Dulce et Decorum Est

I stopped, looked into her shocked eyes, and added miserably, "I couldn't live another day without you and Peter."

Jane said appalled, "Oh my God!!! That must have been awful!!"

You know you've got the right partner when everything that needs to be said is communicated in a gesture and a glance. Jane rose, walked a few steps to me. She stood looking down, processing the situation. Then she gave me a loving look, took me by the hand and led me back into our bedroom.

The bed was illuminated by the moonlight from the open French doors of the balcony. Without saying a word, Jane slipped the light dress that she had been wearing over her fragile shoulders and dropped it to the floor. She unsnapped her bra as she stepped out of her heels and peeled down her modest panties. Then she lay on the bed. She lightly patted the place next to her and said gently, "Lie here."

We had not had sex since we'd both returned to the living. Well, actually Jane had never been dead. But I had been wrapped up like an Egyptian mummy for a month. I still had a shiny bald dome where a little carpet of hair had begun to sprout over the garish scar on the right side of my head. But I was back to normal in every other respect, including one very important function.

I looked at Jane's perfect little body, as she lay there in the bright moonlight. Her neat brown nipples were standing like two stalwart watchtowers on her broad full breasts. The taut lowland plain of her stomach led past her narrow waist to her sleekly muscled hips. Her long gleaming legs were sculptured marvels extending seemingly forever into the distance.

My wife is a very sensual woman. But there was no lust in her eyes, only tenderness. She wrapped me in her love. I lay next to her propped on one arm and took her tidy little body in my arms. She melted into me like she was trying to merge us.

I stroked the side of her face as we both looked deeply into each other's eyes. She said quietly, "We're together now -- that's all that matters." Then she kissed me gently.

You would need to have experienced sex with Jane to understand the difference in that kiss. When Jane is in the mood her lips are alive. Those busy kisses reflect the passion that runs just beneath the surface of all that British reserve. But this was a true kiss of love. It was meant to reassure me, to tell me that she understood. It said that we would always have each other. That was all I needed to know.

I stroked down her warm flank. Jane is spectacularly sexy. But she has a feature that most women don't have. Her alabaster skin is like warm satin, or the finest silk, sleek and smooth to the touch. Her type of skin is a staple in romantic novels because it has such a rare and sensual quality about it and its sensitivity to touch is also the key to my wife's outrageous sexuality.

I was looking into Janes eyes as I stroked her taut round hips. Her golden cat eyes were looking back at me. Then they suddenly clouded over, and she quivered. For Jane, the reconnecting and empathizing part was over. Now, it was time to satisfy the powerful spirit that drove her highly civilized soul. It HAD been a very long time.

She groaned. There were a lot of different tones in that sound. All of them conveyed need. I felt down to where her legs joined, and it was wet and steamy there.

There are couples who need intricate foreplay. Jane and I were never like that. I think it was due to the deep sense of empathy that we had with each other. Whatever the reason, our simple lovemaking was more satisfying than running through all 245 positions of the Kamasutra.

Jane gave me an urgent tug on the shoulders, which was her signal for me to roll between her daintily spread legs. She elevated her slim thighs as I moved into position, and we were joined for the first time since early December.

There are no words to describe the exquisite feeling of sliding into that hot, slick tunnel. Jane made a satisfied purring noise, and we began the age-old motion. I'd wanted it to be a long and languorous lovemaking session. But this was going to be short and intense. there was just too much psychic steam to blow off.

Jane had already started to claw my back when her hips went into frantic up and down motion as she gurgled and whimpered her way to a small orgasm. My wife does that almost every time we make love. It's a consequence of her uninhibited passion.

Then she totally stopped, opened her eyes, and just paused. This was less a matter of sex now, than it was resolution. Our connection was the key thing.

I've always thought that there was a direct relationship between intelligence and sexual prowess in women. Jane was exhibit A. She has no inhibitions when she gives herself. But the key distinction is the word, "give" and she had other ideas right this minute.

We lay there staring into each other's eyes, intimately joined. Jane's intense sexuality was her precious gift to me. But the giving was Jane's choice. not something she did because she was compelled. Jane only allowed a man into the closely guarded realm of her true feelings if she felt that he was worthy.

