When Marjorie and Tom embarked from Los Angeles on the small freighter Parakoola, only the ship’s senior officers knew their exact destination. The passengers (nine in all, including Marjorie and Tom) had been told only that they were headed for an undisclosed port, somewhere in Australia. Although the Parakoola was registered in neutral Sweden, it was carrying armaments bound for General MacArthur’s ‘push’ towards Tokyo. The ship’s hold was crammed with tanks, guns and ammunition, and four brand new PT Boats were lashed to its deck. At night the ship was blacked out but in daylight it was a sitting target for Japanese aircraft and submarines. Many times on the twenty-four-day voyage, the captain had to order a change of course and zigzag to avoid detection or attack.
On board Marjorie discovered why Tom had tried so desperately to arrange for them to fly to Australia.
It had not entered my head that the hero I had married might be a poor sailor, but he was that and more. Two days out, poor Tom was wretched and vomiting continuously. And I discovered how helpless I was without him. I had gotten so used to him doing everything for me, it was frightening to see him so sick he couldn’t get out of his bunk and me sitting in my wheelchair not being able to help him or myself.1
There was one stewardess on board but she was not strong enough to lift Marjorie, so the burly second mate, Gunnar, offered his services and told Marjorie ‘You want go somewhere? Just holler “Gunnar” and I come.’ Marjorie hollered ‘Gunnar’ many times during the journey and the giant Swede carried her effortlessly from her cabin onto the deck, into the small saloon or the dining room and back again. There were other services Marjorie felt uncomfortable asking the seaman to perform, so a young Australian couple on board also came to her aid.
By one of those strange coincidences that occur when least expected, the couple came from Birregurra where Marjorie’s aunt and uncle Prime had lived and where her mother had died. Yvonne Nicholls was suffering terribly from seasickness, but her husband Frank, like Marjorie, seemed immune to the illness. With instructions from Tom, Frank Nichols helped Marjorie shower and dress and carried out the daily massage treatment that was required to stop her legs aching.
Poor Frank. I really strained the friendship with him! As soon as he had his wife bedded down he’d come to help us and I asked him to do things I could never have asked a stranger to do, but then I never saw other Australians as ‘strangers’, rather as members of the same big family.2
The Parakoola reached Sydney safely on 11 July and Marjorie found a very different city from the one she had left five years earlier. Huge guns and anti-submarine nets guarded the harbour entrance. Allied warships of all sizes were anchored in the harbour and dockside buildings were smeared with camouflage paint.
I was in a mood to be sad, when I looked down on the dock and saw an Australian ‘digger’, his cocked-up hat jauntily perched on his head as he walked with fixed bayonet along the dock. He looked up too and saw me sitting in my chair. ‘Marge Lawrence!’ he shouted, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ That was better; that soldier’s informal shout was Australian enough for me. This was home all right.3
Marjorie had anticipated spending a week in Sydney to rest and recuperate and to rehearse with Raymond Lambert, her accompanist for the tour, but that was not to be.4 Just hours after they settled into their hotel, two Australian Army officers arrived. One carried a large box of flowers from General Sir Thomas Blamey, Commander-in-Chief of the Australian Military Forces, and the other the news that the Parakoola had docked five days later than anticipated and, as soon as Marjorie’s official permit to enter the Northern Territory (classified as a military zone) arrived, they were expected to commence the tour. Tom was still decidedly unwell, and both were relieved that the permit took two days to arrive.
On the afternoon of 14 July Marjorie, Tom, Lambert and a Lieutenant Kelly who had been assigned to travel with them were driven to Rose Bay on the southern shore of the harbour, where they boarded a Catalina flying boat bound for Townsville, two thousand kilometres north in tropical Queensland. The flight cheered Tom enormously. He wrote in his diary when they reached their destination:
We had the rear cabin to ourselves and we expected to spend the night at Gladstone, but Captain Denny flew on, reaching Townsville at 10.30 pm after fuel stops in Brisbane and Gladstone. Wonderfully smooth trip up the coast and incredibly I am not sick—ate a full lunch, dinner and snacks. Australian Army has a flat here (really half a house) for us overlooking the harbour and Magnetic Island.5
Orme Denny’s flying skills (he was one of Qantas’s most-respected pilots) had earned Marjorie and Tom the luxury of a morning on the beach in Townsville and a drive in a staff car to view some of the beauty spots in the hinterland before Marjorie’s first concert the following night. Townsville was full of American, Australian and other British Commonwealth troops and Marjorie commented in Interrupted Melody that she felt for the first time that indefinable ‘war atmosphere’ that pervaded the city, even though the nearest fighting was another 1500 kilometres to the north. That first concert—in the Wintergarden Theatre—almost prompted a riot. Hundreds of civilians claimed seats before the concert began and were then herded out by military police. As it was, only half of the 4000 soldiers who turned up could be accommodated in the theatre, but those who made it in rewarded Marjorie with a tremendous reception that included a chorus of wolf whistles.
