I had seen it, about the book I would write. He was a member of a thing called The
Committee on Social Thought. And he told me about the concentration camps, and about
how the Germans had made soap and candles out of the fat of dead Jews and so on.
All could say was, 'I know, I know. I know.'
The Second World War had certainly made everybody very tough. And I became a
public relations man for General Electric in Schenectady, New York, and a volunteer
fireman in the Village of Alplaus, where I bought my first home. My boss there was one
of the toughest guys I ever hope to meet. He had been a lieutenant colonel in public
relations in Baltimore. While I was in Schenectady he joined the Dutch Reformed
Church, which is a very tough church, indeed.
He used to ask me sneeringly sometimes why I hadn't been an officer,, as though I'd
done something wrong.
My wife and I had lost our baby fat. Those were our scrawny years. We had a lot of
scrawny veterans and their scrawny wives for friends. The nicest veterans in
Schenectady,, I thought,, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most,
were the ones who'd really fought.
I wrote the Air Force back then, asking for details about the raid on Dresden, who
ordered it, how many planes did it, why they did it, what desirable results there had been
and so on. I was answered by a man who, like myself, was in public relations. He said
that he was sorry, but that the information was top secret still.
I read the letter out loud to my wife, and I said, 'Secret? My God-from whom?'
We were United World Federalists back then. I don't know what we are now.
Telephoners, I guess. We telephone a lot-or I do, anyway, late at night.
A couple of weeks after I telephoned my old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare, I really
did go to see him. That must have been in 1964 or so-whatever the last year was for the
New York World's Fair. Eheu, fugaces labuntur anni. My name is Yon Yonson. There
was a young man from Stamboul.
I took two little girls with me, my daughter, Nanny, and her best friend, Allison
Mitchell. They had never been off Cape Cod before. When we saw a river, we had to stop
so they could stand by it and think about it for a while. They had never seen water in that
long and narrow, unsalted form before. The river was the Hudson. There were carp in
there and we saw them. They were as big as atomic submarines.
We saw waterfalls, too, streams jumping off cliffs into the valley of the Delaware.
There were lots of things to stop and see-and then it was time to go, always time to go.
The little girls were wearing white party dresses and black party shoes, so strangers
would know at once how nice they were. 'Time to go, girls,' I'd say. And we would go.
And the sun went down, and we had supper in an Italian place, and then I knocked on
the front door of the beautiful stone house of Bernard V. O'Hare. I was carrying a bottle
of Irish whiskey like a dinner bell.
I met his nice wife, Mary, to whom I dedicate this book. I dedicate it to Gerhard
Müller, the Dresden taxi driver, too. Mary O'Hare is a trained nurse, which is a lovely
thing for a woman to be.
Mary admired the two little girls I'd brought, mixed them in with her own children,
sent them all upstairs to play games and watch television. It was only after the children
were gone that I sensed that Mary didn't like me or didn't like something about the night.
She was polite but chilly.
'It's a nice cozy house you have here,' I said, and it really was.
'I've fixed up a place where you can talk and not be bothered,' she said.
'Good,' I said, and I imagined two leather chairs near a fire in a paneled room, where
two old soldiers could drink and talk. But she took us into the kitchen. She had put two
straight-backed chairs at a kitchen table with a white porcelain top. That table top was
screaming with reflected light from a two-hundred-watt bulb overhead. Mary had
prepared an operating room. She put only one glass on it, which was for me. She
explained that O'Hare couldn't drink the hard stuff since the war.
So we sat down. O'Hare was embarrassed, but he wouldn't tell me what was wrong. I
couldn't imagine what it was about me that could bum up Mary so. I was a family man.
I'd been married only once. I wasn't a drunk. I hadn't done her husband any dirt in the
war.
She fixed herself a Coca-Cola, made a lot of noise banging the ice-cube tray in the
stainless steel sink. Then she went into another part of the house. But she wouldn't sit
still. She was moving all over the house, opening and shutting doors, even moving
furniture around to work off anger.
I asked O'Hare what I'd said or done to make her act that way.
'It's all right,' he said. "Don't worry about it. It doesn't have anything to do with you.'
That was kind of him. He was lying. It had everything to do with me.
So we tried to ignore Mary and remember the war. I took a couple of belts of the
booze I'd brought. We would chuckle or grin sometimes, as though war stories were
coming back, but neither one of us could remember anything good. O'Hare remembered
one guy who got into a lot of wine in Dresden, before it was bombed, and we had to take
him home in a wheelbarrow.
It wasn't much to write a book about. I remembered two Russian soldiers who had
looted a clock factory. They had a horse-drawn wagon full of clocks. They were happy
and drunk. They were smoking huge cigarettes they had rolled in newspaper.
That was about it for memories, and Mary was still making noise. She finally came
out in the kitchen again for another Coke. She took another tray of ice cubes from the
refrigerator, banged it in the sink, even though there was already plenty of ice out.
Then she turned to me, let me see how angry she was, and that the anger was for me.
She had been talking to herself, so what she said was a fragment of a much larger
conversation. "You were just babies then!' she said.
'What?" I said.
'You were just babies in the war-like the ones upstairs! '
I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of
childhood.
'But you're not going to write it that way, are you.' This wasn't a question. It was an
accusation.
'I-I don't know,' I said.
'Well, I know,' she said. 'You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be
played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other
glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a
lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.'
