“Just
before I left I heard that my foster brother Bill,
with whom I had spent all my childhood had been shot.
He was a member of the first parachute regiment.
They hung as defenceless targets in the air.”
Behind
these two sentences of Stan Burketts´on page
222 of the Deserted
Hotel hides a world of sorrow. Ronny´s
hero was just a number as so many:
Private soldier b 55 99 7
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Can
you imagine how Stan must have felt during his crossing
to a completely unknown part of the world?
He was only nineteen years of age and he had never been away
from home. Stan told how he as the son of a farmer preferred to
keep
both his feet on the ground or drive over it in a large farm truck.
Now his brother had been shot during his jump and he himself was
about to cross the North Sea. His invasion was yet to begin. So
he had to be strong
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and
swollow his tears. Not long after Stan drove his army
truck unto the boat ready to cross the Channel. What
must have been going through his mind as he looked
up to the sky?
By the time Stan reached the French coast the prefabricated docks
were already in place, the battle was raging he landed with his
vehicle full of ammunition in a foreign land with its strange language
while the bullets were flying past him.
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