Once again Marjorie refused to compromise on what she sang at this or any of the subsequent concerts on this tour. She opened with ‘The Lord’s Prayer’, then offered excerpts from Wagner and German lieder, introducing these with a brief explanation of the story of the opera or the text of the song. The concert ended with English, Scottish, American and Australian songs. As well as accompanying Marjorie, Lambert played solo brackets of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin and Debussy. The audiences lapped up the fare.
A celebratory supper organised by one of the Australian officers responsible for the defence of Townsville followed the first concert, but bright and early the next morning they boarded a huge Douglas C-47 transport plane, bound for Darwin. This time they had to share the accommodation with a hundred five-gallon cans of paint remover. Unfortunately during the first part of the journey one of the cans ruptured and the acrid fluid seeped along the floor of the fuselage. When they landed to refuel at Cloncurry in western Queensland, airfield staff used petrol to clean out the paint remover and when the passengers reboarded the aircraft they had another unpleasant smell to contend with. Next stop was Fenton Drome, a strategic airfield on a remote cattle station in the heart of the Northern Territory and home base for a squadron of American Liberator bombers.
On landing in Darwin they were met by a Major Paterson, in charge of amenities for the Australian army’s Northern Territory Force, whom Tom described as ‘a swell guy’. Paterson explained that Darwin’s exposure to Japanese bombing raids meant that most of the force was stationed inland at Adelaide River. ‘It’s just down the road a bit’, he explained as he bundled Marjorie, Tom, Lambert and Lieutenant Kelly into a staff car. The ‘bit’ turned out to be 130 kilometres through arid and dusty bushland. Between the fumes in the aircraft and the thick dust on the road to Adelaide River, Marjorie wondered if she would have any voice left. Major Paterson reassured his passengers that he had a crate of beer on ice awaiting their arrival, and although Marjorie didn’t often drink beer, she spent much of the journey imagining how welcoming that cool and refreshing drink would be. It was late when they arrived at Adelaide River and as Marjorie was being placed in her wheelchair an agitated corporal approached Paterson and whispered something to him which seemed to distress the Major. A dinner of thick locally bred and butchered steak was waiting for them, but Paterson had to explain sorrowfully that he had bad news—some ‘blighter’ had ‘pinched’ the beer.
The following evening Marjorie and Lambert gave a concert in what was euphemistically called ‘The Adelaide River Theatre’—a huge open-air amphitheatre with a crudely built stage constructed of scrounged timber, galvanised iron and hessian. The commanding officer, General George ‘Tubby’ Alan owned the only settee on the base and was happy to lend it to Marjorie. During the afternoon, 10,000 American, Australian, Dutch, English and Indian troops began arriving from airfields, anti-aircraft posts, camps, hospitals and naval stations within a 200-kilometre radius, and when a staff car came to convey Marjorie, Tom and Lambert to the venue they became caught in a traffic jam so dense that it took almost an hour to cover a kilometre. Finally the concert got underway—but the delays were not quite over.
In the utter silence of the bush night Raymond Lambert began the introduction to ‘The Lord’s Prayer’. Hushed and attentive the vast audience waited. I filled my lungs with air and opened my mouth to sing when the funny little locomotive that drags a weekly train from Central Australia to Darwin let out a piercing peep to announce its departure from Adelaide River. I stopped dead, my mouth agape. There was a roar of laughter from the assembled soldiery followed by a shout from a typically Australian voice, ‘Come on Marge, give it a go!’
