“Keep quiet with your questions and chatter! I’m a professor of theology if you want to know. But, the Lord be praised, there’s no occasion for theology now, my boy. It’s war. Come on!”

He shot the driver of a small car that came snorting towards us and leaping into it as nimbly as a monkey, brought it to a standstill for me to get in. Then we drove like the devil between bullets and crashed cars out of town and suburbs.

“Are you on the side of the manufacturers?” I asked my friend.

“Oh, Lord, that’s a matter of taste, so we can leave it out of account⁠—though now you mention it, I rather think we might take the other side, since at bottom it’s all the same, of course. I’m a theologian and my predecessor, Luther, took the side of the princes and plutocrats against the peasants. So now we’ll establish the balance a little. This rotten car, I hope she’ll hold out another mile or two.”

Swift as the wind, that child of heaven, we rattled on, and reached a green and peaceful countryside many miles distant. We traversed a wide