Winds of War (24 page)

“I’m fine. What’s the news? Are the French and British fighting?”

“Have you been that out of touch? They declared war Sunday, after fussing at Hitler for three days to be nice and back his army out of Poland. I’m not aware that they’ve done anything since but drop leaflets.”

Over a wonderful breakfast of ham and eggs, the first hot food they had eaten in days, they described their journey. Byron could feel his racked insides taking a happy grip on this solid boyhood fare and calming down. He and Natalie ate from trays on the ambassador’s broad desk. Washington had ordered the ambassador and most of the staff out of Poland when the air bombing began; as the only bachelor on the number three level, Slote had been picked to stay. The diplomat was appalled at Byron’s tale of abandoning his passport. “Ye gods, man, in a country at war! It’s a marvel you weren’t caught and jailed or shot. That you’re a German agent would be far more plausible than the real reason you’ve been wandering around. You two are an incredible pair. Incredibly lucky too.”

“And incredibly filthy,” Natalie said. “What do we do now?”

“Well, you’re just in it, my love. There’s no getting out of Poland at the moment. The Germans are overrunning the countryside, bombing and blasting. We have to find you places to stay in Warsaw until, well, until the situation clarifies itself one way or another. Meantime you’ll have to dodge bombs like the rest of us.” Slote shook his head at Byron. “Your father’s been worrying about you. I’ll have to cable him. We still have communication via Stockholm. He’ll let A.J. know that Natalie’s at least found and alive.”

“I am dying for a bath,” Natalie said.

Slote scratched his head, then took keys from his pocket and slid them across the desk. “I’ve moved in here. Take my apartment. It’s on the ground floor, which is the safest, and there’s a good deep cellar. When I was there last the water was still running and we had electricity.”

“What about Byron?”

Byron said, “I’ll go to the Methodist House.”

“It’s been hit,” Slote said. “We had to get everybody out, day before yesterday.”

“Do you mind,” Natalie said, “if he stays with me?”

Both men showed surprise and embarrassment, and Byron said, “I think my mother would object.”

“Oh, for crying out loud, Byron. With all the running into the bushes you and I have been doing and whatnot, I don’t know what secrets we have from each other.” She turned to Slote. “He’s like a loyal kid brother, sort of.”

“Don’t you believe her,” Byron said wearily. “I’m a hot-blooded beast. Is there a YMCA?”

“Look, I don’t mind,” Slote said, with obvious lack of enthusiasm. “There’s a sofa in the sitting room. It’s up to Natalie.”

She scooped up the keys. “I intend to bathe and then sleep for several days - between bombings. How will we ever get out of Poland, Leslie?”

Slote shrugged, cleared his throat, and laughed. “Who knows? Hitler says if the Poles don’t surrender, Warsaw will be levelled. The Poles claim they’ve thrown the Wehrmacht back and are advancing into Germany. It’s probably nonsense. Stockholm Radio says the Nazis have broken through everywhere and will surround Warsaw in a week The Swedes and the Swiss here are trying to negotiate a safe-conduct for foreign neutrals through the German lines. That’s how we’ll all probably leave. Till that comes through, the safest place in Poland is right here.”

“Well then, we did the sensible thing, coming to Warsaw,” Natalie said.

“You’re the soul of prudence altogether, Natalie.”

As the trolleybus wound off into the smaller residential streets, Byron and Natalie saw more damage than they had in Cracow - burned-out or smashed houses, bomb holes in the pavement, an occasional rubble-filled street roped off - but by and large Warsaw looked much as it had in peacetime, less than a week ago, though now seemingly in a bygone age. The threatened German obliteration was not yet happening, if it ever would. The other passengers paid no attention to Byron’s bandage or growth of beard. Several of them were bandaged and most of the men were bristly. A thick human smell choked the car.

Natalie said when they got out, “Ah -
air
! No doubt we smell just like that, or worse. I must bathe at once or I’ll go mad. Somehow on the road I didn’t care. Now I can’t stand myself another minute.”

Slivers of sunlight through the closed shutters made Slote’s flat an oasis of peaceful half-gloom. Books lining the sitting room gave it a dusty library smell. Natalie flipped switches, obviously quite at home in the place. “Want to wash up first?” she said. “Once I get in that tub there’ll be no moving me for hours. There’s only cold water. I’m going to boil up some hot. But I don’t know. Maybe you should find a hospital, first thing, and get your head examined.”

