Our Canary Islands Adventure E-Book

Warren Scolar

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 334

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Where to go? We canvassed the world with an open mind. No place was too distant, no people too strange, so long as certain conditions could be met. First, we decided to eliminate climate as a living complication. Year-round warmth would mean no coats or woolens or door-closing problems; low rainfall would mean no rainwear. Second, living costs would have to be a third or half of what they'd been at home. Third, we should be within twenty-four hours of first-class medical care. Fourth, we should at least have access to some well-educated and well- traveled people. Fifth, we'd like to be able to swim every day in the year. Sixth, we should learn a permanently useful foreign language. Seventh, and most important, the tempo of life should be easygoing. What would be perfect, we decided, was a beach- side cottage on the outskirts of a peaceful subtropical (but arid) village. Did such a Utopia exist? To make a selection, we collected three years' worth of National Geographic and Holiday magazines. Finally, we found our paradise: The Canary Islands!

Leseprobe

Table Of Contents

Our Canary Islands Adventure

Prologue

Getting trapped

Getting sprung

Getting bananafied

Getting going

Epilogue

Copyright

Our Canary Islands Adventure

There are few destinations as underrated and maligned as the Canary Islands. My first real encounter, working in a Canary Island resort, wasn't the best introduction to the islands' scenic and cultural wealth. But on escaping I found dramatic mountains, quaint pueblos and charming seaside villages. I was enamoured with the underdog archipelago and moved there soon afterwards. For years I explored every island and was wowed – and wooed – over and over. On returning for this book I fell in love with the islands again. And when you hike through Tenerife's lava fields, drive Gran Canaria's central mountains or enjoy a plate of cheese in a hilltop pueblo, I suspect you might fall in love too.

Prologue

I have been asked by other members of my family to write my true impression of these remarkable Americans, now that their adventure on our island is at an end. My words may be too few to do justice to the diverse facets of their personalities, and may seem prejudiced by affection, but even so I shall be as accurate and sincere as I can. It is only natural that the Walters of our Angostura Valley would be somewhat different from the Walters of Haddonfield, New Jersey. To scout the world for a different attitude toward life, as distinct from a tourist's-eye view of the superficial sights, they threw overboard many prejudgements and unburdened themselves of much of the ritual of American living. They lived among us, quite stripped of the many material comforts and conveniences and diversions to which, I understand, most Americans are accustomed. It is significant that they accepted this life wearing not the crown of sacrifice nor the lorgnettes of curiosity, but the cap of inquiry and humility. We came to realize that such adjustment is not easy, particularly when we learned how different from our own was the Walters' concept of life. Many things important to them have no part in our scheme, and other things which were of little consequence to them are to us very dear. One important difference, for which we had been prepared by movies, novels and notorious statistics, did not materialize. Dick and Katie Walter are exceptionally close in their family life. As a couple they are fraternally united. It is not necessary for them to speak of this. To us, who know the signs so well, it is apparent in every act and gesture. The relationship between parents and children, however, is for us a new experience. Whereas our children grow as a group in the bosom of the family, Barry, Brian, Karen and Craig Walter grow as distinct individuals. And whereas we guide our children largely by example and tradition, Dick and Katie add to their example a deliberate effort to shape each child's social personality, with- out, it seems, interfering with the uncommon originality of each one's character. Katie's cheery "adios" has become as familiar as guitar music to Angostura dwellers as she passes on her way to market or school or to visit a friend. She is active, attractive and overflows with warmth and sympathetic understanding. She makes an ideal match for her husband, who is a quiet man of gentle manners, earnest and stable yet full of kindness and facile with new ideas and observations. By any light, he is what we call "una buena persona" Both Katie and Dick have brightened our gatherings with their wonderful sense of humour. On every occasion which has joined us over a cup of fellowship I have found that whatever the subject at hand a joke or an anecdote told by either of them carries in addition to- its entertainment and amusement a special flavour of charm and good taste. For if in Dick we have a weaver of words, we have also in him a musician or an artist when the moment calls for it. And he has in his wife a marvellous collaborator to recall every epoch of old times in song or story gay ones for the happier moments of their lives, sorrowful or stirring ones intense with the pathos of war which was for both an authentic reality so closely lived. This American family has passed by our little Spanish homeland and captivated us. What can I say that would be free from the fondness and affection they have inspired in us? I like to recall the first time I saw them. We were in the summer house of our farm in the Angostura when they came in at about seven in the evening. We Canaries are generally conservative in regard to strangers, so in the polite phrases of first meeting we did not imagine that within thirty minutes Katie and Dick would be "as one" with us in an impromptu and authentic fiesta with its full measure of singing and laughing and storytelling. This polite phrasing, or shall we say "etiquette," which so often disturbs or postpones an honest meeting of minds, is interpreted by the Walters in a unique way. They use a form of greeting which combines courtesy and familiarity in a manner that encourages everyone to act as he is, not as he pretends to be. This takes an open, merry and sane disposition which can melt the ice and light the fire of amiable sincerity. Though the Walters are young they are well acquainted with the values of life, and possessed of tremendous enthusiasm. An eagerness to know the world and its people without trying to make them over. A willingness to see wisdom in the beliefs and habits and attitudes of others. I see them in continuous contact with the reality of the moment, living for that moment without trying to exact from it more than it can reasonably offer. We are proud to have people such as these for our friends. They have made a lasting impression on the lives of all of us and will always hold a place of honour in our memories.

