Winds of War (119 page)

Now I have a story for you, and for our grandsons to read one day - especially Byron’s boy. It’s a grim one, and I’m still not sure what to make of it but I want to write it down. Yesterday between the last afternoon conference and the official dinner at the Metropole Hotel, I went to Slote’s apartment for a while with Tudsbury and Pam. Talky engineered this little party. He wanted to pump me about the conference, but there wasn’t much I could disclose.

Anyway, I was having a drink with them - if you get this tired you have to keep up an alcohol level in your bloodstream, it’s a sort of emergency gasoline - when a knock came on the door, and in walked a fellow in worn-out boots, a cap, a heavy shabby coat, and it was a Jewish merchant from Warsaw, Jochanan Jastrow, Natalie’s uncle! The one they call Berel. Briny and Natalie went to his son’s wedding in south Poland, you recall, and that’s how they got caught in the invasion. He’s clean-shaven, and speaks Russian and German with ease, and he doesn’t seem Jewish, though Slote remarked that in Warsaw he wore a beard and looked like a rabbi.

This fellow’s escape from Warsaw with the remnants of his family is a saga. They landed in Minsk and got caught there when the Germans blitzed White Russia. He gave us only bare details of how he got himself and his family out of Minsk through the woods but obviously this is quite a guy for maneuvering and surviving.

Here comes the incredible part. Jastrow says that late one night about a month after the capture of Minsk, the Germans came into the Jewish ghetto they had set up, with a caravan of trucks. They cleaned out two of the most heavily populated streets, jamming everybody into these trucks: men, women, children, babies, old folks who couldn’t walk. Several thousand people, at least. They drove them to a ravine in the forest a few miles out of town, and there they shot them, every single one, and buried them in a huge freshly dug ditch. Jastrow says the Germans had rounded up a gang of Russians earlier to dig the ditch, and then had trucked them out of the area A few of them sneaked back through the woods to see what would happen, and that was how the story got out. One of them had a camera and took pictures. Jastrow produced three prints. This occurrence, whatever it was, took place at dawn. In one of them you see a line of gun flashes. In another you see this distant shadowy crowd of people. In the third which is the brightest, you just see men in German helmets shovelling. Jastrow also gave Slote two documents in Russian, one handwritten and one typed that purported to be eyewitness accounts.

Jastrow says he decided to get to Moscow and give some American diplomat the story of the massacre in Minsk. I don’t know how he got Slote’s address. He’s a resourceful man, but naïve. He believed, and evidently still believes, that once President Roosevelt found out this story and told the American people, the United States would immediately declare war on Germany.

Jastrow turned over these materials to Slote, and said he’d risked his life to get that stuff to Moscow, and that a lot of women and children had been murdered, so would he please guard those pictures and documents with care. He and I talked a bit about the kids; his eyes filled up when I told him Byron and Natalie’d had a boy.

After he left, Slote offered the stuff to Tudsbury. He said, “There’s your broadcast for you. You’ll hit all the front pages in the United States.” To our surprise, Tudsbury said he wouldn’t touch the story. He worked in British propaganda after he was wounded in the last war, and helped concoct and plant atrocity yarns. He claims the British invented the business of the Germans making soap out of the bodies of soldiers. Maybe this Minsk massacre happened, but to him Jastrow looked like an NKVD plant. It was too coincidental that a distant Polish relative of mine by marriage - a freakish connection to begin with - should suddenly pop up of his own free will in Moscow with this yarn and these documents.

A heated argument ensued, and Tudsbury finally said that even if he knew the story were true, he wouldn’t use it. This thing could backfire and keep America out of the war, he claimed, just as Hitler’s Jewish policy worked for years to paralyze the British. “
Nobody wants to fight a war to save the Jews
,” he kept insisting while banging the table, and Hitler still has a lot of people convinced that anyone who fights Germany is really spilling blood just for the Jews. Talky says this is one of the great war propaganda ideas of all time, and that this story about the Minsk Jews would play into German hands.

