Chapter
One
Harvard
Yard
Wednesday,
August 26, 1914
It was said that
heroic architects didn’t fare well in
Harvard Yard. If you wanted haut
monde, move past the Johnston Gate,
preferably to New York. The Yard was
Boston’s: energetic, spare, solid.
The Yard had evolved as a
collection of buildings, each with its
own oddities, interspersed among
large elm trees and tracts of grass.
The rich red brickwork of Sever Hall
stood apart from the austere gray of
University Hall. Appleton Chapel’s
Romanesque curves differed from the
gabled turrets of Weld and the sharp
peaks of Matthews. Holworthy,
Hollis, and Stoughton were as plain
as the Pilgrims. Holden Chapel,
decorated with white cherubs above
its door and tucked in a corner of
the Yard, looked like a young girl’s
playhouse. The red walls of Harvard
and Massachusetts halls, many
agreed, could be called honest but
not much more. The massive new
library had been named for a young
man who went down on the Titanic
two years before. There were those
who would’ve had the architect
trade tickets with the young lad. At
least the squat form, dour roofline,
and grate of Corinthian columns did
indeed look like a library.
The Yard had become not a single
building demanding the attention
of all around it but the sum of its
parts: its many irregular halls filled
with many irregular people. Taken
together over the course of nearly
three hundred years, this endeavor
of the Puritans was judged a
resounding success by most. In fact,
none were inclined to think higher
of it than those forced to leave
Harvard, such as the bespectacled
Wilhelm von Lützow Brandl, a senior
and the only son of a Prussian
countess, at that hour sud- denly
called to return to Germany.
A soft rain fell in the Yard that
day, but Wils seemed not to notice.
His hands were stuffed in his
trouser pockets; his gait slowed
as the drops dampened his crested
jacket, spotted his glasses, and
wilted his starched collar. The dying
elms, bored to their cores by a
plague of leopard moths, provided
meager cover.
He looked out to the Yard. Men in
shirtsleeves and bowler hats carried old furniture and stacks of
secondhand books into their
dormitories. This was where the
The End o
poor students lived. But the place
had a motion, an energy. These
Americans found no man above them
except that he prove it on merit, and
no man beneath them except by his
own faults. They believed that the
son of a fishmonger could match the
son of a count and proved it with
such regularity that an aristocrat
like Wils feared for the future of
the wealthy class.
He sighed, looking over the many
faces he would never know. Mein
Gott. He ran his hands through his
short blond hair. I’ll miss this.
His mother had just wired
demanding his return home. He pulled
out the order from his pocket and
reread it. She insisted that for his
own safety he return home as soon
as possible. She argued that Boston
had been a hotbed of intolerance for
more than three hundred years, and
now news had reached Berlin that
the American patriots conspired to
send the German conductor of the
Boston Symphony to a detention
camp in the state of Georgia. That
city was no place for her son.
She was understandably distressed,
although he was certain the reports
in Germany made the situation sound
worse than it was. The papers there
would miss that Harvard was
welcoming, for instance. If the front
door at Harvard was closed to a
student due to his race, class, or