Finally the day of departure for Europe arrived. Three Squadrons, of which the 73rd was one, were to fly the northern route, with stops at Fort Wayne, Indiana; Presque Isle, Maine; Goose Bay, Labrador; Bluie West, Greenland; and Iceland. As the final preparations got under way, an incident occurred which gave me one of those rare and shaking views of myself as others saw me. I had done some flying with a young pilot named Jim Freeman and his co-pilot, whose name I cannot recall. Freeman was a careful and conservative pilot, not given to buzzing and other such stunts as were popular with others. I had hoped to be assigned to his plane for the flight overseas, and when I found I was not, I went to the assignment officer and asked to be transferred. He looked at me and said scathingly: "In other words, you prefer that someone else take the chance of being killed." Since this was the exact and unsparing truth about my motive, I was speechless. I rationalized it after a fashion, by telling myself that whereas I was willing to face death in action, I did not want to be sacrificed to the crazy whim of some hare-brained youth. And yet, the fact still remained that I preferred that another take that risk. He did, however, change me to Freeman's plane and I did not protest. Though I am not particularly proud of my motives, I still felt that to refuse the change would have been quixotic. In the end all of our planes made the crossing safely and the only one to have any trouble at all, so far as I know, was Freeman's!

We were instructed that our B4 bags and footlockers were to be in place in front of the BOQ before six the evening before departure, to be picked up by trucks and taken down to the line for loading on the planes. There were strict --- supposedly --- limitations on weight. I noted, as I went to dinner that evening, that mine was the only luggage set out. The next morning there was a mad confusion as people got their luggage to the line by any possible means. No regard was paid to the limitations on weight and it seemed that our plane would never become airborne. An officer sitting beside me asked: "Are you sweating out this take-off as much as I am?" and I answered that indeed 1 was. Upon arrival at Fort Wayne, everyone's baggage was present and accounted for save mine, and a later plane reported having seen it sitting forlornly in a hangar at Alliance. Fortunately, a plane coming from there the next day brought it.

At this our first stop, Baer Field, our planes underwent a thorough overhaul in preparation for the long flight overseas. Some of our crews reported to me that they had found evidence of sabotage on the part of the civilian employees at the Base. I reported it to the Base Intelligence Officer, but the outcome of the resultant investigation I never learned, since we were long gone before it could be completed.

We flew over the Great Lakes in a thick fog and I earned some ridicule for donning my Mae West (the Air Force term for the life preserver issued for all flights over water.) I did not care, for few things are more unnerving than to fly in zero visibility over heavily traveled airways. We had indeed, just had a new and highly secret form of radar installed. (I believe it was called Asdic by the British and 1FF by the Americans), but it was so new that its reliability was still of dubious reliability.

The weather cleared in time for us to make a slight detour to view Niagara Falls from the air. Then we flew over the Finger Lakes, the Adirondacks, Lakes George and Champlain, the Green and White Mountains, and landed at Presque Isle, Maine, our Port of Embarkation from the United States.

I have some scattered memories of Presque Isle: that it was, next to Iceland, the dirtiest base that we touched --- transient bases seemed too often to be poorly policed; that after my speech at Alliance warning the men on the importance of saying nothing in letters or phone calls as to where we were or whither bound, I found numbers of them in the PS buying souvenirs to send home, all plainly marked Presque Isle, Maine: that one or two men refused to board the planes when we came to take-off and were hustled away by MP's; and that as I looked down from the air after take-off I wondered whether I should ever set foot on United States soil again --- hardly an original bit of meditation.

It must, I think, have been at Presque Isle that I indulged in the sort of theft to which the service hardened many of us. By regulations, the medical and intelligence officers of a squadron were obliged to travel with the air echelon. Our medic, a pleasant but bibulous character from Maine, shared the cabin of my plane with me. It was crowded by the auxiliary gas tanks, which gave comforting assurance of a speedy and flaming end in case of a crash. It was also unheated. With the customary service logic, the pilots and crew occupying the cockpit, where there was some heat, were all issued magnificent flight jackets and trousers lined with sheepskin. We in the frigid cabin --- and remember that we were to fly across Greenland --- were not issued anything. I forget how we managed it, but the doctor and I managed to secure fleece-lined equipment like that of the others. The jacket I still have --- much too small for me now --- but the trousers were lost somewhere in my many moves.

The flight over the great forests of Quebec and Labrador remains a dream of beauty in my memory. It was a cloudless day, the skies the intense blue of early October, and the woods below us an oriental carpet of gold and russet and scarlet. Goose Bay itself was beautiful, situated beside a brawling stream, which, I am sure, must have bred salmon in their season. I recall a show there, put on by Andy Devine --- one of the few stars to visit the remote and less publicized bases. In his husky voice, he told one of the funniest "blue' stories about WAGS that I heard during the war.

The next stage was to Bluie West, Greenland. It was one of the two really perilous stages of our trip. In the first place, the weather was so treacherous that, even if reported clear at the time of our take-off from Goose Bay, it might have closed in by the time we approached Greenland, necessitating a return to Labrador. We were warned that if we ditched, life expectancy in those frigid waters was some three minutes. Furthermore, the approach to the base was up a narrow fiord whose close and towering walls left small room for any maneuver. And, at the end, one must bank sharply right to land on the field which had been constructed on the detritus at the mouth of a glacier. The flight out was even more difficult, for then the planes had to bank left and fight to gain altitude in the narrow confines of the fiord.

We were blessed with fair weather all the way, and as we approached Greenland, her icy mountains formed a splendid barrier in the eastern sky. Freeman negotiated the difficult approach with his usual dexterity and landed with customary smoothness. As we walked away from the plane, I congratulated him on the flight and he said wryly: "You didn't notice it when the port engine conked out?" He had forgotten to turn on the auxiliary fuel supply and we had flown for some minutes on one motor.

Surprising though it may seem, I was enchanted with Greenland. The towering cliffs behind the base and the great glacier which descended to the bay where ships were moored made a scene of magnificent splendor. The afternoon of our arrival, I scaled a cliff to the head of a waterfall which fell straight down to the level of the base. That night was cold and clear; I spent some time in a cozy, panelled library which appeared to hold a wide and judicious selection of books. As I walked back to quarters, the sky was alight with the aurora, which danced and shimmered and swept from horizon to zenith. The quarters were clean and comfortable, the food excellent, and I thought I should not mind at all spending the winter there. However, the endless, sub-arctic night might well have changed my mind.

The flight to Iceland was very different from that to Greenland. It began well enough; we negotiated the tricky take-off and climbed to the top of the beetling wall of the fiord well enough, then turned eastward to cross the ice-cap in bright sunlight. I recall thinking, as I gazed down on the savage expanse of ice and snow below us: "Whatever am I doing here?" However, as we set out across the sea to Iceland, the clouds moved in and the ceiling dropped lower and lower, until, as we approached the shoreline, we seemed to be flying only some fifty feet above the waves.

However, all our planes landed safely. The Iceland base was the filthiest of any I ever saw and the food almost inedible. I had no half-formed wish to spend the winter there. We were forbidden to leave the base, and although a few venturous souls did so, I did not.

It was about 2 A.M. when we were summoned to our preflight briefing for the trip to Prestwick, Scotland. The weather officer explained that there was a zone of freezing vapor up to so many feet, then a shallow level of clear air, then another of frost above that. We were also warned that the Germans liked to jam radio beams and lure planes out over the North Sea toward Norway, there to be shot down. There was a stunned silence, then, finally, one young pilot spoke the thoughts of all: "Sir, couldn't we wait for better weather conditions?"

