Garden of Beasts

I just finished re-reading Jeffery Deaver’s novel, Garden of Beasts, set in 1936 Berlin, as the Germans are preparing to host the Olympic Games. Deaver tells a riveting story, featuring two very compelling characters.

One is Paul Schumann, the main character. Schumann is an American hit man (“button man”), who is arrested and given a chance at redemption. If he will go to Berlin and assassinate Reinhard Ernst, the man in charge of re-arming Germany, then his past will be forgiven. Schumann is a surprisingly moral hit man who adheres to a code; he kills only the guilty. He is good at his job and hard to catch; think Jason Bourne vs. the Nazis.

No less compelling is Willi Kohl, a quick-witted and humane German policeman charged with finding Schumann. (If Schumann is Bourne-like, then Kohl is a German version of Chief Inspective Foyle.) Kohl’s humanity is clearly on display as he and his young assistant, Konrad Janssen, are called upon to investigate a murder. Janssen makes the mistake of complaining about exerting so much “effort for a fat dead man.” This earns a reprimand from his boss. The victim was not just a “fat middle-aged man,” Kohl tells him, he was also “somebody’s son.” Kohl continues:

And perhaps he was somebody's brother. And maybe somebody’s husband or lover. And, if he was lucky, he was a father of sons and daughters. I would hope too that there are past lovers who think of him occasionally. And in his future other lovers might have awaited. And three or four more children he could have brought into the world. So, Janssen, when you look at the incident in this way we don’t have merely a curious mystery about a stocky dead man. We have a tragedy like a spiderweb reaching many different lives and many different places, extending for years and years. How sad that is … Do you see why our job is so important? (pp. 122-123, paperback version)

Kohl is not the only good German in the book. Another, heartsick at what the Nazis were doing to her country, mourns:

I don’t understand what has happened. We ware a people who love music and talk and who rejoice in sewing the perfect stitch in our men’s shirts and scrubbing our alley cobblestones clean and basking in the sun on the beach at Wannsee and buying our children clothing and sweets, we’re moved to tears by the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata, by the words of Goethe and Schiller — yet we are possessed now. Why? (p. 291)

Garden of Beasts is both a gripping page-turner and a brooding meditation on the subject of good versus evil.

Piece of Cake

I recently watched Piece of Cake again, a British-made miniseries about the Battle of Britain. I originally watched it several years ago while I was in high school, when it played on PBS’s Masterpiece Theater. I enjoyed it then, and enjoyed it again.

The six-part series details the service of the fictional Hornet Squadron during the first year of World War II. The pilots — Churchill’s fabled “few” — find themselves in a near impossible battle for survival.

The series is based on a novel of the same title by Derek Robinson, which I also read — several years after watching the series the first time, but several years before watching it the second time. These gaps of time are sufficient to make it hard to compare the two works, though I do remember there being significant differences between book and movie concerning my favorite character, the American pilot Chris Hart.

Without giving too much away, the title is ironic. Stopping the Luftwaffe was anything but a piece of cake.

The Teammates

At my brother’s suggestion, I recently read The Teammates by David Halbertstam, a book about the remarkable friendship between four ballplayers, Johnny Pesky, Dominic DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr, and Ted Williams.

Halberstam was not your typical sportswriter. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting during the Vietnam War, and published a famous book about Vietnam entitled The Best and the Brightest, which I probably ought to read. Tragically, Halberstam was killed in a car wreck in April, 2007.

Luke has already blogged about the book, so I won’t cover the ground that he did. But there are a couple or three other things which also stood out to me. One was the fact that Williams — who is one of two finalists for the distinction of Greatest Hitter Of All Time, with Babe Ruth being the other — was a quarter Latino; his mother was half Mexican.

Williams and Joe DiMaggio are the two great icons of 1940s era baseball (though I think I would take the amazingly classy Stan Musial over either of them; but that is another story). Dom DiMaggio had the unique distinction of being the brother of one of these icons and a very close friend of the other. No slouch of a baseball player himself (a .298 career hitter who played a magnificent center field), Dom had a more successful life than either Joe or Ted, according to Halberstam. He quotes Dick Flavin, who observed, “I think both Ted and Joe were aware of it, how well he had dealt with his life, and what a complete life it had been, and Ted to his credit admired him for it, and Joe, I am afraid, resented him for it.” (p. 22)

The Sox met St. Louis in the 1946 World Series. The climactic Game Seven was tied 3-3 going into the eighth inning, the Cardinals’ half of the inning. With two outs, Harry Walker was up, trying to advance his teammate Enos “Country” Slaughter, who was at first. Walker hit a bloop to left-center, which the official scorers recorded as a double, even though Walker himself admitted it was a “dying seagull.” Slaughter, who had broken for second with the pitch, managed to come all the way around to score what would prove to be both the game-winning and series-winning run.

Sportswriters would blame the run upon Pesky, the Sox shortstop, who, they felt, hesitated before throwing an errant relay throw home. More at fault than Pesky, however, was back-up centerfielder Leon Culberson. Culberson was filling in for Dom, who had injured himself earlier in the game, and failed to position himself appropriately for Walker, who had a penchant for punching the ball to left-center. Making matters worse, Culberson approached the ball tentatively and then made a throw to Pesky that was both soft and low. A third Sox player, hurler Bob Klinger, also deserves a measure of blame for the play, because he neglected to hold Country Slaughter at first in the first place.

Perhaps the play was caused not so much by what the Sox did wrong, but by what Slaughter did right. It was Slaughter who had broken with the pitch; it was Slaughter who had blown through the stop sign that his third base coach had thrown up. Marine general Archie Vandegrift, hero of Guadalcanal, once noted, “God favors the bold and the strong of heart.”

But in the hands of sportswriters, all of the blame fell upon Pesky. Rather than giving up Culberson — the most culpable Sox player — Pesky simply shouldered all of the blame himself. “By the time I turned and picked up Slaughter, he was virtually home,” he finally admitted in 2002, fifty-six years after the play, and several years after Culberson’s death. “They decided to make me the goat afterwards, and I decided I could take it — I could live with it. If they want to blame me, they can blame me. Because none of it changes what happened on the field.” (pp. 157-158)

How refreshing to those of us who live in an era where accepting personal responsibility is the exception, not the norm.

Horse Soldiers & Youth Ministers

On the first day of World War II, September 1, 1939, elements of the Polish 18th Uhlans Cavalry regiment attacked German infantry in a delaying action. In this they succeeded, but they soon encountered German armored cars, which hit the Polish cavalrymen with machine gun fire. About a third of the cavalrymen were killed or wounded before they could retreat. This story was exaggerated in the press to the effect that the cavalrymen had attacked German tanks (not armored cars) with their sabers and lances. This was an exaggeration, but still: Polish cavalrymen were no match for German armor.

Though these cavalrymen have been ridiculed throughout the years, I have nothing but the profoundest respect for them. Two things stand out. First, they realized they were in the presence of vast evil. Second, even though they were unable to turn back that evil tide, they proved for all time — many of them at the cost of their lives — exactly where they stood. This was not true of everyone who lived in lands invaded by the Germans.

This week I completed my career as a youth minister at the Bella Vista church of Christ. For the past seven years, it has been my job to keep teenagers out of alcohol, drugs and sex, and to keep them in the church. It has been a near-hopeless task. I can identify with those Polish cavalrymen.

Though I have largely failed as a youth minister, I am comforted by two thoughts. I realized evil forces were at work trying to destroy the teenagers I love. And, though I was unable to keep these teens from making terrible decisions — they knew exactly where I stood.