Hatred

"Clevinger recoiled from their hatred as though from a blinding light. These three men who hated him spoke his language and wore his uniform, but he saw their loveless faces set immutably into cramped, mean lines of hostility and understood instantly that nowhere in the world, not in all the fascist tanks or planes or submarines, not in the bunker behind the machine guns or mortars or behind the blowing flame throwers, not even among all the expert gunners of the crack Hermann Goering Antiaircraft Division or among the grisly connivers in all the beer halls in Munich and everywhere else, were there men who hated him more" (Heller, 81).

Clevinger has just faced a hearing where Lieutenant Scheisskopf and two other officers convict him of something that he didn't do and sentence him to punishment duty. He gets called Jewish and that his own friendlies will hate him; even after he denies being Jewish, he is told they will still hate him and Clevinger can see the hatred in their eyes. He wonders what compels armies to want to kill each other when they have no personal hatred, when the people in the war he can find that hate him more are his own allies.