MEMORIAL DAY
HOW I LOST THE
SECOND WORLD WAR
AND HELPED TURN BACK
THE GERMAN INVASION
I April, 1938
Dear Editor:
As a subscriber of some years
standing—ever since
taking up residence in Britain, in point of fact—I have often noted
with pleasure that in addition to dealing with the details of the
various All New and Logical,
Original Games designed by your readers, you have sometimes
welcomed to your columns vignettes of city and rural life, and
especially those having to do with games. Thus I hope that an account
of a gamesing adventure which lately befell me, and which enabled me to
rub elbows (as it were) not only with Mr. W. L. S. Churchill—the man
who, as you will doubtless know, was dismissed from the position of
First Lord of the Admiralty during the Great War for his sponsorship of
the ill-fated Dardanelles Expedition, and is thus a person of
particular interest to all those of us who (like myself) are concerned
with Military Boardgames—but also with no less a celebrity than the
present Reichschancellor of
Germany, Herr Adolf Hitler.
All this, as you will already
have guessed, took
place in connection with the great Bath Exposition; but before I begin
my account of the extraordinary events there (events observed—or so I
flatter myself—by few from as advantageous a position as was mine), I
must explain, at least in generalities (for the details are exceedingly
complex) the game of World War,
as conceived by my friend Lansbury and myself. Like many others we
employ a large world map as our board; we have found it convenient to
mount this with wallpaper paste upon a sheet of deal four feet by six,
and to shellac the surface; laid flat upon a commodious table in my
study this serves us admirably. The nations siding with each combatant
are determined by the casting of lots; and naval, land, and air units
of all sorts are represented symbolically by tacks with heads of
various colors; but in determining the nature of these units we have
introduced a new principle—one not found, or so we believe, in any
other game. It is that either contestant may at any time propose a new
form of ship, firearm, or other weapon; if he shall urge its
probability (not necessarily its utility, please note—if it prove not
useful the loss is his only) with sufficient force to convince his
opponent, he is allowed to convert such of his units as he desires to
the new mode, and to have the exclusive use of it for three moves,
after which his opponent may convert as well if he so chooses. Thus a
player of World War, as we
conceive it, must excel not only in the strategic faculty, but in
inventive and argumentative facility as well.
As it happened, Lansbury and I
had spent most of the
winter now past in setting up the game and settling the rules for the
movement of units. Both of us have had considerable experience with
games of this sort, and knowing the confusion and ill feeling often
bred by a rule-book treating inadequately of (what may once have
appeared to be) obscure contingencies, we wrote ours with great
thoroughness. On February 17 (Lansbury and I caucus weekly) we held the
drawing; it allotted Germany, Italy, Austria, Bulgaria, and Japan to
me, Britain, France, China, and the Low Countries to Lansbury. I
confess that these alignments appear improbable—the literal-minded man
might well object that Japan and Italy, having sided with Britain in
the Great War, would be unlikely to change their coats in a second
conflict. But a close scrutiny of history will reveal even less
probable reversals (as when France, during the sixteenth century, sided
with Turkey in what has been called the Unholy Alliance), and Lansbury
and I decided to abide by the luck of the draw. On the twenty-fourth we
were to make our first moves.
On the twentieth, as it happened,
I was pondering my
strategy when, paging casually through the Guardian, my eye was drawn to an
announcement of the opening of the Exposition; and it at once occurred
to me that among the representatives of the many nations exhibiting I
might find someone whose ideas would be of value to me. In any event I
had nothing better to do, and so—little knowing that I was to become a
witness to history—I thrust a small memorandum book in my pocket and I
was off to the fair!