Getting trapped

When Katie and I married in Rheims in May of 1945, we promised each other we'd never let living problems kill the sparkle of our champagne wedding. Nine anniversaries, four houses and four children later we took each other up on that promise and ran off for a change of pace in the Canary Islands. The bright day we said our "I do's" to the mayor of the champagne capital, the future looked powerfully good. The Nazi brass had just signed the unconditional surrender in a schoolhouse a few blocks away. Both Katie and I had survived six campaigns and over eight hundred days in combat zones without a purple heart. We'd managed to save a few thousand dollars of army pay. We had a go-ahead from General Ike for our two war theatre marriages a legal one in France, whose laws were U.S.-approved, and a religious one in Germany, where our chaplain and friends were waiting. We were soon to honeymoon back along the still-exultant liberation route in a captured Ford V-8. Then it was just a matter of time and the point system before we'd be back in the wonderland of milk shakes and hamburgers, gadgets and friends and life-as-you- like it. Katie, to my discomfort, labelled herself as the Bargain Bride. I had revealed the cost of the marriage license, with a groom's fumbling intuition, as an aisle-table special, and she immediately tied this in with my pre-war experience writing “Canary Islands Adventures” about bargains at Gimbels and Macy's department stores in New York. The cobwebby 1937 vintage champagne for my bachelor's dinner (attended by I-don't-know-how-many females) was only $2 a bottle even though the wily Monsieurs Pommery had bosomed it in a sub-sub basement while lying themselves cross-eyed to Herr Goering's procurement agents.

