In Europe

machine guns, Sten guns and field mortars, their home accommodated more than 300 wounded men. Kate was referred to respectfully as ‘the Lady’, she was a paragon of calm and bravery, she talked about the future of a free Holland while holes were being shot in the parsonage walls, and she comforted the boys with aPsalm: ‘Thou shall not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day.’
    She herself wrote: ‘They are all dying, and must they breathe their last amid such a hurricane? God, give us a moment's silence, give us rest – even if only for a moment, so they can die in peace …’ When the battle was over, fifty-seven soldiers were buried in her garden. Of more than 10,000 Britons and Poles who landed at Arnhem, almost 1,500 were killed and 3,000 were wounded.
    Today the river rolls slowly past the green forelands, the cows lie in the shade of trees, the occasional barge passes, then a few geese honking in flight. There is an old church amid the greenery. Every once in a while, a yellow train goes thundering across the railway bridge.
    It was hard for Winrich Behr to talk about autumn 1944. He could not really remember, he said, how he had thought about it at the time. He had talked and read too much about it afterwards. Rommel was wounded during an air raid, and soon afterwards died quite unexpectedly, on 14 October, 1944. As the representative of his army unit, Behr came to the funeral with a wreath. ‘I'll never forget it. General Rundstedt gave a horribly hypocritical address. An old acquaintance, an officer from the Paris parade committee, had organised the entire funeral. That evening we agreed to meet in a café. There he told me the true story: how Hitler had sent two generals to Rommel, how they had accused him of complicity in Stauffenberg's assassination attempt and said that he, because of his exemplary service record, was to be allowed to choose between being executed and having his family sent to a concentration camp, or committing suicide with a fast-working poison, a military pension for his family and a state funeral. ‘It was nothing but a filthy business,’ he said. So you can imagine that, after that, we of the Western staff couldn't really summon up much enthusiasm for our planned offensives.’
    Behr also remembered one of his own generals, that same autumn, openly stating: ‘Of course we must do our duty as soldiers. But our most important task is to allow the West to come in, to make sure the East doesn't advance too far.’ Such opinions, Behr said, became increasingly common among the
Wehrmacht
staff. ‘It sounds strange, but after the Allied catastrophe at Arnhem we became increasingly worried: what's keepingthese idiots from breaking through? We all knew that the whole thing would be over soon, whatever happened, and after that autumn we didn't care about winning the war in the West. What we wanted was to defend ourselves against the Russians, that above all.’
    In December, when Hitler came up with plans for the Ardennes Offensive – its target, once again, the vital supply port of Antwerp – many of Behr's colleagues in the
Wehrmacht
were furious: ‘That bastard Hitler said we were going to fight the Bolsheviks, and now that the Russians are marching on Berlin he's deploying our best armoured divisions to attack the West. The idiot!’ It was a mystery to Behr too how twenty-five German divisions could ever hope to assemble without anyone on the British or American staffs realising they were planning a counteroffensive. ‘Sometimes their intelligence work was rather shoddy. There were even those on our side who tried to make contact with the Allies, to put a quick end to the war in the West. But the officer who did that, Lieutenant Colonel Krämer, returned empty-handed: the West was interested only in total surrender. Of course, all kinds of agreements with Stalin played a role in that. And I think the Western leaders knew well enough about the atrocities in the concentration camps. They weren't interested in doing business with a criminal regime.’
    Meanwhile Martha Gellhorn was criss-crossing the fronts of Europe for
Collier's
magazine. The townspeople of Nijmegen, she wrote, were clearly God-fearing citizens who led a quiet, provincial life. But due to a bombardment – a case of mistaken identity, by the way, on the part of the Americans – ‘the city now looks as though it had been abandoned years ago after an earthquake or a