Chapter 6: Shake Hands on the Bridge

Two endings met on the same spring day in 1945.

On 25 April 1945 two endings met on the same day, one on a broken bridge over a river and one in a theatre on the far shore of the ocean. Soldiers from the west and the east shook hands in the middle of the defeated country, and on the evening of that same day the delegates of nearly fifty nations sat down to write the rules of a new world organization.

Before you walk out onto that bridge with me, I would like you to remember the tired man on the deck of his ship, wrapped in a heavy cape and watching the grey water on his long voyage home from the palace by the sea. He did not live to see either of the meetings he had worked for. The plans he left behind went on without him, like a train that keeps its timetable after the driver who set out with it has stepped down at an earlier station.

This chapter follows those plans through April and into the first days of May. I will ask you to keep two places in your mind at once, a muddy riverbank and a crowded hall, because the people in each of them were trying, in very different ways, to make sure that the war would not simply stop but would end.

The president died on an April afternoon in the southern hills.

On 12 April 1945 the president was resting at a small cottage in the hills of the south of his country, where warm springs had long eased the pain in his legs. In the morning he read his papers and signed letters at a table by the window. A painter was working on his portrait in the same room, and a few friends and relatives sat nearby, talking quietly. Shortly after one o'clock he raised a hand to his head and said that he had a terrible headache. He lost consciousness and died at 3:35 in the afternoon, without waking again.

At 7:09 that evening his vice president, Harry Truman, took the oath of office in a room of the president's house in the capital. The members of the cabinet stood around him, and his wife and daughter were at his side. The new president had been in office as vice president for less than three months. He had not been told many of the secrets of the war. You can imagine how heavy the next morning must have felt to him.

One of his first decisions, made within hours, was that the conference on the world organization would open on 25 April as planned. Nothing would be postponed.

The marshal in the east, who had first meant to send only an ambassador to the conference, now decided to send his foreign minister instead, as a gesture of respect for the dead president. It was a small change in a list of travellers. Yet you can see in it how a death may soften, for a moment, the hard edges of politics between allies.

You may wonder whether such gestures matter. I believe they do. They are small, but you can sometimes see a whole relationship in them, as you can see the weather in a single flag on a mast.

A funeral train travelled north through the night.

On 13 April the coffin was carried to a railway station and placed in the last car of a long funeral train. The windows of that car were left uncovered, so that people could see the flag-draped casket inside. The train travelled slowly north for more than twenty hours, through towns and farmland and across rivers. Wherever it passed, people had gathered beside the tracks, many of them in work clothes, some kneeling, some singing hymns, some simply standing with their hats in their hands. Men who had driven the trains of their country all their lives later remembered the night as one of the quietest journeys they had ever made. They slowed through every station so that the people waiting there could see the car go by. On 14 April there was a funeral service in the president's house in the capital. On 15 April he was buried in the rose garden of his family home, beside the river valley where he had grown up, while a single bugle played across the quiet hedges.

I have stood on many small railway platforms at dusk, waiting for a late train, and I have often thought of those people. They stood at the edge of the tracks in the dark, waiting not for a train that would carry them somewhere, but for one that would pass them and go on.

If you have ever watched a long train pass slowly through a station without stopping, you know how the sound grows, holds for a long moment, and then fades into the distance until only the rails are humming. I think the whole country felt something like that in those days in April.

Soldiers from the west and the east approached the same river.

Meanwhile the armies kept moving. By the middle of April the western Allies had reached a great river in the middle of the defeated country and halted there, as their supreme commander had decided, while the army from the east fought its way into the outskirts of the enemy capital. Between the two forces lay a narrowing strip of land, full of retreating soldiers, refugees and freed prisoners walking along the roads in both directions.

Commanders on both sides were anxious about the moment of meeting. Two great armies approaching each other from opposite sides could easily mistake one another for the enemy, especially in the confusion of the last weeks. Signals had been agreed in advance, coloured flares of one kind for one army and another kind for the other. Patrols were sent out carefully to look for the first contact, like two trains on the same line, each feeling its way forward and watching the signals for the other.

On the morning of 25 April several small patrols went out from the western side toward the river, under orders to look but not to go too far.

You should not imagine them as heroes in a film. They were cautious and tired. Most of them simply hoped to come back alive from the last weeks of a long war.

On a broken bridge strangers became comrades for an afternoon.

Shortly after noon on 25 April, a small patrol from the western side reached the river near a village and saw soldiers of the eastern army on the far bank. They crossed in a small boat and met them among the reeds and the farm buildings. Later that afternoon, at about four o'clock, another patrol came to a town with an old castle on the riverbank. Its young lieutenant climbed out onto the wreckage of a blown bridge, where the twisted steel girders hung down toward the water. Soldiers of the eastern army climbed toward him from the other side, and they met in the middle above the river, gripping hands across the girders.

You must picture the scene as it really was, not as the later posters showed it. There were no bands and no generals, only tired young men, muddy and unshaven, laughing and trying to speak to one another in words neither side understood. They exchanged cigarettes, watches and badges, toasted one another, and shared what food they had. Some of them wept. They had seen so much of death in the months before that a single afternoon of welcome seemed almost unreal. A photograph taken the next day, when the meeting was staged again for the cameras, shows two soldiers embracing on the broken bridge. It became one of the most famous pictures of the war.

On 27 April the news was announced at the same hour in the capitals of the three great Allies. The leaders spoke of the joining of hands and of the coming end of the war in the west. In the towns of the river valley, the soldiers of both armies took an oath, as some of them later remembered, never to forget that afternoon and never to fight one another.

Many of those young men kept that promise all their lives, long after their governments had drawn apart. Some came back to the river together, as old men, to stand once more on the rebuilt bridge.

