Winds of War (20 page)

Madeline was used to civilian ignorance of the armed forces, but this shocked her. “Mr. Cleveland, there’s nobody higher in the United States Navy.”

“Fine. Then he’s our boy. I just found out he’s at the Warwick. We keep tabs on the big hotels, Madeline. Now let’s get off a letter to him.” He leaned on the edge of the desk and started to dictate. The yawning beauty crossed glorious legs, lit a cigarette, and leafed the
Hollywood Reporter
. Madeline desperately tried to keep up, but had to plead with him to go slower.

“Don’t you know shorthand?”

“I can learn it quickly enough.”

Cleveland glanced at his watch and at the beauty, who drooped her eyelids contemptuously at Madeline. Madeline felt like a worm. Cleveland rumpled his hair and shook his head. “Look, you know these Navy characters. Write him a letter, that’s all. Invite him to come on the Thursday morning show. Mention Gary Cooper, if you want to. Sign my name, and take it over to the Warwick. Can you do that?

“Certainly.”

“Fine. Wendy and I want to catch a ten o’clock movie. She plays a bit in it. Say, this Preble fellow, does he know your father? How about that, Wendy? This kid’s father is our Navy Attaché in Berlin.”

Wendy yawned.

“Madeline said coldly, “Admiral Preble knows my father.”

“Well, how about mentioning that, then?” He gave her his persuasive impish smile. “I’d really like to get him, Madeline. Admirals and generals are usually crappy guests. Too cautious and stiff to say anything interesting. But there’s a war on, so for the moment, they’re hot. See you in the morning. I go on at nine, you know, so get here not later than eight.”

* * *

As he had told Madeline, Warren was dancing away this first night of the war in moonlight, with a congressman’s pretty daughter.

The moon floats out in space, some thirty diameters of the earth away, shining on the just and the unjust as the cloud cover allows. It had lent dim but helpful light to columns of young Germans in gray uniforms, miles and miles long, trudging across the Polish border. Now Europe had rolled into the sun giving the Germans better illumination to get on with the work, and the same moon was bathing the Gulf of Mexico, and the terrace of Pensacola’s Harbor View Club. The German General Staff had carefully planned on the moonlight, but the silver glow fell on Warren Henry and Janice Lacouture by a pleasant chance.

Everyone said it was the best club dance in years. The big headlines, the excited radio broadcasts, had created a pleasurable stir in flat quiet Pensacola. The student aviators felt more important and the girls found them more glamorous; war was in the air, and however remote the combat, these were warriors. The talk about the German attack soon gave way to homier topics, however: the horse show, the new base commander, recent flying accidents, recent romances. Der Führer, for these happy people, remained the queer hoarse German of the newsreels, with the wild gestures and the funny moustache, who had managed to start up a European mess, but who could scarcely menace the United States just yet.

Lieutenant (junior grade) Henry took a different view. The invasion really interested him, and that was how he first caught the interest of Janice Lacouture. At the Academy he had excelled on the subject of the World War. They sat in a far corner of the terrace in the moonlight soon after they met, and instead of talking aviation or making a pass at her, this student pilot told her about the Schlieffen Plan to capture Paris - and the way von Moltke had fatally tampered with it; about the feat of German railroading that had made the Tannenberg victory possible; about the strategic parallels of 1914 and 1939. He had begun with the usual aviator chitchat, which after years of Pensacola dating stupefied Janice. But once they began on the war and she allowed her own knowledge of history and politics to show, he turned serious. It had been an exciting talk, the sort in which lovers sometimes discover each other without speaking a romantic word.

Despite the big Lacouture nose, a mark of French ancestry, and rather irregular front teeth, Janice was one of the belles of Pensacola. Her mouth, skin, and hazel eyes were lovely; her figure so striking that all men automatically stared at her as at a fire. She was tall, blonde, with a soft purring voice, and a very lively manner. Her family owned the largest house in the club estates. The Lacoutures were solidly rich, from two generations in the timbering that destroyed the Gulf pine forests for hundreds of miles, and turned northern Florida into a sandy insect-swarming waste. Her father was a wonder in somnolent and self-satisfied Pensacola, the first Lacouture who had ever bestirred himself in politics.

