09 January 2003

The Horrors of War

Vicky Barker of the BBC did me wrong this morning. She got me agitated and very nearly made me later for work. Actually, it wasn't her. Vicky is OK. It was one of the Beeb's correspondents with an irritating air of moral superiority and a foreshorted memory.

I was lying in my bed, letting the coffeemaker bubble and giving myself just a few extra minutes after the alarm. The eiderdown was soft and night still deep, the shadows reluctant to cede the stage to the coming day.

I turned on the radio next to my bed to begin the slow process of recalibrating myself to the reality of 09 January 2003. There was the usual harvest of stories from overseas, the flash point du jour. Hans Blix, the UN Official charged with the inspection program in Iraq is expected today to issue an interim report which will contain the stunning announcement to the effect that Saddam Hussein has been "less than forthcoming" on his weapons of mass destruction program.

This revelation was not enough to rouse me from my twilight state, but then Vicky Barker introduced a correspondent reporting from Cologne, Germany. I thought about Cologne, suddenly free in my mind to walk the streets there as I once did. A friend and I had a weekend to kill in between business, and we drove wildly in his little sedan in search of the route of the American 3rd Army as it penetrated the Reich to destroy the murderous gangster state of Adolph Hitler. We stopped in Cologne, having heard that the museum contained some marvelous artifacts of the Roman city which had been the first to stand on this riverbank.

The city was strange. There was intricate stonework at street level, costly and old, but it was the foundation for buildings of modern proportion and swooping roofs. No good stonework or brick seemed to go higher than my uplifted hand. We walked on, to the Dam, the main square which is dominated by the Romanesque twin spires of the cathedral. It is one of the great works of medieval Europe. Across the square were old-modern faux Bauhaus blocks of apartments and office complexes. Disappointing, like Holiday Inns in the Midwest. I stood with my friend and looked up and was surprised to see modern brickwork in the midst of the fantastic carving which adorns the spire. I looked at it intently, the incongruous half sphere taken from the old stone like a bite from a cookie.

Then suddenly it clicked. Of course, I thought to myself. This is Cologne. This place was the objective of the Royal Air Force and the Americans, trading day for night to cripple the industry of the valley. The Americans came during the day with high explosives, and the British came at night with incendiaries. This town and everything else round about was flattened in the war. Blown to bits. The Roman artifacts were found because the modern city was blown down to that strata of the sediments. The hand-high walls are all that is left of the stones, and the cookie bite in the spire is the remnant of the red-hot expanding sphere of a 500lb bomb that blossomed on command from its proximity fuze. Of course. This is Cologne.

In my mind I was standing below the spire when the Brit with the insinuating tone began to talk to Germans on the street, Germans who had been young when the war come to them here. I listened with disbelief as the correspondent linked together the testimony of the Germans as they talked about the horror of war. A burgher with nasal tone bitterly protested the warlike Americans, the real threat in the world. He went on to say that Americans did not know the nature of war, that they had never seen it in their own land. A woman bitterly remembered a schoolmate who did not make it home one afternoon, and the commentator reminded us of the man who had not seen his father since he was twelve and the Red Army marched him off at the point of a bayonet.

I did the math. The burgher would have been ten in 1945, and thus would have had his kerchief and shirt as a member of the Hitler Youth.

My astonishment grew as the commentator encouraged complaints about America's warmongering, the threatening nature of the Administration, and the bald assertion that America's bombs are the real threat in the world. They spoke with authority, these Germans, and they said that we should try to talk to the terrorists. They spoke from a high moral plane, self righteousness dripping from their voices. They knew about evil.

Because they are victims of war....

Sometimes this world is too ironic even for Vic Socotra.