I suppose I need not describe the
spacious grounds
to the readers of this magazine. Suffice it to say that they were, as
everyone has heard, surrounded by an oval hippodrome nearly seven miles
in length, and dominated by the Dirigible Tower that formed a most
impressive part of the German exhibit, and by the vast silver bulk of
the airship Graf Spee, which,
having brought the chief functionary of the German Reich to Britain,
now waited, a slave of the lamp of Kultur
(save the Mark!) to bear him away again. This was, in fact, the
very day that Reichschancellor Hitler— for whom the Exposition itself
had opened early—was to unveil the "People's Car" exhibit. Banners
stretched from poles and even across the main entry carried such
legends as:
WHICH PEOPLE SHOULD
HAVE A "PEOPLE'S CAR"
?????
THE ENGLISH PEOPLE!!
and
GERMAN CRAFTSMANSHIP
BRITISH LOVE OF FINE MACHINES
and even
IN SPIRIT THEY ARE AS
BRITISH
AS THE ROYAL FAMILY.
Recollecting that Germany was the
most powerful of the nations that had
fallen to my lot in our game, I made for the German exhibit.
There the crowd grew dense; there was
a holiday
atmosphere, but within it a note of sober calculation—one heard
workingmen discussing the mechanical merits (real and supposed) of the
German machines, and their extreme cheapness and the interest-free
loans available from the Reichshauptkasse.
Vendors sold pretzels, Lebkuchen,
and Bavarian creams in paper cups, shouting their wares in raucous
Cockney voices. Around the great showroom where, within the hour, the
Reichschancellor himself was to begin the "People's Car's" invasion of
Britain by demonstrating the vehicle to a chosen circle of celebrities,
the crowd was now ten deep, though the building (as I learned
subsequently) had long been full, and no more spectators were being
admitted.
The Germans did not have the field
entirely to
themselves, however. Dodging through the crowd were driverless model
cars only slightly smaller (or at least so it seemed) than the German
"People's Cars." These "toys," if I may so style something so elaborate
and yet inherently frivolous, flew the rising-sun banner of the
Japanese Empire from their aerials, and recited through speakers, in
ceremonious hisses, the virtues of that industrious nation's produce,
particularly the gramophones, wirelesses, and so on, employing those
recently invented wonders, "transistors."
Like others, I spent a few minutes sightseeing—or
rather, as I should say, craning myself upon my toes in an attempt to
sightsee. But my business was no more with the "People's Car" and the
German Reichschancellor than with the Japanese marionette motorcar, and
I soon turned my attention to searching for someone who might aid me in
the coming struggle with Lansbury. Here I was fortunate indeed, for I
had no sooner looked around than I beheld a portly man in the uniform
of an officer of the Flugzeugmeisterei
buying a handful of Germanic confections from a hawker. I
crossed to him at once, bowed, and after apologizing for having
ventured to address him without an introduction, made bold to
congratulate him upon the great airship floating above us.
"Ah!" he said. "You like dot fat
sailor up there?
Veil, he iss a fine ship, und no mistake." He puffed himself up in the
good-natured German way as he said this, and popped a sweet into his
mouth, and I could see that he was pleased. I was about to ask him if
he had ever given any consideration to the military aspects of
aviation, when I noticed the decorations on his uniform jacket; seeing
the direction of my gaze he asked, "You know vat dose are?"
"I certainly do," I replied. "I was
never in combat
myself, but I would have given anything to have been a flyer. I was
about to ask you, Herr-"
"Goering."
"Herr Goering, how you feel the
employment of
aircraft would differ if—I realize this may sound absurd—the Great War
were to take place now."
I saw from a certain light in his eyes
that I had
found a kindred soul. "Dot iss a good question," he said, and for a
moment he stood staring at me, looking for all the world like a Dutch
schoolmaster about to give his star pupil's inquiry the deep
consideration it deserved. "Und I vill tell you dis—vat ve had den vas
nothing. Kites ve had, vith guns. If vor vas to come again now . . ."
He paused.
"It is unthinkable, of course."
"Ja.
