Winds of War (39 page)

“Well, I wish I had that in prospect. I hear that’s becoming the gayest city in Europe.”

“Come along.”

“Oh, Palmer, don’t tease me. Dear me, I was supposed to call you Fred, wasn’t I? And now I find I’ve been thinking of you all along as Palmer. Fred - well, there are so many Freds. You don’t strike me as Fred.”

“That’s very strange.” He drank at his highball.

“What is?”

“Anne called me Palmer. She never would call me anything else.”

Rhoda twirled the stem of her daiquiri glass. “I wish I had known your wife.”

“You’d have become good friends.”

“Palmer, what do you think of Pug?”

“Hm. That’s a tough one.” The engineer pushed his lips out ruefully. “My first impression was that he was a misplaced and – frankly - rather narrow-minded sea dog. But I don’t know. He has a keen intellect. He’s terrifically on the ball. That was quite a job he did on that waiter. He’s a hard man to know, really.”

Rhoda laughed. How right you are. After all these years, I don’t know him too well myself. But I suspect Pug’s really something simple and almost obsolete, Palmer. He’s a patriot. He’s not the easiest person to live with. He’s so goldarned single-minded.”

“Is he a patriot, or is he a Navy career man? Those are two different things.”

Rhoda tilted her head and smiled. “I’m not actually sure.”

“Well, I’ve come to admire him, that much I know.” Kirby frowned at his big hands, clasped around the drink on the table. “See here, Rhoda, I’m really a proper fellow, all in all. Let me just say this. You’re a wonderful woman. I’ve been a sad dull man since Anne died, but you’ve made me feel very much alive again, and I’m grateful to you. Does this offend you?”

“Don’t be a fool. It pleases me very much, and you know it does.” Rhoda took a handkerchief from her purse. “However, it’s going to be a little hard on my contentment for a day or two. Oh, damn.”

“Why I should think it would add to your contentment.”

“Oh, shut up, Palmer. Thanks for the drink. You’d better go to your plane.”

“Look don’t be upset.”

She smiled at him, her eyes tearful. “Why everything’s fine, dear. You might write, just once in a while. Just a friendly little scribble, so I’ll know you’re alive and well. I’d like that.”

“Of course I will. I’ll write the day I get home.”

“Will you really! That’s fine.” She touched her eyes with her handkerchief and stood. “Good-bye.”

He said, getting to his feet, “They haven’t called my plane.”

“No? Well, my chauffeuring job is finished, and I’m leaving you here and now.” They walked out of the lounge and shook hands in the quiet terminal. War had all but shut down the airport; most of the counters were dark. Rhoda squeezed Dr. Kirby’s hand, and standing on tiptoe, kissed him once on the lips. This in a way was strangest of all, reaching up to kiss a man. She opened her mouth. After all, it was a farewell.

“Good-bye. Have a wonderful trip.” She hurried away and turned a corner without looking back. She saw enough of the Emil Jannings movie to be able to talk about it to Pug.

* * *

Byron at last wrote the report on his adventures in Poland. Victory Henry, suppressing his annoyance over the five vapid pages, spent an afternoon dictating to his yeoman everything he remembered of Byron’s tale. His son read the seventeen-page result next day with astonishment. “Ye gods, Dad, what a memory you have.”

“Take that and fix it any way you want. Just make sure it’s factually unchallengeable. Combine it with your thing and let me have it back by Friday.”

Victor Henry forwarded the patched report to the Office of Naval Intelligence, but forgot his idea of sending a copy to the President. The cool autumn days went by and Berlin began taking on an almost peacetime look and mood.” Byron lounged around the Grunewald house, knotting his forehead by the hour over one book after another from Leslie Slote’s list. Three or four times a week he played tennis with his father; he was much the better player, but Pug, a steely plodder at first, wore him down and beat him. With food, exercise, and sun, however, Byron lost his famished look, regained strength, and started winning, which pleased Pug as much as it did him.

One morning he walked into his father’s office at the embassy and saw sitting on the floor; carefully roped up and ticketed with a tag in his own handwriting, the large valise of suits, shoes, and shirts he had left behind in Warsaw. It was a shocking little clue to the efficiency of the Germans. But he was glad to have the clothes, for American styles were idolized in Germany. He blossomed out as a dandy. The German girls in the embassy looked after the slender young man whenever he walked down the hall, casually à la mode, with heavy red-glinting brown hair, a lean face, and large blue eyes that widened when he wistfully smiled. But he ignored their inviting glances. Byron pounced on the mail every morning, searching in vain for a letter from Siena.

When the Führer made his Reichstag speech offering peace to England and France, early in October, the propaganda ministry set aside a large block of seats in the front Opera House for foreign diplomats, and Pug took his son along. Living through the siege of Warsaw, and then reading
Mein Kampf
, Byron had come to think of Adolf Hitler as a historic monster - a Caligula, a Genghis Khan, an Ivan the Terrible - and Hitler standing at the podium surprised him: just a medium-size pudgy individual in a plain gray coat and black trousers, carrying a red portfolio. The man seemed to Byron a diminutive actor, weakly impersonating the grandiose and gruesome history-maker.

Hitler spoke this time in a reasonable, pedestrian tone, like an elder politician. In this sober style, the German leader began to utter such grotesque and laughable lies that Byron kept looking around for some amused reactions. But the Germans sat listening with serious faces. Even the diplomats gave way only here and there to a mouth twitch that might have been ironic.

A powerful Poland had attacked Germany, the little man in the gray coat said, and had attempted to destroy her. The brave Wehrmacht had not been caught unawares and had justly punished this insolent aggression. A campaign strictly limited to attack of military targets had brought quick total victory. The civilian population of Poland, on his personal orders, had not been molested, and had suffered no loss or injury, except in Warsaw. There again on his orders, the German commanders had pleaded with the authorities to evacuate their civilians, offering them safe-conduct. The Poles with criminal folly had insisted on holding defenseless women and children within the city.

