I was standing in a snowy field with a hundred or so other prisoners. It was bitterly cold, and we were deeply dispirited. The Krauts had put us in a line abreast, six rows deep, with our hands raised in abject surrender, I was in the middle of the fourth row.

We were looking around, trying to figure out what would happen next, when two half-tracks pulled up. A short time later, another came grinding up and parked between them. A Kraut in the third vehicle stood and took aim with a pistol. Two shots rang out and, to our absolute horror – a couple of guys in the front row grunted and crumpled into the snow.

That set off the gunners in the other halftracks. They hosed us down with their MG 42s. At 1,200 rounds a minute, we never stood a chance. There were anguished screams as guys fell like so many stalks to the reaper. Ultimately, the shooting stopped and there was nothing but the eerie silence of death.

Then the Panzergrenadiers dismounted from their Kfz .251s. They were big kids, in their late teens, laughing and joking as they went around shooting, or brutally clubbing any poor soul who still had the breath of life in them. All-in-all ... those were fun times for the Hitler Youth.

A 7.92 round had grazed the side of my helmet knocking it off and leaving me face-down unconscious - bleeding like a stuck pig. Fortunately, I was under a pile of bodies. So, the clean-up crew missed me.

Eventually I came-to, terrified. It was unnervingly quiet. I heard someone shout, “Let’s go!!” And a few of the fellows who’d been playing dead jumped up and ran. The MG42s opened up again. A couple of guys fell, and a flock of SS pursued the rest toward a tavern at the crossroads. There, they proceeded to set fire to the building and shoot anybody who fled the flames.

It was the dead of winter, and it was getting close to dark. I was blanketed by as-yet warm bodies. So it seemed prudent to just keep lying there face down, lamenting the cruel fate that had brought me to the crossroads of Malmedy on that dark December day. I surreptitiously felt in my pocket for my worn picture of Jane and Peter. It was comforting to know that I would join them soon.

I grew up in a German speaking part of Wisconsin. Back then we Huns tended to band together in little farming communities where German was still a common language, even if your family had been over for two generations.

Hence, most of us were bi-lingual. Still, The Great War had changed our neighbor’s attitudes about Germans and so we all began to pronounce our names with a decidedly English cast. That’s why I was Bill, not Wilhelm.

Our community was self-sufficient, and of course orderliness is one thing that Germans do better than anybody else. As a result, even though I grew up during the depression my childhood wasn’t as hard as it was for people in the more citified areas. We made our share of sacrifices. But there was always food on the table and a good school to go to.

That was where I discovered my flair for writing. It wasn’t anything I studied. An idea would just pop into my head, and the words would line themselves up like the boxcars on a passing train. I won a writing contest during high school and that brought me to the attention of Max Schlemiel.

Yes, I said Schlemiel ... He’d inherited his unfortunate last name from some hapless ancestor. But Max was one very sharp cookie. He owned and published the local newspaper.

One steamy July day I was sitting on our front stoop drinking lemonade. It was hot and I was thinking about what to do with the rest of my life. That’s when Max appeared. I didn’t see him arrive. He must have come down the alley behind our big colonial house. In those days we used the alleys more than we did the streets.

He said without preamble, “Bill, I’ve got a job for you.”

It was funny he should mention it. Since I didn’t have a clue about what I was going to do with my life. Hey! I was a kid!! No eighteen-year-old has the course plotted. But I knew for sure that there had to be a “next” out there somewhere.

I said grumpily, “I don’t want to be a paperboy.” What the heck ... that’s all I could imagine Max’d ever want me to do. He laughed and said, “No, I need a reporter. I read the prize essay that you wrote, and I think you have potential as a cub.”

Now that was intriguing. College was out of the question, we didn’t have that kind of dough, and I didn’t want to join the WPA, or be a fieldhand. My old man worked for the local Grange Association as an organizer. But I had no interest in keeping the local farmers happy.

So, I said warily, “How much do I make and when do I start?” Max said, “You can start anytime you want. I pay a dollar for a standard article and two bucks if you get a byline.” That was a lot of money in ‘37. I said, “What’s being a cub entail?” He said, “I give you a credential that says you’re from the Times and you have to hunt up your own stories.”

