That night for hours I stood by in the evacuation hospital and acted as an interpreter for the English doctors and nurses, while orderlies unloaded wounded Belgians fresh from the battlefields.

My instructions were to say something nice to each wounded man and then ask those who needed it if they consented to be operated on, as British law required, war or no war.

Simple enough. And for a while I had no difficulty. Then a bedraggled boy of about eighteen in a torn uniform limped into the operating room on a mangled foot in which shoe and flesh were inextricably mingled. When, following precise instructions, I asked him if the surgeon might amputate, he collapsed. And after a second wounded soldier, this time carrying half of his intestines in his hat pressed to his belly, fainted at the mention of an operation, I stopped asking the sinister question and let the British doctors think that the patients had specifically consented.

"Is it far?"

"Not far. Five minutes on foot."

"Oh," groaned a voice. "I can't walk so far. Don't leave us; we don't want to stay behind and be captured." The speaker stood up. One foot was a bloody bandaged stump, but he placed it firmly on the pavement without wincing. "We don't want to be captured," he said again. And then, I swear, he walked to where we stood just outside the door and fell at our feet.

"Don't leave me, don't leave me."

Had we been of finer stuff we would have stayed and looked after them and ourselves spent the rest of the war in prison. Instead, we left.

When we looked back, the man with one foot was fifty yards down the sidewalk, crawling on his hands and knees.

We did not blame the doctors and nurses who had gone. Their duty was to their country and it demanded that they be free. These wounded could not, I repeat, could not, have all been saved by any means the Italians possessed. Many were the examples of devotion among the hospital and ambulance corps. At Cervignano, south of Udine, a woman fifty years old, a volunteer nurse, remained at her post twenty-four hours after her son, who had commanded naval guns on the Carso, had retreated. She did not leave the hospital until the last wounded soldier had gone.

Soldiers abandoning a town to the enemy almost always try to carry away with them everything of value. They "commandeer" food and liquor, shoes, pass on to bicycles, and end by common robbery if they are not controlled. This is normal and in one sense logical. Why leave anything to the enemy?

The Italian Arditi sacked Udine as the French "captured" Verdun. While the majority followed the main way around the outskirts of the town, some who had apparently been ordered to defend the city, mingled with stragglers from other corps and set about systematic plundering. I remember seeing soldiers parading through the rain in silk hats and women's underwear, armed for the most part only with bottles. Yet I saw no civilians mistreated.

And where were the Austrians? Had they decided to surround Udine and come in from the west? Just before noon, we strolled out of the town in the direction of the enemy. Suddenly, just ahead we heard two shots. Rushing forward we saw a strange sight. In a stopped foreign car sat a dead Austrian general and his military chauffeur, both killed by Italian carabinieri.

It made us think. "Who," Gibbon asked, "ever saw a modern general out in front of his troops? Obviously the Austrian wings must be closing in on the town from behind. This is our last chance to get out."

I agreed. It was time to go-without our world scoop.

Before joining the retreating mob at the Porta di Venezia, we "commandeered" two bicycles standing before an empty house.

Nearly all day and then again in the evening, the rain fell in streams that a rough wind drove here and there in mighty gusts. The road was a lake of mud. Bicycles were almost as useless as pushcarts or perambulators, but we clung to them and twice succeeded in riding a few disconsolate miles.

There was no rioting, but no order. The center was occupied by a double row of automobiles, camions, carts, and donkeys moving about two miles per hour. Beside, between, behind, and around these conveyances walked a mixed congregation of men, women, children, and soldiers. A few of the latter carried loot. But the wineshops of Udine had proved too great a temptation for most of the pillagers. Officers were rare, and their men were taking orders from no one. Some few sang antiwar songs, others, popular tunes. Others talked in small groups of twos and threes, chiefly about peace.

"But are you certain we shall have peace?" a round-faced boy asked.

"Certain," replied his companion. "You can have no war without an army. An army cannot fight without arms. When we threw away our arms we ended the war."

This confidence in the midst of such appalling misery was astounding. "Where are you going now?" I asked.

