The Bitter Taste of Victory (21 page)

Now stationed in Berlin, Goronwy Rees was also finding the city depressing. He was especially distressed by his own house in the Grunewald, where the German wife and daughter of the former owner had been installed in the basement to attend to his needs. Both were prematurely aged, with dirty white hair and a ‘crazed look’ in their eyes. And both were devoting their time to trying to keep alive the daughter’s baby, who lay day after day in a cot in the shade of the trees in the
garden, ‘perfectly still, perfectly silent, never uttering a cry either of pain or of pleasure’.
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Rees gave the baby his rations and watched as the women fed him milk and smeared chocolate on his lips, waiting for a sign that he was still human. But gradually the whites of his eyes took on the sickly yellow of his face; his stomach became distended and enlarged; he could neither eat nor digest. The baby was starting to resemble a motionless tiny effigy of the kind found on family tombs in country churches. He lay still and unsmiling while the women brushed away the flies that settled on his face. Rees’s dreams became haunted by the sight of the two women bent anxiously over the dying baby’s cot, watching intently as if they knew that any moment might be his last. And he found that ‘it seemed futile and ironical beyond all measure that for me five years of war should end with that scene in the garden where the two bomb-crazy women and their baby presented so perfect an image of what victory really means’.
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That dying baby was one of thousands of Berliners who were unlikely to survive the winter. In the British sector the death rate of children under a year old in December 1945 was one in four, bringing new and devastating loss to families already torn apart by the war. As food supplies and healthcare deteriorated, the very young and the very old were especially at risk. On 3 November, Marlene Dietrich’s mother, Josephine von Losch, died of a heart attack in her furnished room in Friedenau. She had survived almost six years of war but was too frail to endure the Occupation, despite living more luxuriously than most Berliners. Dietrich was in Paris and asked James Gavin to arrange for her mother’s burial. He was worried that he was too visible a figure to oversee the digging of a German’s grave so he delegated the task to his PR officer, Barney Oldfield, who conducted four paratroopers to Berlin’s Schöneberg cemetery.
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Oldfield later recalled the graveyard itself as resembling a Dracula film: there were graves blown apart and coffins on their ends with partial remains spilling out. The whole place stank of death. They waited until it was dark to dig the grave and then at two in the morning they went to Josephine’s room where they lifted her body into a casket
made from old German school desks, which they transported to the cemetery in an army truck. Later in the morning Dietrich arrived, accompanied by Bill Walton (now the
Time
bureau chief in Berlin, he had made friends with Dietrich in Paris) and by three professional mourners. Dietrich dropped a handful of earth onto the lid and was then led away by Walton. Oldfield waited until it was dark again before fully covering the grave. It was not a ceremonious funeral, but it was far more than any other German received that year.
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Dietrich had flown to Berlin from Paris on the same plane as Martha Gellhorn, who was still researching her article on the 82nd Airborne Division. The two women do not seem to have become well enough acquainted on their journey to compare notes on their shared lover. But once they had arrived in Berlin, it was difficult for Gavin to keep his two conquests happy and apart. Dietrich had expected the return to Berlin to involve a reunion with her new uniformed hero. ‘Oi yoi yoi is my life messed up,’ she had told Rudi from Paris in October; ‘I wish I could stay with the Army – There everything is clear and easy.’ It was clearer and easier when you had your general to yourself, and she was disconcerted to find that Gellhorn was promptly established as his official mistress. Gellhorn herself had heard rumours about her lover and Dietrich but assumed that it was a minor flirtation, and that Dietrich was one of the many women to be impressed by the general’s film-star glamour. This was true, but this time the love-struck fan was a film-star herself. And there were people determined to divide Gavin and Gellhorn.
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During this trip to Berlin, Gellhorn was spending considerable time with Charles Collingwood, a radio journalist who was funnier and worldlier than Gavin. Dietrich informed Gavin that his lover was more enamoured with Collingwood than she was with him and Gavin started a jealous scene with Gellhorn. Angry and confused, he told her that he was going out for a walk and then stayed out all night. Bill Walton, himself half in love with Gellhorn and pleased to rupture the relationship with the general, reported to Gellhorn that Gavin had gone straight
to Dietrich and that they had been having an affair since the summer. Gellhorn decamped to Paris where the general assailed her with explanatory missives and she replied with a tirade of astonished fury.

