Chapter 4: Ring the Bells Carefully

Liberation came to each town on its own day.

For the towns and villages freed in 1944 and the winter that followed, the end of the occupation was not a signature on a page but an ending felt street by street, one house, one square and one church tower at a time. You will understand this ending best if you listen for the small sounds that returned: bells, footsteps, the click of a post box, the voices of children going back to school.

You will remember the church bells ringing in that autumn of 1944, some for the first time in four years, rung by hands that had nearly forgotten how. Those bells belong at the centre of this chapter. In many occupied lands, the bells had been silent for years, or they had been taken down from their towers altogether. When they rang again, people came out of their houses without being called, stood in the street, and listened.

Yet the bells had to be rung carefully. In the same streets where some families were weeping with joy, others were weeping for men who would never come home, and still others were afraid of what the next days might bring. Liberation was a joy, and it was also a grief, and it was also a test. I would like you to keep all three of these in mind as we walk through the calendar.

Many bells had been silent or taken away during the war.

Before I tell you about the bells that rang, I should tell you about the bells that did not.

On the thirteenth of June 1940, in an island kingdom of the western Allies, the government ordered that church bells should no longer be rung for services. From then on they were to be rung only by the army or the police, as a warning that enemy troops had landed. For more than two years the towers were silent on Sundays. They rang once, by special permission, on the fifteenth of November 1942, to mark a victory in the desert war, and the ban was eased in the spring of 1943. In the occupied lands the silence was of a harsher kind. Over the course of the war, the main Axis power removed tens of thousands of church bells from its own towns and from the countries it occupied. It took them for their metal, which was needed for the war industry. Many were melted down. Others lay waiting in great yards near a harbor in the north, row upon row, each marked in white paint with a code for the place it had come from.

I want you to picture a village church whose bell has been lowered from the tower on ropes and carried away on a cart. The rope still hangs from the ceiling of the ringing chamber. The beam is empty. On Sundays the people walk to church in silence, and at noon there is no sound to tell the farmers in the fields that it is time to rest. You can see, then, why the return of even one bell meant so much.

In many villages a bell was not only a sound but almost a member of the family. It had a name, often the name of a saint, cast into its bronze together with the year it was made and the names of the people who had paid for it. It had rung for the baptisms, weddings and funerals of the same families for generations. When it was taken, people sometimes said that it felt as if a grandparent had been led away. If you ever have the chance to stand beneath an old bell and read the words cast around its rim, I hope you will take it, because you will be reading a small piece of a village's memory.

The capital of the south was freed on the fourth of June.

The first great capital to be freed in that year was the ancient capital of the south, where the troops of the former ally left the city during the night, and Allied soldiers entered on the fourth of June 1944.

The city had been spared heavy fighting in its streets, and people came out onto the steps of churches and the edges of the squares to watch the columns pass. Two days later, on the sixth of June, the western Allies landed on a coast in the west, and for a while the freeing of the old capital was pushed off the front pages of the newspapers. That is often how it went in 1944. One town's great day was another town's ordinary morning, and the news moved on before the bells had stopped ringing. If you read the diaries of that summer, you will find people writing about the same days in quite different moods, depending on where the front happened to stand outside their window.

I once read the diary of a schoolteacher from a hill town not far from the old capital, written in a cheap exercise book with a cardboard cover. On the fourth of June she wrote only a few lines: that the soldiers had passed through in the night, that the morning was very quiet, and that the baker had opened his shop for the first time in a week. She did not mention the bells at all. On the next page, a few days later, she wrote about her brother, who had been sent away with his regiment in the previous autumn and from whom there had been no word since. You can feel, in those two pages, how freedom and fear lived side by side in the same small kitchen.

A great bell rang on a summer evening in a capital of the west.

On the evening of the twenty-fourth of August 1944, a small advance column of soldiers reached the centre of a great capital in the west, where the population had risen against the occupation a few days earlier.