Today der Vaterland, dot
could not
conquer Europe vith bayonets in dot vor, conquers all der vorld vith
money und our liddle cars. Vith those things our leader has brought
down die enemies of der party, und all der industry of Poland, of
Austria, iss ours. Der people, they say, 'Our company, our bank.' But
die shares are in Berlin."
I knew all this, of course, as every
well-informed
person does; and I was about to steer the conversation back toward new
military techniques, but it was unnecessary. "But you," he said, his
mood suddenly lightening, "und I, vot do ve care? Dot iss for der
financial people. Do you know vat I" (he thumped himself on the chest)
"vould do ven the vor comes? I would build Stutzkampfbombers."
"Stutzkampfbombers?"
"Each to carry vun bomb! Only vun, but
a big vun.
Fast planes—" He stooped and made a diving motion with his right hand,
at the last moment "pulling out" and releasing a Bavarian cream in such
a way that it struck my shoe. "Fast planes. I vould put my tanks—you
know tanks?"
I nodded and said, "A little."
"—in columns. The Stutzkampfbombers
ahead of the
tanks, the storm troops behind. Fast tanks too—not so much armor, but
fast, vith big guns."
"Brilliant," I said. "A lightning war."
"Listen, mine friend. I must go und
vait upon our Führer,
but there iss somevun
here you should meet. You like tanks—this man iss their father—he vas
in your Navy in der vor, und ven der army vould not do it he did it
from der Navy, und they told everybody they vas building vater tanks.
You use dot silly name yet, and ven you stand on der outside talk about
decks because uf him. He iss in there—" He jerked a finger at the huge
pavilion where the Reichschancellor was shortly to demonstrate the
"People's Car" to a delighted British public.
I told him I could not possibly get in
there—the
place was packed already, and the crowd twenty deep outside now.
"You vatch. Hermann vill get you in.
You come vith
me, und look like you might be from der newspaper."
Docilely I followed the big, blond
German as he
bulled his way—as much by his bulk and loud voice as by his imposing
uniform—through the crowd. At the door the guard (in Lederhosen) saluted him and made no
effort to prevent my entering at all.
In a moment I found myself in an
immense hall, the
work of the same Germanic engineering genius that had recently stunned
the world with the Autobahn.
A vaulted metallic ceiling as bright as a mirror reflected with
lustrous distortion every detail below. In it one saw the tiled floor,
and the tiles, each nearly a foot on a side, formed an enormous image
of the small car that had made German industry preeminent over half the
world. By an artistry hardly less impressive than the wealth and power
which had caused this great building to be erected on the exposition
grounds in a matter of weeks, the face of the driver of this car could
be seen through the windshield—not plainly, but dimly, as one might
actually see the features of a driver about to run down the observer;
it was, of course, the face of Herr Hitler.
At one side of this building, on
a dais, sat the
"customers," those carefully selected social and political notables
whose good fortune it would be to have the "People's Car" demonstrated
personally to them by no less a person than the German nation's leader.
To the right of this, upon a much lower dais, sat the representatives
of the press, identifiable by their cameras and notepads, and their
jaunty, sometimes slightly shabby, clothing. It was toward this group
that Herr Goering boldly conducted me, and I soon identified (I believe
I might truthfully say, "before we were halfway there") the man he had
mentioned when we were outside.
He sat in the last row, and
somehow seemed to sit
higher than the rest; his chin rested upon his hands, which in turn
rested upon the handle of a stick. His remarkable face, broad and
rubicund, seemed to suggest both the infant and the bulldog. One sensed
here an innocence, an unspoiled delight in life, coupled with that
courage to which surrender is not, in the ordinary conversational sense
"unthinkable," but is actually never thought. His clothes were
expensive and worn, so that I would have thought him a valet save that
they fit him perfectly, and that something about him forbade his ever
having been anyone's servant save, perhaps, the King's.
"Herr Churchill," said Goering, "I
have brought you
a friend."
His head lifted from his stick and he
regarded me
with keen blue eyes. "Yours," he asked, "or mine?"
