“Go on, please. You spoke about Lightning Joe before.”
“After Cherbourg we had everything. I took nothing but an Admiral’s compass because I had a small boat at that time on Chesapeake Bay. But we had all the Wehrmacht stamped Martell and some people had as much as six million German printed French francs. They were good until a year ago, and at that time they were worth fifty to the dollar, and many a man has a tractor now instead of simply one mule who knew how to send them home through his Esses, or sometimes his G’s.
“I never stole anything except the compass because I thought it was bad luck to steal, unnecessarily, in war. But I drank the cognac and I used to try to figure out the different corrections on the compass when I had time. The compass was the only friend I had, and the telephone was my life. We had more wire strung than there are cunts in Texas.”
“Please keep telling me and be as little rough as you can. I don’t know what the word means and I don’t want to know.”
“Texas is a big state,” the Colonel said. “That is why I used it and its female population as a symbol. You cannot say more cunts than Wyoming because there are less than thirty thousand there, perhaps, hell, make it fifty, and there was a lot of wire, and you kept stringing it and rolling it up, and stringing it again.”
“Go on.”
“We will cut to the break-through,” the Colonel said. “Please tell me if this bores you.”
“No.”
“So we made the mucking break-through,” the Colonel said, and now his head was turned to her head, and he was not lecturing; he was confessing.
“The first day most of them came over and dropped the Christmas tree ornaments that confuse the other people’s radar and it was called off. We were ready to go but they called it off. Quite properly I am sure. I love the very highest brass like I love the pig’s you know.”
“Tell it to me and don’t be bad.”
“Conditions were not propitious,” the Colonel said. “So the second day we were for it, as our British cousins, who could not fight their way out of a wet tissue towel, say, and over came the people of the wild, blue yonder.
“They were still taking off from the fields where they lived on that green-grassed aircraft carrier that they called England, when we saw the first of them.
“Shining, bright and beautiful, because they had scraped the invasion paint by then, or maybe they had not. My memory is not exact about this part.
“Anyway, Daughter, you could see the line of them going back toward the east further than you could see. It was like a great train. They were high in the sky and never more beautiful. I told my S-2 that we should call them the Valhalla Express. Are you tired of it?”
“No. I can see the Valhalla Express. We never saw it in such numbers. But we saw it. Many times.”
“We were back two thousand yards from where we were to take off from. You know what two thousand yards is, Daughter, in a war when you are attacking?”
“No. How could I?”
“Then the front part of the Valhalla Express dropped coloured smoke and turned and went home. This smoke was dropped accurately, and clearly showed the target which was the Kraut positions. They were good positions and it might have been impossible to move him out of them without something mighty and picturesque such as we were experiencing.
“Then, Daughter, the next sections of the Valhalla express dropped everything in the world on the Krauts and where they lived and worked to hold us up. Later it looked as though all of the earth had erupted and the prisoners that we took shook as a man shakes when his malaria hits him. They were very brave boys from the Sixth Parachute Division and they all shook and could not control it though they tried.
“So you can see it was a good bombing. Just the thing we always need in this life. Make them tremble in the fear of justice and of might.