Disclaimer: I don't own Hogan's Heroes or any of the characters; I merely borrow them and play with them for a while.
His Paris has changed.
He can't put his finger on exactly what it is that has changed, though, but perhaps it has something to do with the haunted eyes he sees all around him, belonging to people who have lived – existed – under foreign occupation. Or perhaps it's the tiredness, the abject weariness that inevitably settles in after a long war in which no one is truly the winner.
He knows that some would argue otherwise, but he can't see them as victors, not really. France has lost too much for that, and so many of her young sons are lying dead on foreign soil, never to return again. At times, it's almost as if he can see the gaps in the crowds, the mysteriously empty slots where all those people would have been standing, had they been alive today.
Well, whatever the reason is, his Paris now feels like a different place. It's not the city he once used to know, before the war. It's not the place where he used to laugh, drink, and sing in the company of friends, on those beautiful spring evenings when there was still a chill in the air from the winter gone by, but also the light of an approaching summer. The atmosphere has changed so much since then, and everything feels sadder, more forlorn.
Even the tones coming from a lone street musician standing in a street corner are tinged with sadness. The man is wearing a black beret that fits him badly and droops slightly to the side, giving him an eccentric, almost vagabondish look. Maybe the beret is some kind of souvenir or a leftover from better times long gone by, and now he can't bear to throw it away for all the memories it holds.
LeBeau recalls – whimsically, because it's not like it really matters now – that the last time he walked past this square, before the war, the tunes he heard were cheerful. A middle-aged man with a harmonica had been standing in that corner, now occupied by the man in the beret, singing about love lost and then found again. It had been a song filled with hope. Slightly solemn and sung in a minor key, but still hopeful.
But the tune that the man with the beret is singing is only sad. There is love lost, but none recovered in the end. The sorrowful tones haunt him as he walks on until he turns a corner and they fade away into nothingness.
He steels a quick glance at the faces of the people he passes by, wondering if they feel the same thing as him – this creeping estrangement – but their looks are closed, giving away nothing to strangers. Perhaps another leftover from the war, like the fallen buildings that still haven't been rebuilt.
So different, he thinks. He left one place, but returned to another. It's like he's an alien from another planet, worlds lying between him and this strange, unfamiliar place he finds himself in.
And perhaps there really are worlds in between, or at least one – a smallish town named Hammelburg in war-torn Germany. All the years he spent in that odd, insulated world, in Stalag 13, have changed him, and in more ways than one.
So in retrospect, it was probably silly thinking he could just return to Paris and pick up the pieces of his life from where he had left it. Like he could just leave everything that happened in Stalag 13 behind, letting it remain behind the barbed wire as he left through the front gates, and then live a normal life as those years slowly faded into dusty memories.
And even though he never really realized it while he was in the camp – he was too busy with other things, then – it's something that has slowly become clear to him now that he's home again. But during his time in Stalag 13, his perception of home slowly changed, until it was no longer Paris with its bustling streets and gourmet cuisine and romantic outposts, but rather a drafty wooden barracks smack dab in the middle of Germany.
And now, he isn't sure if that perception will ever change back. Because he's been through so much with his fellow prisoners. They've all been through so much, and shared so many things that he will never again share with anyone else. And definitely not with the faceless masses of people jostling him in the street, people whose names he doesn't even know and that he will probably never meet again. Why he should call a place like that his home, when he has nothing in common with the people around him? They don't know him, can't relate to what he has gone through. They haven't shared the debilitating fear of a Gestapo crackdown, the triumph of a successful mission, or the danger of death with him.
They're just anonymous faces passing him by. They're not his friends in Barracks 2. The ones who know him, who will support him, stand by him no matter what. Who would risk their lives for him, and he for them.
Some of his old, pre-war friends are still here in Paris; he's even met a few of them since his repatriation. But things aren't the same anymore, because there are years between them now, years of death and suffering and war, and nothing can really overcome that they never went through those years together.
He turns another corner, crosses another street. There should be a church there to his left, he thinks, but it's no longer there. Instead, there's a block of houses whose white plastered walls stand out against the grayed taint of the surrounding, considerably older buildings. The ones that are still standing, having withstood whatever it was that levelled the church.
He supposes that one day, he might get used to this, to seeing the results of the havoc wrought upon his home country. But that day is not today, and probably not any of the days in the near future either.
No, Paris has changed, and it no longer feels like home.
Or maybe, he wonders, Paris hasn't really changed at all. Not truly, not fundamentally.
No, maybe the one who has changed is him. And perhaps that's why he doesn't feel at home here anymore.