So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want her babies or
anybody else's babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by
books and movies.
So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise 'Mary,' I said, 'I don't think this
book is ever going to be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and
thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there
won't be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.
'I tell you what,' I said, 'I'll call it The Children's Crusade.'
She was my friend after that.
O'Hare and I gave up on remembering, went into the living room, talked about other
things. We became curious about the real Children's Crusade, so O'Hare looked it up in a
book he had, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles
Mackay, LL.D. It was first published in London in 1841.
Mackay had a low opinion of all Crusades. The Children's Crusade struck him as only
slightly more sordid than the ten Crusades for grown-ups. O'Hare read this handsome
passage out loud:
History in her solemn page informs us that the Crusaders were but ignorant and savage
men, that their motives were those of bigotry unmitigated, and that their pathway was one
of blood and rears. Romance, on the other hand, dilates upon their piety and heroism,
and portrays, in her most glowing and impassioned hues, their virtue and magnanimity,
the imperishable honor they acquired for themselves, and the great services they rendered
to Christianity.
And then O'Hare read this: Now what was the grand result of all these struggles?
Europe expended millions of her treasures, and the blood of two million of her people;
and a handful of quarrelsome knights retained possession of Palestine for about one
hundred years!
Mackay told us that the Children's Crusade started in 1213, when two monks got the
idea of raising armies of children in Germany and France, and selling them in North
Africa as slaves. Thirty thousand children volunteered, thinking they were going to
Palestine. They were no doubt idle and deserted children who generally swarm in great
cities, nurtured on vice and daring, said Mackay, and ready for anything.
Pope Innocent the Third thought they were going to Palestine, too, and he was thrilled.
'These children are awake while we are asleep!' he said.
Most of the children were shipped out of Marseilles, and about half of them drowned
in shipwrecks. The other half got to North Africa where they were sold.
Through a misunderstanding, some children reported for duty at Genoa, where no slave
ships were waiting. They were fed and sheltered and questioned kindly by good people
there-then given a little money and a lot of advice and sent back home.
'Hooray for the good people of Genoa,' said Mary O'Hare.
I slept that night in one of the children's bedrooms. O'Hare had put a book for me on
the bedside table. It was Dresden, History, Stage and Gallery, by Mary Endell. It was
published in 1908, and its introduction began
It is hoped that this little book will make itself useful. It attempts to give to an
English-reading public a bird's-eye view of how Dresden came to look as it does,
architecturally; of how it expanded musically, through the genius of a few men, to its
present bloom; and it calls attention to certain permanent landmarks in art that make its
Gallery the resort of those seeking lasting impressions.
I read some history further on
Now, in 1760, Dresden underwent siege by the Prussians. On the fifteenth of July
began the cannonade. The Picture-Gallery took fire. Many of the paintings had been
transported to -the Konigstein, but some were seriously injured by splinters of
bombshells-notably Francia's 'Baptism of Christ.' Furthermore, the stately Kreuzkirche
tower, from which the enemy's movements had been watched day and night, stood in
flames. It later succumbed. In sturdy contrast with the pitiful fate of the Kreuzkirche,
stood the Frauenkirche, from the curves of whose stone dome the Prussian bombs -
rebounded like rain. Friederich was obliged finally to give up the siege, because he
learned of the fall of Glatz, the critical point of his new conquests. 'We must be off to
Silesia, so that we do not lose everything.'
The devastation of Dresden was boundless. When Goethe as a young student visited
the city, he still found sad ruins 'Von der Kuppel der Frauenkirche sah ich these leidigen
Trümmer zwischen die schone stddtische Ordnung hineinges?t; da rühmte mir der Kiister
die Kunst des Baumeisters, welcher Kirche und Kuppel auf einen so unerüinschten Fall
schon eingeyichtet und bombenfest erbaut hatte. Der gute Sakristan deutete mir alsdann
auf Ruinen nach allen Seiten und sagte bedenklich lakonisch: Das hat her Feind Gethan!'
The two little girls and I crossed the Delaware River where George Washington had
crossed it, the next morning. We went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past
had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the
future would be like, according to General Motors.
And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much
was mine to keep.
I taught creative writing in the famous Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa for
a couple of years after that. I got into some perfectly beautiful trouble, got out of it again.
I taught in the afternoons. In the mornings I wrote. I was not be disturbed. I was working
on my famous book about Dresden.
And somewhere in there a nice man named Seymour Lawrence gave me a three-book
contract, and I said, 'O.K., the first of the three will be my famous book about Dresden.'
The friends of Seymour Lawrence call him 'Sam.' And I say to Sam now: 'Sam-here's
the book.'
It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say
about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want
anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it
always is, except for the birds.
And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like 'Poo-teeweet?'
I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in
massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction
or glee.
I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and
to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.
As I've said I recently went back to Dresden with my friend O'Hare. We had a million
laughs in Hamburg and West Berlin and East Berlin and Vienna and Salzburg and
Helsinki, and in Leningrad, too. It was very good for me, because I saw a lot of authentic
backgrounds for made-up stories which I will write later on. One of them will be Russian
Baroque and another will be No Kissing and another will be Dollar Bar and another will
be If the Accident Will, and so on.
And so on.
There was a Lufthansa plane that was supposed to fly from Philadelphia to Boston to
Frankfurt. O'Hare was supposed to get on in Philadelphia and I was supposed to get on in