If you ever visit such a bridge, you may find a plaque there, and sometimes fresh flowers. I hope you will stop for a minute and remember the soldiers of every army who never reached that river at all.

An old man on a rebuilt bridge was feeding the swans.

I once crossed a rebuilt river bridge on foot early on a spring morning, when the mist was still lying on the water and the only other person on the bridge was an old man feeding the swans. He wore a thick cardigan and a cap and tossed the bread in small handfuls, carefully, so that each bird got its share. We stood together for a while without speaking. Then he told me, without my asking, that his father had been a ferryman on that river and had carried soldiers across it in both directions in the last spring of the war.

He did not say which soldiers his father had been afraid of, or which ones had paid him, or whether anyone had paid at all. He only said that his father used to say that a river does not care who crosses it, and that the water was just as cold for everyone.

I have kept that sentence with me ever since. When you read about the meeting at the river, I hope you will keep it too, because it reminds us that the soldiers on both banks, and the soldiers of the defeated army who had fled across that water in the weeks before, were all young men far from home, and that many of their mothers never saw them again.

Nearly fifty nations gathered in a theatre beside the ocean.

On the same day, 25 April, at 4:30 in the afternoon local time, the conference on the world organization opened in a large opera house in a city on the far shore of the ocean. Delegates from forty-six nations, soon joined by four more, filled the stage and the seats in front of it. The flags of all the nations stood in a row behind the speakers' table, and the stage was decorated with four golden pillars, meant to stand for the four freedoms the late president had spoken of years before.

The session began with a minute of silence in memory of the president who had called it. Then the new president spoke to the delegates by radio from his capital. He told them that they were the architects of a better world and that history would judge them by what they built.

You can still hear a recording of that broadcast. His voice is plain and a little hurried. He was not a practised speaker, and you can tell that he knew it.

Because of the difference in time, the conference opened when it was already night at the river in the middle of the defeated country. The soldiers who had shaken hands that afternoon were asleep, or sitting by small fires on the riverbanks. You might like to imagine the two scenes side by side: the young men by their fires, and the delegates in their dark suits under the bright stage lights, all of them taking part, without knowing one another, in the same long ending.

The work of the delegates went on for two months, in committees and commissions, often late into the night. The smaller nations argued hard for their rights against the great powers. They won more than they had expected, especially on the role of the general assembly and on human rights. The great powers kept the voting formula agreed at the palace by the sea, though not without long and painful debates.

Behind the speeches lay a great deal of humble work. Typists worked in shifts through the night. Translators checked every line in five official languages. Young clerks carried drafts from room to room along the corridors. Many of the delegates had travelled for weeks by ship, train and plane to get there. Some came from countries that were still occupied only months before. You might picture the building at two in the morning, with most windows dark and a few still lit, like a ship at anchor with its watch awake.

Read the opening words of the Charter aloud and time them.

The Charter which the delegates finally signed on 26 June 1945 begins with a single long sentence, the preamble, and I would like you to read its opening aloud now, slowly, with a watch or a clock in front of you. The words are these: "We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small."

When I read it aloud, it takes me about twenty seconds. It may take you a little longer if you pause at the commas, and I hope you do.

Now think of the people who wrote it, sitting in hot committee rooms through May and June, while news reached them every day of the last surrenders in the west and of the hard fighting still going on in the war in Asia. Notice the words "twice in our lifetime". Many of the delegates had lived through both world wars, and some had lost sons in each of them. Notice also that the sentence begins not with governments but with peoples. It was a deliberate choice, made after long debate, and you can feel in it the hope that ordinary men and women, and not only their leaders, would own the peace.

The last days of April brought the fall of the old capital.

In the days after the meeting at the river, the end in the west came quickly. On 29 April, in a palace in the south, the commanders of the Axis forces in that theatre signed a surrender, to take effect on 2 May. On 30 April, in a bunker beneath the besieged capital of the defeated country, the dictator who had led it into the war took his own life. The garrison of the capital surrendered on 2 May, after days of fighting in its streets, in which tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians on both sides had died.

I do not want to linger over the ruins of that city. You can find the pictures easily, and they speak for themselves. I would rather ask you to think for a moment of the people who came out of the cellars into the daylight on 2 May. They were mostly women, children and old men. They looked at the broken streets and wondered whether there would be water, bread and news of the missing.

For them the end of the war did not come in a single moment either. It came slowly, like a long train pulling into a terminal station, with a series of jolts and pauses before the final stop.

You and I know how the story ends. They did not. Each morning they woke without knowing whether the fighting would come back.

On the evening of 6 May a car drove toward a cathedral town.

By the first days of May, the government that had taken over after the dictator's death had moved to the far north of the defeated country. Its leaders knew that the war was lost. They hoped only to surrender to the western Allies first, so that as many soldiers and refugees as possible could escape westward ahead of the army from the east. On 4 May their forces in the northwest surrendered in a tent on a windy heath, and the next day an envoy went south to the headquarters of the supreme commander of the western Allies.

The supreme commander refused to accept anything but a complete surrender on all fronts at once. On 6 May a second, more senior general was sent to join the talks. He flew south in a small plane, and in the evening a car carried him from the airfield through the dusk toward a cathedral town in the northeast of a liberated western nation, where the supreme commander had his headquarters in a red-brick school building.

I often think of that drive. The fields beside the road were green with early spring, and the farmhouses were dark behind their shutters. The cathedral's towers stood against a sky still holding the last light. Inside the car, the general sat with his papers on his knees, knowing that he would be asked to sign away the existence of the army he had served for his whole life. Far behind him, on the river where the soldiers had shaken hands, the water went on flowing quietly under the broken bridge, and the swans slept in the reeds. In the theatre on the far shore of the ocean, the delegates were still at their work.