I went up to him and put a hand on his shoulder. "Don't take it so hard, chief. It's not your fault. We gave them all the warning in the world."
He looked up again. "Estelle Karst suicided this morning."
Anybody could have anticipated it, but nobody did. And somehow I felt harder hit by her death than by the death of all those strangers in Berlin. "How did she do it?" I asked.
"Dust. She went into the canning room, and took off her armor."
I could picture her — head held high, eyes snapping, and that set look on her mouth which she got when people did something she disapproved of. One little old woman whose lifetime work had been turned against her.
"I wish," Manning added slowly, "that I could explain to her why we had to do it."
We buried her in a lead-lined coffin, then Manning and I went on to Washington.
* * *
While we were there, we saw the motion pictures that had been made of the death of Berlin. You have not seen them; they never were made public, but they were of great use in convincing the other nations of the world that peace was a good idea. I saw them when Congress did, being allowed in because I was Manning's assistant.
They had been made by a pair of R.A.F. pilots, who had dodged the Luftwaffe to get them. The first shots showed some of the main streets the morning after the raid. There was not much to see that would show up in telephoto shots, just busy and crowded streets, but if you looked closely you could see that there had been an excessive number of automobile accidents.