The Winds of War (The Henry Family, #1)

by Herman Wouk

These three old comrades were mightily fond of intellectual talk, and kept pressing on Henry books from Stöller’s library that came up in conversation. He tried to read them at bedtime. After fifteen minutes, night after night, he fell into deep restful slumber. Germany’s strange literature usually had that effect on Victor Henry. He had long since given up trying to understand the fantastic seriousness with which Germans took themselves, their “world-historical” position, and every twist and turn of their murky history since Charlemagne. From a military standpoint, all this river of ink about German destiny, German culture, German spirituality, Germanophilism, pan-Germanism, and the rest, kept underlining one fact. Here was an industrial people of eighty million that had spent a century uniting itself, talking to itself, rolling up its sleeves to lick the world, and convincing itself that God would hold Germany’s coat and cheer it on. That was worth bearing in mind.