Two enormous bouquets came to less than a dollar. Transportation cost nothing at all, what with a hitch-hike for the wedding party in bucket-seated cargo planes from Munich to Rheims and back. This last episode, for one frightful moment, didn't seem like too much of a bargain. The rest of the party had discreetly gone off in another plane, leaving us newly-wed with a boy wonder who was his own copilot, navigator, radio operator and crew chief and perhaps due to make colonel before the month was up. When he came to the abandoned Heidelberg-to-Munich superhighway he thought he'd have some fun with us. He swooped down to power line level and proceeded to skim the highway at two hundred miles an hour. When he came to a bomb crater he artfully dodged it. Where a bridge was out he took the detour. Suddenly we banked around a mountain and came face-to-mouth with a tunnel. "He wouldn't!" shrieked Katie, throwing her arms around my big, strong, quivering frame. "He can't." I said, with my masterful studied casualness. He didn't, of course, but it was only the conscientious riveting or welding or strut-stringing of some- body's mother-in-law in Seattle or Los Angeles or somewhere that squeezed us up the face of that tunnelle Bavarian mountain. Our wayward paths had first passed at New York's Hotel Pierre more than three years before the wedding. Governor Dewey had just given our specially-formed evacuation hospital unit a rousing send-off to the coming army manoeuvre in North Carolina, and the McLanes, the Dominicks, the Oyster Bay Roosevelts and other generous Roosevelt Hospital trustees had just treated us to a dinner the like of which we were not to taste for a long, long time. The music started up. Newly sworn-in officers, self-consciously proud in Saks Fifth Avenue uniforms began to dance with wives and nurses. Most of us, due to our modest ages and experience, were lieutenants. Those in their early thirties were captains. Still older men, known for their outstanding abilities in surgery, medicine or dentistry, were majors or lieutenant colonels. I don't know just what qualified me most for the posts of adjutant, historian, civil affairs and what-not officer. Perhaps my familiarity with writing, public relations and foreign languages. Perhaps my two years reserve officer's training in the U.S. Navy, But I also had worked for some months in the psychopathic section of a county hospital, wrestling with manic-depressives and reasoning with paranoids. It may have been this experience more than any which convinced the authorities that I could grapple with army administration. As the dancers whirled by my table I was deep in conversation with Mr. Gayer Dominick. Suddenly I saw her. Just a fleeting look, the twinkle of an eye, the sparkle of a round and friendly face, the lilt of a laugh that threw me three sentences behind the great man who was speaking to me. His eyes followed mine, he smiled gently and paused for a moment before going on. I think he knew something was about to happen. It happened at a welcome dance at North Carolina's Rocking- ham Country Club. The nurses were getting a good rush, in which the oh-so-smooth boys from the cotton belt were making us Northeners look pretty stupid. Katie was radiant, and dancing with fantastic speed and agility. The cotton boys cut in on each other with merciless frequency, disappearing temporarily for rest and refreshment while the lady whirled on and on. I worked up a head of steam and charged in. "You must be exhausted. . ." I began. "Cut, please!" came a voice from somewhere. A few minutes later I tried again. Same fate. The third time I had my back up. "Got to have fresh air," I grunted, propelling her firmly and purposefully out of the glare and into the night. We walked out on the fairway and down to the water hazard. "Let's stick our feet in," she said, and we did. Talk flowed naturally, as if we had known each other all along. We walked barefoot around the green, letting the thick, luxuriant grass find its way between our toes. Then we heard one of those cotton voices hooting from the clubhouse veranda. Katie cocked an eye at me. "Massah's voice," she said, "the man who brought me." I fast-talked her into a couple of dances in a sand trap then surrendered her to the pack. We saw little of each other in the next two months before we moved overseas. Katie was busy nursing the poison-ivy and snake-bite casualties from the stick war between the Blues and the Reds. I split my time between trying to streamline garrison paper work procedures to the realities of tent life in a cornfield, and keeping out of the way of an outspoken Texas master sergeant who knew ten times more about army regulations and wasn't going to let me forget it. We had one date in Jacksonville when the outfit was briefly staying at Camp Blanding, a few hours together on the troop train that took three days to get through Georgia, then at last the ten nights in silent, blackened convoy through the tense submarine lanes of the North Atlantic. We learned a lot about each other, standing by the rail on those bitter nights. Often alone, despite the 3000 passengers on a ship built for 500, and heavily over coate and life-jacketed, we watched huge forms hulk out of the murk, change course and slip away to nothingness. We talked tirelessly of many things, two voices without visible source, and sometimes her infectious laugh would lift the shroud and make my worry seem very silly indeed. She sang songs, dozens of them, and' all the way through. New war songs like Bless 'Em All and I've Got a Six- pence she learned almost