Roll Me Over
Page 43
Another device of this mob of gangsters was employed only once, on an exceptionally difficult case. A certain desirable fraulein had remained adamant to all offers and threats, and the frustrated officers determined to get her. Spurn the fair white bodies of Americans, would she? Hah!
They waited their time, and one day she appeared at the AMG office to apply for a wood ration card. Cold weather was at hand, and with no coal available either for cooking or heating, wood was a basic necessity in a German household. Particularly in hers, because she cared for an invalid mother and an aged father. The lieutenant in charge of the town’s wood supply stalled and stalled and finally intimated that all the wood she could possibly burn would be forthcoming if she would “cooperate.” Indignantly, she stormed from his office and for several days managed to get along on what scraps of fuel her neighbors could spare from their allotments. But that source was soon exhausted and she returned to the AMG office, to be met with the same smiling proposition. She begged, she wept and pleaded, but the proposition stood as before. Haunted by the vision of her ailing mother in an unheated room, she gave in at last, and the triumphant officer escorted her to his room.
The following morning he told her to call at his office in the afternoon and he would give her the requisition slip. But when she appeared, a strange officer was seated behind the desk. Blandly he informed her that he was the new officer in charge of the wood supply, and what was it she wanted?
Oh hell... finish it yourself!
Author’s Note
So it’s over, this one’s over, and the next one may be ripening. All the blood, all the tears, all the pain and fear and dirt and madness to come again.
That’s the thing I’ve got to end on, that bleak note of what is mostly despair. Unlike Mr. Norman Corwin, I don’t believe the war ended on a note of triumph. Because, although we were a little more aware of what we were fighting for while we were fighting, the old miasmas of greed and distrust obscured that fine clarity almost before the war was done. The web that held the Allies together was soon torn, and the gleaming, perfect tapestry that had been promised the world is already a tangle of raveled threads, dirty and unrecognizable. The rule of the fist and the lie threatens little people once more, faith has become a whore, and hope dies of malnutrition.
And America... once again America dithers in a soprano hysteria of suspicions and denials, charges and countercharges, indecisive lunges first to the left and then to the right, political maneuvering and political opportunism. We know how to fight; we don’t know how to make peace. And oh, my son, for whom this was written, I pray we learn the secret and the wisdom of peace before you’re old enough to tote the gun and dig the foxhole that will be useless in the next war. And oh, my daughter, for whom also this was written, I pray we learn before you are old enough to wave good-bye to the man you love and see him go off to a cataclysm that could be prevented. Because if he does go, my dear, I doubt that you will see him come back.