Winds of War (27 page)

Digger Brown had been exec of the
Colorado
only six weeks. Sitting at the head of the table, Digger was making too many jokes, Pug thought so as to put himself at ease with the ship’s lieutenant commanders and two-stripers. That was all right. Digger was a big fellow and could turn on impressive anger at will. Pug’s style was more of a monotone. His own sense of humor, such as it was, went to jabbing ironies. As an executive officer - if he ever achieved it - he planned to be taciturn and short. They would call him a dull sour son of a bitch. One had plenty of time to warm up and make friends, but the job had to be done right from the hour one reported aboard. It was a sad fact of life that everybody, himself included, jumped to it when the boss was a son of a bitch, especially a knowledgeable son of a bitch. In the
West Virginia
he had been a hated man until that first meatball pennant had broken out at the yardarm. Thereafter he had been the ship’s most popular officer.

The immediate target of Digger’s raillery was his communications officer, a lean morose-looking Southerner. Recently the
Colorado
had received a new powerful voice radio transmitter which bounced waves off the Heaviside layer at a shallow angle. If atmospheric conditions were right, one could talk directly to a ship in European waters. Digger had chatted with his brother, the engineering officer in the
Marblehead
, now anchored off Lisbon. The communications officer had since been romancing an old girlfriend in Barcelona via the
Marblehead
radio room. Digger had found this out three days ago, and was still milking it for jokes.

Pug said, “Say, how well did this thing work, Digger? Could you understand Tom?”

“Oh, five by five. Amazing.”

“D’you suppose I could talk to Rhoda in Berlin?” It occurred to Pug that this was a chance to tell her about Madeline, and perhaps reach a decision.

The communications officer, glad of an opportunity to stop the baiting, said at once, “Captain, I know we can raise Marblehead tonight. It ought to be simple to patch in the long-distance line from Lisbon to Berlin.”

“It’ll be what - two or three o’clock in the morning there?” Brown said.

“Two, sir.”

“Want to break in on Rhoda’s beauty sleep, Pug?”

“I think so.”

The lieutenant carefully rolled his napkin in a monogrammed ring, and left.

The talk turned to Germany and the war. These battleship officers, like most people, were callowly inclined to admire and overestimate the Nazi war machine. One fresh-faced lieutenant said that he hoped the Navy was doing more work on landing craft than he’d been able to read about. If we got into the war, he said, landing would be almost the whole Navy problem, because Germany would probably control the entire coastline of Europe by then.

Digger Brown brought his guest to the executive officer’s quarters for coffee, ordering around his Filipino steward and lolling on the handsome blue leather couch with casual pride of office. They gossiped about their classmates: a couple of juicy divorces, a premature death, a brilliant leader turned alcoholic. Digger bemoaned his burdens as a battleship exec. His captain had gotten where he was with sheer luck, charm, and a marvellous wife - that was all; his ship-handling was going to give Digger a heart attack. The ship was slack from top to bottom; he had made himself unpopular by instituting a stiff program of drills; and so forth. Pug thought that for an old friend Digger was showing off too much. He mentioned that he had come back from Berlin to talk to the President. Digger’s face changed. “I’m not surprised,” he said. “Remember that phone call you had at the Army and Navy Club? I told the fellows, I bet that’s from the White House. You’re flying high, fella.”

Having taken the wind out of Digger’s sails, Victor Henry was content to say nothing more. Digger waited, stuffed his pipe, lit it, then said, “What’s Roosevelt really like, Pug?”

Henry said something banal about the President’s charm and magnetism.

There was a knock on the door and the communications officer came in. “We raised the
Marblehead
, no strain, sir. It took all this time to get through to Berlin. What was that number again?” Pug told him. “Yes, sir, that checks. The number doesn’t answer.”

The eyes of Digger Brown and Victor Henry met for a moment. Brown said, “At two in the morning? Better try again. Sounds like a foul-up.”

“We put it through three times, sir.”

“She might have gone out of town,” Henry said. “Don’t bother anymore. Thanks.”

The lieutenant left. Digger puffed thoughtfully at his pipe.

“Also, she cuts off the phone in the bedroom at night,” Henry said. “I forgot that. She may not hear the ringing in the library if the door’s closed.”

“Oh, I see,” Digger said. He puffed again, and neither said anything for a while.

