Germany

Dolph's Letter #79

Dear Sweetheart -

Still snarled in the clutches of this repple depple system. Moved again I quite some distance; also away from my division. What a job it is to get back to the outfit.

Well honey I was in Nuremberg. I have seen villages, towns + cities which have taken a licking, but Nuremberg beats everything. It was supposed to have been one of the most beautiful, from a historical point of view at least, in Europe, but you can't tell it now. Destroyed - utterly. Those people there now must live primitively. Their concern is there: a place to sleep, food to eat + clothes to wear - + it does not take all their time + ingenuity to achieve those ends.

As I remarked earlier in this letter I had quite a trip. It was a vista convoy + I saw scenes - landscape scenes - which would thrill any artist. So many vistas are just beautiful + breathtaking. The war couldn't ruin that. At intervals there would be a panorama of undulating hills with green green pine trees in groves which would stand out against a background of cultivated fields of green + yellow with a backdrop of heavily wooded trees hills at the horizon + interspersed amid it all would be a little village nestling against the side of a hill as if for support while a church steeple would stick th up above the trees like a periscope for a look see, as if to tell those below what it saw while it grandly surveyed all within its keen, and as we motored around curves on the road I craned for for a further glimpse of these musical comedy settings + admired the hue which the rays of the sun implanted in the roofs + said "How could they go to war!"

Maybe, maybe we shall come visiting here in later years, + I do believe there will still be that pungent odor about the little villages of fertilizer which is kept with the cow adjacent to the kitchen of these people, but maybe we won't come, for where ever we do travel it will only be done with love in our hearts for the people. We couldn't + (I know you can't) the enjoy ourselves unless we at least like the people we are with + I just don't think I could ever get to like these people. Even that grand looking woman of 55 who stood beside the road with her husband as we passed + had the look about her which said, I knew it! I knew it! See what frie + healthy people there Americans are, not like the 'verdammit Koyos'! And I know she would invite us into her kitchen which would be spotless + serve us serve tea which she had just brewed, + a platterfull of "cookies" which would remind of us of Austria + Gemütlichkeit + that lovely life which all should enjoy. But that we shall have to decide at a future date.

The children are still running out, as in France, + saying the equivalent of Cigarette for Pappa, but receive curt stares even as when they wave to us. It is hard, Jean, to refuse to even smile at children. But out of all this!

Well honey I shall stop now. It can't be too long before I rejoin my division + then we'll see what's what. I love you for beautiful. Stay well.

Your devoted husband,
Dolph