Well, I’ve just set down the bald facts of this. I didn’t mean to get so long-winded, but it’s been haunting me. If there’s even an element of truth in Jastrow’s yarn, then the Germans really have run amuck, and among other things Natalie and her infant, unless they’re out of Italy by now, are in grave hazard. Mussolini apes whatever Hitler does. But I assume they did get out; Slote tells me it was all set before her confinement.

Rhoda, when I think about Jastrow’s story my head spins and it seems to me the world I grew up in is dissolving. Even if it’s an exaggeration, just hearing such a story makes me think we’re entering some new dark age. It’s all too much for me, and the worst of it is I found it hard not to believe Jastrow. The man has a keen and dignified manner; not a man I mind having for a relative, strange as it felt to look on him as such.

It’s five minutes to six. I have to wrap this up and get on to the banquet.

This war has sure played hell with our family, hasn’t it? The days in Manila, with all three kids in school, and that house with a tennis court where I taught them all to play, seem a far-off dream. Those were the best days. And now here I am in Moscow. I hope you’re keeping up that weekly doubles game with Fred Kirby and the Vances. You always feel better when you get exercise. Give my best to Blinker and Ann, also to Fred and tell him I hope Foggy Bottom isn’t getting him down.

I miss you, busy as I am, but you sure wouldn’t care for Soviet Russia darling, in war or peace. Pamela Tudsbury says there isn’t a hairdresser in Moscow she’d go to. She cleans her own suits and dresses with gasoline.

You know, I’ve now met Hitler, Churchill Roosevelt, and tonight I may shake hands with Stalin. Considering that I’m nobody much, that’s something! My career’s taken a decidedly freakish turn. For my grandsons’ information (you already know this) I’d have preferred an entry in my record showing I’d been at sea these past two years. But there’s no changing that and in a way I guess it’s been an education. Only at this point I’ve had my bellyful and so help me God, I would gladly trade dinner in the Kremlin for one honest-to-God whiff of Navy stack gas.

Till the next time, with lots of love -

Pug

* * *

Victor Henry had arrived with the Harriman-Beaverbrook mission just as the Germans were starting their autumn smash toward Moscow. The panzer armies were breaking through less than a hundred miles away, but the Russians wined and dined their visitors, whirled them about the city in black limousines, took them to the ballet, and carried on long committee meetings, with no hint that anything was going wrong; though they did appear a bit brisk in laying on a farewell banquet less than a week after the guests had got there.

The Americans and the British understood that the Germans had been stopped east of Smolensk more than a month earlier in their central push, and had been pinned down there on the defensive ever since. In Moscow this halting of the Nazi hordes in the center was still talked of as a great feat of Soviet arms, a new “Miracle of the Marne.” Just as the French had stopped the Huns thirty miles from Paris in 1914 and snatched away their chance of quickly winning the war, so the Red Army had halted Hitler’s marauders, the assertion went, in their drive to seize Moscow before the winter set in. The Russians had even taken foreign correspondents to this central front, showing them recaptured villages, smashed Nazi tanks, and dead and captured Germans. Now the Germans claimed the march toward Moscow was rolling again, and the Russians were denying it. The fog of war effectively hid what was really happening.

Contrary to a notion popular at the time - a notion which has never quite died - the Wehrmacht was not a giant solid phalanx of tanks and armored cars, spitting flame and death as it clanked through whole nations. Hitler had a horse-drawn army. It was larger than Napoleon’s, but mainly it advanced into Russia as the Grande Armée had, by animal power and the march of men’s feet. He also had some armored divisions, spaced on the flanks of the three big groups invading the Soviet Union. The blitzkrieg worked so: the armored forces, the panzers, chugged ahead on either side of each attack front, slicing into the enemy lines, counting on surprise, terror, and punch to soften or panic the foe. The infantry came along between these two swathes as fast as it could, killing or capturing the forces which the panzer divisions had broken into or thinly encircled.

These armored divisions were a big success, and no doubt Hitler would have been glad to employ more of them. But he had started his war - as his generals had feebly grumbled - much too soon, only six years after he took power. He had not come near arming Germany to the full, though he had made frightening noises exactly as if he had, and Europe had believed him. He was therefore very low on panzer divisions, considering the vastness of the front.

