Every two or three months Franz repeated his first attempt to join the Army, but the complication of his citizenship was still an impossible one. He had moments of black despair when it seemed that his life was fated to wither away in an interminable anticlimax. He had come to Germany offering the Blut und Ehre, the blood and honor of a devoted warrior, and there seemed no way of escaping the life of a very junior clerk. But the day after Pearl Harbor he was ordered to report for induction.
The enlistment officer had several special questions.
“I have your file here,” he said. “You may or may not know that the Gestapo had been keeping an eye on you for a long time.”
“As it should have done,” Franz said tactfully. “After all I’m a foreigner here.”
“Technically you’ve just become an enem