"These are optimum conditions for this area," was the unconsoling reply.

Through the winter darkness we rode out to our planes. My medical companion was one of those who had stolen into Reykjavik and had returned thoroughly drunk. When he was called to go to the plane, he refused to get up. Accordingly, he was hauled out of bed by force, dressed and carried to a jeep and from jeep to plane. Dumped into the cabin with me, he fell into a snoring slumber, filling the air with the fumes from his evening's potations.

The weather belied the predictions, for we could not have had clearer skies or smoother flying. We passed over the Hebrides and began to cross the Highlands toward Prestwick. At this point, however, a dispute arose between pilot and navigator and we became lost. We flew in what seemed to me aimless circles, about and about, and my mind dwelt upon those German planes. Eventually, we approached Prestwick, only to be told that the field was full and we must fly over to Meek's Corner, near Belfast.

At last, we landed safely there, and a group of us, of whom I recall only Freeman and Jacobs, the navigator, went into Belfast for dinner. Though I did not foresee it, this excursion was to be crucial to the balance of my life.

We found Belfast a dirty, dreary city none the better for the hardships of war. It reminded me of Glasgow. We ate a poor dinner, wandered about a bit, then boarded a truck for the ride back to the Base. I was the last to climb in and so found myself sitting at the extreme rear of those longitudinal boards which constituted the seats in a GI truck, as I have mentioned above. Our driver became confused in the blackout just after we entered the Base, stopped the truck and called back asking if someone would jump out and check a signpost which he could not see to read. I was the obvious candidate, so I climbed onto the tailboard and jumped. I had jumped out of a score of such trucks, but all my previous leaps had been from the floor; the added height of the tailboard was a new element. Subconsciously, I had prepared to land after a fall of the usual distance; instead, I went on falling and ended by coming down with all my weight on my right heel. There was a flash of sharp pain and when I tried to rise, I found that I could not bear my weight on that foot.

I was helped into the truck, and then into my quarters. The medical officer was summoned, and arrived drunk as usual. He examined my foot, tentatively agreed with my opinion that I had sprained my ankle, gave me two large tablets for the pain, and departed, beerily cheerful. There was no water to help me swallow the tablets and they lodged half-way down, where they slowly dissolved with a sensation like that of severe heartburn, doing nothing for my pain. My foot ached and throbbed agonizingly and sleep was impossible. Finally, I bethought me of the surette of morphine which each of us carried in his first aid packet. I got it out, jabbed myself inexpertly in the buttock and eventually fell asleep.

The next morning we were to fly to the base assigned to the squadron in England. Bill Wade carried me to the plane in his arms, saying: "Here's our first Purple Heart!" Thanks to the morphine, I was sadly airsick on the flight, something which has never happened to me before or since. As soon as we landed, I was placed in an ambulance and taken to the 30 General Hospital in Mansfield, near Nottingham. The next morning, my foot was Xrayed and placed in a cast from knee to toe. The heel bone had been split as neatly as though it had been divided by a cleaver.

I must explain the crucial importance of this accident. In the first place, it separated me permanently from my squadron and may thereby have saved my life. The group took part in the disastrous Arnheim adventure, and Bill Wade was killed when his plan was shot down. (Not that I did not have close brushes with death later in London bombings). Secondly, it provided never-to-be forgotten experiences in the Hospital which I shall relate. Thirdly, it resulted in a year and a half of fascinating adventures and noteworthy acquaintances in London and Paris. If I had not been the last to enter the truck that night in Belfast---

My first experience in the hospital was a real shock. I was carried on a stretcher into a two-bed room, my foot swollen to the size --- it seemed --- of a football. A pleasant young man in the opposite bed looked at it and asked: "What happened to you?" (This was to be an embarrassing question which I had to meet repeatedly in the next few weeks. A broken heel was a typical paratroop injury, so I was asked where I had bailed out and had to confess that it had been from a GI truck.) At that moment, however, I still supposed I had a sprained ankle and so replied.

"And what is wrong with you?" I countered.

There was an embarrassed pause, then he answered: "I have a slight urethral infection." Actually, while in London on a pass, he had contracted the peculiarly virulent strain of gonorrhea there prevalent. As he several times took smears on slides which he then deposited on our common bureau, I was shocked and scared, for I had supposed that venereal cases were isolated in special wards, as I believe they were for enlisted personnel. I grew callous to the rather numerous patients with gonorrhea, but I never did reconcile myself to the presence of one case of syphilis, who was permitted to use the communal toilet and bathtub.

Trying to be broad-minded but still not adjusted to war-time morality, I said, I fear patronizingly: "I can understand young, unmarried men seeking relief with available women, but I cannot excuse married men." A day or two later, I discovered that he had a wife back home.

The use of penicillin was then in its infancy; it was rare and costly, and according to good old Army custom, its use, at least in treating VD, was confined to officers of the rank of Major or above (Field Grade). My roommate, being a mere Lieutenant, was given the brutal fever treatment. As I recall his account, he was placed in a "hot box," where his temperature was slowly raised over four hours to that of a high fever; it was kept at that reading for eight hours, then over four hours allowed to descend slowly to normal. They brought him back on a stretcher and laid him on his bed so weak and limp that there seemed not a bone left in his body. He kept me awake for hours with the sound of his vomiting. This Spartan treatment proved effective and he was returned to duty at his bomber base just in time to take part in the terribly costly Schweinfurt raid, in which he may have been killed. I never heard from him again.

Because I was there so long --- from mid-October to early January --- I had a long series of roommates of the most varied characters and backgrounds. I cannot recall all of them clearly, but a few were unforgettable. There were two Majors, both in hospital to recover from a combination of nervous exhaustion and colds. After the war I encountered the sister of one of them at a party in Buffalo. There was a handsome young Lieutenant in the MPs from Colorado and a colored warrant officer (I was asked if I objected to a colored roommate), Whose West Indian English sounded so very incongruous. All I recall of their ailments is that they were minor.

One of the two most interesting was a young warrant officer with an arm badly mangled by the explosion of an anti-aircraft shell in the cockpit of a B-17 on a bombing mission over Germany. The pilot had been killed at his side, and John, with his one good arm, had brought the great plane back from the Continent and safely landed her. I was to watch in him a sad growth of bitterness, as he was subjected to one betrayal after another. He had been proposed for the Medal of Honor but as his papers went up through "channels," the decoration was successively downgraded until it became merely one of those common ones which the Air Force handed out so carelessly as to rob them of all meaning. Then just as he had received the final disappointing word on his medal, a "Dear John" letter arrived from his fiancée, breaking their engagement. He was an entirely embittered boy when he returned to duty; I should like to know what happened to him.

My most interesting roommate was a splendid old Norwegian sea captain. A sudden attack of gallstones had sent him from his American freighter in a nearby port to ours, the nearest American hospital. He was successfully operated upon and kept the offending objects in a bottle on our dresser. He had quite a long convalescence and I enjoyed his company enormously. It was rather like living in one of Conrad's novels, for the Captain --- I have, alas, forgotten his name --- had gone to sea as a youth from his native country but had long been an American citizen in the service of our Merchant Marine. I heard from him once or twice after the war; one of the plans whose unfulfillment I most regret was that of making a voyage as a passenger with him.

I have seldom known anyone who hated the Germans as much. He told me a delightful story of how his engagement to a young lady in Hamburg was broken. He had spent an evening in her home, where a cousin of hers had told of his wounds incurred in World War I and had displayed them all to the company. Later, my friend said to the young lady: "Lucky he was not wounded in the behind or I suppose he'd have shown us that." "No German," she retorted, "is ever wounded there." So ended the engagement.

