P—, which lost 'almost one-third of its 60,000 inhabitants in a single raid', might well be that town to which my lately-deceased friend Max alluded in his Natural History of Destruction.

A kind of nature did indeed flourish there: sprigs (principally of stubborn acacia) worked their green through cracked brickwork; rats with long sharp teeth seethed under slabs of concrete; flies swarmed, buzzing and golden-winged; scavengers made tracks through the rubble carrying leatherette bags, carrying off a fork or the undamaged face of a clock. Life went on without a sound, as though the Metzgerei were still on the next non-existent corner, or for flowers to put on graves we had but to cross the road.

I gathered from the letter (carefully re-addressed to me under my assumed name of 'Bernhardt') that it had taken him eight days to die rather than the few hours in which P— was wiped out.

A year earlier—as part of my duties before I was assigned to live as a German among Germans—I had taken a film around to many such towns and shown it to involuntary audiences—to men and women who had been arrested for their part in the regime which had brought this sort of retribution (rightly or wrongly) on a whole people. The silence was much the same, to start with. The footage I showed had been shot in silence by newsreel teams who had gone into the camps, as I had. We would hang a sheet between two jagged walls and used a portable generator for power. Then our audience was marched in, that had spent the day burying the dead. The images that flickered brightly after dark drew others (the presumed innocent) like so many moths, the cinema being an entertainment they had all but forgotten about. But when the striped ghosts appeared or bodies stacked like firewood, here and there the silence was broken. The hiss of our projector briefly concealed a similar sibilance among the watchers, like leaking gas; then a murmur began (seemingly equally the presumed guilty and the presumed innocent) such as unruly schoolboys might make. The murmur spread from front to back in a hum and then broke out in a set of coughs or angry growls, then laughter, then howls of laughter, perhaps hysteria—what sort of cheats were we to show such obvious and impossible fabrications?

Though that was fifty years ago, I seem to remember sharing their feeling of being deceived.

The deliberate passage from Bremerhaven down to Stuttgart (with my orders in my Ike jacket) went through a newsreel landscape of devastation. A black-and-white subtitle read: As ye sow so shall ye reap. The train labored in slow-motion, stop-and-start. The fields were grainy, mixing ash with snow. We passed over bridges that had just been restored but had to be taken at dead slow; we went past signals that were hand-operated and held us up. When we reached cities we by-passed them with complicated shuntings. The whole journey was as circuitous as a guided tour of a fortification long destroyed and built for wars long forgotten. None of it was any more real than a photograph of a generic destruction, a long-ago catastrophe.

We averaged about twenty years' experience. Nothing much. We played poker and some pulled down the windows on mid-winter and laughed at the sights as my Germans were to do at the camps. They found it funny that the locals wore leather coats down to their ankles or pre-war railway uniforms and oil-soaked leather caps. Their hunger and silence was no more than they deserved. They chucked their butts and watched the Krauts fight over them.

Having reached Munich and spent a week in billets, I was sent East via Berlin (a more direct route was impracticable) and sat with a pad on my knee and took down the answers of guards and doctors and factory-managers as to why they had done what they had done. Some were defiant, some wheedling, but most behaved as an arrested tram-conductor would, answering meticulously about the route, about timing, the cost of tickets, the behavior of passengers. The rest was up to the people above.

Max mentions the silence of city and camp. "I had grown up," he says, "with the feeling that something was being kept from me."

This is something I can understand. I was barely nineteen when I, my uniform discarded along with my American privilege, was sent back to P— to live as though those memories of destruction were my own. I would have felt back then that everything had always been hidden from me, so that the letter informing of my father's death came to me as a dumbfounding surprise.

My time in P— made me acutely aware of waste land, even when it lay in California. Not everyone would admit to the destruction, nor could they account for it.