"He iss big enough to share," Goering
answered
easily. "But for now I leave him vith you."
The man on Churchill's left moved to
one side and I
sat down.
"You are neither a journalist nor a
panderer,"
Churchill rumbled. "Not a journalist because I know them all, and the
panderers all seem to know me—or say they do. But since I have never
known that man to like anyone who wasn't one of the second or be civil
to anyone except one of the first, I am forced to ask how the devil you
did it."
I began to describe our game, but I
was interrupted
after five minutes or so by the man sitting in front of me, who without
looking around nudged me with his elbow and said, "Here he comes."
The Reichschancellor had entered the
building, and,
between rows of Sturmsachbearbeiter (as
the elite sales force was known), was walking stiffly and briskly
toward the center of the room; from a balcony fifty feet above our
heads a band launched into "Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles"
with enough verve to bring the place down, while an American announcer
near me screamed to his compatriots on the far side of the Atlantic
that Herr Hitler was here,
that he was even now, with commendable German punctuality, nearing the
place where he was supposed to be.
Unexpectedly a thin, hooting sound cut
through the
music—and as it did the music halted as abruptly as though a bell jar
had been dropped over the band. The hooting sounded again, and the
crowd of onlookers began to part like tall grass through which an
approaching animal, still unseen, was making its way. Another hoot, and
the last of the crowd, the lucky persons who stood at the very edge of
the cordoned-off area in which the Reichschancellor would make his
demonstrations, parted, and we could see that the "animal" was a small,
canary-yellow "People's Car," as the Reichschancellor approached the
appointed spot from one side, so did this car approach him from the
other, its slow, straight course and bright color combining to give the
impression of a personality at once docile and pert, a pleasing and
fundamentally obedient insouciance.
Directly in front of the notables'
dais they met and
halted. The "People's Car" sounded its horn again, three measured
notes, and the Reichschancellor leaned forward, smiled (almost a
charming smile because it was so unexpected), and patted its hood; the
door opened and a blond German girl in a pretty peasant costume
emerged; she was quite tall, yet—as everyone had seen—she had been
comfortably seated in the car a moment before. She blew a kiss to the
notables, curtsied to Hitler, and withdrew; the show proper was about
to begin.
I will not bore the readers of this
magazine by
rehearsing yet again those details they have already read so often, not
only in the society pages of the Times
and other papers but in several national magazines as well. That
Lady Woolberry was cheered for her skill in backing completely around
the demonstration area is a fact already, perhaps, too well known. That
it was discovered that Sir Henry Braithewaite could not drive only
after he had taken the wheel is a fact hardly less famous. Suffice it
to say that things went well for Germany; the notables were impressed,
and the press and the crowd attentive. Little did anyone present
realize that only after the last of the scheduled demonstrations was
History herself to wrest the pen from Tattle. It was then that Herr
Hitler, in one of the unexpected and indeed utterly unforseeable
intuitive decisions for which he is famous (the order, issued from
Berchtesgaden at a time when nothing of the kind was in the least
expected, and, indeed, when every commentator believed that Germany
would be content, at least for a time, to exploit the economic
suzerainty she had already gained in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, by
which every "People's Car" sold during May, June, and July would be
equipped with Nordic Sidewalls at no extra cost comes at once to mind)
having exhausted the numbers, if not the interest, of the nobility,
turned toward the press dais and offered a demonstration to any
journalist who would step forward.
The offer, as I have said, was made to the
dais at
large; but there was no doubt—there could be no doubt—for whom it was
actually intended; those eyes, bright with fanatic energy and the pride
natural to one who commands a mighty industrial organization, were
locked upon a single placid countenance. That man rose and slowly,
without speaking a word until he was face to face with the most
powerful man in Europe, went to accept the challenge; I shall always
remember the way in which he exhaled the smoke of his cigar as he said:
"I believe this is an automobile?"
