The Personality of War. John Bryson

      Dresden

      FOR THE INCINERATION of a hundred and forty thousand souls, if all went right, for the destruction of a graceful city, of its old walls and obedient gardens, they flew east. He was the navigator. They were flying in at fifteen thousand feet, in the left lane of the crowded sky, which made the heading and beam angles easy, and in the last wave of bombers but one. It was a black night, true to the forecast. He wondered, because the point of his pencil on the chart lay over the farmlets west of the river Elbe, what endless thunder they made in the winter valleys down there. His father had once fished some small stream between here and the Polish border. He remembered the clear and exuberant book, the glossy pebbles.

      The horizon ahead was aglow, a false dawn, where Dresden unerringly was.

      He must have been, at the time he was thinking of, six or seven. His father had driven them in along a ribbony road through a close wood and the moon was up. When they saw the mist of light over the hills, his mother thought it a pleasing aura of welcome. It was not the large city he had expected. The first of it was the province of apartment houses with dormer windows and of darkened corner stores, where the only person he could recall in the street was a woman in a fox wrap who was winding her dachshund away by the leash from something distasteful in the gutter. But buildings were so much brighter towards the centre of town that it seemed they were then journeying back into an earlier part of the evening. The windows of jewellers and haberdashers were lit. The coffee houses and restaurants were busy, and waiters carried trays at head height on fingertips. Upright taxi cabs stood at the curbside. They passed a playhouse where the evacuating crowd had brought the gaiety of the musical with them out onto the footpath under an awning ribbed with light-bulbs, and stood smiling beside the open doors of limousines and carriages, receding then like glazed figures on a carousel, and the revolving corner negligently disclosed the vulgar stage-door, a press of admirers, and a portly man with a velvet collar, holding flowers. They turned off at a marble street-corner lion which was also the emblem of the hotel. He found, in the foyer, a night-thrush in an airy cage, a comfortable concierge whose up-turning palm disclosed a harlequin sweet when he chose correctly from two pump fists, and a tiled floor which incited hopscotch and where he jumped from one to another naming the squares, a triumphant step at a time, for the countries of Europe he had passed over to get there.

      He spends the greater part of summers, now, fishing an alpine lake, which is where I met him, a tall, bony-faced and courteous old man who can still cast to a far fish without fussing the water, and who likes to talk late by the fireside. Of the bombardment of the city, all he would offer was this: by the time they were online over Dresden, it was as if the raid had already so violated the foundations of the mortal world that the city was falling to the eternal fires beneath. It seemed to me that he was not then minimising his own part in this, but had to exercise some care in the choice of recollections he could deal with. Then, he said, they turned west, and flew out into the lengthening night.