Now she was telling me that our joining reaffirmed her absolute commitment to me. We had both experienced the shock of loss. I'd lost Jane through a miscommunication, and she'd nearly lost me for a much more prosaic but no less painful reason. Now, that watershed moment was behind us, and we had forged an adamantine bond.

Love is a frivolous and light-hearted thing. You might ride its feelings into a marriage that'll last a lifetime. But that life can be as unsatisfying as it is shallow. Even so, a few genuinely lucky people achieve a status that is far richer than simple romance. That quality is, "devotion."

Devotion has nothing to do with transient feelings. Devotion anchors your existence in the bedrock of solidarity. The other person willingly shoulders life's profound burdens with you, while the two of you face the consequences of simply being human together.

That unification of two souls is countersigned by the most intimate physical act of all, sex. Sex is "la petit mort;" the little death. Most people think that implies orgasm. But the real connotation is much more metaphysical. It describes the elemental state of being that people lapse into during the act.

In essence, sex lets both partners connect at the fundamental level, stripped of all of civilizations pretensions. Sometimes it's mindless animal mating. Other times it's a fundamental statement of two people's commitment to each other. That was sex for Jane and me and it was priceless.

We were no longer man and woman. We were two similar spirits frolicking in a sea of sensation, basking in our oneness. We experienced all of the primal urges that lurk in our animal self, pleasure, greed passion, power. But our dedication to each other blended those things into a symphony of synchronized passion, a choreographed dance.

I would groan as I pushed into her. She would cry out and moan. I would thrust. She would gasp with sensation. The whole opus couldn't have lasted more than ten minutes. But in that time, we renewed our deep connection by giving each other extreme pleasure.

The grand finale was remarkable. I could feel Jane beginning to wind up to a monster orgasm. Her knees were almost at her shoulders, her mouth was emitting little shrieks, wide open in a rictus of effort, her beautiful breasts were bobbling wildly, and her head was thrashing back and forth as we pounded down the home stretch.

Then she began to writhe in the grip of something extraordinary. It was good that she had reached that point. Because we were about to cross the finish line in a dead-heat. There were a few lost seconds while the two of us dealt with the extraordinary internal pressures we had generated. Then it was over, and I lay knocked out on top of her panting and heavily sweating body.

I rolled to one side in order to not suffocate her. The point had been made. She took my hand and said fervently, "Until death we do part. Don't fear it my love." I said just as earnestly, "Not one second sooner."

I knew that our life would be comfortable, and Peter would be our bright and shining star. But it was the simple assurance that I wasn't alone that really mattered. We would face our future together as the days of our lives spun out. And in the end... that's all you ever need.

EPILOG

The war ended and the accounting began. The Wehrmacht was falling all over themselves to surrender to the Americans, because they knew what would happen if they ended up in the hands of the Red Army.

Herr Peiper was captured by Patton's boys down in Bavaria, and they stuck him in a POW camp. Since he was Waffen-SS, he got an early appointment with Army interrogators. When they asked him about his politics, he informed them that, "All Jews are bad. We cleansed our society and moved these people into camps, and then you let them loose!"

His honesty in that respect immediately labelled him as one of the "unreconstructed" ones. Meantime, there was a separate war crime investigation going on over Malmedy. Kampfgruppe Peiper was identified as the perpetrator and the Americans went looking for the culprits.

Unfortunately. that was like searching for a needle in a big stack of needles, since there were three million Nazi POWs to sort through. Nevertheless, thanks to Pieper's relentlessly expressed views about Jews, Poles, and the foolishness of Americans who refused to incorporate the SS into their army, he came to the attention of the right folks.

They handed him over to military justice, which in Pieper's case wasn't an oxymoron. Herr Pieper's defense was that he wasn't at Malmedy when the massacre actually occurred. But unfortunately for him, he'd left a few eye witnesses.

That was the reason why Jane and I visited the pretty little town of Dachau in May of '46. Dachau sits on the Amper river in upper Bavaria. It's a quaint cuckoo-clock kind of place featuring a small Baroque palace and a big Nazi death camp.

Unlike Nuremburg, the trials that were held in Dachau were designed to settle the score for war crimes committed in the U.S. zone of control, or against its citizens. That included the soldiers of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion.