Both stared. "Where? Home." It was their turn for astonishment.

"But if the Austrians come after you?"

"They won't come far. They too want peace."

"What did your officers say when you threw away your arms?"

"What could they say? It would not have been well for them if they had said anything. Some were ugly, but when they realized that we were serious they changed their tune. And if our officers do not understand now, we shall make another jump to the rear. We are tired, you understand, tired of all this business and we are going home. Why should we fight Austria?"

This message was droned into our ears. But among the talkers were many who trod along silently, and I saw tears rolling down the cheeks of one.

"All retreats are like this," muttered Gibbon. "I have seen three in this war. "The Allied Governments ought to pay me to stay away. This is nothing compared to the Russian retreat from Poland in 1915."

This one was bad enough. If you can imagine an army with all its vehicles, supplies, men, weapons, shaken up in an immense bottle and then violently shot out of it along a muddy country road, then add many thousands of refugees, all under a torrential rain, and you begin to see what we saw.

Under my raincoat, heavy jacket, and sweater, in spite of the effort of pushing a bicycle through the slime, I was shivering. Yet beside me, peasant children trotted with bare feet, their bodies wrapped only in calico. Old men tottered under the weight of babies, women sank down exhausted beside ditches. Boys dragged unwilling livestock along. Families rode in wagons on top of household goods, or in donkey carts, or on donkeys. A few refugees found places in crowded military camions, but the drivers were impatient; children were separated from their parents, wives from their husbands.

A few moments after leaving Udine, we heard a great uproar behind us and a cry, "The Austrians, the Austrians!" A panic started. Chauffeurs left their cars, drivers their wagons, women and children fell and were trampled. A few minutes later, there came a sound of fusillade across the fields from the town. If there were any Austrians, their number must have been small. We saw none. There were enough Italian soldiers on that road to have repulsed a division had they kept their arms. But they thought only of flight.

We trudged on, going nearly twice as fast as the jam of automobiles, clinging tenaciously to our bicycles. Sooner or later we expected to emerge from the mess of traffic and mount them.

How then explain the enthusiasm for Fascism expressed by foreigners? Not mainly because Mussolini had smashed the unions, driven beggars and prostitutes from the Roman streets, increased the Italians' self-esteem to the point of arrogance, and made the trains run on time.

There was a deeper reason. Fascist parties sprang up in other countries, notably in Germany and Hungary. At a meeting of the Italian-American Society in Rome, Ambassador Child, presumably with President Harding's approval, publicly praised the Duce for having saved Italy from "impractical humanitarianism and whining weakness, worse than war."

Mussolini was almost delirious with joy. "Never before," he gloated to me, "has an ambassador openly approved of a political party in a country to which he was accredited." Child later became a member of the Italian Fascist party.

Fascism, I began to see, was a mixture of nationalism and socialism, combining the worst features of both. Early humanitarian reformers, even including the somewhat less than humanitarian Marx, had sought to eliminate injustice and inequality by advocating the public ownership of the means of production. That this could substitute state oppression for capitalist exploitation was obvious. Marx tried to soften the threat by promising that at some future date the state would "wither away." Some British Socialists sidestepped it by proposing pluralistic (guild) ownership. Lenin, however, extended the (temporary) dictatorship to everything, thus creating, or borrowing from Robespierre, the totalitarian state, the most efficient form of despotism ever devised.

Mussolini saw that the one-party state could dominate the national economy without formally collectivizing it, ostensibly in the name of the nation, actually for the benefit of the party hierarchs. And, as in Russia, the identification of the people with the state and the ruling party required making the Big Lie "the art of government and the rule of' life."

Here lay the attraction of' Fascism for foreign Nationalists, adventurers, reactionaries, and purblind capitalists (who imagined they could buy control of the ruling party by supporting it). Obviously, there were everywhere incipient Fascists waiting for the chance to acquire a Duce of their own.