I nodded to Raymond. He played the introduction again and I ‘gave it a go’. Raymond and I played and sang for an hour and half. If I never achieved more with my singing than I did that night, my career has been worthwhile. As the concert ended the commanding officer came on stage and made a speech. He wound up saying, ‘And now boys, let’s give three cheers for Marjorie Lawrence’. That moment I shall remember forever: ten thousand troops standing in the darkness beneath a star-smothered sky and cheering me. I was very proud because I had been able to bring them brief surcease from the horrible business of war.6
The next morning Marjorie held a press conference for war correspondents based at Adelaide River and visited the military hospital, again capturing the hearts and touching the souls of the wounded troops. To a soldier in a wheelchair, Marjorie said cheerfully ‘I hope we’ll both be out of our jeeps soon’. Tom reported that the hospital was nothing more than a vast collection of huts and tents in clearings cut out of the bush, but the patients were expertly and lovingly cared for. The vegetable farm at the base also impressed him and he wrote in his diary: ‘It’s a forest of tomatoes, vegies, pineapples and watermelons that grow like wildfire in this climate’.7
That afternoon the party were driven back to Darwin and they dined with the general officer commanding the city, while the following day was spent relaxing and feasting on chilled watermelon from a giant crate of produce that had been delivered to them as an offering from the Adelaide River farm unit. That evening they gave a concert in the Darwin Theatre—another makeshift venue completed just an hour before they arrived for the performance. Tom described the event as ‘another thrilling concert before many thousands of cheering, appreciative troops’ and noted that small green frogs hopped all over the stage during the performance.8
This Darwin concert was to have been the final one of the troop tour, but the following morning Marjorie was approached by senior staff of the Australian General Hospital and the US Camp Hospital in Darwin asking if she would sing for their patients. Only a few hours remained before their scheduled departure, but Marjorie could not refuse. At the American hospital she was rewarded with the first glass of her favourite drink—Coca Cola—since leaving America and the gratitude and admiration of some of the most seriously wounded soldiers she had so far encountered.
That afternoon Marjorie and her party flew from Darwin to Katherine, where she gave another impromptu concert at the local military hospital there, then on to Adelaide via Alice Springs, in time to catch the Adelaide to Melbourne Express. Tom estimated that in a week and a half Marjorie had sung to 22,000 soldiers and won the hearts of most of them. A few days after they reached Melbourne a letter arrived from General Blamey saying how much he appreciated what Marjorie had done, but it was the responses that came from ordinary soldiers that touched her most. One soldier told her that she reminded him of the blonde barmaid in his home town who was a ‘real corker’, as was Marjorie. A sergeant of the Ninth Docks Operations Company based in Darwin wrote to say that she had put new life into many a sad heart and that he felt she must be telepathic. When he attended Marjorie’s concert, he explained, he had done so with the vague hope that she might sing one of his two favourite songs—‘Danny Boy’ and the Bach-Gounod ‘Ave Maria’—and she had sung both. ‘I feel sure I will never hear them sung so beautifully again. May God forever bless you’, he wrote.9
In the weeks leading up to this tour and while Marjorie and Tom were in northern Australia, the Allied thrust against the Japanese had seen the retaking of most of New Guinea and a rapid advance towards the Philippines. Much of this action was in evidence when Marjorie and her party had arrived in Townsville and Darwin, with reconnaissance planes taking off and landing non-stop, flotillas of fighting ships and supply ships being loaded and vast squadrons of planes setting out for the battle zone. Marjorie found this satisfying not only because it meant the tide of war was turning against the Japanese, but for a personal reason as well. Before leaving the United States, she had decided that after completing the northern Australian leg of her tour she would try to get permission to travel to New Guinea and entertain the front line troops there. Given the current situation, this plan now seemed practical. The office of the United Services Organisations in Australia was happy to arrange the trip and General MacArthur’s headquarters said they had no objection, but pointed out that, as New Guinea was now under the operational control of the Australians, she would need their permission as well. To Marjorie’s dismay General Blamey’s headquarters flatly refused to let her go. Marjorie immediately went over Blamey’s head and applied to the Australian Government.