“Well. Guess I’ll make tracks.” Victor Henry stood up.

The executive officer accompanied him to the gangway, looking proudly around at the vast main deck, the towering guns, the flawlessly uniformed watch. “Shipshape enough topside,” he said. “That’s the least I demand. Well, good luck on the firing line, Pug. Give my love to Rhoda.”

“If she’s still there, I will.”

They both laughed.

* * *

“Hello, Dad!” When Paul Munson’s plane landed, Warren was waiting at the Pensacola airfield in a helmet and flying jacket. The son’s handgrip, quick and firm, expressed all Warren’s pride in what he was doing. His deeply tanned face radiated exaltation.

“Say, where do you get this outdoors glow?” Pug said. He deliberately ignored the scar on his son’s forehead. “I thought they’d make you sweat in ground school here. I expected you to look like something from under a rock.”

Warren laughed. “Well, I had a couple of chances to go deep-sea fishing out in the Gulf. I tan fast.”

Driving his father to the BOQ, he never stopped talking. The flight school was in a buzz, he said. The day after Hitler invaded Poland, Washington had ordered the number of students tripled and the year-long course cut to six months. The school was “telescoping the syllabus.” In the old course a man qualified in big slow patrol planes, then in scout planes, and then, if he were good enough, went on into Squadron Five for fighter training. Now the pilots would be put on patrol, scout, or fighter tracks at once, and would stay in them. The lists would be posted in the morning. He was dying to make Squadron Five. Warren got all this out before he remembered to ask his father about the family.

“Ye gods, Briny’s in
Warsaw
? Why, the Germans are bombing the hell out of that town.”

“I know,” Pug said. “I stopped worrying about Byron long ago. He’ll crawl out of the rubble with somebody’s gold watch.”

“What’s he doing there?”

“Chased a girl there.”

“Really? Bully for him. What kind of girl?”

“A Jewish Phi Bete from Radcliffe.”

“You’re kidding.
Briny
?”

“That’s right.”

With an eloquent look, surprised and ruefully impressed, Warren changed the subject.

The audience at Paul Munson’s lecture was surprisingly big. There must have been more than two hundred student aviators in khaki, youngsters with crew cuts and rugged clever faces, jammed into a small lecture hall. Like most naval men, Paul was a bumbling speaker, but the students sat on the edges of their chairs, because he was telling them how to avoid killing themselves. With slides and diagrams, with much technical jargon and an occasional heavy bloodthirsty joke, he described the worst hazards of carrier landings, the life-or-death last moments of the approach, the procedure after cracking up, and such cheerful matters. The students laughed at the jokes about their own possible deaths. The strong male smell of a locker room rose from the packed bodies. Pug’s eye fell on Warren, sitting in a row across the aisle from him, erect and attentive, just one more close-cropped head in the crowd. He thought of Byron in Warsaw under the German bombs. It was going to be a tough ten years, he thought, for men with grown sons.

Warren told him after the lecture that Congressman Isaac Lacouture, the man who had taken him deep-sea fishing, had invited them to dinner at the beach club. Lacouture was president of the club, and before running for Congress, had been chairman of the Gulf Lumber and Paper Company, the biggest firm in Pensacola. “He’s anxious to meet you,” Warren said as they walked back to the BOQ.

“Why?”

“He’s very interested in the war and in Germany. His opinions are kind of strong.”

“Why has he taken such a shine to you?”

“Well, sir, this daughter of his, Janice, and I have sort of hit it off.” With an easy knowing grin, Warren parted from him in the lobby.

At his first sight of Janice Lacouture, Victor Henry decided against talking to Warren about Pamela Tudsbury. What chance had the slight English girl in her mousy suits against this magnetic blonde whose long legs dazzled at every turn and flip of her skirt, this assured radiant tall American girl with the princess-like air, and the lovely face only slightly marred by crooked teeth? She was another, early Rhoda, swathed in cloudy pink, all composed of sweet scent, sexual allure, and girlish grace. The slang was changed, the skirt hem higher. This girl looked and acted brainier. She greeted Pug with just enough deference to acknowledge that he was Warren’s father, and just enough sparkle to hint that he was no old fud for all that, but an attractive man himself. A girl who could do that in half a minute of talk, with a flash of the eyes and a smile, was a powerhouse, and so much, thought Pug, for his inept matchmaking notions.