He saw the hesitant look on my face. How in the heck was I supposed to do THAT. So, he added, “Sometimes I get a tip I want a reporter to check out. If you can show me that you can dig up a few stories in the beginning, then I might send you out on those.”

I appeared at the Times office bright and early the next morning, hair neatly combed. It was a rundown wooden shack on the main drag over by the movie theater. The only people working there were a couple of old guys and a woman. That was the entire staff of our eminent news organization.

The two men were the entire press corps and Mrs. Eldridge was Max’s secretary. She was a widow lady, about eighty-five and she looked like a walnut with a whip cream topping. But she was still spry, and she ran the place like Black Jack Pershing ran the AEF.

She muttered suspiciously, “What’re YOU here for?” I might have been offended. But that was the way she treated everybody. I said, “Max wants to talk to me about being a cub.” She said skeptically, “He’s down at the Hot Spot. You can talk to him there. But I doubt he’s serious. What are you? About twelve?”

I said self-importantly, “Eighteen almost nineteen.” Then I turned and headed for the door.

It was a steamy morning, very muggy, meaning a typical day in Wisconsin in July. That was before air-conditioning. Thus, it was stiflingly humid as I walked into the aptly named Hot Spot.

The Hot Spot was where everybody in town gathered. Hence, it was a tossup whether Max had gone there to get a morning cup of Joe, or snoop into the affairs of everybody else.

He was sitting with Barbara Pederson, the owner of the place and Doc Morton. They seemed to be having a neighborly chat while Barbara’s three-year-old Dot entertained the customers by solemnly carrying menus back and forth to the tables like a waitress. Dot was a very determined little sprite.

They all turned to look at me as I approached their booth. Max said, “Sit down Bill, we were just talking about you.” That was ominous. I said defensively, “What’d I do? I didn’t do anything!”

They all started laughing. Max said, “Relax, I was telling them that I’d put you on the payroll. So, any snooping you were doing was sanctioned by me.”

I said, “What you’re saying is that it’s okay if I follow my nose around town?”

The Doc snicked and said, “I think he has all the instincts of a fine reporter.” Barbara said, “And you can start here. Nothing happens in this town that doesn’t eventually pass through the Hot Spot.” I had to agree. Barbara must have been keeping more secrets than the Sphinx.

That was when my girlfriend Maggie breezed in. Every kid in town hung out at the Hot Spot and she was looking for me. The old Silvertone radio in the pass-through was playing Glenn Miller’s, “American Patrol,” as Mags made her way past the counter in my direction.

First, she stopped and said hello to Betty Moran. Betts had been Maggie’s best friend since grade school. She and her boyfriend Jed Sharpe were the perfect couple. Betty was the most beautiful girl in town and Jed was rumored to be the smartest. All I knew for sure was that I wasn’t.

The three of them gabbed for a minute. Then Maggie came flouncing back to me, chomping on three sticks of Juicy Fruit, horniness gleaming in her eyes. I might add, it was nine o’clock in the morning.

Mags had been around the block a few times. So, she taught me stuff. Her wealth of experience didn’t bother me since I wasn’t planning on marrying her, even though she was making noises in that direction.

Mags was no raving beauty, like Betty was. But she had a pleasant face, framed by dark brown hair in a classic page boy and big brown doe eyes. She was also the owner of a monumental pair of tits. I lived to put those marvels on like a pair of ear-muffs and go Brrrrrrrrrrr! Talk about serious suffocation!!

She said, “Hey Ace,” that was what everybody called me, “How about us going for a little swim?” That was a not-so-subtle hint that she wanted to fuck.

I said, trying to shut her up, “I’m talking to Max about a job.” Maggie’s eyes lit up. The first thing I’d need before marrying her would be employment. Max said amused, “Yes, Bill is going to be our new cub reporter.”

I said, trying to get out of there as fast as I could, “Well I guess I’ll start poking around to see-what-I-can-see. When do you want an article?”

Max said, “The sooner the better. We have an edition going out this Friday.” It was Monday. I could come up with something in three, or four days. I just had to get an idea.