instantly from the British ack-ack gunners on board and sang with such verve and gusto that it almost seemed fun to be going to war. The mess sergeant who later baked goodies for our wedding reception, an astute Brooklynite named Paul Pearl, likes to tell how he was bamboozled on that boat. He was alone on night baking duty just a few hours out of New York, when on the door of the galley, deep in the bowels of the ship, he heard an urgent knocking. Turned out to be a GI he'd never seen before. "Where are the sandwiches for the guards?" demanded the stranger. "Nobody told me about any sandwiches for the guards," countered Pearl in the time-honour GI manner. "Well f'crissake are you going let the poor guys starve out there on the cold deck all night! " "But nobody. . ." "Nobody nobody. Just wait til you pull guard out there, crissake!" As this is an ever-present possibility, if not probability, in every soldier's life, Pearl weakened. "How many guards are there?" he asked wearily. "Twenty," said the stranger. "With two apiece, that's forty sandwiches every night. And no skimping on the meat or cheese or jam," he added, "make 'em thick" "Okay," said Pearl. He couldn't find the required sandwich materials among the troop rations, so had to borrow what he needed from the stores reserved for the Dutch crew. He worked feverishly taking only a few moments now and then to check on his ovens, and when he handed over the forty whopping sandwiches the stranger muttered and disappeared. Some officer goofed off on the job again, Pearl thought angrily to himself as he got back to his baking. Just like 'em to order twenty enlisted men out to the lousy deck all night without food! It gave him a feeling of satisfaction, however, to think that his efforts would mean so much to these twenty men on their many cold nights at sea. After the tenth night and four hundredth sandwich delivered to the same surly stranger, Pearl was enjoying a morning smoke on deck when the colonel commanding troops stopped beside him. "How's it going, Sergeant?" the colonel asked pleasantly. Here's my chance, thought Pearl. "Well fine, Sir, but it takes a lot of time from my baking to make sandwiches for all those guards." "What guards, Sergeant?" asked the colonel with a strange look. "There are no guards on this ship!" Pearl's mind plunged into turmoil. He ran below to confirm the awful truth. Sure enough, the hungriest soldiers, or the ones who couldn't stomach the regular daytime fare, had been paying a dollar apiece for midnight sandwiches. But that was the day we debarked in Scotland, and in the confusion the wealthy stranger was never found. It took a month at Oxford to equip and process the outfit for the North African invasion. This meant I was too busy and Katie not busy enough. We managed a week end in blitzed, blacked-out London, where I discovered Katie's hunger for new sights and sounds, and on the train we met the Scottish writer Sir Brian Fairfax-Lucy and his effervescent wife. They asked us to visit them in their Cotswold cottage. In the face of those early gas and travel restrictions, covering the thirty miles seemed quite out of the question. But I said we'd try, and I should have known better. The following Sunday the executive officer asked me to make arrangements to pick up one of our men who was being discharged from a hospital about fifty miles away. The route lay right through our friends' village. I quickly made sure that none of our regular drivers felt like making the trip that rainy afternoon, picked up an overjoyed and imprisoned Katie, and off we went in the outfit's only jeep. For those few delicious hours of talking, reading and listening to records before the Fairfax-Lucys' log fire, we paid dearly. It was so late when we picked up our man that we had to drive all the way back in total blackout. A dread chore under the best of conditions, this was made triply hard by (1) the wind and rain driving into our open jeep, (2) strange roads with no signs, (3) invasion-wary inhabitants who refused to give any directions or even tell us which road we were on or which town we were in. My admiration for British security was matched only by that for Katie's uncomplaining fortitude. The man in the back seat was pretty good about it, too. All he said was something about having to go back to the hospital again after all this. We made it home somehow, but with our clothes drenched, our muscles paralysed with cold and tension, and with our owl eyes flapping from their sockets. The motor sergeant was relieved to get back his only jeep. But the commanding officer confined me to quarters for three days for taking a vehicle with- out a driver, a rule that stuck until I got the honeymoon car three years later. This much-abused jeep is now sitting on the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, and the corporal who should have driven it for me had to swim for his life to Gibraltar, somewhere in the blackness behind our troopship. Had that torpedo been fired a few minutes earlier it might have struck us, instead of the vehicle carrier, and silenced some of America's most influential war correspondents. On our ship, the Rmgitiki, were Ernie Pyle for Scripps-Howard, Merrill Muller for Newsweek, Will Lang for Time and Life, A. J. Liebling for the New Yorker, Gault MacGowan for the New York Sun, Ollie Stew- art for the Baltimore Afro- American, Robert Neville for Stars and Stripes and others. Ernie Pyle, bless his lovable hypochondriac soul, was overjoyed to find himself in the midst of forty of Manhattan's finest doctors none of them with a thing to do.

