Free What's In A Name by Thomas H. Cook

A LTMAN HAD NEVER SEEN New York dressed so gaily. Bunting hung from every window, and Broadway was decked out in various elaborations of red, white and blue. There’d been an enormous parade earlier in the day, and it had left a festive atmosphere in its wake, people laughing and talking and in a thousand different ways expressing the joy they felt at what this day—November 11, 1968, the 50th Anniversary of Armistice Day—had commemorated.
    Altman, himself, could hardly believe the day had actually come. Fifty years since the Great War had ended, and the unlikely predictions of a few cock-eyed optimists had proven true. It really had been “the war to end all wars.”
    As he walked toward the little bookstore where he was to give his talk, it struck him that he’d never have thought it possible that the world would remain at peace for five decades after that odious treaty his native Germany had been forced to sign in that humiliating little railway car near Compiegne on what had been fatefully recorded as “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918.
    At the time, Altman could not have imagined that this treaty, with its many dreadful provisions, would actually put an end to war in Europe. Nor had he been alone in his doubts. The great economist, John Maynard Keynes, no less, had predicted that a second world war would inevitably result from this sorry peace, one that had saddled Germany with an impossible burden of reparations. In fact, it had been the resulting inflation, with its consequent social chaos, that had urged Altman to leave Germany and come to America, abandon impoverished, defeated Berlin for bountiful, victorious New York. To leave that world behind had been his goal in coming to America, and now, on this splendid anniversary of fifty years of world peace, he felt certain that he’d truly escaped it.
    For that reason, it was with complete confidence that his life had been the result of his own wise decisions that Altman entered the bookstore where he was to speak, and after a few pleasantries to the audience, began his talk.
    He’d finished it only a few minutes later, exactly as planned, and just in time to conclude with his customary summation.
    â€œTherefore, despite the magisterial splendor of the language Thomas Carlyle employed in his great book, The Hero in History ,” Altman said, “his theory that the course of history can be changed by a single human being simply isn’t true.” He felt quite satisfied with the thoroughly convincing argument he’d made against Carlyle. Not bad, he thought, for a man who was simply a rare book dealer who specialized in books and manuscripts in his native tongue, particularly those written just after the Great War, when Germany had seemed on the brink of economic and social collapse, a dangerously spinning maelstrom from which anything might have emerged.
    Even better, the attendance was greater than he’d expected given the 50th Anniversary Armistice Day parties that were no doubt planned for this particular evening. In light of those festivities, Altman had hardly expected anyone to show up for his talk, despite the fact that the History Bookstore catered to a well-educated audience.
    â€œRoman history would have followed the same course without Caesar,” Altman added now, “and France would have followed the same course without Napoleon.”
    He thought of his vast collection of books and manuscripts, a bibliophile’s dream, shelves and shelves of works from the most famous to the most obscure writers. How thoroughly he’d searched through them, not in order to disprove Carlyle, but to support his theory that a great man could change the world. But in the end he’d come to the opposite conclusion.
    â€œA nation may look for a hero who can restore its optimism and revitalize its faith in itself,” Altman said. “But history is made by great