As she awaited a response from the government Marjorie visited her family in Victoria and toured military hospitals and military bases in the southern states. Her answer finally arrived in a cable from Frank Forde, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for the Army, and supported Blamey’s decision. In Interrupted Melody, Marjorie claims that the reason for their blunt refusal was that the Australian authorities considered her too great a security risk—that she might ‘blab’ about what she saw in New Guinea and put their military efforts in jeopardy—but that was wrong. The true reason was that there were still pockets of Japanese resistance in New Guinea and the surrounding islands, and neither the general nor the politician wanted to be blamed if such a high-profile and popular Australian as Marjorie Lawrence fell victim to desperate enemy fire.10 It would not be long before Marjorie was back giving concerts to grateful troops, but in the meantime she had to content herself with her public recitals under the Tait banner and concerts for the ABC.
Marjorie and Tom stayed for a couple of days with Lena and her husband Nelson Batson on their small farm at Wallington, west of Geelong. Marjorie was photographed by the press in her wheelchair nursing a lamb, feeding a calf from a bottle and scattering grain for the ‘chooks’. For one memorable photo she also hoisted herself up into a standing position, holding onto a gate while she fed chaff to two friendly plough horses. Tom was introduced to the simple pleasures of country life in Australia and commented to the press that he hadn’t seen meat, butter and cream of such quality or quantity in the United States since before the war. The tour continued with Marjorie’s triumphant return to Winchelsea on the back of a farm cart and splendid civic receptions organised for her in Melbourne, Geelong, Ballarat and Sydney.
Marjorie’s recitals were a resounding success—artistically and commercially. There were no problems with attendance this time. Marjorie sang well, Lambert played well and capacity audiences cheered them enthusiastically. The doyen of British critics, Neville Cardus, who spent the war years in Australia, penned a laudatory and perceptive review of her third Sydney recital that gives a more accurate assessment of her as a recitalist than most of those written in the United States.
The superb range of Marjorie Lawrence’s voice never ends in mere abnormality. Always there is the touch of nature in it, so, unlike many opera singers, she is not removed from intimate poetry. She is an artist in all she gives us. There is unselfconscious pathos woven into her singing. She sings Rachmaninov’s Floods of Spring with the utmost gush of lyricism and from its almost banal melody she distils a rapture that is as near to tears as happiness. She even makes something engaging and rhythmically enchanting out of Waltzing Matilda.11
Through Cardus we also learn that Marjorie has (too late) found the key to singing Carmen and how she coped with pieces like the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde with only a piano to support her.
With hardly a gesture and using her expressive eyes and a voice that acted, she sang the ‘Seguidilla’ from Carmen as vividly as I have heard it for years … and she began the Liebestod with the softest and most raptly phrased singing. Later, though the surge to the climax was rich in vocal splendour, no doubt she would have given it greater ‘throb’ and exultation had she been singing with an orchestra.12
At her final recital in Melbourne, on 29 August, Marjorie took the opportunity to celebrate some news that had just reached Australia—the liberation of her beloved Paris after four grim years of German occupation. The audience rose to its feet as Marjorie sang first the Marseillaise, then Rule Britannia. Pride turned to relief when a postcard arrived a few weeks later from Madame Grodet, the first communication Marjorie had from her adopted French family for three years. In a spidery hand that betrayed how little vision she had left, Marie Grodet explained that ‘Monsieur’ had died a year earlier, that she and Mimi were well and living in a tiny apartment just a block down the hill from Avenue Trudaine and that they both hoped Marjorie’s career was prospering.13
While in Brisbane to give recitals, Marjorie agreed to audition a young singer with a fine tenor voice. The young man was Harold Blair, an Australian Aborigine who had grown up on a mission station and who currently worked as a sugar cane cutter. At that time he was completely unknown. Wearing borrowed clothes and the first hat he had ever owned, Blair came to Marjorie’s suite at Lennon’s Hotel in Brisbane, desperately intimidated by his surroundings and the task before him. Tom wheeled Marjorie to a piano and she asked the young man to sing some scales, as others had asked of her years before. By his own admission, until that time the only ‘scales’ Blair had heard of were attached to fish, so Marjorie had to improvise.14 Eventually she had him singing excellent top Cs and giving a reasonable account of himself in her stand-by, ‘The Lord’s Prayer’.
