waste his talents

Anxiety about the university job in Oxford had contributed to Ludwig’s torment; he wanted that job so dreadfully. Of course, whatever happened now he would stay on in England after his London scholarship year was over. He had no more doubt about the Tightness of his decision. The war was a piece of absolute wickedness in which he would take no part. He would not fight for the United States of America in that war. But neither was it his task to make politics, to shout and specify and martyr himself. I am not a political animal, he told himself repeatedly. He was a scholar. He would not waste his talents. He would stay in England, where by a pure and felicitous accident he had been born. To regret that his role was in so many ways an easy one was surely sentimental.
    The analysis was clear and the decision was made. Only his Protestant conscience, like a huge primitive clumsy processing machine, obsolete but still operational, continued to give him trouble. If only he could take that awful uncomprehending misery away from his parents. He dreaded their letters, in which they begged him to come home and get himself "straightened out". Old European terrors, inherited from generations of wandering ancestors, coursed in their blood and made them shudder from breaking the laws of the United States and evading its decrees.
    His father’s family was from Alsace. His mother’s were German. Ludwig’s parents had met soon after the war in France. They soon decided to emigrate to America, but while waiting for their visas went first on a brief visit to England so as to improve their English. Here young Ludwig had achieved an English birth, and with it the right to British nationality, although before his first birthday he was already in the U. S. A. He grew up happily enough, normally enough, as an American child, his parents’ joy. Yet in his blood, too, old European things lived and waited, and as he became an adult and an intellectual he found himself an unidentified person. His parents perfectly bi-lingual in French and German, spoke only English at home, laboriously conversing even when they were alone together, in this language which they never fully mastered. Ludwig learnt his French and German at school.
    When he came at last to Europe no blood relations awaited him. All had died or scattered. What mainly confronted him was the ghost of Hitler. This and many other things needed to be exercised. As a historian and as a man he needed somehow in thought to undergo the whole passion of recent history, but he could not do it. Faced with what he had so significantly missed, his intellect became hazy and faint. He remained outside it all and yet burdened by it as by something heavy forever trailing behind him, a part of himself that he could never properly see. In America he felt European, in France he felt German, in Germany American. Only in England, which he found in some ways most alien of all, could he somehow forget or postpone that problem of who he was. The company of other historians suited him, jokey unexcited men who just took him for granted and assumed quietly that of course he would stay and become British. He was so grateful for that.
    Meanwhile he knew that he did not feel guilty only because he was disappointing his parents. He felt guilty exactly as they did because he was disappointing the U. S. A. , because he was breaking the law, because he had decided not to return, because he feared death and would not be a soldier, because he was behaving as cowards and traitors behave. He accepted the guilt as a punishment for what was happening right now to his parents.