Maggie grabbed my arm and said, “Let’s go, it’s getting hot in here.” Somebody was hot for sure. She led me out to her rundown ‘31 Ford convertible, with the rumble seat.

The car had appeared out of nowhere just after her eighteenth birthday. I knew Mags had a mysterious source of income. The rumor was that she had a sugar daddy someplace. I didn’t care since it gave her spare cash that we both spent.

We drove out to the Dells Millpond, which had the advantage of a lot of tree cover and proceeded to skinny dip for fifteen minutes before we made it back to the shoreline. The thing about Maggie was that she knew her way around a blanket. So she just walked over in her birthday suit and plopped herself down flat on her back, legs spread and huge jugs puddling out on her chest.

She raised her head and gave me what passed for a seductive look. Mags was lying slightly elevated on the bank above where I was coming out of the pond and from my perspective her face looked like the sun rising between two vast mountains, with a chasm at their base.

Being naked myself, I hustled across the short space and, with no ceremony whatsoever, I entered that gap. It was like voyaging into the Grand Canyon – extraordinarily vast and a bit intimidating. Needless to say I arrived at the top without delay. She was very hot and wet.

I grabbed a handful of Maggie’s imposing ass and pulled her to me so hard that her clit was in constant contact with my pubic bone. She shrieked with lust and began an up-and-down motion that brought her to a gushing orgasm in about two minutes flat.

I hadn’t really gotten started. And since it was a little loose in there anyhow, I thought that it might take a while. I said, “Turn around,” in order to arrange things for the best angle of attack. Maggie assumed the position like the seasoned pro that she was.

She was kneeling on the blanket presenting her butt for ease of access, face down with her arms extended over her head, legs wide. She also kept looking over her shoulder at me with a smoking hot “fuck me” stare.

I was considering hitting her little rosebud. I’d never done that before, and I thought it might be a bit tighter than her prodigious box. Still, that would be sharing more intimacy with Maggie than I wanted. So I slid into the conventional place instead.

Actually it was more like falling into it. I was instantly pressed against her pillowy cheeks. They were soft. So, when I hit bottom, my arrival set off ripples all the way up to her surprisingly narrow waist and she shrieked again.

Mags was more-or-less in constant orgasm at that point, moaning, grunting, and pounding on the ground as each contraction hit her. I had to admit that she was an insanely good fuck, enthusiastic and very giving.

For my part, I was a man possessed. I wanted to get myself off, but the problem was that with Maggie’s copious lubrication and the – shall we say - “roomy” nature of what I was pounding into, I couldn’t get enough traction to make anything happen.

I finally worked myself around so that I was touching something. Unfortunately, that was her g-spot. And that drove her totally insane. She was slamming her ass back at me so hard that it literally flattened out as we collided and she was shrieking, “AHHH – JESUS- FUCK ME!!!” loud enough that I was afraid we were going to attract attention – all the way back in town.

Still, it got the job done and I was surprised at how hard I came. As I did, Maggie started yelling, “OH GAWD, GIVE IT TO ME BABY!!! ALL OF IT!!!” And she started moving her hips around in wide circles like she was processing another monster orgasm.

Afterward, I slid out of her with the same sound you would make pulling your boot out of the mud. She lay with her face on her arms. Her big round buns were still raised in presentation position. But she was mainly just trying to catch her breath. She finally turned to a sitting position on the blanket. There was no need to worry about getting it messy. It was as messy as it could ever get.

She said, “Wow lover!!! What brought THAT on?” I didn’t like her choice of endearment. But I assumed she was being descriptive. I said, “I don’t know. I think it makes me feel like less of a kid, and more of a man to finally have something to do with myself.”

Then I added, because in my opinion Maggie was truly the world’s greatest fuck, “We’re going to have to do this again, a lot. How about I take you to the Hot Spot tonight?”

Maggie got a furtive look and said, “I’ve got an appointment this evening. It’s just a little something I have to do. It’s not a date.” I didn’t have the impression she was meeting with her priest.

She added heartily, “But we can get together afterward. I’ll make it worth your while.”

