like robots. I lay awake nights in fear of a mortal weakness in us. I fear our sons are too fat, too lazy, too complacent to sacrifice and to serve in silence. It takes no genius to figure out what is going to happen in Berlin and there are too damned few of us willing to believe it or face up to the facts. Our country is asleep. Until it wakes up I need every Sean O’Sullivan I can get in Berlin if we are to survive.”
Sean was dumbstruck by the urgency of the outburst. Could he walk from this room now without even listening to the man’s case?
He nodded slowly for General Hansen to begin....
Chapter Thirty-five
GENERAL ANDREW JACKSON HANSEN first came into contact with the Russians at the close of the First World War in the year 1920. After the Russian Revolution and counterrevolution there was an acute famine condition. As a young officer, he became part of the Hoover Commission, which fed ten million Russians a day.
Hansen contended that the Russian Revolution was not much of a revolution. The Czar’s house was rotten from within from centuries of feudalism, corruption, class rule, church abuse, failure to industrialize, failure to humanize. The rotten house needed but a hearty shove to collapse. History has been conveniently rewritten by the Communists for the world to believe that the revolution was a Communist-led people’s uprising. That is not true.
The Russian people, Hansen said, both by nature and by historical precedent, have proven that they are neither politically inquisitive nor revolutionary in spirit. They have tolerated a police state in one form or another from the origins of their history, for some twelve solid centuries. They have lived out their entire history in complete adjustment to police-state terror with little or no protest.
Hansen liked to point to Pavlov’s experiments with dogs. The great Russian scientist experimented to show how completely an animal could be conditioned. Such an animal could be trained to perform certain feats to ward off hunger, cold, and privation. Hansen believed that in a sense, Pavlov was experimenting with the Russian people themselves. Human history has given few examples of a people who can be so thoroughly conditioned as the Russians. When the pressures reach a critical stage, another bone is thrown them and they will remain quiet. Indeed, with pitifully few exceptions the Russians are magnificently trained animals who will not permit an alien, creative, free, or contradictory idea to function within their minds. They adjust within that framework of what they are allowed to think by their peers.
In recalling the history of the ending of the first war, Russia was weary, bloody, beaten, and hungry. The moment was ripe for a gathering of divergent political parties to unite and push in the Czar’s rotten house. This was the so-called revolution.
Among those divergent groups was the Communist Party. When the new government was formed the Communists were not a majority. However, they were the most tightly knit, the most ruthlessly led, the most dynamic, and the most deliberate in their ultimate goals.
In the confusion that followed the flight of the Czar, the Communists made a naked seizure of power. This was not a popular movement of the people, which they later claimed, nor was it particularly understood in most reaches of that vast land.
After a time, scattered remnants of the Czarist regime got their second wind, and along with Ukrainian and White Russian Nationalists, who hated “Mother Russia,” staged the counterrevolution against the Communists.
These were the “Whites.” The White Counter-Revolution was doomed from its inception. As the Whites reconquered parts of Russia, they reinstated the nobility and the corrupt system that had led to the collapse of the Czar in the first place. They tried to beat a dead horse to life.
The Reds, therefore, fell heir to the people by the default of the Whites. It was the lesser of the evils at the time. The Communists, moreover, did not sell the war-weary people on any lofty idealisms of Marx. The Red slogan was simple and understandable ... Bread! ... Peace! ... Land!
The Communists made a separate peace with Germany, withdrawing Russia from the war, and deserting their former allies. France, Britain, and the United States had both troops and equipment on Russian soil, including an Allied-trained Czechoslovakian division. Angered at Russia’s separate peace and committed to guard their hordes of supplies, the Allies loosely supported the ill-fated White
Counter-Revolution. For this alleged Allied treachery, the Western world earned the everlasting hatred of the Russians.
Poland, which had been partitioned into oblivion before the First World War re-emerged once more as a nation. Poland made an ill-advised move, leaping on the back of the shaky Russians in 1920, the latest in a series of wars between old enemies. However, the Red Army had gained the people’s support and defeated the Poles. Poland fell into the same circle of hatred, being lumped with the West.
One of the first things Hansen learned when he came to starving Russia in 1920 was that the Russians were Asians. Western culture had been imported into only a few of the larger cities. Most of Russia and the other captive states that comprised the Soviet Union simply did not think or act like the West.
From the beginning of the Communist regime the Russians made it clear that they would take Western food, Western long-term loans, Western credits, Western trade, Western recognition. There was never so much as a small thank-you for any of it. For, the Communists made it clear from the first that they intended to remake the world in their own image.