Marjorie liked Blair and he was fascinated by her. Through Marjorie’s efforts the press began to take an interest in him and she recommended he start taking singing lessons with a view to making a career as a singer. Eventually he did have a short career (including a tour of the United States and a recital at Carnegie Hall) but, as the few records Blair made prove, he was not quite good enough as a singer to make the grade. Instead, he became a modestly successful businessman and a highly respected activist for the advancement of Aboriginal people in Australia. How Blair’s singing career ended was a disappointment to Marjorie, but it always pleased her to recall that she had given encouragement to the first Indigenous Australian to at least attempt a career as a classical singer.
Controversy surrounded the concerts Marjorie gave with the ABC’s symphony orchestras on this visit. The conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, was appearing in Australia at the time—the first conductor of note to venture ‘down under’ since Beecham in 1940—and the public wanted to hear Ormandy and Marjorie together. Marjorie had sung under Ormandy’s baton in America and they shared a mutual regard and respect for one another. Ormandy would have been delighted to have had Marjorie as soloist at his concerts and told her so when he called on her in her Sydney hotel.
A rash of letters appeared in the newspapers, demanding the ABC bow to the public’s desire to hear them together and the ABC responded with a statement that joint appearances by the singer and the conductor were not possible because Marjorie’s troop tour of northern Australia had disrupted their concert schedule. This was clearly not the case and it is more likely that the ABC was simply considering the financial implications of a joint appearance and that combining these two major celebrities squandered their individual drawing power. At the time another explanation was widely canvassed among the players in the orchestras which may also have had some credence. The Machiavellian Bernard Heinze, now senior among Australia’s resident maestros, was set on conducting any and all concerts Marjorie might give with the ABC orchestras and was not averse to using his power to achieve that. In the end she gave only two concerts—with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and the Melbourne-based Victorian Symphony Orchestra, both conducted by Heinz.
While in Sydney Marjorie also made a small group of recordings for the Australian branch of Columbia, with Raymond Lambert accompanying. Two discs were issued. The first featured ‘Rule Britannia’, backed by Alfred Hill’s arrangement of ‘Haere Ra’ (the ‘Maori Song of Farewell’), which 2000 Australian troops about to embark for the front had sung to Marjorie at Keswick Barracks near Adelaide. The second disc offered the local patriotic song ‘God Bless Australia’ and Marjorie’s now famous rendition of ‘Waltzing Matilda’. Popular though these discs proved with the Australian buying public, they contribute little to our knowledge or enjoyment of Marjorie’s singing. Her diction is, as always, exemplary but the voice sounds tired and the singing uncharacteristically tentative.15
Before she departed from Australia, Marjorie gave one of her Lilly Daché hats (her ‘pepper-uppers’ as she called them) to be auctioned for charity. The wife of the president of the Footscray Football Club secured the hat for fifty pounds, less than it had cost Marjorie in New York. She also handed over to the Argus newspaper in Melbourne the pair of crutches she had used occasionally in private during this tour with instructions that they be given to someone deserving. Eventually they were presented to a female patient at the Alfred Hospital who had fractured both legs in a riding accident.
This time Marjorie left Australia with more than had arrived with her, including all her earnings. She also took with her seeds of various native Australian plants for the garden at Harmony Hills, an odd-looking hat trimmed with gum nuts, gum blossom and two felt kangaroos (the gift of a patriotic milliner) and a masseuse named Amy Featherstone, whom Marjorie had employed in Australia and who had served Marjorie so well during the latter part of the tour that she was asked to accompany them back to the United States to double as masseuse and personal maid. ‘Feathers’, as Marjorie called her, stayed on as part of Marjorie’s team for some years.
Marjorie, Tom and Feathers took passage again on the Parakoola, bound for Vancouver and reached ice-bound New York in time to round off this tropical Australian adventure with a New Year’s Eve concert for Australian servicemen. Here Marjorie was joined on the platform by another Australian, Flying Officer Kenneth Neate of the Royal Canadian Air Force, who would have a distinguished career as a tenor in London and Germany after the war.
Marjorie immediately got back into the swing of performing life in the United States doing concerts with the major orchestras, including with Eugene Ormandy, this time with the conductor’s own orchestra in Philadelphia. She contacted Edward Johnson to let him know she was available, but there was no interest from the Met, then or in the future. Tannhäuser was not performed during the 1944–45 season and when it returned to the repertoire, a new star, Blanche Thebom, sang Venus. Traubel meantime had regained her hold on Isolde and dominated that role at the Met until she abandoned opera a few years later in favour of nightclubs and Broadway.
