"...there is no doubt that Corporal Hitler earned the Iron Cross, First Class. ...
"And yet, as soldiers go, he was a peculiar fellow, as more than one of his comrades remarked. No letters or presents from home came to him as they did to the others. He never asked for leave; he had not even a combat soldier's interest in women. He never grumbled, as did the bravest of men, about the filth, the lice, the mud, the stench, of the front line. He was the impassioned warrior, deadly serious at all times...
"'We all cursed him and found him intolerable,' one of the men in his company later recalled. 'There was this white crow among us that didn't go along with us when we damned the war to hell.' Another man described him as sitting 'in the corner of our mess holding his head between his hands, in deep contemplation. Suddenly he would leap up and, running about excitedly, say that in spite of our big guns victory would be denied us, for the invisible foes of the German people were a greater danger than the biggest cannon of the enemy.'--the Jews and the Marxists."
Rise and Fall (30-31)
"White crow": like "apparition", a thing so different that it cannot be real.