He promptly collapsed in his bunk and had a delicious time playing sick most of the way to Oran. I later took up. his invitation to slog in from our muddy Tafaroui tent hospital and take a bath in his hotel bathtub, one of the few in Oran. Katie, a real favourit of Ernie's, was also asked. But she felt that bathing in the same bathtub used might cause talk, so she used Joe Liebling's instead. Ernie dropped in on us several times as we advanced with the front. He asked me to proofread and fact-check a column he'd written about medical care. Katie told 1 him that when she tried to wash her feet in her steel helmet she was chagrined to find her feet were bigger than her head. He mentioned this in one of his columns. And when the clipping came from home Katie and I saw our names printed together for the first time. It gave me a nice warm feeling, particularly since the competition for her time was growing pretty hot between me and the artillery and other war correspondents and the highly-paid, highly- anxious air corps. This item later appeared in Ernie's book Here Is Your War. Another who staked my claim in print was Gault Mac Gowan. He brutally described Katie as a red-haired, freckle- faced ex-cheerleader who was now bringing cheer and a will to live to the first neuropsychiatric casualties of the U.S. forces. He wrote many more columns about the outfit's work and our courtship, and eventually got home to lecture about them. One of his lectures took him to Maplewood, New Jersey, where he told a few stories about Katie, never dreaming that her aunt and uncle were in the audience. When they identified them- selves afterwards, Gault shook his head sadly. "Pity I didn't know," he said, "I could easily have devoted the entire lecture to that girl!" It was after our almost disastrous retreat from Tunisia's Kasserine Pass when I realized how much Katie's welfare meant to me. We had been taking almost all of the casualties from the British First Army and the U.S. II Corps in the Faid-Gafsa- Feriana area, when on the afternoon of February 17, 1943, battered and burned U.S. tanks and half tracks began limping past us in inglorious retreat. Then the infantry dropped back and dug in machine guns all around us. We could hear the roar of the enemy offensive coming closer and closer through the pass as we evacuated every patient who could survive movement to a new unit in the rear. In the middle of the night we ourselves were ordered back. The fifty-three nurses went first, on the back of two ziton trucks. "There go the dollies! " some- one shouted, and as the groaning engines and the rattling tail gate chains of the unlighted trucks faded into the mountains I returned to my foxhole with a keen sense of worry. Trucks came for the rest of us at noon on the following day. The enemy had air superiority and was exploiting it by shooting up the road into Tebessa, the key town to our rear. No one knew if the girls had made it back safely. Or if they had, where they would be. No one even knew if Tebessa was to be defended. Our sixty-truck convoy somehow escaped notice, and a few miles to the rear of Tebessa we quickly picked another hog wallow in which to float our tents. Katie was still in coveralls, combat boots and steel helmet, when I found her some miles away. But not even in a Lord & Taylor evening gown has she ever looked so good to me. "Well!" she scolded, tipping back her helmet sunbonnet- fashion, "I was about to write you through the International Red Cross." After our next retreat to Souk Ahras I grabbed the first free hours from our hectic rat-race, walked her to- a hilltop in some pine wood and asked her to be my wife. We didn't tell anyone at first. Not until the victories of both Tunisia and Sicily were won. Katie threw an open-air announcement party on a dusty steppe and to our surprise no one was surprised. She showed off her pro-tern austerity ring- Arab soft silver, inscribed with mysterious passages from the Koran. Six months later this was replaced by the Rommel Diamond, a stone with a story stretching back several thousand years. The Rommel Diamond would never raise eyebrows at Tiffany's. Nor would it be cast in more than supporting role at the opening of the Metropolitan Opera.