Berlin in the nineteen twenties was a kind of stopping off place not only for Russians heading west, but for Americans entering or leaving the Soviet Union, including those who lived there and needed occasionally to come up for air. Among these were newsmen like H. R. Knickerbocker, Frederick Kuh, Walter Duranty, Eugene Lyons, William Henry Chamberlin, and the author, Maurice Hindus. In addition, Samuel Harper, the Russian specialist of the University of Chicago, never went in or out of the Soviet Fatherland without pausing in Berlin to report and enjoy a few good arguments.

These men had varying views of communism. Chamberlin, Kuh, Hindus, Lyons, and Harper were for some years hopeful about the revolution. Duranty always got along well with the Kremlin. He argued that the Russians deserved nothing better.

Knickerbocker, on the other hand, recognized from the first that the U.S.S.R. was at war with the world and prophesied that no good would come of it. I trusted Knick's judgment.

Junius Wood of the Chicago Daily News looked on the Soviet Union with such disdain that the Bolsheviks, unable to believe that anyone would dare treat them as he did, let him get away with it. Arriving in Russia for the first time, he immediately wrote a highly critical piece. Promptly the censor called him in and said: "Mr. Wood, you are new here, but I must warn you that if you write any more dispatches like the last, which I have stopped, you will wake up some morning to find yourself in Riga."

To which, Junius said: "Is that a threat or a promise?" "I don't understand you, Mr. Wood."

"Do you believe I came to your God-forsaken country because I wanted to? The greatest favor you can do me is to expel me and get me sent somewhere else."

At another time, when foreign correspondents were called to the Foreign Office in the middle of night only to be handed an "important news announcement" at the door, Junius went home and wrote:

"According to the doorman at the Soviet Foreign Office," etc. etc. Again the censor intervened, but Junius remained in Russia as long as the paper wanted to keep him there.

And gradually, one by one, several of the original enthusiasts, Chamberlin, Lyons, and, in 1939, even Sam Harper, turned thumbs down on the "great experiment."

Thanks to the comings and goings of these and other Soviet experts, Berlin was probably better informed about events in Russia than other Western capitals.

Friends of Gustav Stresemann have subsequently claimed that he felt that the age of nationalism was dying and that power was passing (in the West, at least) from national governments to economic combines. Certainly in 1926-27, he favored the creation of what I called, after long talks with its creator, Emil Mayrisch of Luxembourg, "probably the greatest economic organization in the world," namely, the Continental Steel combine. Even while the French and German governments were feuding about nearly everything, the industrial magnates of the two countries found no difficulty in cooperating.

In any case, Stresemann was in this respect an optimist. Far from "withering away," nationalism in Germany became more virulent with each French concession.

Did not Stresemann forsee this? Or did he really expect his use of the Russian threat abroad and the nationalist threat at home to make the French value his "European" outlook? Shortly before his death in October, 1929, he expressed his disappointment:

"I have worked with all my heart for peace and reconciliation, and have subordinated everything to reaching an understanding among Great Britain, France, and Germany... It is now five years since Locarno. If the Allies had made one single concession, I could have kept the support of my countrymen. But the Allies have given nothing in return. Their few small concessions always came too late. Now the youth of Germany, which we had hoped to win for peace and a new Europe, is lost to both of us."

Certainly, to me it seemed that Germany was ridding itself of the burdens of defeat slowly but surely. Yet on one point I agreed with Stresemann: to expect Germany under the new Young Plan to transfer 121 billion more marks over the next fifty-nine years was incompatible with a policy of reconciliation. And for this the United States had to bear some of the blame. How America could legitimately expect France and Belgium to let off a beaten enemy, while maintaining its own demand for repayment of inter-Allied wartime debts baffled me. Yet that is what Coolidge and Hoover did - until the worldwide depression made myths of further reparations and debts.

To us it seemed no coincidence that Stresemann should have died on the very day of the break on the New York Stock Exchange which ended the era of beautiful nonsense in the United States and in a great many other countries as well. Two years earlier, a crash on the Berlin exchange had suggested that something was lacking in the picture.

Mr. Mowrer's book is a study in the philosophy of history, in the same sense as the work of Spengler, but written with a lighter hand and with no hard and fast theory into which to fit his facts. It is a study of the future of Americanism both within and outside of America.

