A romantic interlude, 1944

Chapter 11: England, 1944 -- additional excepts, these related to the young Irish woman he had met months before in Ireland ... many, many years later, Bill and his wife Phyllis, met Mavis and her husband, now of New Zealand, in New York when the latter were traveling.

American soldiers could not, or at least were not supposed to, get passes to London without a room reservation. I had one at the American Red Cross in Marble Arch.

The trains in England ran pretty much on time. The London train pulled into Leicester on the dot. I milled around in the crowd and had no difficulty spotting Mavis. She waved and called out to me, "Hello, Bill!" I waved back, sidestepped a few people, and joined her. She was in uniform, with a jaunty overseas cap, large leather gloves, and shoulder bag. "

In a matter of moments the train moved quietly and smoothly from the brick station and we were off for London. We looked out both sides of our compartment where we could see the countryside and occasional small villages slip past us.  "Have you a place to stay?" I asked. "No," Mavis casually answered, as if it didn't matter that we were going to the world's largest city in the most crowded country in the hemisphere. "Well, don't worry," I said. "Your big coat and mine up there will make a fine bed on a park bench." She laughed and agreed but added, "Don't you worry about it. I'll find a place." I said, "Mavis, for a farm girl from Tipperary, who's never been to London, you're doing fine."

The weather was lovely, a bright sun and only a slight spring chill. Good fortune blessed us, for every day was sunny. We spent the first evening at the theatre, having missed dinner to see the sights. The
performance of Arsenic and Old Lace was early, as were most performances in London in the blackout. At the first intermission we had delivered to our seats tea and cakes, a marvelous surprise and delight. After the show we found a restaurant in the blackout and had supper. I was delighted to discover that the Irish eat. As a matter of fact, Mavis and I never had the slightest trouble agreeing on
tea, lunch, and dinner. After supper we walked around, arm in arm, for fear of being separated, if for no other reason, hoping for an air raid-just a little one for excitement. None came ...

We saw the usual sights. We walked. Mavis with a long, firm, graceful stride kept pace, and we stopped a hundred times to ask questions of the bobbies and rode the tube, taxis, and the bus. We walked all over central London from Buckingham Palace to Marble Arch, from Big Ben to Waterloo Bridge, along the Victoria Embankment to Bloody Tower and beautiful London Bridge. We climbed to the top of St. Paul's, later saw the changing of the guards, Scottish to English. We walked around Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus, and Charing Cross. We visited the Old Curiosity Shop, the Wax Museum, some lovely parks, Kensington Gardens, Westminster Abbey and Bridge, the exterior of the House of Lords, and Drury Lane. Names, names as old as my reading, as rich as my inheritance. London of Elizabeth, of James, of Anne, of Victoria, Dickens, Wilde, Irving, and Disraeli.

Naturally, this was a wartime London-a united nations city. Girls in uniform from Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Norway, Poland, and Czechoslovakia and WACS from America. Soldiers from New
Zealand, South Africa, Belgium, Greece, France, from the forty eight states, from Australia, the Netherlands, from all over Britain. Uniforms of every description-royal blue, pale blue, and a dozen shades of khaki. As many different hats as there were services, everyone's favorite being the Aussies' and the Wrens' style!

All of this was London, but it was not until I looked over the city from the top of St. Paul's that I knew for certain just where I was, felt sure that I was in London. A good sun was shining, although it was somewhat hazy. The haze softened the lovely spires and towers of London. All about St. Paul's there was the ugly hand of the barbarians. The area on three sides of it was flattened for several blocks. I looked at London Bridge from where on one such hazy morning Wordsworth had written: "Earth hath not anything to show more fair." It was still an inspiring and gracious sight-the winding slow-moving Thames and the laden barges, a great city, horribly scarred, but like a great people only just that, scarred but never beaten, holding firm to this challenge to civilization. It was common, of course, to draw the obvious remarks about St. Paul, something intact, permanent, and spiritual amid ruin. That was true, yes, but there was something else also significant inside the church.

Bombs had landed upon part of this beautiful building, this Wren masterpiece. It was horribly mutilated in spots, made a little ugly even-ignoble. But repairs were in process even amid the bombings. Block and tackle were hoisting new stones where others crumbled. Some things could never be replaced, but others took their place. The essential beauty remained. Something like this was happening to our civilization, our culture, our lives. We were being scarred, were being subjected to brutality, we were losing much, moving backward in some ways, and some things would never be seen again by anyone. But we were not entirely lost-we had not given in to the Germans; we were holding on to some measure of our culture; we still had something to build upon. We could use block and tackle; we could plug the hold that we in our neglect allowed to weaken and be pushed down.  This seemed to me the meaning of St. Paul's and of London.