But to me, and to New York Sun correspondent Gault MacGowan, it was a star of the first magnitude. I found it in a bazaar in Cairo, between bombers on a round-trip hitch-hike from Sicily. An Egyptian friend of long standing took me to see a jeweller who specialized in buying heirlooms from estates. So the story went, and I'm not interested in disproving it, that this blue-white stone was discovered in the tomb of one of the ancient queens of Luxor and became the property of an Egyptian pasha who sent it to Antwerp for re- cutting in the improved, modern manner. The jeweller bought it from the pasha's estate and was willing to turn it over to me at a figure which was fair but which far exceeded my ready cash. Moreover, it was evening and I had to fly to Malta at dawn the following morning. It was a beautiful stone. I wanted so badly for Katie to have it that I could almost taste it. Then I thought of Gault, then hammering out dispatches from a room in the old Shepherd's Hotel right there in Cairo. We ordered a gin fizz out on the open porch, and while crowds of dark Egyptians and pale colonials milled by in the soft evening air I told the story of the diamond. "This is what war correspondents are for," said Gault, and forthwith he pulled a crumpled blank check from his khaki shirt pocket and wrote it out for the sum I lacked, drawn on a Cairo bank where he knew he had insufficient funds to cover it. He raised his glass. "Let's call it the Rommel Diamond," he toasted, "for the German general who might have owned it, had he taken Cairo, and who' would certainly have separated you and Katie if he'd won out in Tunisia." We then toasted Lady Luck, asking that Gault's overdue Sun salary check would beat my jeweller to the bank. Miraculously, it did. Gault was later captured by the enemy in Normandy and released just in time to join us for a pre-wedding party in Germany. "This diamond," he pronounced with his unfailing flair for die dramatic, " is a symbol of love, good luck and changing times. From Luxor queen to Egyptian pasha. From the entrepreneur of the bazaar to a freckle-faced American cheer leader. This is the course of history!" While the fortunes of war were still contrary in Tunisia we began to plot a postwar trip, a good long leisurely ramble through half a dozen European countries. We daydreamed about living in a villa on the Riviera or on a subtropical island somewhere, free from the dangers and restrictions and tensions of war and wanned by the friendship and serenity of people who knew how to live. We pooled the pay we'd been saving since the North African landing, and! Katie, with the frontiers- woman's instinct for hiding money in the kitchen range, tucked this or that amount into envelopes marked "Italy" or "Spain" or whatever. This squirrelish instinct is usually a good introduction to a masked man. But in February 1943, shortly after Mr. Roosevelt and the Former Naval Person met in Casablanca, it turned to our advantage. I had just paid off the entire outfit for two months in Algerian francs, recovered most of it for transmittal in dollars to the U.S. and stuck the whole wad about $9o,ooo's worth of the cabbagy notes in the outfit's safe. A fresh rush of casualties, with everybody including officers carrying litters, and our vehicles going day and night to supply food and water and medical stocks, prevented me from delivering the $70,000 to Corp's Headquarters for conversion to dollars. Two-three- four more days passed. Each night, after collapsing exhausted into the blankets, I shuddered nervously to think what would happen if all that cash entrusted to me were stolen. On the sixth day I finally got to the Corps finance tent. The captain looked wide-eyed as I dumped huge clumps of bank notes on his field desk. "What you been doing with all that?" he demanded. "Sorry, Captain," I said, "I couldn't get away from the outfit. The Jerries have tied us in knots with new casualties." "I think you are going to thank the Jerries," he murmured strangely as he began counting the money. "How much you got here?" "Five million two hundred fifty thousand francs," I said. "Seventy thousand dollars." "No not seventy thousand," he said without looking up, "one-hundred-five thousand. Roosevelt and Churchill increased the value of the franc by 50 per cent, effective at midnight last night. Lieutenant, either you had a pipeline to Casablanca or you got horseshoes around your neck. By bringing this currency today, instead of yesterday or last week, you've picked up a profit of thirty-five thousand dollars." With our "kitchen range" hoard, Katie's and my share of this windfall was over $500. Currency brought other laughs and heartaches as we followed the Jerries up through Sicily, Italy, France and Ger- many. One heartache concerned the "worthless" Bank of France notes, printed on French machines by the Germans to pay their troops. After the fall of Tunisia, we had both Ger- man patients and