Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/313

 and however piously he tried, he never remembered to button his blouse over the violet-flowered shirts which, he often confided, you could buy ever so cheap on Eighth Avenue.

But Major Dr. Yeo had one military triumph. He hoarsely explained to Martin, as they were marching to the completely militarized dining-hall:

"Say, Arrowsmith, do you ever get balled up about this saluting? Darn it, I never can figure out what all these insignia mean. One time I took a Salvation Army Lieutenant for a Y.M.C.A. General, or maybe he was a Portygee. But I've got the idea now!" Yeo laid his finger beside his large nose, and produced wisdom: "Whenever I see any fellow in uniform that looks older than I am, I salute him—my nephew, Ted, has drilled me so I salute swell now—and if he don't salute back, well, Lord, I just think about my work and don't fuss. If you look at it scientifically, this military life isn't so awful' hard after all!"

Always, in Paris or in Bonn, Max Gottlieb had looked to America as a land which, in its freedom from Royalist tradition, in its contact with the realities of cornfields and blizzards and town-meetings, had set its face against the puerile pride of war. He believed that he had ceased to be a German, now, and become a countryman of Lincoln.

The European War was the one thing, besides his discharge from Winnemac, which had ever broken his sardonic serenity. In the war he could see no splendor nor hope, but only crawling tragedy. He treasured his months of work and good talk in France, in England, in Italy; he loved his French and English and Italian friends as he loved his ancient Korpsbrüder, and very well indeed beneath his mocking did he love the Germans with whom he had drudged and drunk.

His sister's sons—on home-craving vacations he had seen them, in babyhood, in boyhood, in ruffling youngmanhood—went out with the Kaiser's colors in 1914; one of them became an Oberst, much decorated, one existed insignificantly, and one was dead and stinking in ten days. This he sadly endured, as later he endured his son Robert's going out as an American lieutenant, to fight his own cousins. What struck down this man to whom abstractions and scientific laws were more than