for me , at any rate , this was all slightly ludicrous , almost shame-making , but one had to take it as part of modern life . the effect of make-believe was , if anything , heightened by the arrival in the room of the German uniforms . surely this must be fancy dress . there was continuing unreality in the few verbal exchanges and the multiple signatures of many documents and then suddenly , came a heart-stirring display of such moral courage as one rarely meets . all done , German General Alfred Jodl , some time Hitler &apos;s Chief of staff and now , with Admiral Friedeburg , co-signatory to his country &apos;s defeat , leant across the table to General Bedell Smith , our Chief of staff , and in command of this little operation , asking in English for permission to say a few words . instinctively , somehow , permission was given , whereupon General Jodl delivered in German a last-minute appeal to the conquerors to acknowledge the sufferings of the German people and to treat them with gna&quot;digheit . it was of the very essence of the German dilemma that this man , this fine soldier , who had allowed himself to become the instrument of his country &apos;s destroyer , should find himself capable , at this climax of his and his country &apos;s disaster , of pleading with cogent eloquence on behalf of his countrymen . I was able next day to confirm the impression of him as a soldier of the highest efficiency when giving him our Supreme Commander &apos;s orders as to the disposal of the forces remaining in being under German command . within hours of this final act of surrender Admiral Friedeburg had killed himself . we killed General Jodl later by hanging him in Nuremberg Gaol . there seemed to me to be an appropriateness in making the final act of this , my second great war , here at Rheims with its scars still unhealed from thirty years before when the city had stood on the edge of the four-year battle zone of that first great struggle . the lovely cathedral still showed its wounds and it was still possible easily to trace the lines of the old no-man &apos;s land of 1914 to 1918 . this time , mercifully , there had been little destruction but warlike atmosphere was not entirely lacking since , through the town , ran one of the red ball highways , those one-way highspeed supply routes along which by day and night thundered the endless convoys of giant American supply trucks carrying supplies from Normandy to the battle-fields . it was seemingly not only humans that derived comfort from the roar of engines , for it seemed to have positively intoxicating effect upon the nightingales that appear to exist in Rheims in great profusion . it was of our disjointed times that one should be kept from sleep by the deafening chorus of a positive nuisance of nightingales . as a counter-irritant almost I used to listen of nights to light music broadcast from Deutchlandsender-Berlin in equally unbroken stream save when the girl announcer would break in with air raid warning of many enemy aircraft in flight toward Germany . until a night of no more music when one realized , almost with regret , that the Russians must have overrun the transmitter . not entirely to my regret , I was not of the party who flew to Berlin there to re-enact the ceremony of surrender for the benefit of Russian propaganda . from the garbled accounts given by the participants on their return and restoration to normality it had seemingly developed into an oriental orgy of monumental proportions . instead I organized for myself a personal celebration of victory and , on the invitation of American General Maxwell Taylor , brilliant commander of that crack 101st U.S airborne division , I visited Berchtesgaden . there I lodged in the Hotel suite that had until recently been permanently reserved for the notorious Heinrich Himmler , and was shown the local sights . foremost among these , of course , Adolf Hitler &apos;s famed eagle &apos;s nest , that stupendous piece of engineering leading up to the alpine boudoir where so much mischief had been hatched for all the world . in the madness of the whole concept one could sense evil . one could imagine the follies of grandeur that must have assailed the disordered mind as it rode the storm up on those heights , surrounded by the tempests on which it must have seemed that the Valkyries rode to greet the Wagnerian hero gazing out over that wonderful vista of mountain , lake and plain . then down below was hidden away the vast Goring collection of art treasures , the loot of all Europe . herein was another testimony to mental aberration . was it perhaps that , deep down in the man &apos;s vast depravity , there was a craving after beauty that had somehow gone adrift and , nurtured on obscenity , put out freakish growth . I wonder if he appreciated his ill-gotten possessions in the short time he had them . so on to Germany to confirm the great victory , this time without equivocation - no mere armistice , no hanging back at the Rhine , no haggling , not at any rate with our late enemies . easy enough said but to find a suitable location brought us up against considerable difficulty . thanks to the devastation wrought by our air force , choices were few , it being necessary to find a place not only with reasonable accommodation intact but whence good communications radiated . the lot fell on Frankfurt on the Main where the great I.G Farben Industrie head office , surely one of the world &apos;s most advanced functional buildings , was found to be reasonably intact . efficient fire-watching had kept within reasonable limits the several fires that had obviously been started on the roofs by incendiary bombing . bazooka battles in the basement had failed to undermine the fabric . the various temporary lodgers who must have streamed in and out of the place had caused damage principally only to the vast numbers of safes and strong rooms which had been burst open and ransacked . providence gave the solution of the biggest problem which was that presented by the destruction of a large acreage of window glass . by some freak of chance there was found to be