“In league with the Devil”

The expression “In league with the Devil” becomes, for the unnamed boy narrator, more than a saying about extraordinary success: it gives him a rule for understanding a world in which harm appears to bring power. His interpretation makes cruelty the currency of a bargain with the Evil Ones, and casts both his own past and the Germans’ success within that logic.

The expression and its logic

The narrator recalls hearing people describe the very successful by saying, “He is in league with the Devil.” Events that had seemed unclear now appear to explain the phrase. He imagines human minds and souls as open ground where the Evil Ones scatter their seed. If that seed takes root, they offer help on the condition that it serve selfish ends and harm other people.

In this imagined bargain, assistance increases with the misery a person causes. Someone who holds back from harming others, or gives way to love, friendship, and compassion, becomes weaker; the suffering and defeats spared others instead fall on that person. Success is therefore not evidence of virtue in the narrator’s account, but the reward for doing damage.

The narrator’s recognition

The narrator turns the explanation inward. He recognizes himself as someone who had already belonged to this pattern, and is annoyed with himself for failing to understand the world’s supposed rules sooner. The Evil Ones, he concludes, choose people who have already shown enough hatred and maliciousness to welcome their influence.

This recognition makes the expression a framework for interpreting conduct, not simply a label for people who prosper. It also gives the narrator a bleak account of why kindness carries a cost: in the moral economy he imagines, compassion interrupts the bargain and leaves its practitioner exposed to the suffering that might otherwise have been inflicted on others.

The Germans and the cycle of harm

The narrator extends this explanation to the Germans’ extraordinary success. Recalling what a priest once told peasants, he reasons that the Germans had long preferred war to peace: rather than tilling soil and waiting through the year for a harvest, they attacked other tribes and took their crops. He speculates that the Evil Ones noticed this eagerness to do harm and that the Germans surrendered themselves to those forces.

Their abilities and refined methods of wrongdoing thus become, in the narrator’s conjecture, rewards for the same destructive disposition. The resulting cycle feeds on itself: greater harm brings greater powers for evil, and those powers enable still more harm. The familiar expression expands into a theory of success in which achievement and cruelty reinforce each other.