Summer 1941. Situation of the German Army in England: satisfactory. Army corps: Fourth Infantry in Portsmouth, reinforced in the Strategic Redeployment phase by the Forty-eighth Armored. The Tenth is still at the beachhead, reinforced by the Twentieth and Twenty-ninth Infantry. The British are gathering their forces in London and reserving their airborne units in case of air-to-air attacks. (Should I have marched straight on London? I don’t think so.) Situation of the German Army in Russia: optimal. Siege of Lenin-grad; the Finnish and German units meet in Hex C46; from Yaroslavl I begin to press toward Vologda; from Moscow toward Gorki; in the hexes between I49 and L48 the front remains stable; in the south I advance toward Stalingrad. El Quemado digs in now on the other side of the Volga and between Astrakhan and Maikop. Units engaged in the north of Russia: five infantry corps, two armored corps, four Finnish infantry corps. Units engaged in the central region: seven infantry corps, four armored corps. Units engaged in the south: six infantry corps, three armored corps, one Italian infantry corps, four Romanian infantry corps, and three Hungarian infantry corps. Situation of the Axis armies in the Mediterranean: unchanged; Attrition Option.
SEPTEMBER 11
Surprise: when I got up—it couldn’t have been twelve yet—the first thing I saw when I opened the balcony doors was El Quemado. He was walking along the beach with his hands behind his back, his eyes on the ground like someone searching for something in the sand, his tanned and scorched skin so shiny that he nearly left a wake on the golden beach.
Today is a holiday. The last reserves of retirees and Surinamese have gone out after lunch, leaving the hotel at just quarter capacity. At the same time, half the staffhave taken the day off. The hallways echoed softly and sadly when I headed to breakfast. (The sound of broken plumbing or something tinkled on the stairs but no one seemed to notice.)
In the sky a Cessna prop plane strove to trace letters that the strong wind erased before I could make out entire words. I was gripped then by a vast melancholy that seized my belly, my spine, my bottom ribs, until I doubled over under the sunshade!