The court itself was held in one of the buildings at the former concentration camp, which in my opinion was a bit ghoulish. They paraded six of us survivors through the trial as witnesses. We sat in a chair next to a female stenographer and told a military court made up of seven American officers what we'd seen.

I searched the faces of the defendants as the lawyers questioned us. Pieper was in the front row with the rest of the senior Waffen-SS. He looked bored. I told them that Pieper was the guy I'd seen chewing out the fellow in the tank. So, he'd probably ordered it. But he'd moved on down the road before the shooting started.

Happily, it didn't matter whether Pieper was present or not. He was the man in charge and forty-three of those unspeakable motherfuckers were sentenced to the rope - including Pieper. That was the least that the poor bastards who'd been gunned down in cold blood deserved, and the most that those of us who survived could hope for. Afterward I went back to the hotel and got drunk.

Of course the "right thing to do" will always lose out when politics and justice collide. The Americans needed West Germany as a bulwark against the resurgent communists in Eastern Europe. And so, the convictions of German war criminals got a "second look." The outcome was that Pieper's hanging was commuted to life in '48 and then down to time served in '56. As they say, "The lady is a blind bitch.

In the meantime, I had made enough money documenting my war experiences that I stopped hustling stories and just wrote commentary for big papers like the Times and Post.

It was 1956, which was one of the most intense stages of the Cold War, and there were a lot more important things happening than the release of a low-level Nazi functionary. Similarly, Pieper was really a very minor actor in the Nazi Gotterdammerung thing. So, there wasn't enough of a ripple in the news space to grab my attention. In fact, I didn't hear about Pieper until eight years later.

In 1964, the Jewish Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal accused Pieper's fine collection of SS goons of crimes against Italian Jews. It made the papers because Wiesenthal said it. I had just assumed that Pieper had dangled a long time ago. Hence, the news that he was still among the living gave me a new obsession.

The thing of it is - the SS had its own version of the VFW. Except it wasn't a bunch of guys sitting around a run-down hall drinking beer and reminiscing about the old days at Fort Benning. The SS version was an unapologetic pack of racists and anti-Semites who still kept old pictures of Hitler in their cupboards.

Even worse, enough of those xenophobic bastards were suitably well placed in West German industry to be able to move Pieper up the ladder at Porsche. Hence, for years Herr Pieper had been living the life of a successful German car exec.

That fact outraged me to the point where I wrote exposés that would have turned the Prophet Jeramiah green with envy. Obviously, I couldn't make it look like I was personally targeting Pieper. A reporter sacrifices his credibility if he loses his objectivity. So I did a series of articles on Himmler instead. Everybody hated that guy. Plus, he was already dead.

Pieper had been Himmler's senior adjutant. So, naturally his name came up over-and-over again in my pieces. The 1960s was open season on ex-Nazi's, Eichmann, Mengele, Barbi, Wolff and Grothmann. Finally, things got unpleasant enough for Pieper that he upped-stakes in Germany and moved to France.

I think that he was hoping for anonymity, which was about as naive as we'd all been when we were standing in that field in Malmedy. But then again, a good journalist doesn't beat their victim over the head with a story. The last thing you want to do is turn your prey into a martyr.

Instead, you shepherd your reader to the right conclusion using little pokes and prods. That's what I did to Pieper. My aim was to hound him until the day he died. So, I sniped at him for almost ten years.

My masterpiece was a touching little feature that I wrote for all the international rags. It was a "Whatever happened to?" story about a famous Nazi war criminal who was living peacefully in the quiet little French village of Traves, Haute Saone -- by the way - here's his address if you're interested...

I don't know whether my article caused what happened next. One can only hope. But shortly thereafter the former SS Obersturmbannfuhrer's house was firebombed, and his badly burned corpse was discovered in the ruins. That was on Bastille day 1976. Hopefully the eighty-six American soldiers he had murdered at those fatal crossroads rested better that night.

Author's Note: I didn't set out to write a companion piece to "The Baltimore Bitch." But that's the way this one turned out. My stories don't fit well into categories on this site. So, I put it where my eight regular readers expect to find me. And before you contact me, I know that I've gotta get Peter and Josette together. So as they say in the radio days, "Stay tuned."