I thought “Hmmm that’s a bit off-putting.” But like I said, I wasn’t interested in marrying her. So I said, “Where do you want to meet up?” She said, “The Hot Spot’s okay, I’ll see you there at nine. That should give us plenty of time to repeat this morning’s experience.”

Naturally, I was sitting down the block in my dad’s 35 Chevy when Maggie’s “appointment” picked her up. It was curiosity, not jealousy. There was far too much going on in the background and I wanted to find out what it was.

It didn’t take a genius to figure-out that my girlfriend was up to something. So, I followed my nose. That was when I realized that I truly had reporter’s instincts.

Maggie lived on a tree shaded street on the east side of town just off the main drag. It was a classic movie-set kind of neighborhood with the old-fashioned, two story stone houses that all the wealthy burghers favored.

Her daddy was a local bigwig in politics. So, it didn’t seem odd when Grover Cleveland Ebenschlager strode up the sidewalk and into their house. He’d been the town’s mayor for as long as I could remember.

It WAS odd however when he emerged not thirty seconds later with Maggie hanging on his arm like a decoration. It certainly looked like a date. She was nineteen. He was fifty-seven. They drove off in the direction of the Moose lodge on the outskirts of town. The Moose weren’t meeting tonight.

Ebenschlager’s car was parked in the alley behind the place. The building was dark. But it was still early evening, and the sun stays up for a long time in Wisconsin in the summer. This was too good to be true.

My old man had an Argus C-3 that was his pride and joy. He kept it in the glove box, so it was handy for any special moment that he wanted to photograph. This was a special moment as far as I was concerned.

I parked down the street, waited a few minutes and then crept stealthily up to the side of the building. Like every other commercial place in town, the Moose Hall was made out of cheap white clapboards with big windows to let in some ventilation on a hot summer night. Familiar noises were coming from one of the little offices at the back of the building. I’d heard the same sounds about eight hours earlier.

I crept around to the main office and there was Maggie, facing the window. Her hands were braced against the desk. Her weighty pendulous tits were hanging down, revolving in lazy circles. Ebenschlager was behind her assiduously pounding away. Mags was grunting on every in-stroke like a steam engine chugging up a hill.

My girlfriend was clearly in a world of her own. Her eyes would occasionally open but there was nothing but white showing. Ebenschlager was concentrating on her big round ass like it was the most interesting thing he’d ever seen and occasionally he’d give it a slap. Both were sweating profusely in the hot humid evening.

There was still plenty of light, so I took a few tasteful photographs. That is - they were tasteful if your intention is to document the kind of scoop that never falls into the lap of a cub reporter on the first day on the job.

They were still at it as I made my way back to the car. As I got in, Maggie’s high pitched finishing cry nearly shattered the windshield.

Mags was a different person when she slipped into the booth opposite me a few hours later. Her hair was up in one of those double pony tails that make girls look like a Springer Spaniel and her cheeks were pink. She just radiated well-fucked as she said, “Sorry I’m late lover. I was a little delayed.”

No shit!! I said casually, “Not a problem, I was just wondering how you knew Grover?” Maggie got a look of uneasiness on her face and said, “Do you mean the mayor?”

I said, “That very person.”

Maggie looked like she was calculating how much I knew as she said, “What makes you think I know the Mayor?”

I said, “I thought I saw you in his car a little earlier, as he was driving out toward the Moose Hall.”

She got a relieved look and said, “Oh yes – that - he was just giving me a lift out to my job. I do a few chores for him out there. He hired me to straighten things up. That’s where I get the money, lover.”

So that was how it was. At least she was being honest. She was definitely straightening something up for Ebenschlager.

I said with real curiosity, “How do you know him?”

She laughed and said, “He watched me grow up. He and my Daddy run this town.” Her old man was the county treasurer. I didn’t ask her when she started fucking him. That was clearly a new feature for her. Which, no doubt, corresponded with the appearance of the car.”

It was neither here-nor-there to me that Maggie was spreading her bounty around town. Like I said, I didn’t plan to marry her. But I was also not into sloppy seconds. She had that familiar horney look as she said seductively, “Don’t we have someplace to go?”

