It was icy cold, and “the trees are hardly in bud and the field mice are still sheltering in my house. I don’t blame the poor little brutes,” Eugen wrote to Dillon. “I am doing the same myself.” But the weather would turn warm, their pool would be swimmable, their tennis court playable, “so what about coming and seeing your little Berkshire friends sometime this summer?” George wasn’t to beg off on account of his work because he could keep in touch with his office by telephone. “And you needn’t pay for it because, evidently, I needn’t pay it, at least I haven’t paid the telephone bill for five or six months. I think it’s the influence of Roosevelt on the utilities.” If Eugen wasn’t exactly inveigling George to come, he was certainly trying to make it hard to refuse. But this time, George didn’t bite.That March 1939, Hitler stormed into Prague in an open Mercedes-Benz with bright red Nazi flags snapping on its fenders. Czechoslovakia, dismembered by the Allies in Munich, had fallen.
