So we sat down. O’Hare was embarrassed, but he wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. I couldn’t imagine what it was about me that could bum up Mary so. I was a family man. I’d been married only once. I wasn’t a drunk. I hadn’t done her husband any dirt in the war.
She fixed herself a Coca-Cola, made a lot of noise banging the ice-cube tray in the stainless steel sink. Then she went into another part of the house. But she wouldn’t sit still. She was moving all over the house, opening and shutting doors, even moving furniture around to work off anger.
I asked O’Hare what I’d said or done to make her act that way.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. “Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t have anything to do with you.’ That was kind of him. He was lying. It had everything to do with me.
So we tried to ignore Mary and remember the war. I took a couple of belts of the booze I’d brought. We would chuckle or grin sometimes, as though war stories were coming back, but neither one of us could remember anything good. O’Hare remembered one guy who got into a lot of wine in Dresden, before it was bombed, and we had to take him home in a wheelbarrow.
It wasn’t much to write a book about. I remembered two Russian soldiers who had looted a clock factory. They had a horse-drawn wagon full of clocks. They were happy and drunk. They were smoking huge cigarettes they had rolled in newspaper.
That was about it for memories, and Mary was still making noise. She finally came out in the kitchen again for another Coke. She took another tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator, banged it in the sink, even though there was already plenty of ice out.
Then she turned to me, let me see how angry she was, and that the anger was for me. She had been talking to herself, so what she said was a fragment of a much larger conversation. “You were just babies then!’ she said.
‘What?�� I said.
‘You were just babies in the war-like the ones upstairs! ‘
I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.
‘But you’re not going to write it that way, are you.’ This wasn’t a question. It was an accusation.
‘I-I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Well, I know,’ she said. ‘You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.’
So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn’t want her babies or anybody else’s babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.
So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise ‘Mary,’ I said, ‘I don’t think this book is ever going to be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won’t be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.
‘I tell you what,’ I said, ‘I’ll call it The Children’s Crusade.’
She was my friend after that.
O’Hare and I gave up on remembering, went into the living room, talked about other things. We became curious about the real Children’s Crusade, so O’Hare looked it up in a book he had, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay, LL.D. It was first published in London in 1841.
Mackay had a low opinion of all Crusades. The Children’s Crusade struck him as only slightly more sordid than the ten Crusades for grown-ups. O’Hare read this handsome passage out loud:
History in her solemn page informs us that the Crusaders were but ignorant and savage men, that their motives were those of bigotry unmitigated, and that their pathway was one of blood and rears. Romance, on the other hand, dilates upon their piety and heroism, and portrays, in her most glowing and impassioned hues, their virtue and magnanimity, the imperishable honor they acquired for themselves, and the great services they rendered to Christianity.
And then O’Hare read this: Now what was the grand result of all these struggles? Europe expended millions of her treasures, and the blood of two million of her people; and a handful of quarrelsome knights retained possession of Palestine for about one hundred years!
Mackay told us that the Children’s Crusade started in 1213, when two monks got the idea of raising armies of children in Germany and France, and selling them in North Africa as slaves. Thirty thousand children volunteered, thinking they were going to Palestine. They were no doubt idle and deserted children who generally swarm in great cities, nurtured on vice and daring, said Mackay, and ready for anything.
Pope Innocent the Third thought they were going to Palestine, too, and he was thrilled. ‘These children are awake while we are asleep!’ he said.
Most of the children were shipped out of Marseilles, and about half of them drowned in shipwrecks. The other half got to North Africa where they were sold.
Through a misunderstanding, some children reported for duty at Genoa, where no slave ships were waiting. They were fed and sheltered and questioned kindly by good people there-then given a little money and a lot of advice and sent back home.
‘Hooray for the good people of Genoa,’ said Mary O’Hare.
I slept that night in one of the children’s bedrooms. O’Hare had put a book for me on the bedside table. It was Dresden, History, Stage and Gallery, by Mary Endell. It was published in 1908, and its introduction began
It is hoped that this little book will make itself useful. It attempts to give to an English-reading public a bird’s-eye view of how Dresden came to look as it does, architecturally; of how it expanded musically, through the genius of a few men, to its present bloom; and it calls attention to certain permanent landmarks in art that make its Gallery the resort of those seeking lasting impressions.
I read some history further on
Now, in 1760, Dresden underwent siege by the Prussians. On the fifteenth of July began the cannonade. The Picture-Gallery took fire. Many of the paintings had been transported to -the Konigstein, but some were seriously injured by splinters of bombshells-notably Francia’s ‘Baptism of Christ.’ Furthermore, the stately Kreuzkirche tower, from which the enemy’s movements had been watched day and night, stood in flames. It later succumbed. In sturdy contrast with the pitiful fate of the Kreuzkirche, stood the Frauenkirche, from the curves of whose stone dome the Prussian bombs -rebounded like rain. Friederich was obliged finally to give up the siege, because he learned of the fall of Glatz, the critical point of his new conquests. ‘We must be off to Silesia, so that we do not lose everything.’
The devastation of Dresden was boundless. When Goethe as a young student visited the city, he still found sad ruins ‘Von der Kuppel der Frauenkirche sah ich these leidigen Tr?mmer zwischen die schone stddtische Ordnung hineinges?t; da r?hmte mir der Kiister die Kunst des Baumeisters, welcher Kirche und Kuppel auf einen so uner?inschten Fall schon eingeyichtet und bombenfest erbaut hatte. Der gute Sakristan deutete mir alsdann auf Ruinen nach allen Seiten und sagte bedenklich lakonisch: Das hat her Feind Gethan!’
The two little girls and I crossed the Delaware River where George Washington had crossed it, the next morning. We went to the New York World’s Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors.
And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
I taught creative writing in the famous Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa for a couple of years after that. I got into some perfectly beautiful trouble, got out of it again. I taught in the afternoons. In the mornings I wrote. I was not be disturbed. I was working on my famous book about Dresden.
And somewhere in there a nice man named Seymour Lawrence gave me a three-book contract, and I said, ‘O.K., the first of the three will be my famous book about Dresden.’
The friends of Seymour Lawrence call him ‘Sam.’ And I say to Sam now: ‘Sam-here’s the book.’
It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.