In Washington, Janice had grown up farseeing and sober. She had majored in economics and American history at George Washington University, and she was about to start law school. She wanted to marry a public man; a congressman, a senator, a governor; with luck, why not a future president? This was hard on the young men who fell for her beauty and chic. Janice was out for big game, and she acquired a reputation for frostiness which amused her. The last thing she had expected was to meet anybody worth knowing during her enforced summer in Pensacola. And of all people, a naval aviator! Nevertheless there was something different about Warren Henry. He was oddly appealing, with those penetrating eyes, bony ramshackle frame, gray-sprinkled hair, and easy smile, with its hint of shrewdness and immorality. He acted as though he knew women far too well for an Annapolis honor student. This did not trouble her; it added tang to Warren.

They stopped talking after a while and danced close-hugged in the moonlight. The Pensacola onlookers began inquiring about the background of the lieutenant junior grade with the scar; for Warren’s ground loop had given him a forehead wound requiring nine stitches. The naval aviators told each other with envy who the Lacouture girl was.

When Warren returned to the bachelor officers’ quarters he found two telephone messages from Mrs. Tarrasch. This was his Baltimore divorcée; the woman of thirty for whom he had risked expulsion from the Academy; the woman with whom he had spent the afternoon in bed the day his parents had sailed off to Germany. In his third Academy year, he had come upon her as the lady hostess in a tearoom. Responding to a bold remark, she had agreed to see him after the restaurant closed. She was a clever woman, with a hard-luck story about two beastly husbands; she was a reader, a lover of the arts, and hungrily passionate. Warren had grown attached to her, and briefly even thought of marrying her, when she had roused his jealousy by going off with an older man for a weekend. Byron had talked him out of that, rendering him the greatest service in the power of a brother. Helene Tarrasch wasn’t a bad woman, simply a lonely one. If young officer candidates are to be kept by law from marrying, then the lively ones will find one or another Mrs. Tarrasch. Warren’s worst mistake had been asking her to come to Pensacola, but he had been three years at sea. Now she was installed at the San Carlos Hotel as the receptionist in the main dining room.

But how obsolete she suddenly was! Not only because of Janice Lacouture; Hitler’s invasion of Poland had given the future a shape. Warren believed the United States would be at war within a year. The prospect glittered. He would be at war within a year. He might get killed. But he was going to fly in this war and if God allowed, he was going to get a good war record. Warren believed in God, but thought he must be much more broad-minded than the preachers made him out. A Being who could create something as marvellous as sex was not likely to be priggish about it; Warren was fond of saying that God had clearly given a man balls not for beauty but for use. Sitting in his bleakly furnished room with the old-fashioned high ceiling, trying to ignore his room-mate’s snores, Lieutenant Henry looked out of the window at the quiet moonlit lawn in front of the BOQ and allowed his mind to run to golden postwar fantasies.

Politics attracted him. His avid history study had taught him that politicians were the leaders, military men only the mechanics, of war. Warren had closely observed politicians visiting the Academy and the fleet. Some were impressive men like his father, but more were glad-handers with worried eyes, phony smiles, and soft bellies. His father’s ambition, he knew, was flag rank in the Navy. Warren wanted that, but why not dream of more? Janice Lacouture had brains. She had everything. A single day had transformed Warren Henry’s life. In the morning the war had opened up the future; in the evening the perfect partner for that future had come out of nowhere.

He did a strange thing. He walked to the window, and looking out at the moon, he whispered a prayer. His youthful marching to church with his father had taken that much hold. “Let me have her, and let me pass this course and be a good naval aviator. I don’t ask you to let me live, I know that’s up to me, and the numbers, but if I do live and get through the war, then” – he smiled at the dark star-splashed sky – “well, then we’ll see. All right?” Warren was charming God.

He went to bed without telephoning Mrs. Tarrasch. She was always ready for a call from him. But now she seemed to him like somebody he had known in high school.

* * *

Shortly before six in the morning a ring from the embassy woke Victory Henry. The chargé was summoning an urgent staff meeting on the outbreak of the war.