I was brought into the hospital in the late afternoon. My supper and breakfast were served me in bed, then my foot was X-rayed and the cast put on. That noon, the head nurse came in at lunch time and handed me a pair of crutches, saying: "You're ambulatory now." So I made my uncertain way to the mess hall.

I confess that the hospital seemed to me a haven of refuge. I was free for an indeterminate period from the obsessive fear of flying which haunts me to this day. I at once set about a careful schedule of reading which included all of Livy, some Seneca and some Plato. Each evening I read the service of Evensong in the Book of Common Prayer, to me the most beautiful portion of the Church of England's liturgy. I wrote a great many letters and did much censoring of mail from the enlisted men's wards. The explanations of their hospitalization from the men in the VD wards were often highly ingenious.

The days passed in a pleasant sequence. I had little pain and the head nurse, Miss Middleton, told me that my very contentment was a factor in the successful mending of my fracture. It was a dreary season to be in northern England. As the fall went on, darkness fell sooner and sooner after three o'clock, and the sun rose around nine. (We were on War Daylight Time.) The British kitchen help, anxious to get off for the day, pushed the supper hour up until we were eating between four-thirty and five o'clock, which made the cold, black evenings seem eternities. The ward was cold, but it chanced that my room was the warmest place in the wing and so the ambulatory patients used to gather there after supper for long bull sessions. I found these fascinating.

One of the regular visitors was a towering, handsome pilot from Georgia, a cousin of Margaret Mitchell, who wrote Gone With the Wind. I wondered whether the appearance of my black roommate would cause him and other southerners, of whom we had several, to boycott the gatherings. It made not the slightest difference. At mess and in social gatherings, the black officer was entirely accepted and welcomed.

One evening a new face appeared, that of a Major. On his entrance all lower ranks --- and that meant everyone --- leaped to their feet to offer him a seat. "Sit down, boys" he said, "I prefer to stand. I lost the battle of Piccadilly and my ass is like a pincushion." Not for his lofty rank the long misery of the fever treatment.

Many tales --- some of them no doubt tall --- were told in those evening sessions. My favorite was that of a charming pilot from Alabama or Mississippi, with an Irish name which now escapes me. His missions accomplished, he was waiting at a joint British-American base for rotation home when he and a British pilot went up in a dual control plane to accumulate flying time. The plane went into a spin and each waited for the other to prove that he was "chicken" by pulling it out. It was one more clash of English-Irish wills and ended symbolically. Neither would make the necessary move, and so they crashed in company, receiving, by an odd and appropriate chance, identical injuries, fortunately not fatal.

A priceless dividend of my accident was one of the most inspiring experiences of my life --- that of being part of a group in which the best qualities of the human spirit burned more brightly than I have ever seen elsewhere. There was a sympathy, a kindness, a mutual concern which was beyond praise. nevertheless, I did try to praise it in an article called O.W. (Officers' Ward), which to my lasting regret, was rejected by a national magazine. I wish I could find the original manuscript again but it was irretrievably lost in the turmoil of the war and my frequent moves.

We were spared the greatest sadness; I cannot recall a single death there. This was, I am sure, in large part attributable to the superb skill and dedication of the Medical Corps. Those who were not so hopelessly injured as to die within a few hours were so skillfully treated in the Field Hospitals that by the time they reached a General Hospital their chances of recovery were high.

There was a great deal of reparatory and plastic surgery to be performed. it was an established ritual that when the rolling stretcher (called, with grim service humor, "the meat wagon") came in to bear a patient to the operating room someone, somehow produced a flower and tucked it under his chin as he lay with the sheet drawn over him, whereupon he was rolled away amid cries of "Good luck!"

There was a good deal of singing. Since some of these lyrics may never have been written down, 1 am going to record them for posterity --- at least their more decent portions. In the first, a great favorite with American troops overseas, I shall substitute a five letter for a four letter word:

   "Bless them all!
     Bless them all!
     The long and the short and the tall.
     There'll be no promotion
     This side of the ocean,
So cheer up, my lads, bless them all!"

Then there was the lilting RAF song which won favor in our Air Force as well:

I've got sixpence, jolly, jolly sixpence,
I've got sixpence to last me all my life.
     I've got sixpence to spend,
     And sixpence to lend,
And tuppence to send home to my wife,
          Poor wife!
     No cares have I to grieve me,
     No pretty little girl to deceive me,
     I'm happy as a king, believe me,
As we go rolling home."

CHORUS:

     Rolling home, rolling home,
     Rolling home, rolling home,
By the light of the silvery moon.
     Oh, happy is the day
     When the airman gets his pay,
As we go rolling home."

A lieutenant with a battlefield commission and several decorations, all won in North Africa, introduced a song with a rollicking tune. I quote two printable verses:

"I wish all the women were fish in the ocean
And I were a shark, I would set them in motion.
Oh, roll your leg over!
Oh roll your leg over!
Oh roll your leg over!
The man in the moon."

'I wish all the women were cute little vixens
And I were a fox; I would certainly fix 'em.
     Oh, roll your leg over!
     Oh roll your leg over!
     Oh roll your leg over!
The man in the moon."

A fourth favorite, and certainly the most inane ditty ever invented, was performed with a caller like the one at a square dance. One verse will be quite sufficient:

And so on, through as many horses as the singers could endure.

After a month or so, I was given a walking cast, a clumsy arrangement, with a form of clogs on the sole. I was freed from crutches, but still needed a cane.

I celebrated my recovered mobility by a series of excursions. Nearby was a beautiful abbey church at Southwell; it had once been connected with the summer residence of the archbishops of York. I made that the goal of my first extra-mural trip. Proud of my mastery of the whimsies of English pronunciation, which makes Maudlin of Magdalene, Chumley of Cholmondeley and Suthark of Southwark, I carefully asked a bus despatcher for the bus for Sutheil. He looked puzzled, I repeated the name, and a smile spread over his face as he said: "You mean Southwell." Despite the bone-piercing chill of the Abbey, I had a pleasant afternoon, returning cold, fatigued, but happy.

Next came an excursion to London --- a long trip, involving two nights in the city. Three of us went, my roommate with his arm in a cast, I with my plaster boot, and a third, who if I remember, had something wrong with his eyes. We would have made an excellent model for Brueghel. We stayed at a dubious, third-rate hotel in Piccadilly, opposite the Green Park. It was a place popular with American officers because of its central location, cheapness, and I fear, its permissiveness.

I had proudly boasted of my knowledge of London and had promised my companions a succulent dinner of the famous roast beef at Simpson's in the Strand. We had a bitter disappointment, our first experience with the harsh facts of war-time scarcities in England. There was no roast beef to be had, and a merciful forgetfulness has blanked out my memory of what ersatz dish we ate. I believe that it was there that my incredulous eyes first saw on the menu that frequent feature in those lean years --- roast rook.

Either our first or second night, we experienced our first air raid. As there was an anti-aircraft gun in the Green Park directly across from our hotel, sleep was impossible, and so too was lovemaking, according to one of my companions who had taken a complaisant damsel to bed with him.

I do not recall just what I did the next day --- I sorely miss my diary on such points --- but presume that I visited such favorite spots as Whitehall, the Abbey, Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery. Regrettably, I missed the noonday concerts given in the last place throughout those grim days by Dame Myra Hess. That night, we went to a black-market night club, said to be a favorite of Clark Gable, and dined on strictly illegal steaks.