That night, soon after the first vehicles had arrived in front of the town hall, the great bell of the cathedral began to ring. It had been silent for a long time. Other bells across the city joined it, one parish after another, until the whole capital was ringing in the dark. People who lived through that night spoke of it for the rest of their lives. Many did not know, at first, what the bells meant. They opened their windows and listened, and then they understood. The next day, the twenty-fifth of August, the commander of the occupying garrison signed his surrender, and the act was completed in an office at one of the city's railway stations. I have always been moved by that small detail. The machinery of the occupation came to rest, quite literally, in a station, among the timetables and the sidings.

On the twenty-sixth of August a service of thanksgiving was held in the cathedral. Shots were fired during the procession, and people threw themselves to the floor among the chairs, yet the hymn of thanks was sung to its end.

The calendar of freed capitals grew longer through the autumn.

Through the late summer and autumn of 1944, other capitals followed, each on its own day. You will notice how the dates crowd together as the months go by.

On the third of September, the capital of a small kingdom in the northwest was freed, and the crowds were so dense in the streets that the vehicles could hardly move. On the second of October, in a great city of the east, an uprising that had lasted sixty-three days ended in surrender, and the city was left in ruins with very many dead. I ask you to pause on that date. It was not a day of bells, but it belongs in this chronicle as much as any other. On the twelfth of October, the last troops of the main Axis power left the capital of a country in the southeast, and its people filled the streets around their ancient hill. On the twentieth of October, the capital of a country in the southern mountains was freed after a week of fighting. On the twenty-first of October, an old cathedral town on the western border of the main Axis power itself surrendered to the western Allies, the first large town of that country to do so. Its people came out of their cellars into streets of broken stone, and for them the day was neither a liberation nor a defeat, but simply the end of the fighting overhead.

Count the days from the first freed capital to the last.

Here is a small piece of work for you, and it needs nothing more than a pencil and a few minutes of patience.

Write the date of the first freed capital, the fourth of June 1944, at the top of a page. At the bottom, write the twentieth of October 1944, the day the capital in the southern mountains was freed. Now count the days between them, month by month. From the fourth of June to the end of June there are twenty-six days. July adds thirty-one, August thirty-one, September thirty, and the first twenty days of October twenty more. If you add them up, you will arrive at one hundred and thirty-eight days. Then, between the two dates, write the others you have read: the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of August, the third of September, the second of October, the twelfth of October. Look at the page. In one hundred and thirty-eight days, the bells of several capitals rang again. In the same days, a city in the east fell silent in ruins. I found, when I did this myself, that I could not look at the page as a list of victories. It looked more like a railway timetable in a time of storms, with some trains arriving and others cancelled, and every line belonging to someone.

You might also try this exercise in another way. Choose one of the dates and ask yourself where your own family was on that day, if you know. Perhaps a grandparent was a child in a town still under occupation, or a soldier far away, or a young woman working in a factory. Write it beside the date in small letters. The page will then belong to you as well, and the great events will stand side by side with one ordinary life.

The return of lamps, letters and schools marked the ending.

For most people in the freed towns, the ending did not feel like one great day. It felt like a slow return of ordinary things, as when an engine that has been cold for a long time warms up, cylinder by cylinder, and begins to run evenly again.

First came the lamps. Under occupation, the windows had been covered at night, and the streets were dark. After liberation the curtains came down, though in many places there was too little electricity to light the streets properly for months. In the island kingdom of the western Allies, the full blackout was replaced by a milder dim-out on the seventeenth of September 1944, and families took down the heavy cloth from their windows for the first time in five years. Then came the letters. Post offices reopened, often with half their staff, and the first letters from distant relatives began to arrive, sometimes months late. Then came the schools. In the autumn of 1944, in town after town, teachers swept the broken glass from classrooms, borrowed chalk and books, and opened their doors to children who had lost a year or more of learning. You can imagine the first morning, the noise in the corridor, and the empty desks that nobody wanted to talk about.

Each of these was a small ending of its own, and each came on its own day.

A bell ringer showed me how a rope must be handled.

