Now we all know the Peach would never let anything happen to Udo. That he could help Or knew about.
But that’s the problem with life; we don’t know, we think we know, we don’t find out until too late.
As a jake-leg historian (I would never claim to be a trained historian), I understand, if only foggily, historical and scientific rigor. One thing I’ve discovered is that the historian can know more than the people who Were There. Not because an historian is trained or smarter, but because s/he’s studied the subject and put the pieces together.
How many times have you watched something happen, and not known until later what it was that was actually happening? One private in a battle can tell you what he saw and felt. But the corporal standing next to him saw a completely different battle. The guys in the helicopters were in a whole ‘nother world.
An old Australian Desert Rat — a member of the 8th army that fought Rommel — once said, “We used to buy this strong liqour from the Arabs. We didn’t know what it was.” He was told it was Arack, made from the sap of palm trees. He was happy to know.
An old German paratrooper spoke of seeing Rommel taken from his home by a special escort, and assuming he was going back to the hospital. Only because he and his audience had been drinking did the connection get made between the World War Two incident and the fact that Rommel was being taken away to be murdered. The situation was ameliorated when the old man was told that if his unit had known and intervened, they would have messed up the family’s plans to survive the regime; Rommel was dying, and he traded a worthless, short-lived body for the Nazis’ respect for and care of his family. The thought that the old Fox had pulled a last Rommel made the old paratrooper pretty happy. Or maybe that was all the beer.
One story is never the whole story. If two different people tell you a completely different story and hotly stick to it, they’re probably both right, and nobody’s lying. They just differered in their camera angles.