‘Poor James,’ she began, ‘the first time I read your letter I was so angry I could hardly breathe.’ She had spent the week in anguish – ‘like someone who has swallowed a bayonet’ – and was now amazed that he had the audacity to blame Walton for the crash. Gavin had held Gellhorn’s presence in the staff house responsible for their problems; this was absurd when they had been so happy there in October. And he had provided a resumé of his movements that she considered mere bad manners when the essential facts of his infidelity were unchanged. What was most humiliating was that he was the one initially to demand monogamy: ‘I may tell you that you can sleep with everyone you like including sing-song girls and goats, only you can’t launch me into a career of absolute fierce faithfulness and expect me to enjoy being made a fool of.’
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This is partly the outrage of wounded pride. It was humiliating to be the last one to know about her lover’s infidelity. But the brisk anger masked a more bewildered grief. Gellhorn may not have believed that their relationship had any future, but it was still serious on her side. She had entrusted part of herself into Gavin’s keeping and expected him to treat it with care. If all that time half of his mind had been with Dietrich, he had been slighting the moment that he and Gellhorn were creating together. And if they did not have that moment then what did they have, in a world of broken marriages, ruined buildings and warring nations? She betrayed her misery alongside her anger. She had believed in Gavin like God – ‘you were not only my lover but by golly my hero’ – so there had been no need to lie to her when he could have told her any truth he liked. There had been snow in Berlin the night he left her. She had looked out of the window on to the white streets below and seen the beginning of winter and death. ‘I stayed in that room weeping as I really did not believe I ever could or would again, for two hours; and every night since it has come back to me the same way, like a pain that hurts too much.’ Luckily, she observed curtly, none of it mattered. They were only two, not especially important people and
they had a lot of work to do. She was ‘furiously angry’ about a campaign that had been instituted to save German children while children in Holland, Poland and Greece were starving. She was determined to register protest against whatever forms of ‘crookedness’ she saw.
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Gellhorn’s hatred of the Germans had begun during a time of anger with Hemingway and was now swelling during a period of rage with Gavin. There is a lack of proportion here; it is one thing to be moved by the plight of the children in Holland, but quite another to be ‘furiously angry’ about a campaign to stop another set of children from starving. Even the most militaristic of onlookers tended to admit that German children could not be held responsible for the war. If anyone was crooked, it was Gavin, and Gellhorn’s protest was directed against the two-facedness of men who extorted trust and vulnerability only to betray it.

She went to the French countryside to write the report on the 82nd Airborne Division she still owed the
Saturday Evening Post
, describing their heroism through fiercely clenched teeth. The resulting piece is admiring of Gavin and his troops but refuses to take them too seriously. Gellhorn points out wherever she can how much pleasure the division has acquired from the war. In Sicily the wine was copious and the girls pretty; they swam and ate well. In England they indulged in a lot of brawls in pubs. Gavin himself is given his own paragraph of muted praise, seen through the eyes of his men to whom he is known as ‘Slim Jim’ or ‘General Jim.’ They love him because he is one of them; he is brave and cheerful in combat, always jumping out of the lead plane first; he wears his hat cockily and has a ‘charming Irish face’. He is also, she writes somewhat bitterly, extremely lucky.
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The article ends on a note of desolation that reflects Gellhorn’s own: ‘Now that there is time to think and remember, the feeling of loneliness begins. So many dead, and so many who started straight and young and will not have whole bodies again. Any man who went through part of those 371 days of combat will never be the same; he may forget what changed him, but the change is there.’

Gellhorn does not quite excuse Gavin here, but she is more thoughtfully aware of him as a man shaped by war than she was in the angry
letter from Paris. ‘Slim Jim’ with his hat cocked and his continual good fortune is the kind of happy-go-lucky buccaneer who might fall into the arms of a film-star siren without quite noticing his own hypocrisy. A general who has spent 371 days watching his straight, young soldiers being killed and maimed is too lonely a man to sleep alone by choice.
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Wilder’s hero asks how he can be expected to jam on the brakes and stop. Sometimes you skid or spin and smash into a wall or a tree and bash your fenders. The real-life general had done just that; his fenders were bruised and he was reeling from the crash. He tracked Gellhorn down in Paris and they had sex once more. She said later that it was ‘more exciting physically’ than it had ever been but that part of her had already withdrawn. Her relationship with Gavin no longer felt real to her. She had hardened her heart and become worldly in the process; she was now more at home with urbane and ironic men like Collingwood or Walton.
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Either on that visit or, more gallantly, once Gellhorn had departed for London, Gavin visited Dietrich in Paris as well. They had dinner and listened to gypsy violin music, indulging in the kind of maudlin, romantic scene that Dietrich loved best. Arriving back to the US in time for Christmas, Gavin sent Dietrich a telegram to say that he was pining for her and wrote to Gellhorn to say that she was part of him and everything he did. He felt ill when he thought about how much he had hurt her in Berlin and he would never do it again. No one had made him feel this intensely in love before; he did not know what he would do without her.

That winter in Germany, the bleakness of the postwar world was becoming apparent. During the war, speeding between the terror of conflict and the halcyon perfection of interludes of peace, it had been easy to fall in love. Gellhorn, Gavin and Dietrich may all have known that love was an illusion, but if the conjuror’s mirrors were beautiful enough then it did not seem to matter. In the spring and summer of 1945, driving in jeeps amid the ruins they had conquered, partying in the rubble of Berlin, the headiness of wartime could continue. But there was the stench of the corpses in the bombed cities; there were the
sickening scenes in the camps. What kind of love could be idealistic and confident enough to continue in the face of that? Certainly none of them was equipped with sufficient capacity for hope. For all three, love was a means of fighting loneliness and it was a hard battle to win. What they were left with were staged romantic moments that left increasingly little emotional residue behind. This was very different from the kind of love in which even the most ordinary moment is ecstatically charged and in which every experience is half perceived through the eyes of the other. ‘Darling everything I do and everywhere I go I think of how it will look when you are here and how it will look to you,’ Gavin had written to Gellhorn in August. This was no longer true.
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Each of the participants in this glittering but tarnished love triangle left Germany behind that Christmas: Dietrich for Paris and then the US, Gavin for the US, Gellhorn for Java and then for London. And for all three of them, the departure from Germany was an act of defeat. Germany had become a personal dilemma for each of them; Gavin and Dietrich at least were in a position to influence the course of the nation’s fate. But their hopefulness about Germany had become entwined with their hopefulness about love. And so the contradictions and ruin of the defeated nation now seemed too difficult to overcome. Victory had proved lonelier and less hopeful than war.