“So you do it again. Then I will tell you what it looks like.”
The Colonel looked up at the play of the light on the ceiling. It was reflected, in part, from the Canal. It made strange but steady movements, changing, as the current of a trout stream changes, but remaining, still changing as the sun moved.
Then he looked at his great beauty, with her strange, dark, grown-up child’s face that broke his heart, that he would be leaving before 1335 (that was sure) and he said, “Let’s not talk about the war, Daughter.”
“Please,” she said. “Please. Then I will have it all this week.”
“That’s a short sentence. I mean using the word sentence as a jail sentence.”
“You don’t know how long a week can be when you are nineteen.”
“Several times I have known how long an hour can be,” the Colonel said. “I could tell you how long two minutes and a half can be.”
“Please tell me.”
“Well I had two days’ leave in Paris between the Schnee-Eifel fight and this one, and due to my friendship with one or two people I was privileged to be present at some sort of a meeting, where only the accredited and trusted were present, and General Walter Bedell Smith explained to all of us how easy the operation that later took the name of Hurtgen Forest would be. It was not really Hurtgen Forest. That was only a small sector. It was the Stadtswald
