“Exactly. And where do they get it? What's it made from?”
“It's made out of bauxite, I know.”
“And has Germany got any?”
“I don't know, Robbie.”
“Few people know things like that; they don't teach them in the schools. Germany has very little, and she wants it badly, and pays high prices for it. Do you know who has it?”
“Well, I know that France has a lot, because Eddie Patterson drove me to the place where it's being mined.” Lanny remembered this trip to a town called Brignolles, back from the coast; the reddish mineral was blasted from tunnels in a mountain, and brought down to the valley in great steel buckets rolling on a continuous wire cable. Lanny and his friend had been admitted to the place and had watched the stuff being dumped into lines of freight cars. It had been Lanny's first actual sight of big industry — unless you included the perfume factories in Grasse, where peasant women sat half buried in millions of rose leaves, amid an odor so powerful that a little of it sent you out with a headache.
Robbie went on with his story. “To make bauxite into aluminum takes electric power. Those lines of freight cars that you saw were taken to Switzerland, which has cheap power from its mountain streams. There the aluminum is made; and then it goes — can you guess?”
“To Germany?”
“It goes to whatever country bids the highest price for it; and Germany is in the market. So if your friend is brought down by a faster airplane, you'll know the reason. Also you'll know why your father keeps urging you not to tear your heart out over this war.”
“But, Robbie!” The son's voice rose with excitement. “Something ought to be done about a thing like that!”