Herr Hitler nodded. "And you," he
said, "I think
once were of the high command of this country. You are Herr Churchill?"
Churchill nodded. "During the Great
War," he said
softly, "I had the honor—for a time—of filling a post in the Admiralty."
"During that time," said the German
leader, "I
myself was a corporal in the Kaiser's army. I would not have expected
to find you working now at a newspaper."
"I was a journalist before I ever
commenced
politician," Churchill informed him calmly. "In fact, I covered the
Boer War as a correspondent with a roving commission. Now I have
returned to my old trade, as a politician out of office should."
"But you do not like my car?"
"I fear," Churchill said
imperturbably, "that I am
hopelessly prejudiced in favor of democratically produced products—at
least, for the people of the democracies. We British manufacture a
miniature car ourselves, you know—the Centurion."
"I have heard of it. You put water in
it."
By this time the daises were empty. We
were, to the
last man and woman, and not only the journalists but the notables as
well, clustered about the two (I say, intentionally, two, for greatness remains
greatness even when stripped of power) giants. It was a nervous moment,
and might have become more so had not the tension been broken by an
unexpected interruption. Before Churchill could reply we heard the
sibilant syllables of a Japanese voice, and one of the toy automobiles
from Imperial Nippon came scooting across the floor, made as though to
go under the yellow "People's Car" (which it was much too large to do),
then veered to the left and vanished in the crowd of onlookers again.
Whether it was madness that seized me at the sight of the speeding
little car, or inspiration, I do not know—but I shouted, "Why not have
a race?"
And Churchill, without an instant's
delay, seconded
me: "Yes, what's this we hear about this German machine? Don't you call
it the race master?"
Hitler nodded. "Ja, it is very fast,
for so small
and economical a one. Yes, we will race with you, if you wish." It was
said with what seemed to be perfect poise; but I noted, as I believe
many others did, that he had nearly lapsed into German.
There was an excited murmur of comment
at the
Reichschancellor's reply, but Churchill silenced it by raising his
cigar. "I have a thought," he said. "Our cars, after all, were not
constructed for racing."
"You withdraw?" Hitler asked. He
smiled, and at that
moment I hated him.
"I was about to say," Churchill
continued, "that
vehicles of this size are intended as practical urban and suburban
transportation. By which I mean for parking and driving in traffic—the
gallant, unheralded effort by which the average Englishman earns his
bread. I propose that upon the circular track which surrounds these
exposition grounds we erect a course which will duplicate the actual
driving conditions the British citizen faces—and that in the race the
competing drivers be required to park every hundred yards or so. Half
the course might duplicate central London's normal traffic snarl, while
the other half simulated a residential neighborhood; I believe we might
persuade the Japanese to supply us with the traffic using their
driverless cars."
"Agreed!" Hitler said
immediately. "But you have
made all the rules. Now we Germans will make a rule. Driving is on the
right."
"Here in Britain," Churchill said, "we
drive on the
left. Surely you know that."
"My Germans drive on the right and
would be at a
disadvantage driving on the left."
"Actually," Churchill said slowly, "I
had given that
some consideration before I spoke. Here is what I propose. One side of
the course must, for verisimilitude, be lined with shops and parked
lorries and charabancs. Let the other remain unencumbered for
spectators. Your Germans, driving on the right, will go clockwise
around the track, while the British drivers, on the left—"
"Go the other direction," Hitler
exclaimed. "And in
the middle— ZERSTOREND GEWALT!"
"Traffic jam," Churchill interpreted coolly. "You are not afraid?"
The date was soon set—precisely a
fortnight from the
day upon which the challenge was given and accepted. The Japanese
consented to supply the traffic with their drone cars, and the
exposition officials to cooperate in setting up an artificial street on
the course surrounding the grounds. I need not say that excitement was
intense; an American firm, Movietone News, sent not less than three
crews to film the race, and there were several British newsreel
companies as well. On the appointed day excitement was at a fever
pitch, and it was estimated that more than three million pounds were
laid with the bookmakers, who were giving three to two on the Germans.