My third journey was to visit the Norburys at "Sherridge." It was slow and difficult as all such journeys were at that time. Kit met me at a hotel in Birmingham and drove me the rest of the way. Curiously, my memory is completely blank as to the return journey. My recollections of the visit are three: that of my godson Peter, an infant lying in his crib; that of his three-year-old sister, Mary Anne as I helped her father give her her bedtime bath. She is now a very distinguished photographic editor for London publishers and has two children of her own; I am sure she does not remember the occasion. The third recollection is that of kind old ladies at some event at Malvern clucking sympathetically over my crippled state. On this journey, as on that when I later left the hospital for London, I met everywhere that ready kindness so characteristic of the British to those in need.

Almost my last memory of the 30th General Hospital is that of Christmas Eve, 1943. All of us went to a dance and I even danced in my cast, at the cost of some pain to myself and, I fear, to my partners as well. Then we all went on, Catholics and Protestants alike, to midnight Mass in the Hospital's chapel.

The mention of a religious service brings to mind my experiences with the service chaplains. The chaplain of my group was a handsome young Presbyterian, who like so many of his denomination, preached thoughtful and eloquent sermons. While we were at Alliance, attendance at his services was pathetically small. although in those days I was firm in loyalty to the Episcopal Church and used to go into Alliance for the early Communion Service every Sunday, I always went later in the morning to our chaplain's service at the Base, desiring to give him my support, since few of the other Officers ever bothered to do so. Despite this, in all the nearly three months of my stay at the hospital, he never once came to see me, though I heard of his attending a dance there, and according to one informant, a few poker parties. Too many of the Protestant chaplains tried to be "one of the boys," gaining thereby an evanescent popularity but forfeiting the respect which should have been theirs.

Shortly after my arrival at the hospital I asked the chaplain, a member of one of the Fundamentalist sects, to arrange with one of the local clergy for me to take Communion according to the Anglican rite. My request was not well received and nothing was ever done about it.

The Roman Catholic chaplains whom I encountered were in brilliant contrast with the Protestants. Though they were on easy terms with the men, their strong sense of their sacerdotal mission and the respect paid to it and to their authority protected their standing with all ranks. Furthermore, they were as kind and helpful to us Protestants as to their own flock and never did I hear of the slightest attempt to proselytize.

My long hospitalization entailed my final separation from my Squadron. Busy with training for their rôle of dropping paratroops and towing gliders, they could not go without an S-2 for months. As soon as I had my walking cast, I wrote Captain Hutton and offered to return for such limited duty as was possible, but there was no reply. I did hear that he had posted my letter on the bulletin board to refute an unkind rumor that I was malingering. The officer whose place I had taken when I first joined the squadron (it will be recalled that he was hospitalized) and who had returned as my assistant, was promoted to my place, at which I was happy.

I was sorry to part from a group of men whom I liked and admired so much. Later, I ran into Terry Hutton and Bill Wade on pass in London. Bill, as I have said, was killed at Arnheim; I have never had any tidings of Terry.

I shall always recall one touching act by an enlisted man in my section. In the confusion of my departure from Belfast, I had left behind one of the four volumes of my Oxford Greek text of Plato. He took one of his precious days of leave to come some distance to bring it to me, saying that he knew how much its loss would mean to me.

One last morsel of news about the squadron did reach me. My former student and colleague, Paul MacKendrick, married an Army nurse. After she and I became acquainted and inevitably, began to compare our experiences in the war, I discovered that she had worked on planes flying wounded home from the ETO. One of the squadrons with which she had flown was the 73rd and she remembered some of the pilots whom I had known.

One incident of my stay at the hospital made a deep impression upon me. In my daily reading of Livy, I came across the story of Aemilius Paulus' tart rejoinder to armchair critics of his conduct of a Roman campaign. It happened that the President of Andover's trustees at that time was Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War. Knowing that he was accustomed to read the Classics for relaxation, I wrote him, calling to his attention the passage in Livy. Within a few days, I received a courteous acknowledgement of my letter, stating that he was already familiar with the passage. Often since then, when friends have excused long delays in answering letters by a plea of extreme pressure of business, I have thought of Stimson, with all the cares of his office in the crucial year of 1943, replying immediately to a casual letter from me, whom he knew very slightly.

In closing my account of this strangely happy, isolated period of my life, I must pay tribute to Dr. Klausen my physician, and Miss Middleton my head nurse, for their wise and careful supervision of my convalescence. Fractures of the heel are notoriously difficult to treat, too often leaving in their wake arthritis of the ankle and other forms of lameness. In my case, though recovery was slow --- it was June before I could walk normally or without pain --- it was complete and to this day I feel no after effects. When the walking cast came off, I had to learn to walk again. We had a superb physiotherapist, a woman from Australia, who was as much an expert in psychology as in her proper field. She laughed at my gait, which she said resembled that of a duck and in order to loosen my stiffened ankle joint used to make me rise on my toes endless times until the sweat ran down my face from pain.

One lad had lost both legs just below the hips. I can see him now, lying on his back on a table, alternately raising those pitiful stumps, while she had him roaring with laughter at her jibes. She never allowed the slightest hint of pity in her room.

That same lad suffered a blow as cruel and ironic as those visited upon any of O. Henry's characters. He had not written his family the true nature of his injury. A Christmas package arrived for him and, with the communal interest usual in such hospitals, others in the ward gathered around to watch him unwrap it. From it emerged a pair of new shoes. There was a hushed moment of shock and horror, then he broke the tension by laughing and tossing the shoes underneath his bed.

Separated as I was from the squadron, I was concerned as to my fate when my release occurred. By normal procedure, I should be thrown into a "pool" of unassigned officers, to be drawn out by anyone with a vacancy for a man with my qualifications. Since I was over age in grade and fit only for non-combat duty because of my lameness, the prospect was a gloomy one.

However, my persistent good fortune went into intensive action, helped by a slight push from me. I read in "The Stars and Stripes" that Colonel Hughes, the officer who had tested my German at the first interview, had arrived in the ETO to take up duty with the Eighth Air Force. I at once wrote him explaining my situation and in a very short time received orders to report to Eighth Air Force Headquarters at Bushy Park in Teddington, near London, early in January. although I did not then know it, those were also Eisenhower's Headquarters at that time.

I said my last farewell to the 30th General on a black, chill morning in January. The long train journey to London was lengthened by a fog as we approached the city. On arrival, I found that almost nothing was moving on the surface, so I had to take the Underground across the city to Waterloo Station, laden as I was with B-4 bag, Musette bag and gas-mask. As I limped quite badly, I was the object of the customary English kindness from a variety of strangers who helped me with my burdens.

I took a train to Teddington and struggled a long way to the base, where, despite my obvious fatigue, I was barked at by an irate Major for arriving late and was told that there were no accommodations for me there and that I should go to Kinsman House, a sort of British USO, and try to find a billet with a local family.

At this point, my fortune, which may have seemed to be neglecting me, took over with a strong hand. I walked wearily a short distance to a house which had obviously once been a private residence. The ground floor was dark, so I climbed the stairs to a lighted room on the second floor. It was empty. For what seemed a long time but was really only a few minutes, I waited wearily, almost at the end of my strength. The front door closed, steps hurried up the stairs and into the room came a small, round woman with the brightest of blue eyes behind spectacles and blond hair wound in tight braids around her head.

"I'm so sorry to have kept you waiting; I had to go and feed my hens," she explained breathlessly. "I am Mrs. Stott."

I introduced myself and explained my need.

She looked distressed and said: "I'm afraid I have not a single thing just now."

There was a pause, while my heart sank and I wondered what I was to do.

