Chapter 12: This is the Spring (1944)

Chapter 12

This Is the Spring

This is the Spring-the long-awaited Spring.

This the Hour-the breath-abated Hour.

Now is the perilous day approaching,

The waves on the shore encroaching.

This is the Spring, breaking the darkness.

These the Armies, smashing the blackness.

This is the Spring-the long-awaited Spring.

This the Hour-the breath-abated Hour.

3-31-44

It was the spring, and it did lead to a breath-abated hour. But from

early March to June, when my glider was one in a fifty-mile-long

flying train across the Channel, the hundred days were a strange

mixture of impatience, serenity, waste, happiness, boredom, and

beauty. The times bring to mind the analogy of a man's life being

like a tone poem. Various passages of agitation and calm, shifting

moods from vivace to largo, with mucho moderato in the middle. A

series of themes, some abandoned, some recurring. Now and then

passages of intentional monotony, including several beats of

silence. Those hundred days lived at the bottom of the military pile

must have been very different from life at SHAPE Headquarters

and in the United States. Not knowing the date or place of invasion,

making no decisions, seeing no end to repetitive preparations, contrasted

with reams of information, boxes of reports, conferences

galore, and some generally determined week "to go." Or in America,

living under the pressure of newspaper, magazine, and radio

coverage hyped by wild guessing, adding up to plain jitters. The

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