Of the nearly forty shows from which to choose Mavis and I saw three. We saw the Lunts in There Shall Be No Night. Our arrangements were to share expenses, but I had to see one show from the stalls. I pulled my rank-I had one stripe; Mavis had no stripes and we sat fifth row center. I have  ever forgotten the night. As I was in much-bombed London in the very center of tragedy, sadness, and death and daily examples of conquering this death, this poignant and beautiful performance brought tears and memories that would live forever afterward. My personal involvement in World War II  seemed, as it was meant to be reflected for us all, in the life of the play. Dr. Vlachos's situation, a very much heightened version of my own, was one I could not help identifying with. I was thankful for the understanding and sympathy given me, in silence or otherwise, by the strong, sensitive woman who shared the evening with me.

We also watched John Gielgud lead a superb company in Congreve's Love for Love. In the beautiful Haymarket Theatre, Gielgud both entertained me and taught me. We saw The Lisbon Story-a play with music, another side of the theatrical coin. During supper after Love for Love I remarked to Mavis that Mr. Gielgud, in program notes, called our time the "barren present." In contrast to the carefree world of the seventeenth century, yes. But barren? And a world in revolution? We knew what he meant-barren of artistic creation. Yet the adjective bothered us. Much was being born, much was getting started, in the fiery crucible of 1943-44. It was true that no great novel, play, song, or movie had as yet come from the United States. Perhaps none of these forms could contain the war. It was more like an epic. The scale of the war was so great that no play, no movie, nor even a novel could encompass it. The breaking and smashing of ancient sanctuaries, the frenzy of hatred, the incipient revolution that was sweeping the world surged beyond the confines of any form of art save the epic. It would probably be written by someone of another generation.

We ultimately had an air raid.

***

The next morning, Mavis and I said good-bye to the Markendales and returned to Derby. On the station platform I kissed Mavis good-bye. She went north to Scotland and across the Irish Sea to Belfast. I returned south to Leicester. Under the severity and long silence of the fall, winter, and spring of 1944-45 we grew more fond of each other.

-0-

England 1944

Chapter 11

For fifteen years I've wanted to come to this country, to this England.
For months I've wanted to hear music. For days I've wanted to see
shows, eat at tables, and talk to English-speaking men and women.
Now I've come to England. I've heard some music, seen some plays,
been to dances, eaten at tables, conversed in English. In fact I've tried
desperately to have a good time. And I have failed miserably. I have
no heart for it-now that I've got it. I've no mind for it. It isn't the
thing or they are not the things that satisfy my desires-the interest
of my heart and mind. What I want is what I left in the mountains of
Italy-satisfaction of something accomplished, something concrete,
something real, something to eat up this tremendous desire to get on
with the business of exterminating Germans.

Moving from North Ireland through Scotland to Leicester in
the Midlands was like traveling back through one's reading. Little
did I know of North Irish literature, but some I knew of Scotland.
The country I sped through, whether lowlands, highlands, or
moors, suggested those literary landscapes I had read about since
childhood. Conversation in the jeep was certainly negligible, so that
my mind ran off to the songs of Burns, the castles and abbeys of
Scott, the lakes of Wordsworth. We crossed the border into England
seeing road signs (when they were not removed for military security)
pointing to Carlisle, Nottingham, Liverpool; I remembered
Emily Bronte and Thomas Hardy. The deeper we got into England,
with names like Lancaster, Westmoorland, Cumberland, Derby,
Shakespeare, and the Wars, stirred memories of the Henrys and the
Richards. The trip was far more like being on holiday. It was a
dream come true. If only there weren't the army and a war.

***

Ireland

Chapter 10 [Shower of Frogs (WWII memoir), William Stigall]

It was now the middle of November (1943). We were somewhere in the cold North Atlantic. We heard the high-pitched, pulsating honk of seagulls. They swooped above us crying with delight as they dived into the garbage-filled wake of our ship. Experienced seamen, as we now were, we smelled land. Rumors and guesses got all mixed up with wishes and hopes. The choices were as extravagant as the longings. Scotland, Norway, Ireland, Greenland, Iceland, England, of course, and wistfully, the States. I do not recall the moment of docking on the east coast of North Ireland. But I vividly remember the first images. They persisted and are with me still.

