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Hobart J. Crawley the Third.”
    â€œAnd what was that, sir?”
    â€œI ran into ol’ Hobo at the bar at the New York Athletic Club. Actually, I picked him up off the floor of the bar at the Athletic Club, where he was curled in a fetal position and weeping piteously. When I got him into an armchair in the lounge and got about a quart of black coffee into him, he confided in me his shame.”
    â€œAnd what was that, Pop?”
    â€œThat idiot son of his, the one they call ‘Little Hobo,’ couldn’t keep his You Know What in his pocket and instead used it to get another mental deficient in the family way. You may have seen her around. They live in this building. Tall blonde with a vapid face and no bosom worth mentioning. Anyway, these two are now going to contribute to the further degeneration of the gene pool, and poor ol’ Hobo’s stuck for the tab for the whole operation for the foreseeable future. Little Hobo is now on his third try to get out of the freshman class at Yale. I thank you from the bottom of my heart, son, for not doing anything like that to me.”
    â€œYou’re welcome, Pop.”
    â€œI do have one question, Philip, about your orders.”
    â€œSir?”
    â€œThat three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar clothing allowance. What’s that all about?”
    Phil told him.
    â€œAnd how long are you going to be in Berlin?”
    â€œI enlisted for two years. I’ve got about seventeen months left to go.”
    â€œThat’s outrageous!” the elder Williams said indignantly. “How the hell does the Army expect you to spend seventeen months in Berlin with only a sports jacket and a pair of slacks—well, maybe two pair, one wool, one khaki—to wear?”
    â€œI thought I would go to Brooks Brothers in the morning, Pop, to see what they might have on sale.”
    â€œTomorrow, my boy, we will go to J. Press—I thought you understood, God knows I’ve told you this often enough, that J. Press serves gentlemen and Brooks Brothers the less fortunate others—we will go to J. Press and get you enough clothing to spend seventeen months in Berlin.”
    â€œYes, sir.”
    â€œOn my nickel, of course, in the hope that you will find it in your heart to forgive me for what I thought—
My God, what’s it going to cost me to keep him out of Leavenworth?
—when you came home just now.”
    On the tenth day of his son’s delay-en-route-leave, P. Wallingford Williams, Jr., loaded CPL Williams Philip W. III—and the three leather suitcases containing the corporal’s new wardrobe—into a taxicab on Park Avenue and waved goodbye as Phil headed for Idlewild and the Pan American Flight to Frankfurt.

III
    OL’ PHIL’S FIRST GRAND EUROPEAN TOUR
    [ ONE ]
    22-26 Beerenstrasse
    Zehlendorf, Berlin, Germany
    Monday, May 5, 1947
    T he black Volkswagen Beetle drove through Zehlendorf, which looked to Phil very much like South Orange, New Jersey—that is to say, the part of South Orange where his mother lived with lots of big houses with lawns, not downtown South Orange by the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western railroad commuter station, which was sort of lower-middle-class in ambience—and then through a set of twelve-foot-high cast-iron gates that opened at their approach.
    Inside, Phil saw a rather large three-story building before which were parked seven Volkswagens essentially identical to the one in which he was riding. Phil, who had paid attention during the classes in Techniques of Observation he had been subjected to at Fort Holabirdwhile in training, quickly saw that, while on casual observation the Volkswagens were essentially identical, upon closer examination the eye trained to be alert for details could see that they were not.
    One of the VWs was painted olive-drab green all over, including the bumpers, and on the bumpers had been stenciled some numbers and letters, including the legend
U.S.