Let There Be Light

And the morning and the evening were V-E day.

Some other God, somewhere, said "Let there again be light." And there was light.

Searchlights swept magic wands from side to side, parachute flares, brilliant white, floated slowly down, star shells plucked bursts of flame out of the sky, Verey lights arced red, green and orange in pale glimmers near the horizon, tracers dropped red necklaces into the cupped hands of the night. Everybody threw anything that exploded into the sky in an outpouring of joy, of relief, of hope.

It was V-E day; the killing had stopped.

I walked slowly through the disappearing dark of the small Austrian town of Klagenfurt with my pipe and my thoughts; golden druggets of light spilled across my feet as black-out curtains swept aside, shutters burst open, street lights, one in five, sputtered, flickered, then burned strong.

There was light. It was V-E day; the killing had stopped.

What had happened in the five years from a seventeen-year-young's volunteer enlistment in Johannesburg to an accelerated adult's watching light flow over his feet in Klagenfurt, a million miles away?

I remembered men who had died by my side, the horror of falling bombs, the sullen surrender of a disillusioned German soldier. I remembered the comradeship, the satisfaction as a Bailey bridge dropped on the far bank of one more river, uniting another war-split community.