Then she looked at me closely and said, as if on an impulse: "I tell you what I'll do. My sons are both away and you may have their room until we can find you one elsewhere."

So I moved in with Verney and Dorothy Stott and began a friendship which has remained undiminished in warmth and firmness from that day until this. there was never any question of my leaving them until I was forced to move into London. Since the war, I have visited them repeatedly and they have stayed with me in America. Dorothy has told me that my appearance of utter fatigue and discouragement was what moved her to take me in. Her kindness has ever been without stint or measure, unfailing and unforced.

One incident among many will illustrate that kindness. My mother, as a token of her gratitude to Dorothy Stott for her goodness to me, sent her a box of chocolates, which arrived some time after I had moved into London. Now sweets were rationed and very severely rationed in England in those years. Just at the time of the arrival of the chocolates, I had invited Verney and Dorothy to have dinner with me at an officers' Mess in town. As we sat down at the table, Dorothy took a small package from her handbag and gave it to me saying that she wished to share it with me. It was a few of the precious chocolates from America.

Colonel Hughes' original plan for me was that I was to be sent to the 15th Air Force Base in Bari, Italy where one of the intelligence staff had been killed. I was to be flown down in a B17, which promised excitement enough, since to the normal perils of the flight there was the added danger of being shot down by German planes over the Bay of Biscay.

Each day I trudged up the road to the base, where I sat waiting for my orders to come through. Eventually, word came that another officer at Bari had managed to pull strings enough to get the job for himself.

It was during that time of waiting that two events occurred which are vivid in my memory. One was that staff meeting already referred to in which Colonel Hughes begged anyone who had an idea of what to bomb to injure the German war effort to produce it. The other was a similar meeting a few weeks later. It had been found that bombing the factories producing aircraft engines seemed to have little effect; accordingly, it was decided to try bombing the air frame plants where the master dies for stamping out parts of the fuselage were kept. For some reason, these proved a much more effective target than the engine factories. An unparalleled stretch of clear sunny weather in the midst of the gloom of a north European winter allowed our bombers free range and perfect visibility, with gratifying results. I can still see Colonel Hughes as he strode up and down that sunlit room and shouted, his natural stammer heightened by his exultation: "Gentlemen, w-we h-h-have really f-f---- ed up the German Air Force."

I always began my morning walks to the base limping badly, for my ankle stiffened over night and was very painful when I first began to use it. Mrs. Stott's kind heart could not bear to see me set off breakfastless --- I was eating at the base mess hall --- and soon proposed that I pay a minimum extra fee on my rent and have breakfast with them. She was a splendid cook --- as Yorkshire people usually are --- and besides, she had a steady supply of fresh eggs from her own hens. Only those who endured the loathsome powdered eggs of those years of scarcity and rationing can know what that meant. Each morning, while I was still in bed, she would enter my room, light the gas fire and place beside the bed a tray with tea and bread and butter. She did the same, of course, for her husband. he was a very brilliant physicist working in a government research laboratory, a Cambridge man, which was of course, a bond between us. The older of their two sons was a medical officer in the Royal Navy, the younger still away at school. When Mr. Stott and I came downstairs, a hot, abundant and delicious breakfast awaited us. Later, when I was for a time, going daily into London and not returning until mid-evening, a cup of hot chocolate was always ready for me.

By now I was becoming somewhat of an embarrassment to the Bushy Park Headquarters and so I was assigned to a branch office in London largely concerned with economic intelligence. I cannot recall that I ever did anything there except the classic service activity. --- wait. The staff of the office was largely made up of bright young Jews, that race having a special interest in, and aptitude for, economics. Among them, if my memory is correct, was Walt Rostow who later became a power in Washington during the Vietnam War. They treated me with that benign neglect which Patrick Moynihan prescribed for the ghetto.

My non-duties entailed traveling into and out of London daily by rail. The trips were less dull than they might sound for at night the compartments were illuminated only by feeble, blue lights and the windows covered by blackout curtains. The stations also had the dimmest of lights and had long since had their identifying signs removed as a precaution against the feared invasion. I used to count off on my fingers the stops to Teddington. It was, naturally, extremely easy to go by one's stop if one failed to tick one off.

Those were the days of frequent air raids, and I remember the sounds of shrapnel and other anti-aircraft debris rattling on the car's roof like hail. Shortly after I came to the Stotts we had a heavy raid one evening. I went out on the lawn to watch the coruscating display of flashes of anti-aircraft shells and the eerie light of the star shells. Far above, I could hear the heavy drone of the German bombers. Suddenly, I realized that there were people up there trying to kill me --- not as an individual, but as part of a target. The war at last became real and I went soberly back into the house.

One mid-winter night a heavy raid began as we came out from London. At Teddington Station, there were frequent bomb blasts and a constant hail of shrapnel. Having no helmet, I decided to remain at the station rather than risk the walk home, a decision that undoubtedly saved my life. Two women and I stood together under the glass canopy over the station's street entrance, a singularly poor place to stand under the circumstances.

Suddenly there was a tremendous explosion quite near at hand, plainly from one of the huge bombs called land-mine, and a shower of glass from the canopy rained down upon us, fortunately injuring no one.

Shortly thereafter, the bombing and AA fire ceased, so I decided to walk to the house. When I reached it, I at first sensed that there was something strange about it. Then I perceived that it lacked roof, door and windows. I went in, calling to the Stotts with my heart in my mouth. They answered from the kitchen, where J found them crouched under one of the table shelters which in those days provided very minimal protection. Both were unharmed, though of course, badly shaken; the house was a shambles. The solid oak front door had been blown the length of the front hall; all the front windows and their casings had been blown out; in my room the whole casing was lying on my bed. Plaster and debris of all sorts were strewn everywhere.

The land mine had fallen behind the house directly across the street; all our damage had been done by the blast. So whimsical were its effects that some china plates hanging in wire holders on the wall beside the front door were intact. Even more inexplicable was the fate of a diamond ring which Mrs. Stott had left lying on a bedroom table. The ring was no longer there, but she later found it in a closed drawer below, which she swears was closed when she went to bed, before the incident. It was quite plain that had I come straight home after arriving at the station, I should have arrived in front of the house just in time to be killed by the blast. My recollections of the remainder of the night are hazy. The Stotts were taken in by neighbors and I believe that I went to the base and slept on a sofa.

The next morning I went to the Stotts' and found them pathetically striving to restore some order to the shambles in their kitchen. They, of course, assumed that I should look for other lodgings, for another American officer living with them did so at once. There was a house next door whose owners had moved to the country to escape the bombings. They offered this house to the Stotts until their own could be made livable. It was my instinctive desire to share the bad times with them as I had shared the good. I made known my feelings, making only the reservation that I should move if my presence would add to their difficulties. They said that it would not, and so a bond was formed which has never been broken.

I am not certain how long it was before we moved next door, but I do recall that we spent the first two or three nights in the home of neighbors. Just at that time, the Germans bombed that area very heavily for several consecutive nights. Our theory was that they had learned that the headquarters of both Eisenhower and Spaatz were in Bushy Park, although neither General slept there.

One night in the neighbor's house I shall never forget. All were in bed when the alert went. all five of us got up and crept under a small table shelter. It was the heaviest raid I experienced until the coming of the V-1's. The noise of AA fire and bombs was deafening and at times the house rocked as bombs fell very near at hand. Probably because of a combination of nervous reaction, the damp cold of a winter's night in an English house, and the danger of the bombs, Mr. Stott and I had the "shakes." This has never happened at any other time in my life, but I can bear expert witness to the fact that one can really shake with fear.

