In Europe

flood.’ She gave a lift to a woman who worked for the Red Cross. Her young daughter had been seriously wounded by shrapnel, her husband had been killed, her possessions were stolen by the Germans and her house lay in ruins. ‘She was a Jewess. She had returned to life as usual, in the last month.’
    Gellhorn later travelled through German border towns as well: ‘No one here is a Nazi, no one here ever was a Nazi … To see an entire people skirt responsibility is no pretty sight.’ Finally, in Torgau in late April 1945, she came across the advance guards of the Russian 58th Infantry Division, which had already moved up to the Elbe. She met anice colonel, became acquainted with Russian drinking customs, and thought they were all fantastic. ‘We had been toasting “Treeman” for quite some time before I realised that we were drinking to the new American president; the way they pronounced it, I thought it was some pithy Russian expression for knocking back a drink.’
    The colonel suggested they take a walk, it wasn't good to become too sombre, and it was a lovely spring evening. ‘From a building came the beautiful, melancholy sound of Russian song, low and slow and mournful. In another building a young man was hanging out of the window, playing a fast and cheerful tune on his harmonica. The strangest characters were walking around: blond men and Mongols, wild-looking characters with nineteenth-century moustaches, and children not much older than sixteen. We passed a couple of burning houses that looked lovely.’ The only thing was: they could go no further than the Elbe. All permission to cross to the Soviet side was denied. ‘It's just that you people are capitalists, and we are communists,’ the colonel explained succinctly.
    Today Torgau is a provincial town like many in the former DDR: bumpy cobblestones, a half-restored centre, a hesitant pizzeria, an enormous Kaufland shopping centre at the edge of town, and around it all a ring of orchards and lush kitchen gardens. The Elbe here is not much broader than an irrigation canal; it looks as though you could wade to the other side, but in 1945 it was the divide between two continents.
    In London I had happened to run into an old American solider: Phill Sinott of the 69th Infantry Division, once a machine-gunner, now retired in San Francisco. For hours he had told me about the workaday war for the average Allied soldier: brief periods of incredible fear, a few skirmishes, then months of boredom. For him the war consisted of either ‘being bored to death or shitting your pants in fear’. There was no middle ground. At Torgau I was reminded of him again, because he had been there on that historic 25 April, 1945, when the Americans and the Soviets fell into each other's arms along the Elbe – in the middle of not only Germany, but also, as John Lukacs says,‘in the middle of European history’.
    In reality, Torgau was quite chaotic, for both armies had been in the vicinity for a long time. ‘At night in that patch of no-man's-land it was as busy as Piccadilly Circus,’ Sinott told me. ‘There were our patrols, and Russian patrols, there were Germans and refugees, it was one huge mess.’
    Only when enough photographers and journalists had been assembled could the official fraternisation at last take place, and those photographs are familiar to us all. Phill Sinott: ‘The Russians across the river had a party every day. They were always rolling these barrels around, we thought it was gasoline. Pure vodka! Every once in a while we would hear women screaming, but what could we do? That same day we liberated a prisoner-of-war camp. The American boys were skin and bones, but they didn't say a thing. All they did was touch our jeep – crazy isn't it, only our jeep. A major came out of one of the barracks, he looked terrible, but he tried to stand up straight, he saluted stiffly, then he burst into tears. So did we.’
    A few days later, from a wall along the river, Martha Gellhorn watched the Soviet troops move on. ‘The army came in like a flood; it had no special form, there were no orders given. It came and rolled over the stone quays and out onto the roads like water rising, like ants, like locusts. What was moving along there was not so much an army, but a whole world.’ Many of the soldiers were wearing medals from the Battle of Stalingrad, and the entire group had fought its way at least 4,000 kilometres to the west in the last few years, most