Anybody could have anticipated it, but nobody did. And somehow I felt
harder hit by her death than by the death of all those strangers in Berlin.
“How did she do it?” I asked.
“Dust. She went into the canning room, and took off her armor.
I could picture her—head held high, eyes snapping, and that set look on her
mouth which she got when people did something she disapproved of. One
little old woman whose lifetime work had been turned against her.
“I wish,” Manning added slowly, “that I could explain to her why we had to
do it.”
We buried her in a lead-lined coffin, then Manning and I went on to
Washington.
While we were there, we saw the motion pictures that had been made of the
death of Berlin. You have not seen them; they never were made public, but
they were of great use in convincing the other nations of the world that
peace was a good idea. I saw them when Congress did, being allowed in
because I was Manning’s assistant.
They had been made by a pair of R. A. F. pilots, who had dodged the
Luftwaffle to get them. The first shots showed some of the main streets the
morning after the raid. There was not much to see that would show up in
tele-photo shots, just busy and crowded streets, but if you looked closely
you could see that there had been an excessive number of automobile
accidents.
The second day showed the attempt to evacuate. The inner squares of the
city were practically deserted save for bodies and wrecked cars, but the
streets leading out of town were boiling with people, mostly on foot, for
the trams where out of service. The pitiful creatures were fleeing, not
knowing that death was already lodged inside them. The plane swooped down
at one point and the cinematographer had his telephoto lens pointed
directly into the face of a young woman for several seconds. She stared
back at it with a look too woebegone to forget, then stumbled and fell.
She may have been trampled. I hope so. One of those six horses had looked
like that when the stuff was beginning to hit his vitals.
The last sequence showed Berlin and the roads around it a week after the
raid. The city was dead; there was not a man, a woman, a child—nor cats,
nor dogs, not even a pigeon. Bodies were all around, but they were safe
from rats. There were no rats.
The roads around Berlin were quiet now. Scattered carelessly on shoulders
and in ditches, and to a lesser extent on the pavement itself, like coal
shaken off a train, were the quiet heaps that had been the citizens of the
capital of the Reich. There is no use in talking about it.
But, so far as I am concerned, I left what soul I had in that projection
room and I have not had one since.
The two pilots who made the pictures eventually died—systemic, cumulative
infection, dust in the air over Berlin. With precautions it need not have
happened, but the English did not believe, as yet, that our extreme
precautions were necessary.
The Reich took about a week to fold up. It might have taken longer if the
new Fuehrer had not gone to Berlin the day after the raid to ‘approve” that
the British boasts had been hollow. There is no need to recount the
provisional governments that Germany had in the following several months;
the only one we are concerned with is the so called restored monarchy which
used a cousin of the old Kaiser as a symbol, the one that sued for peace.
Then the trouble started.
When the Prime Minister announced the terms of the private agreement he had
had with our President, he was met with a silence that was broken only by
cries of “Shame! Shame! Resign!” I suppose it was inevitable; the Commons
reflected the spirit of a people who had been unmercifully punished for
four years. They were in a mood to enforce a peace that would have made the
Versailles Treaty look like the Beatitudes.
The vote of no confidence left the Prime Minister no choice. Forty-eight