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18 NOVEMBER 9, 2011 ARKANSAS TIMES AUA 1111 003 Building_NewNLR_4.5x12_gs.indd 1
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shrubs. Yesterday, we drove about 150 miles through the heart of Germany. The war had passed lightly over much of it, for the Germans were on the run when this part was taken, but there were plenty of signs of the fighting. Already the hulls of the tanks had begun to look as if they had been knocked out a long time ago. They were beginning to rust and new blades of grass were creeping up through the tracks. What I am trying to get at is the war is not permanent and the world will soon forget it. Not literally, of course, nor completely. It will live on as a terrible dream and will be something that youngsters will find on page 435 of their history books. But the edge of the picture will be blurred and there will be no sharp outlines of black and white. We will forget the sharp crack in the wind that a bullet makes when it passes overhead, and how it sounds like the gun is behind you and you begin to imagine the enemy has filtered through the lines. The sharp sting of the tiny pieces of shrapnel will be forgotten and we will find ourselves trying to remember exactly how German powder smelled. The disrupted fragments of lives will form new and more tranquil patterns — yours and mine together. Love Always, Leland Heldra, Germany August 6, 1945 My Dearest Letty: … This is not a nice place to see. You could have no idea what a war can do to a country unless you get a chance to see one city that has been destroyed and one country road that is clogged with people who do not know where they want to go. There are literally millions of people now who have no idea where they are going and what they will do when they get to the end of the road. In one little town no larger than Dover, a park cares for the wanderers. It is a sort of small town Bowery or flophouse where the lost people can sleep and spend a night before pushing on to a destination that is unknown to them. Every night the place is crowded with a new group of people. When morning comes, they are on the road again, traveling by every means available. Wheelbarrows, toy wagons, bicycles, wagons drawn by horses or cows and tractors pull trains of anything that will roll, and there are a few automobiles. The convoy lines up at sunrise and moves out in the direction of the Ruhr or toward the southern part of Germany. None of them goes east. In one such convoy, I counted three tractor trains (each tractor was pulling at least two trailers and as many small wagons as the owners could find space to hitch on), 16 animal-drawn wagons (these, too, had a string of small wagons behind them),
five cars of various makes, and at least 30 small wagons that were being pulled by their owners. Each small wagon was piled high with bedding, suitcases and all the goods that the family owned. It was not a pleasant sight, but somehow I can feel no pity for the German people. If it were not for them, I should be telling you this evening that I am crazy about you instead of having to write it. That would be more fun, I am sure, and I could certainly make it sound more convincing that way. Love Always, Leland Heldra, Germany August 13, 1945 My Dearest Letty: … Logically, in the long months we have been apart, we should have learned the knack of letting well enough alone, but I have never learned. Always when I go to bed there is the same mischievous face, the same impish grin etched in the blackness of the ceiling. Always there is you. I cannot dismiss the face, nor do I want to. It says, “Take things easy, Junior (sometimes it says ‘Toots’ but it always means the same thing). There is really no need to be serious about all this that you see. The world is a place to laugh in and a thing to laugh at. There is war and suffering, like it says in the papers, but that is only a small part of the picture. There is the mountain where the wind is clean and sharp and where the leaves play a soft symphony in the evening. There are quiet lakes where the grass has been nipped short by the grazing cattle so that it makes a carpet of green velvet. There are white birches for the shade, and thrushes and catbirds for the orchestra. Not all the world is tired and hungry and looking for some place to spend the night under a shed before moving out on a road that leads into the unknown.” “There is still the hometown,” the face says to me, “where you meet people who will call you by your first name and who really mean it when they shake hands with you. This is the part of the world that you grew up in. This is the kind of life that you learned to like, and it is the kind that you are going back to. I am marking a little corner of it ‘Reserved’ and that is for us. I hold the other end of the rope that keeps you from drifting into the belief that all the people of the world are a sordid, drifting herd of animals who have not made any progress in the thing we like to call civilization.” All this the face — that is, your face — says to me. Not in so many words, of course, for you would never be so verbose as all that. But you say it in the way you smile, and the way the smile makes me remember that all this is true. Love Always, Leland