Marjorie also renewed her acquaintance with the Roosevelts. She sang ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ at the opening of the President’s fourth inauguration dinner in Washington, although the President himself was too busy to attend. Perhaps it was well that Roosevelt did not, for Marjorie inadvertently almost turned the dinner into a strip show. As Tom was dressing her in an anteroom, the long zip in the back of her gown broke and she had no other with her to wear. A member of the Woman’s Army Auxiliary Corp volunteered to sew Marjorie into the gown, but as Marjorie sang the stitches popped out one by one. By the end of the song only will power and the back rest of her wheelchair were holding the gown up.
The next morning Marjorie and Tom joined the crowd assembled on the snow-covered lawn below the south portico of the White House to witness a frail and exhausted FDR being sworn in for his fourth term. There was a bank of newsreel cameras lined up to record the historic event and the United News crew took a panning shot across the front of the crowd. Marjorie can be seen clearly, sitting in her wheelchair, rugged up against the bitter cold and with Tom standing in his accustomed position behind her. That afternoon Marjorie and Tom returned to the White House for afternoon tea with Mrs Roosevelt, along with 3000 other guests.
We entered the White House through the President’s own private entrance and elevator. The butler said ‘Tell me your names for Mrs Roosevelt’ and Marjorie said ‘I think she’ll know me’. Then Eleanor turned around and greeted us saying ‘I think you’d like to see the President, wouldn’t you?’ She left for a moment, returning almost immediately to say it was arranged. On the way to the study, the President’s old coloured [sic] manservant said to Marjorie: ‘But ma’am, you’re such a pretty lady. I didn’t think anybody like you would ever be in a wheelchair!’ We were pounding with excitement when we were shown into the President’s study. We found him poring over a huge file marked ‘Confidential’. He knew but we didn’t, that he was leaving the next day for the Yalta conference that would decide the fate of the post- war world. He greeted us courteously and cheerfully and he and Marjorie talked about their conditions. ‘My doctor tells me we get better until we’re seventy, so I’ve at least got that to look forward to’, he said. Marjorie mentioned that her knees gave her trouble and the President agreed saying ‘What a pity it gets us all in the knees!’16
Few people saw President Roosevelt that day and Marjorie rated her private audience with him as one of the highlights of her life. She was so proud to have been singled out for this honour that she couldn’t resist boasting about it to the taxi driver who drove them from the White House back to their hotel.
Three months later Marjorie returned to Washington to give a recital in Constitution Hall. She took a nap during the afternoon and was woken by Tom to say that it had just been announced over the radio that President Roosevelt had died. Marjorie cancelled her recital and sent all the flowers she had been given to the White House. Just as Marjorie was an inspiration to so many others, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had inspired her.
As the world slowly emerged from darkness and the defeat of Germany and Japan became a probability rather than a possibility, there were moves to re-establish opera in the capitals of Europe. In London the Royal Opera House had been used as a dance hall since 1939, but now a committee appointed by the Arts Council was making plans to resume performances of opera and ballet. A member of that committee, Ralph Hawkes (a partner in the music publishing company Boosey & Hawkes) visited New York in January 1945 and one of the singers he approached was Marjorie, possibly at the suggestion of Sir Thomas Beecham. There were discussions about what Marjorie might sing in the inaugural post-war season at Covent Garden and interest centred on Isolde. Marjorie was elated. She had not sung in London since the brief and disappointing tour of 1937 and she was keen to make a fresh start.
Marjorie had changed agents again, replacing Austin Wilder with J. Colstan Leigh, and Ralph Hawkes confirmed that he would commence negotiations with Leigh as soon as he arrived back in London.17 To Marjorie’s dismay the negotiations never even began. Tristan und Isolde was not included in the repertoire for the first post-war season at Covent Garden and by the time it was given (in the second season) Flagstad was back in circulation and sang each of the ten performances.
Marjorie received a consolation prize, however, in the form of an invitation from ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association), which organised entertainment for British troops, to tour Britain the following summer. In mid-May ENSA invited Marjorie to extend her tour to include concerts for the Allied occupation forces in Germany for, by then, the war in Europe, which had dragged on for six ghastly years, was over.