Army & Navy: I Thee Endow

A boy and a girl stood before an elderly clergyman in an 18th-Century, bomb-damaged Berlin church. The girl, blonde, in her late 'teens, was well dressed, well fed, carefully made up. She spoke for the two: "Will you marry us?" The silent youth, in his early twenties, looked better fed than most Germans, although his blue suit did not fit him well. The girl readily produced her identification papers, but he said: "I lost mine in the bombing . . . she can vouch for me."

The Pfarrer noticed his accent and began to question him. The boy admitted: "I am an...

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