The fall of the year shone gently upon the broken cities and the exhausted fields of Europe. On Berlin's Kreuzberg, frost stiffened upon the worm-wrought, illegible features of an exhumed, Gestapo-killed cadaver to which someone had attached a tag reading, Homo sapiens.
Of the unrecounted millions of Europeans who survived him, few could greet the season with anything of its own tenderness. It was the first autumn of liberation, the first since the end of the war. It was the first autumn of the atomic age.
The Bells. In the steep forests of Norway, German guerrillas still skulked and fought. In Denmark, for want of transportation, practically the only food surpluses in Europe were near standstill. Only butter, eggs, meat moved, thinly, to England, Norway, the U.S. Army.
By millions, in transverse migrations, Germans struggled westward out of New Poland, northward out of the Sudetenland and Austria, to swell a nation already overpopulated and reduced in size; while Russians struggled eastward, some out of slavery and some out of voluntary servitude, towards home and an uncertain welcome.
In Hamburg, hundreds of looted bells awaited restoration to the belfries of nations with bell-like names, Poland, The Netherlands, Belgium; provided, of course, that those belfries, and their churches, still existed.
In the Sudeten, those Germans who remained wore identifying armbands. In Berlin, Jews were entitled to extra rations. In the British zone, on behalf of Jews, the British commandeered clothes from Germans. Thanks to presidential demand, the first of many Jews in the American zone were removed from behind barbed wire and were installed in houses requisitioned from Germans. Into Germany, fleeing a new paroxysm of pogroms in New Poland, wandered still more Jews.
Mysteriously planted placards warned fraternizing Bavarian girls: "0 God, if it depends on us, you will pay for it!" Daily, the snowline crept a little farther down the mountains of Bavaria, hideout of SS men. A Sudeten German asked whether it was true that Americans were now fighting the Russians.
In Switzerland, Belgium's Leopold bowed to temporary exile, but by no means to permanent renunciation of his throne.
Food and a Grave. In The Netherlands, underfueled pumps sucked at flooded farmlands which for years to come would be sterile as salt.
The scraped Danubian plain blazed like brass: Hungary, one of the bounteous nations of Europe, would this year require six million quintals of wheat. Allied authorities started a vast woodcutting campaign in the Vienna woods, to supplement the capital's inadequate coal stocks.
In all the nations of eastern Europe, free and secret elections were still promised. Angered and fearful, a group of Bulgarian peasants told an American correspondent how an armed 23-year-old Communist mayor had lumped their long-held acreages and plowed the boundaries under.