EUROPE: Autumn Story

The fall of the year shone gently upon the broken cities and the exhausted fields of Europe. On Berlin’s Kreuzberg, frost stiffened upon the worm-wrought, illegible features of an exhumed, Gestapo-killed cadaver to which someone had attached a tag reading, Homo sapiens.

Of the unrecounted millions of Europeans who survived him, few could greet the season with anything of its own tenderness. It was the first autumn of liberation, the first since the end of the war. It was the first autumn of the atomic age.

The Bells. In the steep forests of Norway, German guerrillas still skulked and fought. In Denmark, for want of transportation, practically the only food surpluses in Europe were near standstill. Only butter, eggs, meat moved, thinly, to England, Norway, the U.S. Army.

By millions, in transverse migrations, Germans struggled westward out of New Poland, northward out of the Sudetenland and Austria, to swell a nation already overpopulated and reduced in size; while Russians struggled eastward, some out of slavery and some out of voluntary servitude, towards home and an uncertain welcome.

In Hamburg, hundreds of looted bells awaited restoration to the belfries of nations with bell-like names, Poland, The Netherlands, Belgium; provided, of course, that those belfries, and their churches, still existed.

In the Sudeten, those Germans who remained wore identifying armbands. In Berlin, Jews were entitled to extra rations. In the British zone, on behalf of Jews, the British commandeered clothes from Germans. Thanks to presidential demand, the first of many Jews in the American zone were removed from behind barbed wire and were installed in houses requisitioned from Germans. Into Germany, fleeing a new paroxysm of pogroms in New Poland, wandered still more Jews.

Mysteriously planted placards warned fraternizing Bavarian girls: “0 God, if it depends on us, you will pay for it!” Daily, the snowline crept a little farther down the mountains of Bavaria, hideout of SS men. A Sudeten German asked whether it was true that Americans were now fighting the Russians.

In Switzerland, Belgium’s Leopold bowed to temporary exile, but by no means to permanent renunciation of his throne.

Food and a Grave. In The Netherlands, underfueled pumps sucked at flooded farmlands which for years to come would be sterile as salt.

The scraped Danubian plain blazed like brass: Hungary, one of the bounteous nations of Europe, would this year require six million quintals of wheat. Allied authorities started a vast woodcutting campaign in the Vienna woods, to supplement the capital’s inadequate coal stocks.

In all the nations of eastern Europe, free and secret elections were still promised. Angered and fearful, a group of Bulgarian peasants told an American correspondent how an armed 23-year-old Communist mayor had lumped their long-held acreages and plowed the boundaries under.

National Actionists in Greece went armed and carried British Army passes certifying their “confidential work.” Their enemies, the hunted men of EAM, lived in peril of arrest and beatings. In Rome, the first Italian democrats to meet in parliamentary Assembly since the murder of Matteotti set themselves to restore integrity and hope to a broken nation. The withdrawal of A.M.G. from Italy was indefinitely postponed; in liberal opinion, to protect Rightists and Monarchists.

In Paris a man’s suit cost $500. A correspondent stopped to get his jeep repaired in Neufchâteau. The garage operator, a brawny Frenchwoman, immediately questioned him about American soldiers sleeping with German girls. “C’est incroyable” she mourned. “Yes, some French girls slept with Germans when they were here. But only bad girls. We do not understand why you Americans do it. You are not bad but you still sleep with Germans.” An American sergeant lounged at a nearby corner watching the thin traffic in Neufchâteau’s one big street; he turned loose barbaric French at passing girls; they giggled, and swept on. Wearily he jerked his, thumb towards the hilltop graveyard on the edge of town. He said: “My division liberated this joint. A lot of the boys from the 79th are lying up there. And for what? To have these people spit on us now?”

French nuns and children sifted garbage against the lean chance of bits of food fit for children or nuns or pigs to eat.