Since the regulations (written,
largely, by Mr.
Churchill) governing the race and the operation of the unmanned
Japanese cars were of importance, and will, in any event, be of
interest to those concerned with logical games, allow me to give them
in summary before proceeding further. It was explained to the Japanese
operators that their task would be to simulate actual traffic. Ten
radio-controlled cars were assigned (initially) to the "suburban" half
of the course (the start for the Germans, the home stretch for the
British team), while fifty were to operate in the "urban" section.
Eighty parking positions were distributed at random along the track,
and the operators—who could see the entire course from a vantage point
on one of the observation decks of the dirigible tower—were instructed
to park their cars in these for fifteen seconds, then move onto the
course once more and proceed to the nearest unoccupied position
according to the following formula: if a parking space were in the
urban sector it was to be assigned a "distance value" equal to its
actual distance from the operator's machine, as determined by counting
the green "distance lines" with which the course was striped at
five-yard intervals—but if a parking position were in the suburban
section of the track, its distance value was to be the counted distance
plus two. Thus the "traffic" was biased—if I may use the
expression—toward the urban sector. The participating German and
English drivers, unlike the Japanese, were required to park in every
position along the route, but could leave each as soon as they had
entered it. The spaces between positions were filled with immobile
vehicles loaned for the occasion by dealers and the public, and a
number of London concerns had erected mock buildings similar to stage
flats along the parking side
of the course.
I am afraid I must tell you that I did
not scruple
to make use of my slight acquaintance with Mr. Churchill to gain
admission to the paddock (as it were) on the day of the race. It was a
brilliant day, one of those fine early spring days of which the west of
England justly boasts, and I was feeling remarkably fit, and pleased
with myself as well. The truth is that my game with Lansbury was going
very satisfactorily indeed; putting into operation the suggestions I
had received from Herr Goering I had overrun one of Lansbury's most
powerful domains (France) in just four moves, and I felt that only
stubbornness was preventing him from conceding the match. It will be
understood then that when I beheld Mr. Churchill hurrying in my
direction, his cigar clamped between his teeth and his old Homburg
pulled almost about his ears, I gave him a broad smile.
He pulled up short, and said: "You're
Goering's
friend, aren't you—I see you've heard about our drivers."
I told him that I had heard
nothing.
"I brought five drivers with me—racing
chaps who had
volunteered. But the Jerries have protested them. They said their own
drivers were going to have to be Sturmsachbearbeiters and it wasn't
sporting of us to run professionals against them; the exposition
committee has sided with them, and now I'm going to have to get up a
scratch team to drive for England, and those blasted SS are nearly
professional caliber. I've got three men but I'm still one short even
if I drive myself . . ."
For a moment we looked at one another;
then I said:
"I have never raced, but my friends all tell me I drive too fast, and I
have survived a number of accidents; I hope you don't think my
acquaintance with Herr Goering would tempt me to abandon fair play if I
were enlisted for Britain."
"Of course not." Churchill puffed out
his cheeks.
"So you drive, do you? May I ask what marque?"
I told him I owned a Centurion, the
model the
British team would field; something in the way he looked at me and drew
on his cigar told me that he knew I was lying—and that he approved.
I wish that my stumbling pen could do
justice to the
race itself, but it cannot. With four others—one of whom was Mr.
Churchill—I waited with throbbing engine at the British starting line.
Behind us, their backs toward us, were the five German
Sturmsachbearbeiters in their "People's Cars." Ahead of us stretched a
weirdly accurate imitation of a London street, in which the miniature
Japanese cars already dodged back and forth in increasing disorder.