German workers in our hospital. They knew they'd be sent to prison camps in America and that their enemy- printed currency would be worthless so in payment for small favours they gave it away wholesale to our GFs. These men, in turn, reportedly participated with this money in games of chance and asked me to convert their winnings to dollars to send home. "Sorry," I had to say, "General Eisenhower has declared Bank of France notes worthless." Months went by. The currency changed hands again and again. After a party in Sicily the big holders finally decided to rid their luggage of it for good. They built a huge bonfire and with hoarse shouts of delight hurled into the flames handful after handful of the worthless notes. "Here goes ten thousand!" called a sergeant. "Raise you twenty!" called Corporal Berinato, who had amassed 400,000 francs. And thus every last note went up in flames. Ten months later we invaded Southern France, and one of the first directives to reach us in this newly-liberated land declared all Bank of France notes legal at fifty francs to the dollar. I broke the news first to Berinato. He took it like a soldier, staring at me in stunned disbelief, his poker face hardly twitching. I left him, and returning later saw him still riveted to the spot. The approach of V-E Day was not recognized by the stub- born enemy. Our ward tents continued to be filled with wounded Germans, as well as Russians and GFs who were dying from a drink of guided missile fuel. Our camp had been buzzed twenty-six of April's thirty nights by a lone Luftwaffe plane we called Bedcheck Charlie. In the last raid of the war four of us were sitting in the semi blackness of Katie's wall tent when we heard the pulsating thrum of Bedcheck's plane coming low over the rear of the camp. We lunged from the tent just in time to see an American truck convoy headed for the front with all lights ablaze. It was a clay pigeon set-up for Bedcheck. "Douse your lights!" someone shouted with that futile impulse you get at a horror movie. The trucks groaned on. Bedcheck's guns chattered. Tracers streaked across our tent tops and swept the convoy from end to end. Two trucks caught fire, and in the flare of an exploding gas tank we could see the grotesquely twisted silhouettes of men about to leap. "Oh no!" murmured Katie, "a truckload of men!" Bedcheck circled once more, pumped some more tracers into the trucks, some of which had now zigzagged driver less off the road or into each other, and then he was gone. Our receiving teams were already on the job when I arrived, separating the dead from the living. Some were replacements straight from home, heading for the front that no longer needed them. A few days later we were married, and the world took on a brighter glow. Many years before meeting me, Katie had promised herself a white wedding. So with confidence in ultimate Allied victory (and in me) she wrote home for a wedding gown and brides- maid's gown even before the war was won. She and tent mat Ayrol Decker measured each other with a steel tape, the kind used to stake out camp sites and measure lumber for latrine boxes, then mailed home a list of figures and do's and don'ts. Back through the chain of APO's came the dresses. Katie's in ivory satin with a sweetheart neck. Ayrol's in aqua nylon net with a draped jersey top. Both had short trains. The girls tried them on and found they fitted perfectly. Ayrol was so excited about the feminine-feel of hers that it took some stern persuasion to get her back to coveralls and her two tentfulls of patients. Somehow the two gowns survived mud and dust and hurried trucking until victory brought them into their own. This frippery, of course, was for our second wedding. Not the legal ceremony in Rheims, but the religious one in Landsberg, Germany. "And," said Ayrol looking me straight in the eye, "that's the one that counts" We found a dandy little vinecovered church on the River Lech, just a gunshot from the prison where Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle). The Lutheran rector agreed to let our Episcopal chaplain conduct services. One of our noncoms found he could make the organ speak our language. Some Quartermaster candles were trundled out to make up for lack of electricity. A colonel from Seventh Army Intelligence promised to furnish flowers. Another, from Ordnance, would bring the captured honeymoon car. A little old printer on a little crooked street found enough austerity paper to print announcements to be sent to the States. Our Colonel, Katie's pro-tern father for three years, agreed to give the bride away. At his reception a bridegroom usually has nothing to do but shake hands, eat and get away as fast as possible. But as the current mess officer, I was smack in the middle. We had moved from tents into the bomb-damaged buildings of an air base, but we still had to use our field cooking equipment. Naturally there was nothing to buy from German stores.