Late in the winter or early in the spring, a real niche was found for me in a joint RAF-AAF office in London which was engaged in plans for strategic bombing. It occupied a long suite of rooms in Lansdowne House, a vast complex of offices and apartments in Berkley Square, behind the Berkley Hotel. The British maintained tight control of the operation, holding all the upper ranks. The American personnel were few in number, with none above my rank of Captain. Wing Commander Verity, who headed the office was a superb administrator, in his ruthless drive much more like an American than the usually more relaxed English. There were occasional bits of friction between the nationalities, almost entirely with one arrogant British officer, but, in general, the group was as harmonious as any with which I ever worked. We Americans shared a secret joke about the one Britisher whom we disliked. There is an ancient story of the nouveau riche American who settled in Britain determined to become a member of the County hunting set. As a first step, he hired an English valet. Dressed in the proper pinks, he joined his first fox hunt under the critical eye of his valet. On their return, the American asked hopefully: "Did I do all right?"

"Quite well, sir," replied the valet, "but if I may, sir, I'd like to suggest that when one sees the fox, one cries 'Tallyho!' not 'There goes the son-of-a-bitch!"

So, whenever the detested officer would pass a group of Americans, one of us would murmur; "Tallyho."

AI3C1, as the office was called, was at the time of my arrival, busy with the so-called interdiction program. This was a long-range attempt to interrupt, by every possible means, the flow of troops and supplies to the German forces in northern and western France, in anticipation of the Allied invasion. We prepared careful target charts for the British and American strategic bombing forces. Because of the superiority of British Intelligence for the European Theater, all such work had been handed over to the RAF. All those costly target folders prepared in Washington were money thrown away. As I understand it, American Intelligence ruled in the Pacific and China-Burma-India area. However, since the two theaters worked quite separately. I cannot speak with certainty.

By this time, photo-reconnaissance had been highly developed. We would prepare the maps and verbal information for a raid; Reconnaissance would supply photographs of the target area; the raid would take place; and within a very short time, depending largely upon the weather, we would receive photographs and analyses of the damage.

Sometimes it was heartbreaking evidence. I recall one particular instance. I was doing an information sheet on a French railway marshalling yard and noticed, at some distance from the target a town that had recently been built, evidently the fruit of city planner's dream. In my description, I remarked that it was laid out on the plan of a Greek theater. (My copy came back from the Wing Commander with the no doubt pertinent comment that most pilots and bombardiers did not know what a Greek theater looked like.) The raid took place, and back came the photographs of the results. The marshalling yard was untouched, but the beautiful little town was pock-marked with bomb craters. I wondered how many of its inhabitants had perished or been maimed in the raid. Perhaps it was that incident which started me thinking of my own remote but real responsibility for the tragedy and others like it. Not to have fought would have been to surrender Europe and perhaps the world to a brutal and inhuman regime; fighting involved us in repeated slaughter of innocent people and of the military, many of whom were, in a sense, not responsible for their own involvement. One of the two memorable remarks which have persisted in my mind from the many sermons to which I have listened in my day, was one made by Dean Sperry of the Harvard Theological School at a school service in Andover. "When one is young," he said, "one's decisions are between black and white. When one grows older, they are between various shades of gray." (The other remark was one of old Dean Faunce of Brown, "Some people are so broad they're flat.")

One of the RAF Officers in the room where I worked was a short, stocky Flight Lieutenant, bald, save for a fringe of red hair and with slightly protuberant eyes of a bright blue. He was John Williams, universally known as "Pug." Shortly after my arrival there, he looked over at me one morning and said in a crisp, challenging manner characteristic of him: "Well, Chase, what do you think of the English?"

Combining candor and courtesy, I replied: "I like them next best to my own people."

"You don't have to be polite to me," snapped Pug. "I'm Welsh."

In the short months left before his tragic death, Pug and I became close friends. We were both teachers in civilian life, he of History. He talked much of his family, especially of his small son David, of whom he was immensely proud. I am happy to write that had he lived, Pug would have had continued reason for that pride, for David has become a very fine and thoughtful young man, a credit to his mother who had the sad duty of rearing a fatherless son.

Pug and I rather unsettled the more staid English by our high spirits. We relieved really hard and long hours of work with jokes and song. I can still, after more than thirty years, recall his voice raised in "I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby" and "Cuddle Up a Little Closer, Baby Mine." Sometimes, in the noon break for lunch, we would walk over to Hyde Park to hear a concert by one of the guards' bands. On Sundays, we developed a happy ritual. I would invite him and one or two other of the RAF officers to lunch with me at the enormous American Mess at Grosvenor House, where they never ceased to marvel at the assembly line efficiency and the abundance and richness of the food. Then, in the evening, they would take me for supper to King George's Club for RAF officers which served an excellent cold meal.

Mention of Grosvenor House prompts me to recall an exceedingly amusing incident there. In typical American fashion, music with meals was provided by a record player amplified by a public address system. One noontime, as the vast ballroom was filled with officers eating lunch or waiting in line to be served, the strains of "The Star Spangled Banner" began. Everyone leapt to attention casting curious glances at the entrance in the expectation that General Eisenhower or President Roosevelt would appear. The record played to its end, no exalted personage materialized, people sat down and the buzz of conversation resumed. There was the scratch of the needle and "The Star Spangled Banner" again blared forth Again men stood at attention until the anthem ended. We were spared a third interruption; someone discovered that the British civilian employed as a disk-jockey had failed to recognize the song for what it was and, supposing it merely a popular American piece, had played it twice for good measure.

There is a long standing American legend that the pace of work in British offices is much more leisurely than that in our own. AI3C1 gave the lie to this tradition. Work began at nine and continued until seven in the evening. There were no long, leisurely breaks for elevenses and tea; we merely had mugs of tea at our desks. An hour was allowed for lunch, but only because it was impossible to get to service messes, eat and return in less time. We were allowed one day off a week; I chose to take mine in mid-week (Wednesday, as I recall), a choice which was to have fateful consequences. As I have said, the wing commander was a high pressure worker himself and he drove us equally hard. For the first time since my induction into the service, I found myself working all-out at a job which I felt to be of real and immediate importance.

My definite assignment to London made it necessary for me to find digs in the city. Once more my good fortune intervened, I first went to the billeting officer for U.S. Forces. His offering was a room which was remarkable for dinginess and gloom, even by wartime London standards. At someone's suggestion, I consulted the English-Speaking Union. The pleasant woman there said at once: "Yes, we have a room, if you don't mind being out of the center of London. It is with Mrs. Hunter, on the Old Brompton Road, near Earl's Court." " Mrs. Hunter," she added, "is a remarkable woman."

So I took the underground to Earl's Court and shortly located the block of flats at the address given me. I rang the bell, and a striking looking woman came to the door. Not tall, but massive in figure, she had a leonine head of greying hair and dark eyes as magnificent as any I have ever seen. Her accent was impeccably "U" and her manners in the best tradition of upper class coolness.

I was offered a spacious, high-posted room, directly opposite bath and toilet, rather dark, but handsomely furnished. The far from modest rent included breakfast, which I was to eat with Mr. Hunter. She added weightily: "We do not converse at breakfast," a statement which Mr. Hunter soon proved false.

I accepted the terms at once and so began another friendship rich in every sort of benefit for me. It lasted until Ysabel Hunter's death in 1973.

