Just Because: 'The Thousand Hour Day'

The first time I found this book, it was in one of my parents' many crammed, wonder-filled bookshelves. It's a long book, and emotionally draining, but I couldn't put it down. The title refers to the six weeks after the Nazis invaded Poland. The book, a historical fiction by W.S. Kuniczak, follows the stories of various people in completely diverse situations but all in that same period of time.
   I loaned it to someone, never got it back, and forgot who had it. That was several years ago. Since then, I had occasion to recall it many times, wishing I still had it, but as I couldn't remember the exact title or the name of the author, Google as I might, I couldn't find it.
   The second time I found this book, I was in a rental condo in Mammoth. This was last summer. I noticed that the owners were readers and that they read some pretty heavy-duty books. Intrigued, I started looking through their bookshelves ~ and guess what I found? Right.
   Because there's so much to this book, a part of one section alone won't give an idea of its scope, so I'm regaling you with a couple of excerpts. Also, I usually post the first few paragraphs of a book, but in this case, I'm starting a little further in.

Hang yourself, brave Crillon;

We fought at Arques and you

were not there.

Fall 1939

And soon, my friend, we shall

have no more time for dances …

…

Sunday, August the twenty-seventh

 THE CORRESPONDENT

  …

   Coming to Berlin at this time had been his idea. The office in New York had seen no need for it. They had not been sure that anything would happen. The world had circled above reality for ten years, after all. They thought the British and the French would do it again: shuck off their obligations and back away smiling. Then Roosevelt wrote to Hitler asking for guarantees that German appetites were satisfied after Austria, the Sudetenland, Memel and the Czechs, and Hitler read the letter in the Reichstag, rattling off a long list of names of countries, planets, states and geographic equations in which Germany had no interest (all to the thunderous laughter of the deputies), and William Shirer cabled his report about the reasonable nature of Hitler’s demands, and the foreign

bureau chief said: —All right. I guess the budget can stand it. But you had better come up with a war.

   Loomis left the same day. He was in Paris on Friday, August 25. Next morning he boarded the Eastern Express at the Gare du Nord and was in Berlin shortly after noon. The city burned with color. Great banners hung in the Fehrbelliner Platz and along the Kurfurstendamm. The air was thick with tension. He could almost feel it. News came that the Polish border was closed, then that it was not, then that it was, and finally Loomis drove to the Friedrichstadt to find out for himself but no one seemed to know anything. A fat young SS lieutenant, named Libesis, told him (with tears in his eyes) that the war had already begun. It was a terrible disgrace to him not to be in it. He had enlisted in the SS Waffengrenadiere because he thought that he would thus become one of the first to cross the Polish border and raise Germany’s banner from the mud and plant it in the land of the enemy and now look what happened: The war was on and he was in Berlin. It was patently unfair. Loomis made sympathetic sounds. On Sunday morning, he sought out Miller in the Adlon Bar and Miller reassured him. —No war. Not yet. Don’t worry, Billy. You haven’t missed anything except a lot of German parties. There’s one tonight you’ll have to come to anyway.

   All of official Berlin seemed to be one tense, excited party. After Paris the contrast was startling. Paris had been almost black with gloom: The City of Light seemed asleep, life slowed down. In Berlin the excitement was impossible to contain. They talked of nothing but the coming war. They still believed that Hitler would get them all they wanted without war, but no one doubted that within a week Deutschland would march. Cadence of martial music crashed from loudspeakers. Sieg Heil! Wir zogen gegen Polen.

   —That war, Miller said. Only God and Hitler know when that one will start, and neither is talking. At the moment, friend, we’re having Neville Chamberlain’s Pax Britannica and everybody flies a lot of planes and talks a lot, but it’s been clear since April there will be war. No one knows what kind of war it will be or when it will begin, but there is little doubt that we’ll have one. Now that the Germans have Czechoslovakia, their border with Poland is seventeen hundred and fifty miles long. You will admit that this is a marvelous assault line. With all your military experience you have to admit it. The Germans will, since they so clearly can, take advantage of this opportunity. They are remarkably good at taking advantage. They have never been known to miss an opportunity. They will attack from every possible direction. They will come, my sources inform me, south and southwest and southeast out of East Prussia, east from behind the Oder River, north and northeast from the new Czech acquisition. They will come slowly and methodically and relentlessly in their German manner and will go hell for leather for Warsaw the way they have always done. What they find so attractive about Warsaw beats the hell out of me. I never thought it much. Can’t get good bourbon anywhere in Warsaw. But you know your Boche. Once he gets an idea in his square head you never get it out and they’ve had this one about Warsaw for nine hundred years. The Germans are, after all, traditionalists. They haven’t changed their way of thinking or doing things in a thousand years. And that gives them credit for nine hundred and thirty-nine years when all they thought about was slaughtering each other. They’ve never looked kindly on military innovations. They’ve never been known to gamble on anything. They are remorseless and persistent and they never do the unexpected.

   —You’re a bitter old man, Loomis said. But I love you.

   —Fine. But I know what I’m talking about. Maybe I haven’t seen as many wars as you but I’ve seen a lot more politicians and it’s the politicos who make wars. And when you get a crazy politician who’s also a German … Jesus H. Christ, hold onto your head. This is going to be a honey of a war.

   …

   

Tuesday, September the fifth

...

THE HUNTER
   The heat was tangible, profound. The sun was enormous. It seemed as though the earth had leaped into the sky to be closer to it. It seemed as though soon, quite soon—perhaps at the hundredth mile of this march, perhaps in its two-hundredth hour—the earth would catch fire and explode. Pawel saw nothing. His eyes had ceased to look. They were like the other eyes carried along that road, he supposed, the pupils shrunk to the size of coal-chips, seeking rest and darkness and refuge from the sun under eyelids the sun pierced brutally with a scarlet glow. For a long time, perhaps an hour or two hours, and for a great distance, which might have been two kilometers or ten, he walked with his eyes shut, seeing nothing, hearing the shuffling silence of the crowd around him: the hurried hopelessness of many feet, men's and horses', the grating sound of ironbound wheels on unresisting bone. Some man's hoarse breathing urged him on.
   Somewhere ahead in the straw-laden carts of the dead and wounded a madman started singing: —I once had a comrade/But a bullet flew towards us through the air/Was it meant for him or was it meant for me?/I once had a comrade, now he is dead ...
   No one else made a human sound.
   It was no march, he thought. It was the flow of a monstrous animated sea of indistinct shapes lapping against each other, a mute army of the Nation of the Dumb. Men fell in silence and the dust choked the sound of the collapse and the moving men stumbled against the bodies without sound, and went around them and went on in the same silence, with heads rigidly out-thrust and eyes and ears turned inward, each man hearing his own terror or despair. Pawel fell several times and, getting up (facing the wrong way after the last fall), he opened his eyes and saw the overturned cannon which had tripped him in a white glare. The sun seemed very near. The air quivered. The distant trees trembled like black skeletal phantoms against the whiteness of the heat, and in the far-off bend in the road where the flow began, men, horses, wagons, guns seemed to drift along without contact with the road, borne by the air like shadows.
   Someone sighed harshly behind him and stumbled against him, and Pawel, stumbling in turn against the man in front of him, saw him stop and raise his arms against the sun as though the quick indignity of the blow was just too much, the final humiliation, the last agony he was going to endure. With outspread arms the man uttered a cry and straightened his red-blistered back and fell suddenly, straight like a stave, full-face in the dust. Pawel stepped over him. He began to laugh.
   It struck him that for all he knew he might have died at Chelmno and was now a shadow, walking with other shades into the first peripheries of hell.
   ...