One frosty morning a few winters ago, I climbed the narrow stair of a village church tower to watch the ringers practise. The ringing chamber was a small square room with whitewashed walls, lit by one bare bulb, and six ropes hung from holes in the ceiling.

The leader of the band was an old woman named Margaret, who had rung in that tower since she was a girl. Her hands were red with cold, and she wore woollen gloves with the fingertips cut off. She was teaching two children how to handle the rope, and I listened as she explained it to them. A bell is heavy, she said, and once it begins to swing, it has a will of its own. If you pull too hard, the rope will jerk out of your hands, and if you pull too softly, the bell will not speak. You must listen to it and pull only as much as it needs. Then she rang a few slow strokes herself, and the whole tower hummed around us. I thought, standing in that cold room, that she had described the art of liberation better than any historian. You could not simply ring the bells as loudly as possible. You had to listen to the town, and to the grieving families in it, and pull only as much as the moment would bear.

Anger after liberation was slowly brought under the law.

I must tell you about a harder side of liberation, because a friend would not leave it out.

In many freed towns, in the first days and weeks, anger broke out against people believed to have helped the occupiers. Some were beaten, some shamed in public, and some killed without any trial at all. These things happened in many countries and on many streets, and I will not describe them further. What I would like you to notice is what came after. The new authorities, and many ordinary citizens with them, worked hard to bring this anger under the law. In the autumn and winter of 1944, special courts were set up, rules of evidence were written, and the accused were given the right to be heard. It was not perfect justice, and in some places it came too late for those who had already suffered. But it was an attempt to ring the bell carefully, to stop the swing of the rope before it tore the hands of those who held it. I think that attempt deserves our respect, and our prayers for all who were caught up in those days.

Families waited for news of the missing through the long winter.

For many families, liberation did not end the war at all, because the person they loved most was still missing.

On the walls of town halls and railway stations, lists of names were pinned up, and people came every day to read them. Photographs were fixed to notice boards with small handwritten cards beneath them: have you seen this man, have you seen my daughter. The international committee of the Red Cross carried short messages between separated families. Each message was limited to twenty-five words, written on a printed form, and it might take many months to arrive. If you try writing a message of twenty-five words to someone you have not heard from in three years, you will find how hard it is to choose. In the occupied lowlands of the northwest, where the war had not yet ended, the winter of 1944 and 1945 brought a great hunger, and about twenty thousand people died of it before spring. On the sixteenth of December 1944, a new offensive of the main Axis power began in the snowy forests of the west, and some villages that had celebrated their freedom in September found themselves at the front again. So the waiting went on, in cold kitchens and on cold platforms, through the darkest weeks of the year.

Christmas came in the middle of that waiting. In the freed towns, many churches held their first midnight services in years, with candles instead of electric light and with coats worn inside because the buildings were unheated. In villages close to the new front, people prayed in cellars. Soldiers of every side kept the feast where they were, in barns, in dugouts and in hospital wards, and many of them wrote home on that night, letters that would take weeks to arrive.

Please light a candle in your mind, if you will, for the families who waited, on every side of the war.

The bells of a freed village rang into the frozen new year.

On the first morning of 1945, in a small freed village whose name I do not need to tell you, the ringers climbed the cold stair of their tower once more.

Their bell had come back to them only a few weeks before. It had been found in a yard behind the railway station, where it had been left when the occupiers withdrew, still waiting for a train that never came. The men had brought it home on a farm cart and hauled it up into the tower with ropes, slowly, a little at a time. Now the frost lay white on the roofs and on the fields beyond them, and their breath hung in the air of the ringing chamber. The village was quiet. Several of its sons were still missing, and the families in the houses nearest the church had asked that the ringing be gentle.

So the ringers pulled carefully, listening to the bell as it swung, and its sound went out slowly over the frozen roofs and the bare orchards and the empty road, into the grey light of the new year.

In the houses below, people stood at their windows with their coats on, because there was little fuel for the stoves that winter, and listened until the last stroke had faded into the cold.