As Dorothy Stott was one of the kindest women I have know, so Ysabel was one of the most interesting and remarkable. She had been born at Westacre in Norfolk in the last years of Victoria's reign. Her family, the Birkbecks, were wealthy and in Barclay's Bank. Women's libbers will shudder to hear that her father, when asked how many children he had, gave merely the number of his sons, feeling that his daughters quite literally did not count. The family had everything that wealth and social position could confer in those opulent days. The sons, when boys, played with the sons of George V when the Royal Family was at nearby Sandringham. (I had regarded this statement by Ysabel with a certain skepticism until recently, when I read in a biography of George V a reference to close relations between Edward VII and the family at Westacre.) And the latter monarch had come to the Birkbeck hunting lodge on Loch Home. (This is my recollection of the spelling of the name; I cannot find it on any map available to me, but it was near the Kyle of Loch Alsh.)

But Ysabel's sharp mind and enterprising spirit rebelled at the tedious life of a proper miss in Victorian county society and somehow, I never learned how, she managed to get away to London to study art. For years her income from the family was limited to her dress allowance. Soon the First World War began and she went off to France as an ambulance driver. There was typical wartime romance with an American officer, who emerged from her rather vague hints as no great credit to us. Her intrepid services won her the Croix de Guerre. Later in a series of moves which were never clear to me, she went first to Rumania and then to Russia, in time to witness the October Revolution.

When she came down to breakfast the morning after her return to England, full of stories of her perilous journeys, the family had no ear for her, being entirely involved in a discussion of the setter bitch's latest litter. Accordingly, she was happy to accept the escape offered by an invitation to visit friends in Egypt. On the P&O liner going out, she met Neil Hunter, a handsome young officer in the British Civil Service. A steamship romance resulted in a wedding at Khartoum and some years of residence in the Sudan, where, in her words, "she hunted lions and taught the Arabs to cook."

The Hunters returned to England for one of Neil's regular leaves. Suddenly he disappeared, and the first news Ysabel had from him was a postcard from Moscow. He had read one of the numerous books of the period laudatory of the Soviet experiment and had gone to Moscow to see it for himself. He returned a convinced Communist and there was a separation. As a good Communist, he felt compelled to take a mistress, and did so, not very enthusiastically. Entertaining doubts as to her taste, he asked Ysabel to choose the curtains for his illicit ménage, and according to her, she did so. By all this divagation, he forfeited his Civil Service position.

I do not know just how long this stage lasted, but the next information which I have shows the two Hunters reunited and running a camp for Spanish refugee children from the Civil War. Then came the Second World War, in which each found a place: Mr. Hunter worked at the Woolich Arsenal and Ysabel began serving as a "Light Rescue Worker," somewhat of a meiosis, for the work consisted in dragging victims from the ruins of bombing raids and giving them First Aid. Such were their occupations when I came to live in their flat in the spring of 1944.

Despite Ysabel's grim warning against conversational élan at the breakfast table, no problem arose. She herself never appeared, preferring breakfast in bed, and Mr. Hunter proved a wholly charming companion. He was still a handsome man, slender, with a still unlined boyish face and abundant slicked down hair of the mousy stage between blonde and grey. I was sorry that I did not get to know him better. I rarely saw him after breakfast, as he went immediately to work and seldom returned until late in the evening. He and Ysabel had settled down to live separate lives of mutual tolerance. They occupied separate bedrooms, with mine as a sort of buffer state between them. There were never any vulgar quarrels, but on the rare Sunday lunches which I shared with them there was some brilliant verbal fencing. A fellow American officer whom I once invited there upon Ysabel's insistence, compared the performance to a particularly lively tennis match.

It will occur to the reader that I have far more to say of Dorothy Stott and Ysabel Hunter than of their husbands. For one thing, I naturally saw less of the husbands, whose work took them away for the greater part of the day. Furthermore, Verney Stott, though always courteous, was very reserved, and I suspected, perhaps quite wrongly, that he entertained a basic dislike for Americans. In the case of the Hunters, Ysabel's tremendous and dominant personality insured that she should gain and hold the major share of one's attention.

The third member of the family, Neil, Jr. was just beginning service in the RAF. I saw him seldom at that time, but since the war have come to know him and like him well.

And I must by no means forget Harriet, the maid of all work, a little cockney with a tiny, bird-like, twittering voice, whom Ysabel, with her lifelong devotion to saving stray sheep, had taken in after Harriet had been in jail for stealing. Harriet was a character straight out of Dickens, whose sayings and exploits did much to enliven my stay with the Hunters. She and Ysabel quarreled frequently. I always knew when one of these disagreements had taken place because there would be a sound of smashing crockery from the scullery where Harriet was relieving her anger by breaking any dishes that came to hand.

Harriet took a great fancy to me and did many small kindnesses to smooth my days. At one time, Ysabel picked up a young woman almost literally off the streets and gave her shelter for a time in the flat. On one of my days off, as I was writing letters in my room, the damsel kept parading up and down the corridor outside and coming in from time to time on the most flimsy excuses. Eventually, I beat a retreat. Ysabel, coming in, asked Harriet where I was. "E's gone to the office," said she, "and quite right, too."

An American civilian had a room with us later in the spring. The V1s had begun to fall, and London was a perilous city, more so than was divulged until after the war. Now one of the peculiarities of the British reaction to bombing was that, with rare exceptions, the upper classes did not take refuge in the public shelters or the underground. Either they had shelters, usually very insufficient, in their own homes, or they faced the danger. (One of the few amusing incidents was that when a bomb neatly sheared off the outer wall of a block of flats and left one of the tenants cruelly exposed to the world in his bathtub, which teetered on the edge of the abyss.) The American failed to return one night, and we were all seriously alarmed, for casualties were very heavy at that time. However, he appeared the next morning, disheveled and unshaven, and confessed to having spent the night in a public shelter. Thenceforth, Harriet had nothing but contempt for him. During breakfast the next day when we were all huddling into a corner of the kitchen as a heavy wave of bombs threatened to blast the window in, she summed up her opinion of my countryman: "E's timid, 'e is."

Despite Harriet's somewhat dry and mummified appearance, there was more life in her than one would suppose. She acquired a gentleman friend, for whom she used to go and cook dinner on her day off. Unfortunately, the gentleman had a wife, who appeared one day and staged a dramatic scene of protest to poor Ysabel. The latter and the rest of us were both puzzled and amused that the gravamen of the wronged woman's complaint was not her husband's infidelity but the fact that he and Harriet consumed the food prepared by the latter and gave her none.

My departure for Paris in September was the occasion for a dramatic scene. Shortly before, Mrs. Hunter had wagered that she could lend savor to that blandest of English dishes, vegetable marrow and went on to prepare for me a casserole which was, indeed, most savory. But Harriet was consumed with jealousy. On the day that I departed she asserted that I did so because Ysabel had tried to poison me. As I drove off in the jeep for the airfield, she wept and murmured: "E was quite clean." I am thinking of having these words inscribed upon my tombstone.

Ysabel used to tell a story of an incident in our first acquaintance of which I have no recollection and which I find hard to credit. According to her, she invited me to a Sunday lunch with her and Mr. Hunter, whereupon I replied, no doubt in my best Boston accent: "Thank you very much, but I do not believe we know one another well enough yet." I cannot believe that I can have been so rude. However, it had a most beneficial effect. I have discovered that nothing starts one off so well with the English upper classes as a blunt snub. I suppose that they are so used to Americans who fawn upon them that a snobbish American is rather a refreshing phenomenon, whom they accept with good sportsmanship as one determined to stand toe to toe with them.