surviving in the devastated railway yard nearby a trainload of sheet glass , enough to make a reasonable replacement job . blocks of modern flats housed the junior staff in some luxury while the seniors suffered no pain in the palaces of the I.G Farben directors up in the charming villages of the Taunus Mountains only a few miles out of town - Konigstein , Falkenstein and Kronberg with its imposing Victorian castle , its sculptured likeness of Queen Victoria herself on the church tower . here at last we had found for ourselves an ideal lay-out , high efficiency in the offices , great comfort in our billets - so , inevitably one might say , there came the end of S.H.A.E.F . the German surrender having disposed of the military problem , it was no longer possible to ignore the inevitable consequences thereof that demanded for their solution efforts that might be of a different nature , but were none the less strenuous . so long as the battles lasted they naturally took priority over all other activities and thoughts and one tried to salve the conscience with the hope that , victory won on the battlefield , the rest would be all right on the night . but , recovered from the excitements and tensions of those few dramatic hours of unconditional surrender , the partial capitulations on the two flanks to Field-Marshals Alexander and Montgomery and then the overall climax at Rheims with its repeat performance in Berlin , one became immediately and horrifyingly aware of the terrifying inadequacy of our preparations for what was now to come . so long ago as in the early C.O.S.S.A.C planning days I had earnestly sought for some definition of the ultimate object of the whole great enterprise ; whether , for instance , Germany was to be destroyed , dismembered or reorganized . I had asked , in fact , for the definition of some positive object to pursue . here we were at the end of the campaign still with no answer to my question . and , for the majority , thought on the subject had been inhibited by the narcotic effect of the terrific slogan unconditional surrender than which nothing could be more negative . we had received the enemy &apos;s unconditional surrender . so what ? to make it all doubly difficult , the end of battle had released the unifying pressures that had bound the alliance so comparatively intimately , and there became at once evident a pronounced tendency in the other direction , a tendency to fly apart . so that we were in the worst possible shape to deal with the immediate task of trying to co-operate with the Russians who suffered from no such disadvantages as did we . history suffered dismal repetition . back in 1918 the end had also come with unexpected speed and had found the western alliance infirm of purpose and lacking precision of aim . at the very heart of the confusion the resolute but unbroken Germany , grievously wounded but far from destruction , was able to lay the firm foundations for military revival . so now in 1945 the Russians were quick to take advantage of the all too evident disunity among those from whose efforts they had , since 1941 only , been glad to benefit . as a British officer of S.H.A.E.F , serving an American Chief , I was well placed to watch the distressing drift apart , the growing impatience on American part with British bombast and bland assumption of superiority in so many fields . while on the British side there appeared all the evidence of a growing inferiority complex , jealousy of lavish American resources of all kinds and reluctance to acknowledge the scale of American achievement . the speed of events once the Rhine was crossed found both British and Americans equally unprepared for what followed . we had overestimated the degree of resistance to be put up by the Nazi party and by the German people . we had given too much credence to German propaganda , which had built up in our minds a picture of widespread fanaticism that might well entail prolonged operations of a type that would call for most careful handling . we foresaw a withdrawal by the Nazi &amp;eacute;lite with the cream of their surviving S.S troops into a well-chosen mountain fortress in the Tyrol , heavily fortified and provisioned , that would necessitate difficult siege operations for its reduction . meanwhile we should have met the Russians head-on , in mid-Germany , which might lead to anything . even at this late stage there was no working arrangement as to the details of this encounter . it was bound to happen one day and from our side every conceivable effort had been made to arrive at agreement on a procedure for the avoidance of unfortunate accident in the heat of battle . less than no response from the Russian side led one to fear that the event might well have the outcome that the Nazis evidently hoped might lead to disaster . then there had been much talk of the setting up among the German population of a general system of francs-tireurs , to be named werewolves . arms were to be distributed widespread among the civilian population , whose burning patriotism would inspire them to wage a clandestine war of murder , sabotage and terror against the hated conquerors . as it turned out we were wrong on all accounts . altogether we had overestimated the hold of the Nazi party over the German people . the Nazi fortress concept turned out to be nothing more than a fantasy . thanks to the good sense of the front line soldiers , the meeting of east and west was marked by the use of no weapon more lethal than vodka . and the effect on the German people of the first ten years of the promised thousand of Nazi rule , so far from creating a spirit of warlike frenzy , had produced universally a dull bewildered apathy . so far had our thinking led us in this matter of the werewolves that we had contemplated the necessity of very special precautions to guard the lives of our airmen . particular hatred , we felt , was bound to be aimed at the representatives of those who had , over the years , spread such ghastly havoc , destruction and death over Germany , causing such wholesale slaughter among men , women and children , old and young alike . 