The Weir

"They were trying to hit the weir, of course" the old lady said suddenly.

It was her last sentence before she turned away.

I had been standing with a group of people who were looking at a forgotten place, a place where the dammed millstream re-enters the river in the middle of my town. It had, together with a small hydroelectric power plant that is run by it, been fenced off to the public for decades, and was now being opened for refurbishing; it had been that way, more or less, since the war.

I looked around. There was not much too see. Peaceful, unused meadows spread, falling off into the riverbank in some distance. Empty abandoned houses were lining the road.

"We used to do the washing here,"  the old lady continued. "My father almost drowned once over there one day. The millstream had dragged him in. We used to use the meadows to dry and bleach the laundry." She pointed to a dilapidated two-story house, old and battered, which had obviously been damaged and repaired badly. 

"That's where we used to live. When I returned, my cousin's bed was hanging out of the that window up there." She looked forlorn. "It was burning." I looked around; the group had moved on. 

"I had taken shelter in a cellar across the road where I was working at the time." the old lady went on. "I didn't make it back home." 

She shrugged slightly. She was talking about the night of the bombing raid that had flattened the city. Trains, heavy industries, aeroplane works. Thousands had died. Some had been burnt to death alive in the aftermath, crouching in corners and pressed against some ruins still standing.

"After the war, my brother and I tried to get the business going again, but it didn't work out. But at least we were able to live here. Now it's being torn down."

She turned away; I thought of the bomber pilots speeding at hundreds of miles per hour across the sky, miles high, trying to hit a thin, dark line crossing a foreign river in foreign terrain on one try, and row upon row of terrifying bombs, built to rip concrete apart, blasting their way blindly through people, roads and houses en route towards their target.

And to this day, the huge bell in the main church tower - Christianity's greatest single contribution to the culture of man - still hammers out on each anniversary the exact 15 Minutes it took to tear the city and its people to pieces, its relentless metal hammering reminiscent even for those thankfully not there at the time of the mayhem, which the survivors will forever remember, and the thousands burnt alive and torn apart can not; after a while, you just want it to stop; but, like the hell it extolls, it doesn't. 15 minutes can be a terribly long time... and some stand silent and think of the dead.

For those for whom the bell tolls.