Make them victors and healers, let them be
unsentimental and compassionate;
spill not their generous blood abundantly
as gifts of stockings and gum and chocolate.
Let them be modest, knowing the irony
of hard-fought peace, our bold united youth
returned in strength across the migrant sea,
rebuilding and restoring law and truth –
then afterward, when the last prayer’s been said,
home for the living, burial for the dead.
*
And now I am going to go to sleep. I have been scribbling this by flashlight under my borrowed US Army blanket. I’m not flying the Oxford back – they want to keep that here for local taxi runs, so one of the RAF pilots at the front will come pick up Roger to take him to his next stop, and I am going to swap planes and take a Spitfire back to Southampton for a new paint job (it is being modified for reconnaissance).
Now that I want to go to sleep I can’t put my notebook and flashlight down on the ground because it’s just an ocean of mud, and I don’t want to get out of bed and wake everybody up hunting for a place to put them. So I guess I’ll shove everything down at my feet and hope I don’t kick it out of bed. I’d put the notebook under my pillow except I haven’t got one! I hope I don’t forget it tomorrow morning.
‘Chiltern Edge’
1 Thames View
Medmenham, nr Marlow
Bucks
4 October 1944
Dear Mrs Beaufort-Stuart,
Thank you for all your thoughtful effort over the past three weeks. I wish I had some good news, or even some small shred of hopeful news, to pass to you and your fellow pilots. But there isn’t anything – not a single thing. As time moves on and so many others are also lost, it seems selfish to keep badgering for an investigation into one more missing aircraft, especially as it wasn’t entirely above board for Rose to be in France in the first place. My husband Roger feels keenly that if he makes a fuss about losing Rose, none of the rest of you young ladies will ever be allowed to fly in Europe.
I do not want to give up hope, but I do not think we are ever going to hear anything now. Roger says her family won’t even get a military pension. I suppose you know that, being a civilian pilot yourself. But it does seem dreadfully unfair.
Perhaps you would like to write to her parents. I think they would appreciate hearing from one of Rose’s friends. Sometimes I think I will send them the poem you copied out for me from her notebook, the ‘Battle Hymn’. ‘Home for the living, burial for the dead.’ And then I think I won’t, as poor Rose will have neither.
I shall leave it up to you.
Thank you again for all your past kindness, to me and to my missing niece.
Yours sincerely,
Edith Justice
Justice Airfield
Mt Jericho, PA
23 November 1944
Thanksgiving Day
Dear First Officer Beaufort-Stuart,
I want to thank you myself for the effort you’ve made on our daughter’s behalf. You say in your letter that you don’t feel you’ve done enough, but in every telegram from Roger and in all Edie’s letters they always mention you. I know how many times you’ve telephoned Edie to check for news – that you supplied your husband’s squadron in Europe with Rose’s picture so they will know who to look for – that you took over the sad task of sorting through Rose’s things and packed them up for Edie to send us. She also sent us the newspaper clipping you gave her about the shot-down gunner who spent three months hiding in France. But I think it is better for us to face the worst than to hold out for good news that will never come.
Even if there is no way for you to turn back time or find out what really happened that morning in September, it means a great deal to all of us to know that Rose had such a devoted friend so far from home.
Thank you also for the photograph from your wedding. It is the last picture we have got of Rose. You all look so excited and happy, and the ivy-covered church nestled in the heather is an idyllic setting for a wartime marriage – my boys noticed your husband has got a football tucked under his arm! It is hard to believe you were only temporarily ‘between bombs’.
I never imagined – never could have imagined – even flying over the hell of no man’s land myself in the last war – that less than thirty years later, another war would cost me a daughter.
On behalf of myself and Rose’s mother Grace Mae, and Rose’s young brothers Karl and Kurt, thank you for being Rose’s friend.
Yours sincerely,
Jack Justice
Krefeld, Germany
10 March 1945
My bonny Maddie-lass,
I am flying Hudsons now, transport and parachutists – dropping madmen deep into Germany on God knows what missions. I only fly one night in four. Mostly I sit around all day smoking or go on schnapps hunts with other idle airmen.
I look for your Rose everywhere I go. I think I am really looking for our Julie, who I know is dead. If I could just win one damned personal victory, you know? We are into Germany, but still not across the Rhine, and all I feel is grief and horror. I cannot describe to you the horror of this war, Maddie. I do not want to. I think the biggest surprise is that I don’t have more friends and big brothers and little sisters who are dead. The destruction we are heaping upon the German cities is unimaginable – it is shameful. It makes me feel ashamed to be one of the victors. And then we come across a row of railway wagons abandoned on a siding under the snow and packed with hundreds of frozen, emaciated bodies – hundreds of them, unexplained, some of them children – and I know that we must be the victors. Whatever the shame – whatever the cost.
I look for your Rose in every face, dead and living. But there are so many, and all of them are ravaged by hunger and grief and loss, even the faces of the enemy. I swear, it’s sometimes hard to tell which faces do belong to the so-called ‘enemy’. Deserters hide as civilians to avoid capture, not only by us, but also by their own army, and civilians surprise you with hospitality and gratitude. I met a group of four displaced men travelling together – two had escaped from a German prison camp, and the other two were shot-down German airmen trying to get back to their base. All we did was trade cigarettes. Strip men of uniforms and badges and they are just men.
A year and a half ago, when we first lost track of Julie, I remember you described the way people disappear into the Nazi death machine like an unlucky lapwing hitting the propeller of a Lancaster bomber – nothing left but feathers blowing away in the aircraft’s wake, as if those warm wings and beating heart had never existed. It has happened to tens of thousands of people. Maybe hundreds of thousands or even millions. They are gone. They have vanished without leaving even a vapour trail. Everywhere I go I meet people who are hunting for husbands, mothers, children, brothers, sisters, cousins, friends, lovers, and they are all gone.