Prologue
Late September 1907:
He sat snugly in the corner of the third-class compartment and watched the tawny landscape race by under a low autumn sky. Sometimes, focusing to a shallower field of vision, he caught his own reflection in the smoky window.
He was a youth of eighteen; a mixture of old, tired virtues and young dreams. He was of medium height and weight at five feet nine inches and one hundred fifty pounds. His peasant's face had a large, protruding nose and gaping black nostrils which he was trying to hide with a sparse growth of hair on his lip. There was little graceful about his face. It was thin and rather bony at the time, but would have a tendency with age to puff out, as if he were a farmer from the Waldviertel who had spent his life drinking wine and eating pork. His dark brown hair was parted on the right side.
The youth had large feet, which added to the general air of his peasant origins, but the finely molded hands, which he held in his lap as if protecting his genitals, countered this impression. They were the delicate hands of a pianist, painter, or surgeon. His clothing and the ivory-tipped cane resting in the overhead rack went with the hands. They were the accouterments of a dandy, not a worker. Peasant origins were battling with artistic aspirations in this young man.
His eyes also, extraordinary in their light blue color with the greenish-grey hint deep within, added to the dichotomy. They stood out of his coarse face unexpectedly as did the hands from the body.
Alone in the compartment, he smiled at the thin, youthful face he saw reflected in the window. He had good reason to smile. The train he was on, the slow five-hour milk run from Linz to Vienna, was carrying him to his future; puffing and winding along the Danube valley to his greatness.
Many other young men, filled with the same hope and nervous excitement, had made this journey before him. Few of those had succeeded.
But he was not reckoning the odds. This young man knew he would succeed where others had failed. On the rack over his head, next to his walking stick, lay his entry card to the world of greatness: his portfolio of drawings. Next to that was the bruised and bulky leather suitcase that contained his worldly belongings.
He continued to look out at the landscape, now dampened in rain, and dreamed of fame and fortune in the capital.
The hours passed, and the train lurched in and out of one station after the other. Darkness fell so discreetly in the gray sky that the change from day to night was one of degree, not of quality. The young man now most probably sat fidgeting in the darkness of his compartment, cursing himself for saving a crown or two by taking this damnably slow train, which was growing colder by the minute.
Reluctantly, he wrapped his heavy winter coat tight around his thin frame against the evening chill. Afraid to rumple the well-cut black suit he wore for this momentous journey. He occasionally brushed at the unruly flop of hair that dangled onto his forehead.
As with generations of train passengers, excitement had turned to impatience in young Adolf Hitler....