"On the Firing Line with the Germans" Film Annotations (2017)

Homeward Bound
After returning to Berlin from the eastern front, Durborough and Ries had one more short trip in the
Stutz to the western front. Driving back to Berlin through the mountains, Durborough wrote with
emotion some thirty years later of the near loss of the auto and all their gear. They were pressing
through a hard rain on slick muddy clay roads when they rounded a curve and came to an ominous
steep grade with a sheer drop on the left that curved right at the bottom. They rigged a long drag
anchor by attaching a log to the rear axle with a tow rope. Ries rode the log down “digging in his heels”
providing the necessary braking until just before the curve when the rope broke and the car surged
forward in the slick clay mud. Durborough relates:
“Just when the good old Stutz with all our stuff aboard was within about five feet of
the edge of the cliff, I muttered a prayer, and jumped. I had turned my back. I began
to cry. My nerves were all shot. I had rigged that car up just the way I wanted it. I
had traveled in it, I had brought it along all the way from Chicago, thousands of miles.
It was my pal, I had grown so accustomed to its every whim, that it seemed like an
old friend. I had left it once chained to a tree in a woods up in Poland. I had burned
out the clutch, trying to get across a sandy stretch of country. Several weeks later,
there it was, still chained to the tree, and not a thing missing. I had repaired it and
we had taken to the road again. No I couldn’t bear to see it go slipping over that cliff.
I sunk down on my knees in the mud, with my hands over my eyes. 50
When Ries caught up with him, he brought Durborough out of his daze by telling him the car remained
hanging right on the edge. They found a local farmer with a team of horses who got the car back on the
road and on their way. However impractical and burdensome the car was financially and logistically, it
had clearly served him well not only for transportation but in attracting attention. This manuscript
section written years later reveals just how emotionally attached he had become to his Stutz Bearcat
roadster and possibly the cumulative physical and mental stresses endured during his war film
correspondence. Just as telling is the observation his manuscript has no similarly emotional passage
about any person, not even his assistant Ries.
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