One visual: the lumbering, ponderous Cydesdale horses pulling small solid wagons loaded with whiskey barrels over the cobbled streets of modem Belfast. One auditory: the joyous and friendly sound of Irish voices speaking the cadences of my native tongue.

...

I had treasured the sun breaking over the lovely inland Lough Neagh and had experienced one of the
most memorable New Year's Eves of my life. After five years of silence--a silence imposed upon themselves, a silence of all the church bells of North Ireland, which, were they to ring, would announce an invasion by the Germans-the breaking of that long five-year silence by ringing all the church bells all over North Ireland at midnight December 31, 1943. The bells of Ballymena rang
joyously to bring in the year 1944--the year of the great invasion of occupied Europe.

The Atlantic: November 1943

The Atlantic, November 1943

Sea voyages were all alike: that is, for soldiers they were all alike.
Days were long; hours passed slowly. All effort was irksome. Time
hung upon inactivity. Our quarters, the hold, "the interior cavity of
a ship where cargo is stored," was sealed off above by a hatch covered
with coarse, airtight tarpaulin. The tarp and hatch were never
removed. In the cavity the air was at best secondhand and grew
heavy for want of oxygen. It was further weighted with the stale
odor of men, for in spite of excellent bathing facilities, we smelled.

...

In two days we dropped anchor in the port of Oran, Algeria.
Oh, no! Not North African again? Rumors and rumors. No shore
leave. Rumors and more rumors. In two days we hoisted anchor,
joined a convoy, and headed out into the Mediterranean Sea. At
noon the next day the public-address system reported Gibraltar on
the starboard side. We went on deck, sailed westward past "the
Rock" out to a great ocean of mist and fog. Whereupon I lost all
sense of direction.

...

Stacked in steerage, silent and smelling, I felt like a body in a
morgue. With no other desire than to be left alone, I thought back to
the day of my enlistment and of the appalling waste of my life. Such
thoughts were, for thousands of us, a recurring and corrosive experience.

Gigantic forces were at work in the world outside. I seemed
to be standing in a hole that got deeper and deeper. A soldier 's life
was consumed with waste time. He found "hurry-up-and-wait"
humorous because it was hopeless. Mail brought news of births and
deaths, of graduations and weddings. They stirred the juices of a
man's ambition and fermented his sense of waste time and life.
Fretting as a prisoner of the great war, I thought I saw a Fifth Horseman, Waste, riding an olive-drab horse through Revelation.

Added to waste and life was wasted talent. No matter how
ingenious a soldier might be, there seemed little he could do to
affect his world. I enlisted because I sat by and watched country
after country in Europe fall before the Nazis. In my infinitely small
way I felt responsible. I felt guilty for the events that had led to Pearl
Harbor. As an educated man, I was aware of world events, but I had
chosen to pursue my own ends in a safe midwestern America. I
grew up a pacifist, believing that war was evil and that there had to
be another way. The smashing tactics of Hitler upon an undefended
Europe convinced me of the fallacy of my views.

I would soon have been drafted, but I wanted the decision to be
mine. Only in this way could I live with the army. Six months after
enlistment I realized that anything less than combat would seem
like but two acts of a three-act play. I had to know what war was
like. I had to find out what I and other men were like in war. Quite
by chance I was assigned to an outfit destined to provide me with
the third act.

Also, as an artist, I felt it was necessary to experience the great
event of my time. Reading about it would not be enough. I had to
live it. But I did not want to be destroyed by it. I especially did not
want to die, nor even to lose my way in it. But having once penetrated
the swamp of that dark forest of war and the preparation of
war, I could not turn back. My mind was too curious, my heart too
engaged.

Remember: Who was Bill Stigall?

Information on William Stigall, author of Shower of Frogs [a World War II memoir] can be found in the Profile to this blog.

Normandy: June 7-12

[Editor's note: Last month (May 2018) I was in Wales and met a man who was going back to Normandy's beaches to commemorate that day. As we talked, it turned out that his British unit was adjacent to William Stigall's unit. They would have loved talking together.]

Chapter 13 -

I do not know if the men in Henry the Fifth's army knew, on the morn of Agincourt, that they were about to take part in one of the memorable moments of world history. I do not know if King Henry
knew. In Shakespeare he is fully aware of it. He calls his little band about him and exhorts them with:

And Chrispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remembered;

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.

