Red Tape

Jorge always got dressed in the exact same manner. This can't be stressed enough. "The devils in the details," he would croon to anyone who would listen to him.

Jorge Guerra De la Iglesias was a man of procedures. Rules were sacred to him, even more than God above, as he had once confessed with great shame to his local priest. The father had smiled, pushed his spectacles back onto the bridge of his nose, and softly explained

"I'm sure our Lord would be pleased you follow his edicts, and those of the world he created,"

This answer pleased Jorge immensely, although he had no desire to encourage the Father to be a lawbreaker himself and so insisted on a penance. The priest just sighed and said "Say three Hail Marys." and before blessing Jorge the Father paused, wondering for a second, if a man of his standing in the community should say such a thing.

"Jorge, it's perhaps," again he paused unsure what Jorge's reaction would be "once... every so often... necessary to break the rules," and before Jorge could give him his penance to say for such sacrilege, he blessed him and bid him well on his way.

The memory troubled him years later that morning in Paris many miles away from Porto as he put on his socks. First the right, then the left, each precisely to the same height. You could have calibrated a ruler with Jorge's socks.

How could a man of the cloth who knew we were made in God's image and therefore obliged to follow his laws; even suggest that we break the rules? Why it would be... he stopped. He tried in vain to forget the word it frightened him so much.

He buttoned his stiff starched white shirt from top to bottom. Fear fumbled his fingers a little before placing his trousers on and tucking his shirt in. He finished with his waistcoat and jacket. He admonished himself briefly for almost forgetting his pocket watch with Beatriz's photo inside. What are rules without time and its many tables to regulate it? The final touch was to part his hair exactly down the middle and apply the precise ration of pomade to hold it in place.

For one second, in the mirror he saw his true self, that drop of the water downed divine, peaking from behind the eyeballs, and the horrible thought it aroused was "perhaps the priest was right." Maybe one day he would have to break the rules, but like most people in such moments of epiphany, he pushed the truth as deep as he could and continued with his day.

So it was he left his house in Paris as the gas lights began to lose their power to the dawn and walked along the bank of the Seine.

In such a setting his thoughts turned to his fiancée Beatriz back in Madrid. Soon they would marry and his life's plan would follow the ironclad route he had set down in his diary.

1) Marriage

2) Children

3) Promotion.

He purchased a newspaper from the boy on the corner as he crossed the Pont Neuf. He wouldn't read it. He hadn't read a newspaper since the Germans had begun beating their war drums on the border. War represented that word that could not be spoken earlier: Chaos.

However, there were social norms a gentleman must follow in Paris, and having a newspaper was one of them. So he folded the paper under his arm, in such a way to avoid reading any headlines, as he set out once more for the Portuguese consulate.

Little did he know that there were legions of Jorges and his ilk in the Ardennes to the north. The sinews of war stretched and tensed to such people. Those with their lists and schedules. Inventories of fuel cans, bullets, and shells of different sizes, rations, spare parts for tanks, and other specialized equipment. They called themselves logisticians rather than bureaucrats, as armies don't like to think of themselves as civil servants due to their romantic ideals of duty and honor (although had they stopped to really think about it and looked in the mirror for a brief moment, like Jorge, they would have seen that there is little honor in killing people.)