Even in Marseilles, the sky muted its Mediterranean blare. Along the wide streets the plane trees turned pale yellow. In the still unmended tenements of Madrid, before long now, a people whom victory had passed by would be shuddering.

Man’s hope, man’s fate contested in the subtle autumn light. Winter stood just at the shoulder of the gentlest of seasons.

Man’s Hope. Europe had emerged from history’s most terrible war, into history’s most terrifying peace. Europeans said, again & again, that their aspirations were for liberty. They showed, again & again, their desperately seasoned respect for security. Now the struggle between liberty and security was engaged.

In London the Council of Foreign Ministers achieved only the disconsolation of all in the world who desired peace, not power. Eastern Europe was a Russian bastion; western Europe coalesced toward a “family” which, to the Russians, would be a bastion against the Soviet Union. Within nations, as among them, political forces jockeyed for power.

The totalitarian socialists, by far the most astute professionals in the field, moved toward their goals by methods which equally disturbed scoundrels and honorable men. The democratic socialists, maintaining that full liberty and full security can be combined and made enduring, were embarrassed by their new responsibilities in Britain, and by those problems of relative inefficiency which confront all democrats. Only in Czechoslovakia, one of the less unhappy nations in Europe, were socialist prospects very promising. But that country’s fortunes depended chiefly on friendly relations with the Soviet Union; and democratic and totalitarian socialists are not notable for lifelong friendships.

Europe’s peasants continued to be peasants. Materialists in a sense more primal than that of Adam Smith or Marx, politically inert and purchasable, they served less as anchorage than as ballast. As for Europe’s conservatives, it seemed unlikely at the moment that ordinary people would ever trust them again.

In whom was man to put his hope? In himself? A Frenchwoman, remembering the magnificent selflessness of war and the millennial hours of the liberation of Paris, sorrowfully said: “We have returned to our own egos.”

Man’s Fate. As winter moved down through Norway and, along the Gulf of Finland, rusted the dark green, springlike grass which heavy summer had never touched, many Europeans were preoccupied with matters even more primitive than the ego. When winter came, they knew, it would trap a hundred million of them with less food for each, or little more, than American soldiers got last year in Japanese prison camps. They would be severely short of fuel, of shelter, of clothing. Millions of homes — and, in Berlin, hospitals — were without windowglass. Tuberculosis was rampant among adolescents and common among small children. Bubonic plague nuzzled at the ports of the Mediterranean.

Many would die. Many more would survive. They were no braver than other men; they could be expected, in sufficient anguish and embitterment and desolation, to turn to those stronger than themselves who offered both a will and a way.

They could also be expected, as winter tightened its vise, to confirm an enduring opinion of that nation which, in the unalterable conviction of Europeans, might have prevented much of the anguish and so might have prevented political dereliction. That nation was the U.S.

The Dream & the Judgment. Countless millions of Europeans had all their lives seen in the U.S. a dream of liberty and security, of democratic generosity and efficiency. With the American armies had come the American reality, and it was not—it could not have been—the stuff of the dream.

The people of Europe had seen, and had not failed to value, the vigor and promise and individual generosity of the American soldier. They had also seen, with the deadly discernment of peoples experienced in disaster and disillusion, how ill-raised to understand this most sophisticated of wars, and how timidly briefed in its meanings, were these same Americans. Now, in France and the Lowlands, in Germany and Austria and Italy, the people saw Americans, homesick and purposeless and often misbehaved, affronting all around them and under them with their abundance amid want, their altogether human and altogether brutal longing to get the hell out of those ruined lands, and to go home.

The offenses were not universal, nor were they solely American. By a Dutch roadside stood a sign embossed with the Maple Leaf of the Canadian Army: REMEMBER! THE DUTCH ARE OUR ALLIES! But the Americans, in their overwhelming number and voice and strength, had made Europe supremely conscious of them, and of the country from which they came. In the end, and in this autumn of unfilled need, it was not the Americans, but America, that Europe judged.