I do not know how many men who were a part of the first hours of the invasion of France knew that they were to be a part of history. I suspect many knew. I knew. I wanted to see it, hear it,

smell it, touch it, feel it. I had no wish to die in one of the great battles of the world's history. That did not seem heroic, noble, glamorous, or anything good to me. I simply wanted to be a part of it-to
get in the act, as it were. I wanted to do what I was expected to do and get back safely. Which is sort of wanting to have your cake and eat it, too.

Of course we had no inspiring speech to set us upon the stinking enemy. No Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester . . .

...

So we attacked again. We pushed on to a second attack. Eventually, with infernal slowness, we withdrew a short distance, but not before we encountered more artillery and machine-gun fire, not
before we accumulated a few more casualties. We waited. The Robot bombs began falling on London, and rumors circulated that Germans, desperate to halt Allied attack, might use gas. But finally I started back, bit by bit. As a great crescendo of music starts with a small sound in the woodwinds, is picked up by a violin, then full violins, and with trumpets mounts to a full chord, so did I, bit by bit, partly in thoughts that it could not be the end for me, part in a small song sung, part in the right kind of smile from a passing soldier, joined by a warm cup of coffee, some food, and sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care, and partly the certain knowledge that I am to have no more of it. I started back. The trip, long and weary as it was, was sure, until finally we reached the coast.

Naples: Notes

Chapter 8:

Hunger and poverty are almost synonymous with Naples. Even for those of us whose background was urban and who knew the depression, to whom "slums and Hoovervilles" were a part of our
youth and who had seen and smelled North Africa and Sicily, there was no preparation for the human and sorrowful sights of Naples.

It was one thing to witness the relative static nature of a slum and of the impoverished conditions of the early thirties. It was quite another experience to be literally touched by the swarming crowds, by the frantic, aggressive, and vocal hunger of Naples. Combine this emotional and physical anguish, this outpouring of suffering, with the physical destruction; mix in the elements of unexpected time bombs and the knowledge that many of the men who today walked the streets were yesterday hooting at you or giving some degree of comfort to the rodents of the Wehrmacht; add to this our own personal irritants stemming from military existence and current environment, our own displacement from the things we cared about, the uncertainty of our daily activities-put all these together and one can begin to understand the mixed emotions that rose from our stay in Naples.

...

About this time Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau visited the city of Naples and the front lines. He returned with a list of atrocities to be shown the president. So what? Morgenthau was acting
like a little boy who had heard a few dirty words and wanted his father to do something about it. Political eyewash. War is lawful slaughter or it isn't anything. Life magazine said: "None of this [the
atrocities] is the job of a self-respecting army." Neither American civilians nor American soldiers know the enemy.

Also about this time, five senators made a pilgrimage to Italy. One wondered what in hell they were doing so far from Washington. There was enough of a mess at home. If the senators would just
take care of their mess and let us take care of our mess, how nice it would be. Both this and Morgenthau's action simply galled a soldier.

...

For all the beauty of Italy, and it deserves all praise for it is lovely beyond poetry, nothing is perfect and some things are not like home. October came and went in Naples; November seemed more like October in the United States. But it finally failed and dissolved into coldness and drabness; then I thought of a missed American autumn. I could not hold it back any longer. The massive
irritants of army life and local environment compounded into loneliness.

No man escapes loneliness. I discovered there are several kinds, such as social, intellectual, and emotional. Weeks racing into months, minutes piling up into hours, and no words spoken about
those things that were once as common as coffee. They were all dammed up, rushing against an impassable wall. Is there anyone who reads Keats in this world? Has no man heard of Mozart? Is
there no woman in the world who speaks your native tongue? Is all the world one color - olive drab? Are all things and places in the world infected with dirt and disease, and are they all gutted like
half-burned candles? Is there cleanliness someplace, dishes, sheets? Is there light on the streets and leaves in the gutters? Are there bonfires with smoke rising higher than a house? Is there a child who
will smile at you without also begging from you? Is there a warm-colored moon in a smoky sky making pumpkins' shadows twice their size? Are there red apples in great barrels, corn in tall cribs? Is there an autumn wind that can infect the spirit with the wilds of Halloween? Do lost things come home in autumn, and are new things found in the Renaissance that is October? Yes, over and over,
year after year, and they shall be found again and the great Spirit Wind shall blow again, fields shall yield again and music sing and lights light and the world grow clean. A dam shall burst and a man
shall be free again.