In August, when his three-pronged attack had jabbed far into the Soviet Union, Hitler diverted the thin armored layers of the central formation north and south, to help wrap up the war on the flanks by taking Kiev and investing Leningrad. This done, the panzers were to come back on station and start driving again with the Center Group for the knockout blow on the capital. It was a move that military writers still argue about; but in any case, with the central armor thus peeled away, the infantry and horse-drawn artillery in the center perforce had to halt and dig in, to await the return of the panzers, the steel cutting edges, from their side excursions. This was the new “Miracle of the Marne.” The Russians were at first surprised, then immensely heartened, at this sudden stop of the huge force advancing on their capital; and disorganized though they were, they went over to counterattacks and won minor gains. The “Miracle” ceased at the end of September, when the panzer armies, back in their positions, and properly overhauled and gassed up, went slashing toward Moscow again, in two wide curving paths. That was when Harriman and Beaverbrook arrived, with the obscure Captain Henry in their train.

Chapter 52

The knot of Leslie Slote’s tie came lopsided twice in his shaky hurrying hands. He flung the tie in a corner, pulled another from his dresser, and managed a passable knot. He put on his jacket and sat in a heavy brown leather armchair to calm himself with a cigarette, flinging long legs on the ottoman. A German correspondent had abandoned this apartment on June 15, making a hasty deal with him. For Moscow, these were splendid digs: three rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, solid German furniture. Pamela Tudsbury liked the place and had cooked many a dinner here for Slote and some of their friends.

The English-speaking embassy people and correspondents - an isolated, gossipy little band - assumed that the British girl and the American Foreign Service officer were having an affair. So did Slote’s thickset Russian maid, Valya, who beamed on them and tiptoed about when Pamela was visiting. Slote yearned for such an affair. He had not gotten over the marriage of Natalie Jastrow, and nothing closed such an ego wound like a new romance. But Pam Tudsbury, whom he remembered from Paris as the warm-blooded girlfriend of Philip Rule - wild in her ways, candidly sensual, freshest and gayest when the dawn came up - brushed off his passes. She was in a gloomy state; she was being true, she said, to her fiancé, a missing RAF pilot. Pam’s skin was fair as in the Paris days, her heart-shaped face with its thin bow of a mouth still a flower of English prettiness. She wore tailored wool suits, flat shoes, and glasses; but inside that secretarial uniform glowed the girl who had whipped off her stockings and splashed barefoot in the fountain on a midsummer night with Phil Rule, holding her red silk dress at mid-thigh. She still owned that dress, and sometimes wore it.

Slote had patiently been taking Pamela’s company on her terms, biding his chances to improve them. But the arrival of Captain Victor Henry deprived him of Pamela on any terms. When he glimpsed Pam with Henry, Slote knew at once he was looking at a woman in love. So much for fidelity to the missing airman! As for Captain Henry, this stumpy, sallow, tired-looking fellow of fifty or so seemed to the Foreign Service officer almost a caricature of the anonymous military man: short on small talk, quick on professional matters, poker-faced, firm, and colorless. One couldn’t even tell whether Henry liked Pamela Tudsbury. He made no visible return of her unguarded deep glances. Slote failed to fathom the attraction this middle-aged dullard held for the young Englishwoman, and he never understood Natalie Jastrow’s infatuation with the man’s son, either.

Fate had served him a strange, indigestible dish, Leslie Slote thought - to be beaten out first by the son and then by the father; neither of them, in his own judgment, a worthy rival. Byron Henry at least was a handsome young devil, and had much changed Slote’s ideas of the susceptibility of clever women to surface charms. But there was nothing charming on the surface of Byron’s father. The best one could say for the man was that he still had his hair, thick and dark, and that his waist showed an effort to stay trim. But his age was evident in the weary wrinkled eyes, the gnarled hands, the seamed mouth, the deliberate movements.

Slote was about to meet Admiral Standley and Captain Henry at the Hotel National; he was going to interpret for them at the Kremlin banquet. This privilege did not, in prospect, make him happy. He was in a state of panicky foreboding.