If I did snub her thus --- and I can see no reason for her to invent the story --- it was because I had come to London determined not to become so much a member of another family as was the case with the Stotts. This was in no way a sign of less gratitude and affection toward them; it was simply that I had found myself once more bound by a sense of responsibility to account for my actions and my time, even as I had been to my close-knit family. The taste of freedom in Washington and Alliance had been sweet. This would account for my rejection of Ysabel's kindness. But apparently I can never long refuse a proffered welcome, and I was soon as much a part of the Hunter ménage as I had been of the Stotts'.

If I may digress for a moment, there is a recurrent pattern in my life of a horror of being trapped inescapably in any situation or relationship. Time and again, I have almost panicked when I felt that escape was precluded --- in the Spanish Civil War; as Ysabel's cottage in the Highlands, when a storm bade fair to block my departure; and just recently when I feared that a series of Italian strikes threatened to confine me to Florence for an uncertain period. Yet no one was ever more tenacious of, and devoted to, old friendships, which I am notoriously slow to form. Perhaps these two characteristics are just another sample of that dichotomy between my Saxon and my Celtic inheritance, the former desiring firm certainties, the latter having a wild bird's horror of the cage.

It was the great tragedy of Ysabel's life that she was never able to discern the narrow line which divides benevolence from bossiness. Even in my relatively brief occupancy of her flat I saw her repeat the same pattern of so overwhelming the object of her goodwill or affection that she alienated him. For this reason, it was perhaps well that I early and firmly asserted my independence. She soon began to plan excursions for my days off, and though they were uniformly delightful, and indeed, a rare privilege because of her vast knowledge of London and her love for that imperial city, then in its finest hour. I was, however, careful periodically to refuse an invitation, like one who annually bars a road to assert and maintain its private character.

The memory of those Wednesdays is one of my happiest ---mostly of shared laughter, occasionally of sadness. let me briefly mention a few of them. One day Ysabel took me to Eton for lunch at the home of a nephew who was a Lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards. There was a wife and small children and a soldier servant waiting upon the luncheon table. Afterwards, we went over to Eton College and they showed me the names of three or four generations of their family carved, along with thousands of others in the age-blackened oak paneling. But the thing which impressed me most was the Memorial Cloister, with column upon column of names of Eton's dead in the First World War, that sanguinary first act in the suicide of the West.

Another week, we went for tea with a family of cockney hucksters in Lambeth, one of the most heavily bombed areas of London, where Ysabel did her rescue work.

She was very eager that we go and have dinner at the Prospect of Whitby, a famous old pub on the banks of the Thames down in the old city. Unfortunately, it had become fashionable, and she declared that the old spirit was gone out of it. Undaunted, she led me to another pub in Rotherhithe on the Southwark bank of the river. We made our way through narrow streets, lined with bombed-out warehouses. The perfume of burned spices, once stored in some of them, still filled the air. This pub was the real thing. We had a good cold supper and then joined the "regulars" in a singsong to an out-of-tune piano. The chorus made up in heartiness for what it lacked in tonal accuracy.

One of our most delightful expeditions was to visit a friend of Ysabel's who lived with her father in a charming old vicarage in Kent. It was a superb May day, and Kent is one of the fairest of the English counties. We took a long walk, passing through a wood where the earth was carpeted with the intense color of bluebells. The son of the farmer who owned the wood had died, I was told, as a seaman on a British submarine in Far Eastern seas, half a world away from this enchanting spot, through which he must often have passed in his boyhood.

The vicar's church had a Saxon door, said by some to bear the marks of Norsemen's axes. The vicarage itself was a lovely 18th century house, whose beautiful staircase had had all the spokes of its banister broken out by slum children evacuated there from London during the bombing. The vicar and his daughter were far too gentle to reprove them, fearing lest reproof make them feel unwanted. We had tea in the dining room, where long French windows opened upon an English lawn whence the goats which they were keeping as a part of the war effort strolled in and partook of sandwiches with us.

There is a footnote to this story. Sometime later, Ysabel took the American civilian whom I have mentioned to spend a weekend at the Vicarage. (Because I worked on Sundays, I could not get away for a weekend.) When I next saw her on Monday, I asked: "How did it go?"

"It was not a success," she replied shortly. I waited, certain that there was more to come. After a pause, she explained: "He came down to breakfast in his shirt-sleeves." No wonder that the intricacies of the U code of etiquette sometimes baffle Americans: goats in the dining room for tea, yes; shirt-sleeves at breakfast, no.

It must have seemed to him that he could do nothing right; I, nothing wrong. Bathing in wartime London was a solemn business. Because of fuel shortages, hot water was rationed and one might draw no more than a few inches --- six, I believe --- in the tub. At the flat, there was a schedule for morning baths, and my fellow countryman one day preempted my time and stayed beyond the allotted period. Ysabel, indignant on my behalf, became the British lioness aroused, charged to the door, and ordered him out in peremptory tones.

Many an American in those days wrestled in vain to master the secret of the old British water-closets with their overhead tank and dependent chain. Unless the latter were given a peculiar short, sharp tug, there followed only a brief spurt of water, which ceased at once. One evening, when both Ysabel and I had gone to bed, we heard the other American struggling with the device in the lavatory just across from our rooms. We heard him return to his own, and then a continuing sound of falling water, obviously descending on the floor. I got up in my pajamas and went to investigate, followed almost at once by Ysabel in her dressing gown, armed with mop and pail. Something had blocked the normal outlet and had halted the mechanism which should have checked the in-flow. I climbed up on the seat and groped blindly in the tank, while Ysabel mopped feverishly below. Suddenly, I was reminded of the seven maids with seven mops in The Walrus and the Carpenter which I proceeded to quote, reducing both of us to hysterical laughter, in the midst of which I somehow chanced to turn the right screw and the flood subsided.

As we all know, the powers of coincidence are strange and mighty. Some fifteen years later a small boy turned up in my Andover classroom who bore the same surname as Mr. J. --- not an uncommon one. I do not now recall how I came to ask the pertinent question, but he turned out to be the son of my fellow lodger. So, at the boy's Commencement, we met again and recalled our brief companionship in Mrs. Hunter's flat.

Perhaps the most hilarious of our outings took place at the height of the V1 bombings. We were both feeling the strain of that harassment, which went on almost without surcease, day and night. Furthermore, our flat lay directly beneath the path followed by incoming bombs. So, one Wednesday morning, Ysabel said: "We need to get out of London to some quiet peaceful spot. I suggest that we take the bus to Wimbledon and go for a walk on the Common." So, we set out that afternoon, accompanied by the dog, a poor, cowering, timorous mongrel which Ysabel had found bereft of home and master after a bombing incident. In characteristic fashion, she had brought it home with her.

Just as we descended from the bus in the center of Wimbledon, the alert went, signaling a new flight of V1's. We climbed the hill to the Common and began our walk across it, failing to realize that Wimbledon lay directly beneath Buzz Bomb Alley, the popular name for the route followed by the bombs on their flight from northern France to London. Bomb after bomb flew over us and we could hear their explosions in the distance, though none fell near us. We trudged on, then after a time, Ysabel said: "There is a pretty little tea house on the edge of the Common where we can have a quiet tea."

Off we set and found the tea house, pretty, indeed, but perhaps a little too consciously quaint. We had scarcely seated ourselves at an out-door table in the courtyard when a troop of uniformed Home Guard came in carrying a number of machine guns. These they proceeded to set up all around us in proper tactical positions for a practice defense of the tea house. Neither we nor they paid the other the slightest heed; they went on with their maneuvers, we with our tea, quite undisturbed. But as I remarked, as a project for getting away from the war, the expedition was a distinct failure.