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Some of the light of astonishment was gone from their eyes, but still a light of anger had not taken its place. . . The people spoke to one another in monosyllables, and everyone was thinking of the war, thinking of himself, thinking of the past and how it had suddenly been changed."
Impossible Job. Then Alex Morden, a miner, bashed in one invader's head with his pickax. The invaders asked Mayor Orden to sentence him, to preserve order. The Mayor said he would, if the invaders would shoot the 20 men who killed the loose-hung soldiers. Then Colonel Lanser, who really knew what war is, smiled a little sadly. "We really have taken on a job, haven't we?" he said. "Yes," said the Mayor, "the one impossible job in the world, the one thing that can't be done." "And that is?" "To break man's spirit permanently."
They shot Alex. "And there was death in the air, hovering and waiting. Accidents happened on the railroad. . . . Avalanches poured down on the tracks and rails were spread. No train could move unless the tracks were first inspected. People were shot in reprisal and it made no difference. Now and then a group of young men escaped and went to England. . . .
"Now it was that the conqueror was surrounded, the men of the battalion alone among silent enemies, and no man might relax his guard for even a moment. If he did, he disappeared, and some snowdrift received his body. If he went alone to a woman, he disappeared. ... If he drank, he disappeared. . . ."
The flies, they said, had conquered the flypaper. Little by little "fear began to grow in the conquerors, a fear that . . . one day they would crack and be hunted through the mountains like rabbits. . . ."
"These horrible people!" cried poetic Lieut. Tonder. "These cold people! They never look at you. They never speak. They answer like dead men. They obey, these horrible people. And the girls are frozen. ... I want a girl. I want to go home. I want a girl. There's a girl in this town, a pretty girl. I see her all the time. She has blond hair. ... I want that girl."
Implacable. Lieut. Tonder's meeting with this girl is the high point of The Moon Is Down. For in this human episode there emerges for the first time in the literature of the democracies a pure jet of that implacability which has been the driving force of the Nazi revolution and without which the counterrevolution cannot succeed against it.