The starting gun sounded and every car
shot forward;
as I jockeyed my little vehicle into its first park I was acutely aware
that the Germans, having entered at the suburban end of the course,
would be making two or three positions to our one. Fenders crumpled and
tempers flared, and I—all of us—drove and parked, drove and parked,
until it seemed that we had been doing it forever. Sweat had long since
wilted my shirt collar, and I could feel the blisters growing on my
hands; then I saw, about thirty yards in front of me, a tree in a
tub—and a flat painted to resemble, not a city shop, but a suburban
villa. It dawned on me then—it was as though I had been handed a glass
of cold champagne—that we had not
yet met the Germans. We had not yet met them, and the
demarcation was just ahead, the halfway point. I knew then that we had
won.
Of the rest of the race, what is there
to say? We
were two hundred yards into the suburban sector before we saw the
slanted muzzle of the first "People's Car." My own car finished dead
last—among the British team—but fifth in the race when the field was
taken as a whole, which is only to say that the British entries ran
away with everything. We were lionized (even I); and when
Reichschancellor Hitler himself ran out onto the course to berate one
of his drivers and was knocked off his feet by a Japanese toy, there
was simply no hope for the German "People's Car" in the
English-speaking world. Individuals who had already taken dealerships
filed suits to have their money returned, and the first ships carrying
"People's Cars" to reach London (Hitler had ordered them to sail well
in advance of the race, hoping to exploit the success he expected with
such confidence) simply never unloaded. (I understand their cargo was
later sold cheaply in Morocco.)
All this, I realize, is already well
known to the
public; but I believe I am in a position to add a postscript which will
be of special interest to those whose hobby is games.
I had, as I have mentioned, explained
the game
Lansbury and I had developed to Mr. Churchill while we were waiting for
the demonstrations of the "People's Car" to begin, and had even
promised to show him how we played if he cared to come to my rooms; and
come he did, though it was several weeks after the race. I showed him
our board (the map shellacked over) and regretted that I could not also
show him a game in progress, explaining that we had just completed our
first, which (because we counted the Great War as one) we called World War Two.
"I take it you Were victorious," he
said.
"No, I lost—but since I was Germany
that won't
discomfort you, and anyway I would rather have won that race against
the real Germans than all the games Lansbury and I may ever play."
"Yes," he said.
Something in his smile raised my
suspicions; I
remembered having seen a similar expression on Lansbury's face (which I
really only noticed afterward) when he persuaded me that he intended to
make his invasion of Europe by way of Greece; and at last I blurted
out: "Was that race really fair? I mean to say—we did surprisingly
well."
"Even you," Churchill remarked, "beat
the best of
the German drivers." , "I know," I said. "That's what bothers me."
He seated himself in my most
comfortable armchair
and lit a fresh cigar. "The idea struck me," he said, "when that
devilish Japanese machine came scooting out while I was talking to
Hitler. Do you remember that?"
"Certainly. You mean the idea of using
the Japanese
cars as traffic?"
"Not only that. A recent invention,
the transistor,
makes those things possible. Are you by any chance familiar with the
operating principle of the transistor?"
I said that I had read that in its
simplest form it
was merely a small chip or flake of material which was conductive in
one direction only.
"Precisely so." Churchill puffed his
cigar. "Which
is only to say that electrons can move through the stuff more readily
in one direction than in another. Doesn't that seem remarkable? Do you
know how it is done?"
I admitted that I did not.
"Well, neither did I before I read an
article in Nature about it,
a week or two
before I met Herr Hitler. What the sharp lads who make these things do
is to take a material called germanium—or silicon will do as well,
though the transistor ends up acting somewhat differently— in a very
pure state, and then add some impurities to it. They are very careful
about what they put in, of course. For example, if they add a little
bit of antimony the stuff they get has more electrons in it than there
are places for them to go, so that some are wandering about loose all
the time. Then there's other kinds of rubbish—boron is one of them
—that makes the material have more spots for electrons than electrons
to occupy them. The experts call the spots "holes," but I would call
them "parking places," and the way you make your transistor is to put
the two sorts of stuff up against each other."
