One Nazi Victory

ONE NAZI VICTORY OLAV NoRSMAN THE air was clean and cool · after a night's rain. A faint breeze stirred the trees, shadows of leaves flickered across the green lawn. By the open window sat a graying, middle-aged man. On the desk before him lay a newspaper. His face was set and grave. Vaguely and absent-mindedly he noted- the fragrance of grass, of leaves, of pine needles, of syringa in bloom; he heard the buzz of bees, the twittering of sparrows, the song of a wren perched on the top of its man-made house in the crotch of a tree; he watched a squirrel busily hunting for acorns buried in the garden and a chipmunk rushing to and fro on some mysterious errand. Across the.way he saw a little girl whose golden hair shone in the sunlight. She was so busily occupied, now with her tiny waggon, then with her swing, now digging trenches or building houses in her sand pile, then demolishing all of them and starting afresh. The hum of an aeroplane caused her to look up, quickly she brushed her hands against her dress, cast a swift glance at the passing plane, and proceeded with her manifold tasks. It was a peaceful scene, a beautiful day. The man at the window observed it all with a strange, far-away look in sad, tired eyes. The hum of the plane and the slight notice paid to it by the little girl brought into sharp relief the full meaning of what he had just read, conjured up in his mind memory-pictures of quiet, beautiful scenes in the distant land of his childhood. He recalled so clearly a little town by the sea, far away in Arctic Norway; the impression it had made upon him when as a boy of eleven he first saw it; the sight and smell of it when as a youth he brought fish to the market there; the last glimpse of its waterfront, warehouses, and homes from the deck of the departing steamer on a sunlit summer day two years before. It was a quiet, sleepy, rather insignificant little town, not much more than a hamlet by the sea; a town never before featured in the newspaper press of the great world until that day in May, 1940, when the telegraph flashed the news to the four corners of the earth-((Bodo, a small town in northern Norway, was last night wiped out by a German air attack." To the man by the window it was a soul-searing message. From the recesses of his memory he summoned pictures of this place; from the paper 280 ONE NAZI VICTORY 281 before him he had read the description of its·destruction; in his mind he reconstructed scenes._ of that dreadful act and pondered its meaning and significance. Bodo was located on the north side of a low peninsula, strung out along the shores of an inlet opening on the Arctic Ocean. To the south on the other side of the peninsula was a fjord, and beyond it a mighty row of magnificent mountain peaks which on a clear day seemed like guarding walls though they were ten to thirty miles distant from the town itself. To the west the view of the ocean was obstructed by rocky, barren islands; to the north a gap between an island and the mainland offered a marvellous vista. There fifteen miles to the northward a mountain rose precipitously from the sea. Stern and forbidding though- it was, it had been named Landego (the good land) because it gave shelter to the· storm-tossed mariner who had crossed that great arm of the ·ocean, the Westfjord, ·thrust between the mainland and the mighty Lofoten Alps fifty miles distant. From the waterfront on a clear day one could see this imposing row of mountains between whose peaks the midnight sun cast its magical, eery light during June and early July. Two miles east of Bodo the land rose abruptly to a height of a thousand feet. The mountain-side was covered with white birches, and at the top was a small restaurant to which inhabitants of...