Rhoda muttered and turned, throwing a naked white arm over her eyes. From a crack in the curtains a narrow sunbeam crossed the bed and dust motes danced in the wan light as Pug threw back the covers. Hitler was having good weather for the kickoff, Pug sleepily thought; just the bastard’s luck! The invasion news was no great surprise. Since the Nazi-Soviet pact, the Polish crisis had been skidding downhill. At the big Argentine embassy supper the night before, everybody had noticed the absence of German military men and Foreign Office people, and had talked of war. One American correspondent had told Pug flatly that the invasion was on for three o’clock in the morning; that man had had the dope! The world had crossed a red line in time, and Victor Henry jumped out of bed to go to work in a new era. It wasn’t his war, the one he had been training for all his life; not yet. But he was fairly sure it would be. Despite the absence of surprise, he was excited and moved.

In the library he switched on the radio, which seemed to take a long time to warm up, and opened the french windows. Birds sang in the sunny garden, whence a mild breeze, passing through a red-flowering shrub at the window, brought in a heavy sweet odor. The radio hummed and crackled and an announcer came on, not sounding much different than any Berlin announcer had during the past week, when the air had been full of the “incredible atrocities” perpetrated against Germans in Poland: rape, murder, disemboweling of pregnant women, cutting off of children’s hands and feet. In fact, after this long diet of gruesome bosh, the news that the war had started seemed almost tame. The voice was just as strident, just as full of righteousness, describing the Führer’s decision to march, as it had been in denouncing the atrocities.

The account of a Polish attack at Gleiwitz to capture a German radio station – the outrage which, according to the broadcast, had sent the Wehrmacht rolling two million strong into Poland “in self-defense” – was narrated with the same matter-of-fact briskness as the report of the plunge of the Germans across Polish soil, and of the surprise collapse of the Polish border divisions. Obviously an invasion of this magnitude had been laid on for a month or more and had been surging irreversibly toward Poland for days; the Polish “attack” was a silly hoax for childish minds. Victor Henry was getting used to Berlin Radio’s foggy mixture of facts and lies, but the contempt of the Nazis for the intelligence of the Germans could still surprise him. The propaganda had certainly achieved one aim – to muffle the impact of the new war.

Rhoda came yawning in, tying her negligee, and cocking her head at the radio. “Well! So he really went and did it. Isn’t that something!”

“Sorry it woke you. I tried to keep it low.”

“Oh, the telephone woke me. Was it the embassy?” Pug nodded. “I thought so. Well, I guess I should be up for this. We’re not going to get in it, are we?”

“Most unlikely. I’m not even sure England and France will go to bat.”

“How about the children, Pug?”

“Well, Warren and Madeline are no problem. The word is that Italy won’t fight, so Byron should be okay, too.”

Rhoda sighed, and yawned. “Hitler’s a very strange person. I’ve decided that. What a way to act! I liked his handshake, sort of direct and manly like an American’s, and that charming bashful little smile. But he had strange eyes, you know? Remote, and sort of veiled. Say, what happens to our dinner for that tycoon from Colorado? What’s his name? Will that be off?”

“Dr. Kirby. He may not get here now, Rhoda.”

“Dear, please find out. I have guests coming, and extra help and food, you know.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Rhoda said slowly, “World War Two … You know,
Time
has been writing about ‘World War Two’ for months. It always seemed so unreal, somehow. Now here it is, but it still has a funny ring.”

“You’ll soon get used to it.”

“Oh, no doubt. It’s on now. I’m supposed to have lunch with Sally Forrest. I’d better find out if that’s still on. What a mess! And my hair appointment – oh, no, that’s tomorrow. Or is it? I don’t function this time of the morning.”

Because of the early meeting, Pug gave up his cherished five-mile morning walk to the embassy, and drove there. Berlin was, if anything, quieter than usual. There was a Sunday morning look to the tree-lined avenues in mid-city, a slackening of auto traffic, a scarcity of people on the sidewalks. All the shops were open. Small trucks with machine guns at the ready, manned by helmeted soldiers, stood at some intersections, and along the walls of public buildings workmen were piling sandbags. But it was all a desultory business. The coffee shops were full of breakfasters, and in the Tiergarten the early morning strollers – nannies, children, elderly people – were out as usual for the fine weather, with the vendors of toy balloons and ice cream. Loudspeakers everywhere were blatting the news, and an unusual number airplanes went humming across the sky. The Berliners kept looking at the sky and then at each other with cynical sad grins. He remembered pictures of the happy cheering Berliners crowding Unter den Linden at the start of the last war. Clearly the Germans were going into this one in a different mood.