I said, “That’s what I wanted to tell you. Max wants me in early tomorrow morning so I’ve gotta cancel tonight.”

Maggie looked extremely disappointed. That made no sense. She’d clearly gotten a big helping of cookies not more than an hour earlier. I know, I’d heard the shrieking.

I wanted to talk to Max before I did anything further with Maggie. The contents of the roll of film in my pocket would probably change the dynamic of our relationship. So, I said as lasciviously as I could stomach, “I’ll rock your world tomorrow after I talk to Max.” I probably would. But not in the way she was thinking.

A couple of days passed, and I’d endured three grueling sessions with Maggie before Max called me. He said he wanted to see me. I was in a cheerful mood as I sauntered into his office and draped myself in a chair. He stood up, closed the door, and sat back down.

I said offhandedly, “How did you like my first article? There were even pictures. I’ll bet you haven’t had news like that in a while?”

Max shuffled a few of the papers on his desk and said, “Good-news, bad-news ... which do you want first?”

I said, still cheerful, let’s get the bad news out of the way.”

Max said, “I’m not running it.”

I said, “WHAT!!??”

Max said, “This town has too many cards balanced on each other for your story to upset the apple cart.”

I said accusingly, “You showed it to Ebenschlager.” I didn’t bother to point out how brutally he was mixing his metaphors.

He said, “Of course I did. I have to live here too. But there’s also some good news.”

I said disgusted, “What’s that, Oh-Wise-One?”

Max laughed and said, “What you gave me just made me the guy who’s holding all the aces. Ebenschlager and his cronies know that, and they are willing to dance to my tune...”

Then he paused and added significantly, “Just as long as I do them one little favor. And you might like that since it will get you out of this town.

And that’s how I ended up at the Columbia University School of Journalism, all expenses paid by the Mayor and his shadowy friends. Blackmail is such an unfortunate term. I would prefer to think of it as the leaders of the town underwriting the ambitions of a deserving young man.

Still, whatever the actual reason for their largesse, Max had me on the train to New York City within the week. I think my parents were actually relieved to see me go. Maggie was beside herself with grief. I didn’t want to fill her in on how she had boosted me onto the fast track. She gave me a rousing send off, over-and-over-and-over to the point where I didn’t think I would EVER need sex again.

All-in-all Maggie was a good-hearted slut. All she ever wanted in life was a brood of kids. She would make some burgher a great wife once she had them. But married life in a small Wisconsin town was my version of the nineth level of Dante’s hell.

My knowledge was expanded a lot in the time that I spent in that big brick building on Broadway Avenue. Those studies pushed my worldview up a couple of centuries, right to the leading edge of American journalism. Now, my domain was Runyon and Winchell, Lippman and Grantland Rice.

Of course, shining above them all was the newspaperman turned novelist Ernest Hemingway. I wanted to be just like Ernie and my profs thought I showed promise. So, I had my choice of jobs when I got out of Columbia.

I opted for a “foreign correspondent” role at the Post. That was how Hemingway paid his way while he was writing The Sun Also Rises in Paris.

The New York Post was the liberal rag of the era featuring articles from the likes of Elanor Roosevelt and Drew Pearson. But everybody’s interest was focused on what was going on in Europe. As far as I was concerned, that was the place for an aspiring young man to earn his spurs.

I arrived at the Southampton docks on the Aquitania just in time for the London Blitz. I was lucky that way. Most people wouldn’t like spending their nights sleeping in a subway tunnel. But I was there to get the scoop and so I began doing personal interviews with my fellow denizens of the Underground and then wiring those pieces back to the AP and Wechsler, who was my editor at the Post.

The people in my home town would have cared less about the subject of my stories. But those folks were still living in the nineteenth century. The Manhattan crowd loved what I was writing, and I was beginning to get a solid reputation as a reporter. I was twenty-three years old, living in a little flat in Russell Square and totally full of myself when my life took another turn.

We’d go down into the tube stations every day around dark. That’s when the He 111s would show up. The “whump!!” of the QF 3.7s was like an alarm clock, telling us it was time.

