A Separate Peace.pdf - Southwest High School

71ruining the sport after all. They were preparing it, if you see what I mean, for the future.Everything has to evolve or else it perishes." Finny and I had stood up, and Leper lookedearnestly from one to the other of us from his chair. "Take the housefly. If it hadn't developedall those split-second reflexes it would have become extinct long ago.""You mean it adapted itself to the fly swatter?" queried Phineas."That's right. And skiing had to learn to move just as fast or it would have been wiped outby this war. Yes, sir. You know what? I'm almost glad this war came along. It's like a test, isn'tit, and only the things and the people who've been evolving the right way survive."You usually listened to Leper's quiet talking with half a mind, but this theory of his broughtme to close attention. How did it apply to me, and to Phineas? How, most of all, did it apply toLeper?"I'm going to enlist in these ski troops," he went on mildly, so unemphatically that my mindwent back to half-listening. Threats to enlist that winter were always declaimed like Blinker's,with a grinding of back teeth and a flashing of eyes; I had already heard plenty of them. Butonly Leper's was serious.A week later he was gone. He had been within a few weeks of his eighteenth birthday, andwith it all chance of enlistment, of choosing a service rather than being drafted into one, wouldhave disappeared. The ski movie had decided him. "I always thought the war would come forme when it wanted me," he said when he came to say goodbye the last day. "I never thought I'dbe going to it. I'm really glad I saw that movie in time, you bet I am." Then, as the DevonSchool's first recruit to World War II, he went out my doorway with his white stocking capbobbing behind.It probably would have been better for all of us if someone like Brinker had been the first togo. He could have been depended upon to take a loud dramatic departure, so that the schoolwould have reverberated for weeks afterward with Brinker's Last Words, Brinker's MilitaryBearing, Brinker's Sense of Duty. And all of us, influenced by the vacuum of his absence,would have felt the touch of war as a daily fact.But the disappearing tail of Leper's cap inspired none of this. For a few days the war wasmore unimaginable than ever. We didn't mention it and we didn't mention Leper, until at lastBrinker found a workable point of view. One day in the Butt Room he read aloud a rumor in anewspaper about an attempt on Hitler's life. He lowered the paper, gazed in a visionary way infront of him, and then remarked, "That was Leper, of course."This established our liaison with World War II. The Tunisian campaign became "Leper'sliberation"; the bombing of the Ruhr was greeted by Brinker with hurt surprise: "He didn't tellus he'd left the ski troops"; the torpedoing of the Scharnhorst: "At it again." Leper sprang up allover the world at the core of every Allied success. We talked about Leper's stand at Stalingrad,Leper on the Burma Road, Leper's convoy to Archangel; we surmised that the crisis over theleadership of the Free French would be resolved by the appointment of neither de Gaulle nor