"Do you mean that our track . . ."
Churchill nodded. "Barring a little
terminological
inexactitude, yes I do. It was a large transistor—primitive, if you
like, but big. Take a real transistor now. What happens at the junction
point where the two sorts of material come together? Well, a lot of
electrons from the side that has them move over into the side that
doesn't—there's so much more space there for them, you see."
"You mean that if a car—I mean an
electron—tries to
go the other way, from the side where there are a great many parking
places—"
"It has a difficult time. Don't ask me
why, I'm not
an electrical engineer, but some aspects of the thing can't be missed
by anyone, even a simple political journalist like myself. One is that
the electron you just mentioned is swimming upstream, as it were."
"And we were driving downstream," I
said. "That is,
if you don't mind my no longer talking about electrons."
"Not at all. I pass with relief
from the tossing sea
of cause and theory to the firm ground of result and fact. Yes, we were
driving with the current, so to speak; perhaps it has also occurred to
you that our coming in at the urban end, where most of the Japanese
cars were, set up a wave that went ahead of us; we were taking up the
spaces, and so they were drawn toward the Germans when they tried to
find some, and of course a wave of that sort travels much faster than
the individuals in it. I suppose a transistor expert would say that by
having like charges we repelled them."
"But eventually they would pile up
between the
teams—I remember that the traffic did get awfully thick just about when
we passed through the Germans."
"Correct. And when that happened there
was no
further reason for them to keep running ahead of us—the Jerries were
repelling them too by then, if you want to put it that way—and then the
rules (my famous distance formula, if you recall) pulled them back into
the urban area, where the poor Huns had to struggle with them some more
while we breezed home."
We sat silent for a time; then I said,
"I don't
suppose it was particularly honest; but I'm glad you did it."
"Dishonesty," Churchill said easily,
"consists in
violating rules to which one has—at least by implication—agreed. I
simply proposed rules I felt would be advantageous, which is diplomacy.
Don't you do that when you set up your game?" He looked down at the
world map on the table. "By the way, you've burnt your board."
"Oh, there," I said. "Some coals fell
from
Lansbury's pipe toward the end of the game—they cost us a pair of
cities in south Japan, I'm afraid."
"You'd better be careful you don't
burn up the whole
board next time. But speaking of the Japanese, have you heard that they
are bringing out an automobile of their own? They received so much
attention in the press in connection with the race that they're giving
it a name the public will associate with the toy motorcars they had
here."
I asked if he thought that that would
mean Britain
would have to beat off a Japanese invasion eventually, and he said that
he supposed it did, but that we Americans would have to deal with them
first—he had heard that the first Japanese-made cars were already being
unloaded in Pearl Harbor. He left shortly after that, and I doubt that
I will ever have the pleasure of his company again, much though I
should like it.
But my story is not yet finished.
Readers of this
magazine will be glad to learn that Lansbury and I are about to begin
another game, necessarily to be prosecuted by mail, since I will soon
be leaving England. In our new struggle, the United States, Britain,
and China will oppose the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Poland,
Romania, and a number of other Eastern European states. Since Germany
should have a part in any proper war, and Lansbury would not agree to
my having her again, we have divided her between us. I shall try to
keep Mr. Churchill's warning in mind, but my opponent and I are both
heavy smokers.
Sincerely,
"Unknown Soldier"
Editor's
Note. While we have no desire to tear aside the veil of the nom de guerre with which "Unknown
Soldier" concluded his agreeable communication, we feel we are yet
keeping faith when we disclose that he is an American officer, of
Germanic descent, no longer young (quite) and yet too young to have
seen action in the Great War, though we are told he came very near. At
present "Unknown Soldier" is attached to the American Embassy in
London, but we understand that, as he feels it unlikely his country
will ever again have need of military force within his lifetime, he
intends to give up his commission and return to his native Kansas,
where he will operate an agency for Buick motorcars. Best of luck,
Dwight.