The end of World War II in Europe

A WEEK BEFORE the German surrender I was at Canadian Army headquarters in Holland preparing to drive through the disintegrating Wehrmacht and reach Bremen ahead of our document-destroying infantry. Then that same day I broke my ankle demonstrating to a sergeant how to ride a motorcycle across a plowed field. The war's closing days found me in Leavesden General Hospital near London. April 29, 1945

The last agony of Germany plays itself out ad I am not there. This mornig I might have been driving to Bremen in a scout car. I shall miss the inevitable conclusion, worse luck. The radio in the ward goes the whole day long, pouring out the threadbare tunes, soapy voices of the announcers, giving they boys what they want wherever they may be. I remember the British major with the Military Cross in Grave saying that to punish the Germans properly we ought to forbid all music on their radio except American swing. April 30, 1945

May tomorrow, a thin layer of snow on the green grass this morning. I fear it will hurt the fruit blossom. Mussolini is shot, Hitler rumored to be dead or dying, Himmler asking for some kind of terms, and the whole front collapsing, the end, after 12 years, of the Thousand-Year Reich. May 1, 1945

Pictures show Mussolini and his mistress dangling, head down, in the Piazzale Loreto in Milan, the crowds spitting on his body--no doubt many of the same ones who earlier cheered him. Miserable poltroon--and yet earlier received by the Pope, praised by Churchill, a flattering introduction to his Life by the American ambassador, even good relations with the USSR. May 2, 1945

Last night came the announcement that hitler had shot himself in his chancellery yesterday, at least more of an ending than Mussolini's clown's end in cowardice and venery. His evil instincts grasped the tangled pattern of our era and the reaction against reason, sensing intuitively the dark places have come the abominations of Belsen and Dachau--beasts and perverts maddened by the lust for cruelty. Yet with it all, Hitler would have fitted Carlyle's Greatness category. He changed our age. May 4, 1945

The Germans in Italy surrendered yesterday. Just now the announcement over the air of the surrender in Denmark, Holland, and northern Germany. It is the end except for gathering up a few fragments and pockets. For all the dead and all the years, the radio pounds out the American AEF programs, the same turns, the same pop music. The Germans at least played the movement from the Bruckner symphony to announce Hitler's death. May 7, 1945

I am out on the terrace. Behind me is a linden tree, the leaves still light and glossy spring green. In front of me a little plot of grass with buttercups and seeded dandelions. All afternoon the planes have been going over, Spits and Thunderbolts, Mosquitoes, Lancasters towing gliders. Someone just now stuck his head out of the door and siad: "Well, it's all over, it ended half an hour ago." The sun is warm on me, the air hazy and full of dissolving cumulus. Here are the beds on the terrace, one light blue blanket, one bright red to each. The Sister comes in with a tray containing tots of whisky. An orderly then appears and says everyone is Confined to Barracks. For me it doesn't matter. I had a fresh cast on my leg this morning and can't move till tomorrow. I hear a cuckoo as I write.

So this is the end, on this terrace sloping down to the meadow, the chestnut trees in flower in the background, the warmth of the sun, two white butterflies following each other in spirals up and over the dandelions. Blackbirds and wagtails on the grass. This is the end, from that morning so long ago when I came downstairs to breakfast and Mother said, "England has declared war," and began to cry. May 9, 1945

The first Armistice Day brought a spontaneous burst of wild enthusiasm, a delirium according to contemporary accounts. This time we are all willing to wait three days before being told we can start celebrating. We are still Confined to Barracks, but I sneaked out through the back hedge with my crutches and hooked a ride to Watford where I could catch the underground to London. Official V-E celebration! I got to London at seven--great crowds in Leicester Square and Piccadilly, a fair number of drunks, people in masks and queer paper hats and false noses, more civilians than I've seen in years. But no spontaneity, even with the crowd in front of Buckingham Palace, where they clustered and waited like sheep. They seemed happy, they wanted to make merry, and yet somehow they didn't know how. At Trafalgar Square someone would start a parade or dance, others would join in, and then it would peter out. Instead of fun there is petty meanness. A naval rating tried to steal my glengarry.

When the tube shelters were closed last week, a lot of people were turfed out who'd been coming there nights for five years and who still came when the danger was over because they liked the companionship--as one of old woman said, "the people you meet there and the cup of tea at ten o'clock."