What Salinas did to Mr. Fenchel

An intercalary chapter on Salinas in wartime. The town drilled a Home Guard of men over fifty — William C. Burt died on the armory floor in the middle of a push-up — mustered Minute Men to give one-minute patriotic speeches in cinemas, rolled bandages, and knitted wristlets and liners against tin helmets freezing to the head. Officers wore Sam Browne belts copied from the British at twenty-five dollars each, though wristwatches were still thought too silly to adopt. Then the spy scares: after twenty years of hand tailoring, Mr. Fenchel's accent was suddenly German. Nobody would wear a suit made by an enemy, and he sat on his table basting and ripping the same piece of cloth. The narrator remembers, with shame he still sweats over, stepping into the gutter with his little sister to say "Hoch der Kaiser!" and watching the old man sob. Thirty men later burned the front off his house, and Watsonville tarred and feathered a Pole. There was heroism too, and telegrams, and a sorrow some families edged toward pride.

The chapter puts the narrator inside the crime rather than above it: the town's cruelty is illustrated by two children he can name, one of them himself, and the confession is unqualified. Mr. Fenchel ripping and re-sewing the same cloth carries what was done to him without comment. The closing survey of heroism, profiteering and curdled sorrow is offered flatly, unreconciled.