After the phrase was out of her mouth, it struck them both as funny. They laughed and laughed and couldn’t stop laughing. “Well, while we still both stink,” Natalie gasped, “come here.” She threw her arms around him and kissed him. “You damned fool, abandoning your passport to protect some dopey Jews.”

“My head’s all right,” Byron said. The touch of the girl’s mouth on his was like birdsong, like flowers, exhausted and filthy though they both were. “I’ll clean up while you boil your water.”

As he shaved she kept coming into the bathroom emptying steaming kettles into the cracked yellow tub, humming a polonaise of Chopin. The music had introduced the noon news broadcast, in which Byron had understood only a few place-names: towns and cities more than halfway in from the western and southern borders toward Warsaw.

“My God, how pale you are, Briny,” she said, inspecting his clean-shaven face nicked here and there by the cold-water shave, “and how young! I keep forgetting. You’re just a boy.”

“Oh, don’t exaggerate. I’ve already flunked out of graduate school,” Byron said. “Isn’t that a mature thing to do?”

“Get out of here. I’m diving into that tub.”

An unmistakable wailing scream sounded outside about half an hour later. Byron, on the sofa, dozing over an old issue of
Time
, snapped awake and took binoculars from his suitcase. Scarlet-faced and dripping, Natalie emerged from the bathroom swathed in Slote’s white terry-cloth robe. “Do we have to go to the cellar?”

“I’ll have a look.”

The street was deserted: no cars, no people. Byron scanned the heavens from the doorway with his naked eye, and after a moment saw the airplanes. Sailing forth from a white cloud, they moved slowly across the sky through a scattering of black puffs. He heard grumbling muffled thumps far away, like thunder without reverberations. As he stepped out on the sidewalk, binoculars to his eyes, a whistle shrieked. Down the street a little man in a white helmet and white armband was waving angrily at him. He dropped back into the doorway, and found the planes with the glasses: black machines, bigger than the one that had wounded him, with a different thick shape but painted with the same crosses and swastikas. The fuselages were very long; in the rainbow-rimmed field of the glasses they looked a bit like small flying freight cars.

Natalie was combing her hair by candlelight at a hallway mirror. The electricity was off. “Well? Is that bombing?”

“It’s bombing. They’re not headed this way, the planes I saw.”

“Well, I don’t think I’d better get back in the tub.”

The thumps became louder. They sat on the sofa, smoking cigarettes and looking at each other.

Natalie said in a shaky voice, “It’s sort of like a summer electric storm coming toward you. I didn’t picture it like this.”

A distant whistling noise became louder, and a sudden crash jarred the room. Glass broke somewhere, a lot of glass. The girl uttered a small shriek, but sat still and straight. Two more close explosions came, one right after the other. Through the shutters harsh noises echoed from the street: shouts and screams, and the grumble of falling brick walls.

“Briny, shall we run for the cellar?”

“Better sit tight.”

“Okay.”

That was the worst of it. The thumps went on for a while, some distant and faint some closer; but there were no more explosions that could be felt in the air, in the floor, in the teeth. They died off. In the street outside bells clanged, running feet trampled on the cobblestones, men yelled. Byron pulled aside curtains, opened a window, and blinked in the strong sunshine at the sight of two smashed burning houses down the street. People were milling around scattered chunks of masonry and flaming wreckage, carrying pails of water into the tall thick red flames.

Natalie stood beside him, gnawing her lips. “Those horrible German bastards. Oh my God, Briny, look. Look!” Men were starting to carry limp figures out of the clouds of smoke. One tall man in a black rubber coat held a child dangling in each arm. “Can’t we help? Can’t we do something?

“There must be volunteer squads, Natalie, that neutrals can work in. Nursing, rescue, cleanup. I’ll find out.”

“I can’t watch this.” She turned away. Barefoot, a couple of inches lower without her heels, wrapped in the oversize robe, the eyes in her upturned unpainted face shiny with tears, Natalie Jastrow looked younger and much less formidable that usual. “It was so close. They may kill both of us.”

“We probably should dive for the cellar next time we hear the siren. Now we know.”

