Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [77]
Big Nellie knew what he had to do. There was not much time. He folded the proclamation and put it into his breast pocket. “You’re an ace, General Hansen,” he said, and left.
It was about noontime of the following day, two hours after Proclamation 22 was nailed dead, that Sean maneuvered his jeep through the streets of another German rubble pile. This one was called Frankfurt. Supreme Headquarters for Germany had been established in the I. G. Farben building, formerly the heart of the world chemical cartel. The fact that the building stood intact while nearly everything around it had been leveled was an irony of war. The building was a gargantuan affair comparable in miles of halls and millions of square feet and numbers of elevators to the Pentagon and the Chicago Merchandise Mart
Sean O’Sullivan, a mere major, was lost in the flood of silver oak leaves, eagles, and stars. Everyone here walked with a chipper air. None of that tired drag of the combat man. Each man felt that he carried in his briefcase the most important problem in Germany ... if not the world.
After much ado, Sean was able to ascertain where General Hansen’s office was located.
He stepped into one of those odd, open-faced, one-man elevators that move continually on a vertical conveyor belt so that stepping in and out through the open shafts on each floor called for correct timing, particularly when one was juggling one’s briefcase.
“Major O’Sullivan is here, sir.”
“Send him in.”
Sean stepped before his desk, and accepted the extended hand. “I heard the news sir. I heard about it when I was driving through Mainz an hour ago. What will they do to you, sir?”
“What the hell do you think? They’ll pin a goddam medal on me!” Hansen waved Sean into a chair. “Well, so far my ass has been chewed out by Ike and four of his deputies and three people from the State Department. At the present moment, my future is being discussed by the Pentagon and the White House. We might as well have a game of checkers while we’re waiting ... you do play checkers?”
“How about blackjack?”
Sean lost forty-two consecutive games of checkers while they waited. It was evening when the statement was released from the White House. A single sentence summed up the entire affair: THE RESCINDING OF PROCLAMATION #22 WAS CORRECT.
“You know,” Hansen said, “we Americans have the damnedest luck. The Lord has granted us a rare thing ... that chance to take a second look at things. And on that second time around, we usually come out all right.”
Hansen looked at his watch. “Well, now that we know we are in the Army for a while longer, I’d like you to stay over. There is something very, very important I was saving to discuss with you.”
From the tone of Hansen’s voice, Sean knew that another fateful decision was looming up ahead of him.
Chapter Thirty-four
DURING AND AFTER DINNER the two men spoke of the matters of the day. General Hansen had completed a tour of the British, French, and American zones. The statistics on Germany’s demise, now pouring into Frankfurt, staggered the imagination. Frankfurt itself had 150,000 dwellings before the war; 40,000 of these now stood. Never in the history of modern civilization had a country been so thoroughly demolished.
To add to the misery, tens of millions of displaced persons swelled the roads of Europe, and Germany was being forced to take in millions of her ethnics from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary; expelled from these lands for betrayal to Hitler.
All of those things which make man civilized did not function within Germany. Now came revelations from Poland about places named Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Chelmno that made the death factories of Dachau and Schwabenwald mild by comparison.
Hansen saw the problem in three phases: short range, intermediate, and final. The short-range problem revolved around a single word, food.
“We can get