The majority of American criticisms of America, however intelligent, suffer from a pre-occupation with the local aspects of the problems.... The majority of foreigners think either of Americanization as something to be welcomed and exploited, or as a plague to be quarantined; and either point of view is apt to be superficial. Mr. Mowrer goes farther. He inquires into the origin, as well as the nature, of Americanism; traces it back to Europe; and finds that what are supposed to be the specifically American qualities and vices, are merely the European qualities and vices given a new growth in different soil. Europe, therefore, in accepting contributions the danger of which Mr. Mowrer certainly does not palliate, has contracted a malady the germs of which are bred in her own system. Americanization, in short, would probably have happened anyway: America itself has merely accelerated the process.

Toward the end of 1931, Adolf Hitler felt sure enough of himself to make a first massive appeal for the support of the foreign press. Actually, I had already had one conversation with the self-styled leader in the Party Headquarters, the Brown House in Munich, and confirmed my 1924 impression of a slightly comical but dangerous man, brutal, guileful, and willful.

Now I had two other talks with Hitler at the Kaiserhof Hotel in Berlin, which had become the headquarters of Nazi bigwigs in the capital.

During the longer interview, the Fuehrer, at a question from me, rose from his chair, stared over my head into space, and launched into a five minute speech on his favorite text, Germany's "fourteen years of infamy." At first I thought this sheer theater, then gradually realized that this voluble man believed what he was saying, that, in fact, he was capable of believing whatever he wanted to believe, and intended by sheer will to make it come true. Thanks to this realization, I predicted that he would endeavor to carry out literally the program he had outlined in Mein Kampf (which I had recently read).

Ernest ("Putzi" ) Hanfstaengl, the Nazi press chief, remained an enigma. Big, dark, blessed with a cultured New England mother, subjected to American society at an early age, he should have been Nazi-proof. According to Robert Murphy, Hanfstaengl's attention had been first directed to Hitler in 1922 by an American Army officer, Captain Truman Smith, who already surmised that Hitler might become a German Mussolini. After the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, the Hanfstaengl family hid him from justice and, unfortunately, persuaded him not to commit suicide, as he intended. In consequence, though "Putzi" set small store by Nazi ideology, he did a good job in playing down the repulsive aspects of Nazism for visiting correspondents. Drinking with him in the Kaiserhof occasionally, I met others of the band who were always ready to imbibe a whiskey at the expense of an American newspaperman. Thanks to their thirst, I obtained advance information concerning the Party's plans.

An unexpected source of information was a small cripple, Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels had nothing in common with Hanfstaengl except a dark complexion and a craze for women. Unlike the other Nazi leaders, he was not a paranoiac, a pervert, a crackpot, or a brute. Except when deliberately lying, he always communicated something. This made him the only Nazi orator who could convince rather than hypnotize his auditors.

He came to my attention of his own volition. Some time before 1930, I received a request for a job from an unknown writer. I might have known that, though a Rhinelander, Goebbels was already a leader of the Berlin Nazis, but I did not. Therefore, while refusing his offer, I suggested that he drop in and see me. Some time later the little man with the sharp face limped in, and for half an hour we discussed the world. Goebbels soon revealed that he had become a follower of Hitler in order to remove the "Jewish blight" from Germany.

"Less than 1 percent of the total population," I objected.

"Numerically yes, but dominant. Just imagine, no Jewish theater producer would put on my last play. Too German. No, we shall get rid of them all."

So that was it: his Nazism was pure resentment. He was far too intelligent to believe Mein Kampf. For some time after Goebbels became editor of the Berlin Nazi newspaper, the Angriff, we remained on speaking terms. Occasionally he phoned personally to offer news or to invite me to a Hitler rally in the huge Berlin Sportpalast at which thousands went wild and girls in the front row became delirious.

Goebbels was, I believe, the master manipulator of our time. When, on one occasion, I was too busy to attend the oratorical orgy at which Hitler was slated to announce the Party's economic program, I asked Goebbels for an advance text.