“I got you into it. That keeps eating at me. Your parents in Berlin must be sick with worry about you, and –”

“My people are Navy. It’s all in the day’s work. As for me, I’m having fun.”

“Fun?” She scowled at him. “What the devil? Don’t talk like a child.”

“Natalie, I’ve never had a more exciting time, that’s all. I don’t believe I’m going to get killed. I wouldn’t have missed this for anything.”

“Byron, hundreds of people have probably died out there in the last half hour! Didn’t you see the kids they pulled out of the building?”

“I saw them. Look, all I meant was –” Byron hesitated because what he had meant was that he was having fun.

“It’s just such a stupid, callous thing to say. Something a German might say.” She hitched the robe around her closer. “Fun! Leslie thinks I’m screwy. You’re really peculiar.”

With an unfriendly headshake at him, she stalked to the bathroom.

Chapter 12

Coming back to Washington from Berlin jolted Pug, as had his return in 1931 from Manila to a country sunk in the Great Depression. This time what struck him was not change, but the absence of it. After the blaring pageantry and war fevers of Nazi Germany, it was a bit like coming out of a theatre showing a Technicolor movie into a gray quiet street. Even Rotterdam and Lisbon had been agog with war reverberations. Here, where the Capitol dome and the Washington Monument shimmered in the Ninety-degree heat, people were plodding apathetically about their business. The roaring invasion of Poland, already looking like one of the historic conquests of all time, was as remote from this city as a volcanic eruption on Mars.

He sat in the dining room of the Army and Navy Club, breakfasting on kippers and scrambled eggs. His arrival the day before had proved a puzzling letdown. The man in the German section of the State Department to whom he had reported – a very minor personage, to judge by his small office, shoddy furniture, and lack of a window – had told him to expect a call in the morning; nothing more.

“Well, well, our cookie-pushing friend!”

“Where’s your striped pants, Pug?”

Grinning down at him were three classmates: Digger Brown, Paul Munson, and Harry Warendorf. Though Pug had not encountered any one of them for years, they joined him and began exchanging jokes and gossip as though they say each other every day. He looked at them with interest, and they at him, for gain of fat and loss of hair. Munson had learned to fly way back in 1921, and now he was air operations officer of the
Saratoga
. Digger Brown, Pug’s old room-mate, had an assured if pasty look. Well he might, the first officer of the class to make exec of a battle ship! Warendorf, the brain of the three, was a hard-luck man like Tollever. Following orders of his commodore, he had piled a destroyer on the rocks off the California coast in a fog with half a dozen others. He had fallen into minesweepers, and there he was still.

Under the rough banter about his pink-tea job, they were curious and respectful. They asked remarkably naïve questions about the European war. All of them assumed that the Nazis were twice as strong in the field as they were and that the Allies were all but impotent. It struck Pug again how little Americans knew of Europe for all the flood of lurid newspaper and magazine stories about the Nazis; and how little most men ever knew beyond their constricted specialties.

“Why the hell are the Germans running away with it in Poland, Pug, if all this is so?” Warendorf said. They had been listening, attentive but unconvinced, to his estimate of the opposed forces.

“That’s anybody’s guess. I’d say surprise, superior matériel on the spot, concentration of force, better field leadership, better political leadership, better training, a professional war plan, and probably a lot of interior rot, confusion, and treason behind the Polish lines. Also the French and British seem to be sitting on their duffs through the best strategic opportunity against Hitler they’ll ever have. You can’t win a game if you don’t get out on the field.”

A page boy called him to the telephone. Briskly, an unfamiliar voice said, “Commander Henry? Welcome to these peaceful shores. I’m Carton. Captain Russell Carton. I think we were briefly at the War College together, fighting the Japs on a linoleum checkerboard floor.”

“That’s right, Captain, 1937. The Japs beat the hell out of us, as I recall.” Pug did his best to suppress the astonishment in his tones. Russell Carton was the name of President Roosevelt’s naval aide.

The voice chuckled. “I hope you’ve forgotten that I was the admiral who blew the engagement. When shall I pick you up? Our appointment’s at noon.”

“How far do we have to go?”

“Just around the corner. The White House. You’re seeing the President. . . . Hello? Are you there?”

“Yes, sir. Seeing the President, you said. Do I get a briefing on this?”