Peaceful Road

"One Sunday morning in the spring of 1932 I was hiking through the Rhine Valley. With a pack on my back I was wandering down a quiet country road among flowering apple orchards, near Koblenz. Suddenly a car appeared and came down the road very fast. It was jammed with people. Almost before I had taken full notice of it, I realized it was coming straight at me and instinctively jumped into the ditch. The car passed in a cloud of leaflets and from the ditch I glimpsed its occupants, six or seven youths screaming and shaking their fists.

They were Nazis, and it was election day. I was being invited to vote for Hitler, who was not yet in power. These were future officers in the SS. They vanished quickly. The road was once again perfectly silent and peaceful. But it was not the same road as before. It was now a road on which seven men had expressed their readiness to destroy me."

-- Thomas Merton, My Argument with the Gestapo
My Argument with the Gestapo is the only surviving full-length prose work written by Thomas Merton before he entered the Cistercian Order in 1941. Autobiographical elements are combined with fiction to describe how the central character, called Thomas Merton, travels from America to England and France to report on the war with the Nazis. In fact the real Thomas Merton left England in 1935 and spent the war in America, entering the Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky as a novice monk in 1942. But, despite its fictitious story line, My Argument with the Gestapo is an early statement of Merton's concerns with pacifism and non-violence. It is also notably critical of Britain.