It was a rainy late November night, and I was hunting for a likely target to interview. I concentrated on old folks and mothers with children. Their stories resonated the most with the liberal readership of the Post, who loved to revel in other people’s misery.

It happened in a flash. I was making my way through the huddled mass of humanity sleeping or killing time on the concrete floor of the tube. A face looked up at me just as a parachute mine detonated nearby. The overwhelming noise of the blast and the shaking of the subway walls was a perfect counterpoint to the inescapable feeling that my world had inexorably changed.

She was of medium height for a woman, perhaps five four with a neat little figure in a dark grey button up cardigan and a grey pleated skirt. She was sitting on a tartan blanket with her long, bare legs dangling over the edge of the platform talking quietly to a little boy.

The Brits produce some of the most adorable children on the planet and this little guy was a model of blond haired, blue eyed choir-boy excellence. He had a helmet of thick blond hair and the face of innocence as he sat there listening raptly to his mother telling him a story.

I sat down next to her and said in my friendliest tones, “Hi there, my name is Ace.” She stopped talking to the boy and swiveled her head to look at me. Her eyes said that she didn’t appreciate the interruption. She said, “Do you mind? My son and I would like a little privacy.”

I laughed and said, “I’m not making advances Madam. I’m a reporter with the New York Post and I’m telling the story of the Blitz from the perspective of the regular people living through it. Would you care if I asked you a few questions?”

The kid said in his sweet little boy voice, “Oh, could we talk to the man mummy? We’d be in the newspapers.”

I smiled at the tyke and said with a bit of irony to his mom, “It’ll just take a couple of minutes and you don’t have anything better to do - do you?” At that moment, another parachute mine went off and everybody cowered.

She smiled back at me. I could see where the boy got his angelic looks, she really had a beautiful face. She said hesitantly, “All right then – but I don’t see how anybody would find Peter or me interesting.” Well ... the readership might not be interested. But I was.

I didn’t need to ask whether she lived locally. The people sheltering in the tubes all lived near that particular station. You didn’t want to be running across town to a favorite stop with 250-kilogram bombs raining down on you.

So, I sat there holding my little notebook while I asked my new friend the usual starter question, where was her husband serving? I just assumed he was serving somewhere. That was an unfortunate question since her husband wasn’t serving anywhere. He was buried near Arras, killed during the failed BEF expedition prior to Dunkirk in May of 1940. That was a half year earlier.

Both of them looked sad. I said, “Oh my God!! I’m so sorry!!”

She made a face that said it all and muttered, “I need to carry on. I must be strong.” That was the precise point where my mere interest turned into something far greater. In many ways the woman, reflected the zeitgeist of the British people. She hadn’t started the war. But she was going to persevere without complaint, until the people who HAD started it were punished.

I said. “I’ll leave you alone if you want me to. But I think that your story is something that all of the young mothers who have lost their husbands would want to hear. Your thoughts, feelings and your experiences would be important to any woman in a similar circumstance.”

She looked at me skeptically. So, I added, “My aim is to put whatever you tell me into a larger context for the readers back home and I won’t publish anything without your approval. But I think that every woman in your shoes would want to know that they aren’t alone in this.”

She looked at me with wonder and said, “That’s EXACTLY the way I feel. I’m the only widow on our street whose children aren’t grown up and I’m so very lonely. The future is frightening.” Then she added embarrassed, “I’m not whinging, mind you.”

She’d used the classic London slang term for a constant complainer. I asked, “Have you always lived in the City?”

She said, “I was raised in Shepherd’s Bush. But Nigel and I lived in Stepney before the war. He joined the 60th City of London anti-aircraft regiment. We just assumed that would be safer than the trenches. His unit was caught by the Blitzkrieg, and he was killed a month after he left.” THAT, I thought to myself, is the price we ALL may have to pay some day.

The woman had been looking sadder-and-sadder as she talked. Then, she burst into tears. Her little boy leaned his head on her shoulder, and they cried together. I was an American. As far as I was concerned this “European” war was their problem. But the scene next to me simply broke my heart.