There’s a man for you—there is really a man.
A COZY CASTLE
LONDON, July 27, 1943—The jeep turns off
the main road and pulls to a stop. The great gate of gray stone arches over the
driveway. When it was built America was a wilderness with a few colonies
clinging passionately to its edges. From the stone sentry room an American
sentry emerges and stands by the jeep. He looks at passes. He salutes and opens
a huge iron gate.
The jeep moves on into an ascending driveway
overarched with oaks and beeches six feet through the trunks. The road curves
and climbs a little hill and ahead you can see a gray tower poking above the
enormous trees. Then you come out of the neat, ancient forest and there is a
perfect castle against a hill, with lawns in front of it. It is a little
castle, only about forty rooms, a cottage for its period. And it was built by a
certain English king for a certain English mistress.
It is odd that this ancient scandal must not be
identified but it is so. If, for instance, it were known which king and which
mistress were involved in the building of the little castle, then it would be
known by the enemy which castle it is and if, further, it were known that American
troops are quartered in this castle, it would become a target for enemy
aircraft. But since a wholesome number of English kings had mistresses and
built little castles for them, so much information does not give the enemy a
target or rather it gives him a number of targets too great to concentrate on.
On the lawn in front of the castle, where once
perhaps gentlemen in heavy armor challenged one another with spears, a platoon
of American soldiers, helmeted and with full packs, are doing close-order drill,
marching, countermarching, opening and closing ranks, their bayonets gleam-in
the summer English sunshine.
In the gardens leading to the pointed door the
roses are blooming. Red roses and white roses. Great-grand-children of the
bushes from which perhaps the symbols of Lancaster and York were picked and
worn as insignia in the Civil War. The stones of the entrance are deeply worn,
concave as basins, and beyond is a dark hall, so high and shadow-deep in the
midday that you must get your eyes used to it before you can see the carved
oaken ceiling from which thousands of little oak faces look out. And in this
great hall an American Army sergeant sits behind a pine table and does his
work.
Beyond, through an open door, is an even larger
room but this one is lighter, for one side of it has large leaded windows,
constructed in diamonds and lozenges and circles and moons of glass. And this
also looks on the rose garden, the lawn, and finally to the forest.