A stiff wind was blowing from the water. Waves broke over the club terrace and splattered heavy spray on the glass wall of the dining room, making the candlelit Lacouture dinner seem the cozier. Victor Henry never did get it clear who all the ten people at table were, though one was the beribboned commandant of the naval air station. The person who mattered, it was soon obvious, was Congressman Isaac Lacouture, a small man with thick white hair, a florid face, and a way of half sticking out his tongue when he smiled, with an air of sly profundity.

“How long are you going to be here, Commander Henry?” Lacouture called down the long table, as green-coated waiters passed two large baked fish on silver platters. “You might like to come out and spend a day fishing, if the weatherman will turn off this willawa. Your boy caught these two kingfish with me.”

Pug said that he had to return to New York in the morning to get his plane for Lisbon.

Lacouture said, “Well, at that I suppose I’ll be hurrying up to Washington myself for this special session. Say, how about that? What do
you
think of revising the Neutrality Act? How bad is the situation, actually? You should know.”

“Congressman, I think Poland’s going to fall fast, if you call that bad.”

“Oh, hell, the Allies are counting on that! The European mind works in subtle ways. The President has sort of a European mind himself, you know. That mixture of Dutch and English is really the key to understanding him.” Lacouture smiled, protruding his tongue. “I’ve done a lot of business with the Dutch, they’re very big in the hardwoods trade, and I tell you they are tricky boys. The gloomier things look in the next few weeks, why the easier it’ll be for Roosevelt to jam anything he wants through Congress. Right?”

“Have you talked to Hitler, Commander Henry? What is he really like?” said Mrs. Lacouture, a thin faded woman, with a placating smile and a sweet tone that suggested her social life consisted mainly of softening her husband’s impact, or trying to.

Lacouture said as though she had addressed him, “Oh, this Hitler is some kind of moonstruck demagogue. We all know that. But for years the Allies could have cleaned up him and his Nazis with ease, yet they just sat there. So it’s their mess, not ours. Any day now we’ll be hearing about the Germans raping nuns and boiling soldiers’ corpses down for soap. British intelligence started both those yarns in 1916, you know. We’ve got the documentary evidence on that. How about it, Commander Henry? You’ve been living among the Germans. Are they really these savage Huns the New York papers make them out to be?”

All the faces at the table turned to Pug. “The Germans aren’t easy to understand,” he said slowly. “My wife likes them more than I do. I don’t admire their treatment of Jews.”

Congressman Lacouture held up two large hands. “Unpardonable! The New York press is quite understandable on that basis.”

Warren said firmly from the middle of the table, “I don’t see how the President’s revision would weaken our neutrality, sir. Cash and carry simply means anybody can come and buy stuff who has the ships to haul it off and the money to pay for it, Anybody, Hitler included.”

Lacouture smiled at him. “The administration would be proud of you, my boy. That’s the line. Except we all know that the Allies have the ships and the money, and the Germans have neither. So this would put our factories into the war on the Allied side.”

“But nobody ever stopped Hitler from building a merchant marine,” Warren promptly came back. “Piling up tanks, subs, and dive bombers instead was his idea. All aggressive weapons. Isn’t that his tough luck?”

“Warren’s absolutely right,” Janice said.

Lacouture sat back in his chair, staring at his daughter, who smiled back impudently.

“What both of you kids don’t or won’t understand,” Lacouture said, “is that this proposal is the camel’s nose under the tent flap. Of course it
seems
fair. Of
course
it does. That’s the beauty of the package. That’s the Roosevelt mind at work. But let’s not be children. He isn’t calling a special session to help Nazi Germany! He thinks he’s got a mission to save the world from Hitler. He’s been talking this way since 1937. He’s cracked on the subject. Now I say Adolf Hitler’s neither the foul fiend nor the Antichrist. That’s all poppycock. He’s just another European politician, a little more dirty and extreme than the rest. The way for us to save the world is to stay
out
of it. The citadel of sanity!” He rapped out the phrase and looked around the table, as though half expecting applause. “That’s what we have to be. The Atlantic and Pacific are our walls. Broad, stout walls. The citadel of sanity! If we get in it we’ll go bankrupt like the others and lose a couple of million of our finest young men. The whole world will sink into barbarism or communism, which aren’t so very different. The Russians will be the only winners.”