An Infinity of Mirrors by Richard Condon

smoked a cheroot and stared at the shining brass fittings of the train compartment. He was thinking about the caps of the young train shunters at Osnabrück; peaked crowns of forage caps with stiffeners at the extraordinarily high fronts, giving the railroad yards a weirdly military look.
    They were on the Nord-Sud Express’s regular run from Lisbon to Leningrad. They had left Paris at two-fifteen P.M. on the previous afternoon and they would be in Berlin within the hour, at eight forty-three A.M. Someone rich must have joined the train at Liége because Car 724 with its barber shop, gymnasium, and shower bath had become part of the train. On inquiry Maître Gitlin had learned that it had been built thirty years before for members of the Russian nobility who were hurrying to lose fortunes at Monte Carlo.
    â€œSchools only garnish character,” Veelee murmured. “In Germany everything we have we owe to the demands made on us by our fathers, then to the abnegation of the mother to this symbol, then from having the symbol itself prove the merit of the system by bowing to the authority immediately above him. To a child it is confusing at first, but later he sees the unity of authority and the need for it. We are obedient and law-abiding. We allow experts to do our thinking where possible, because this lengthens the step forward for all Germans.”
    â€œWe have experts in France, too,” Maître Gitlin said, “but they don’t rule us.”
    â€œI didn’t really mean they rule us either.”
    â€œWe are not a subservient nation,” Gitlin insisted.
    â€œThe English have discipline, too, of course,” Veelee said, moving into the second phase of the talk which had been prepared to disconcert Frenchmen. “I know less than nothing about the family-unit side of their education, or about their schools or other adversities, but they seem to pour their obedience into something outside the family. Into the monarchy? No. I think it must be that the diffusion they acquired from colonizing the world from such a tiny island taught them the need for obedience, if only to set an example. They are this island, and that has made them homogeneous. In learning to live so densely packed upon such a small island, they compartmentalized themselves into classes which recognized codes of obedience to each other. They are a family of many classes, and their classes fight for each other when they face the world and only fight against each other through their politics. We admire them.”
    â€œI take it you do not admire the French?” Maître Gitlin asked.
    â€œIf we were weaker we would, of course.”
    â€œYou are saying it is a question of politics?”
    â€œGermans don’t understand politics—and I don’t say that as a soldier. We are trained in politics and we know nothing. Politicians, who are rarely trained in our politics, know even less.”
    â€œI quite agree with you.”
    â€œIt is amazing, really. For all the unity we have when we are strongly led, we cannot seem to figure out a way to create leaders who emerge from a unified people. But in time, in good time. That is Hanover out the window. I am a Pomeranian. When I was a boy a conscript from Hesse never spoke about joining the army, but of joining the Prussians. We haven’t been a nation long enough, you know.”
    Gitlin snorted. Paule stared at Veelee with total wonderment, struck with this incredible contribution of intellectualism, in addition to everything else he had.
    â€œStill,” Veelee said, “we are better off for it than the French, who understand politics so well that they pimp for it and send it out into the streets to prostitute its meaning, until only the basest Frenchmen are willing to pursue such a career—mongrels and manipulators and the wearily cynical who fondle governments as they shuttle past. It is a kind of perversion.”
    â€œBetter a perversion