"No need. Here is our program in one sentence: under National Socialism everything will be different."

It took me a few moments to appreciate the magic of those seven words. In the prevailing German atmosphere they were worth millions of votes. What a public relations man was lost when the lame doctor turned to politics!

At the Kaiserhof Bar, Hanfstaengl presented me to Rudolf Hess and Hermann Goering, both of whom became outstanding among Nazi leaders. Hess was a dramatic looking nobody, a faithful Achates who showed nothing of his mental unbalance.

Goering was full of human traits, most of them distasteful. Praiseworthy were the primitive courage that had made him a famous war ace, and, one might argue, his doglike fidelity to the Fuehrer. Repellent were his insensitivity, general laziness, addiction to drugs, kleptomania, personal vanity and love of show, and, toward everybody but Hitler, mania for personal domination. Even while he was threatening the "hostile" foreign press (as he did at one conference), I had the impression that he was coquetting for our favor.

Jews in Germany were proportionally far fewer than in the United States. Both Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx had been baptized Christians. Most of our many Jewish friends felt German, spoke German, and acted German. They shared the Germans' condescension toward the "East Jews" who flocked in after 1919. Why then the sudden hatred?

Conceivably the Jews' emergence as a successful and conspicuous element in the Republic sparked it. Under the monarchy, they had played a smaller role. Occasionally German nobles and officers, in need of cash, married Jewish heiresses. "Aryan" working girls sometimes preferred Jewish husbands. In banking, trade, medicine, the theater, and the newspapers, Jews were prominent. But before 1919 they had had small political influence.

The Weimar Republic gave them their chance and they made the most of it. Any number sought integration into German society. By 1933 this process had gone so far that when the Nazis started identifying Jews, they found less than 600,000 full-blooded, but well over a million "grandmother Jews"-persons, including a few Nazi leaders, with at least one quarter "Jewish blood"

A Jewish industrialist, Walther Rathenau, became a Cabinet Minister (and was assassinated for his effrontery). In Berlin's artistic and cultural flowering, Jews played a leading part. As well they might, for in the cultural revolution of the twentieth century, three Jews, Marx, Freud, and Einstein, each in his separate field, were acknowledged leaders.

As a result few successful Jews believed in the Nazi threat to their existence until it was too late. When at the weekly Stammtisch I repeated the anti-Semitic threats made by Nazis at the Kaiserhof Bar, my friends laughed at me as a gullible American.

Toward the end of 1932 we visited a banker named Arnholt. After dinner, while the men, all Jews but me, sat over coffee, several boasted of giving money to the Nazi party at the request of Aryans like Schacht and Thyssen! My face must have betrayed my amazement. The host politely asked what I was thinking.

"Merely wondering how the People of Israel have managed to survive so many thousands of years when they obviously have a strong suicidal urge."

Arnholt raised his eyebrows. "But you don't take this fellow seriously."

"Unfortunately I do - and so should you."

"Just talk," insisted the banker while his friends nodded. They too thought me incapable of understanding the German soul...

My growing belief that, given a chance, Hitler would realize the promises of Mein Kampf was based not only upon my experience with fascism and contacts with leading Nazis at the Kaiserhof. From June on, I worked on a book to be called Germany Puts the Clock Back.

Edgar Ansel Mowrer, a correspondent for the strongly interventionist Chicago Daily News... authored nationally distributed serries of exaggerated articles on the threat of the Nazi fifth column.... Mowrer has been named as a British intelligence agent.

Soon after his conversation with Knox the President did exactly what he said he would not do. He named another Republican to a defense portfolio in his cabinet, Stimson, not Bill Donovan, as secretary of war. Still, Knox was not finished with promoting his friend. On July 9, at the White House, he agreed with what the President had been saying all along that the swift collapse of France, the Low Countries, and Norway could be explained only by fifth column subversives operating from within. The Navy secretary proposed having a correspondent from his Chicago Daily News, Edgar Mowrer, already in Britain, Study methods for detecting fifth columnists that the United States might adopt. And he wanted someone else to join Mowrer, Bill Donovan.