To Byron, the brazenness of this assertion was stupefying. All the neutral diplomats had made desperate efforts for weeks to negotiate the evacuation of Warsaw’s women and children. The Germans had never even replied. It was not so much that Hitler was lying about this - Byron knew that the German nation was following a wild liar and had been for years, since
Mein Kampf
was full of obvious crazy lies - but that this lie was pointless, since the neutrals knew the facts and the world press had reported them. Why, then, was Hitler saying such vulnerable nonsense? The speech must be meant for the Germans; but in that case, he reflected - as Hitler went on to “offer an outstretched hand” to the British and the French - why was the speech so mild in style, and why were so many seats reserved for diplomats?

“Surely if forty-six million Englishmen can claim to rule over forty million square kilometers of the earth, then it cannot be wrong,” Hitler said in a docile, placating tone, holding up both hands, palms outward, “for eighty-two million Germans to ask to be allowed to till in peace eight hundred thousand kilometers of soil that are their own.” He was talking about his new order in central Europe, and the expanded Third Reich. The British and the French could have peace simply by accepting things as they now were, he said, adding a hint that it might be well if they also gave Germany back her old colonies. The Führer at the end fell into his old style, howling and sneering, shaking both fists in front of his face, pointing a fist and a finger straight upward, snapping his hands to his hips, as he pictured the horrors of a full-scale war, which he said he dreaded and which nobody could really win.

That night Pug Henry wrote in his intelligence report:

. . . Hitler looks very well. He obviously has first-rate powers of recuperation. Maybe licking Poland toned up his system a bit. Anyway the haggardness is gone, his color is excellent, he isn’t stooping, his voice is clear, not harsh, and - at least in this speech - very pleasant, and his walk is springy and quick. It would be a grave mistake to hope for a physical breakdown in this man.

The speech was a lot of the same old stuff, with some remarkable whoppers, even for the
Führer
, about who started the Polish war and about the sterling conduct of the Germans toward civilians. This tommyrot was certainly for internal consumption. His German listeners appeared to be swallowing it, though it’s very hard to discern what Germans really think.

The radio tonight is making a great to-do about the “outstretched hand” peace proposal. We’ll evidently be hearing “outstretched hand” from now on, possibly to the end of the war, even if it’s ten years hence. The offer may have been authentic. If the Allies accept, Germany gets her half of Poland for the price of a quick cheap campaign, and also her pre-World War colonies, no doubt as a reward for the faultless chivalry of her armed forces. Hitler has never been bashful about making the most outrageous proposals. They’ve been accepted too. So why not try another one?

Ai the very least, if he gets the truce and the conference he suggests, the British and French publics will undoubtedly relax and slack off. The Germans can use the breather to get their half-hearted industrial effort rolling for the showdown. On every count this was a clever speech by a leader who is riding high and seems to have the magic touch. The only fault I can find is a dull and boring delivery, but that too may have been calculated. Hitler today was the judicious European politician, not the roaring Aryan firebrand. Among his other talents he is a gifted vaudevillian.

Pug told Byron to write down his impressions of the speech. Byron handed him half a typewritten page:

My outstanding impression was the way Adolf Hitler follows out what he wrote in
Mein Kampf
. He says there, in his section on war propaganda, that the masses are “feminine,” acting on feeling and sentiment, and that whatever you tell them must be addressed to the dullest ignoramus among them, in order to reach and convince the broadest possible audience.

This speech was full of lies that ought to annoy a half-educated German boy of ten, and the peace proposals amounted to a total German grab. Maybe Hitler judges other countries by his own; otherwise I can’t understand the speech. I realized only today what utter contempt Hitler has for the Germans. He regards them as bottomlessly naïve and stupid. They follow him and love him. Who am I to say he’s wrong?

His father thought this was not bad, and included it in quotation marks as the comment of a youthful American spectator.

The din of the German radio and press in the next days was terrific. Italy and Japan had hailed the Führer as the greatest peacemaker of all time. A mighty popular surge for peace was sweeping the West and the United States. But “Churchillian” warmongers were trying to stamp out this warm response of the people to the Führer’s outstretched hand. If they succeeded, the most ghastly bloodbath of all time would follow, and history would know whom to blame. Pug gathered from neutral intelligence in Berlin that some Frenchmen wanted to make a deal and call off the war, but not because they took seriously anything Hitler had said. It was just a question of yielding to the facts or fighting on.

Into this confusing noise came an electric shock of news. A U-boat had sneaked into the British fleet anchorage in Scapa Flow at the northern tip of Scotland, had sunk the battleship
Royal Oak
, and had returned home safe!

News pictures showed the solemn fat-faced Führer shaking the hand of Lieutenant-Commander Prien, a nervous stiff young man with receding hair. The Nazi propaganda ministry foamed with ecstasy over the British Admiralty’s report that sadly praised Prien’s skill and daring. The writer was Churchill himself. Goebbels’s broadcasters said the sinking of the
Royal Oak
would prove a great boon to peace, since the Führer’s “outstretched hand” proposal would now receive more serious consideration.

A small reception was laid on for neutral military attachés to meet Prien. Victor Henry put his son’s name on the list, with the rank Ensign, USNR, and Byron received a card. The Henrys dined before the reception at the apartment of Commander Grobke, a small dark walk-up flat on the fourth floor of an old house with bay windows. Heavy thick furniture so cluttered the rooms that there was hardly space to move. The meal was salt fish and potatoes, but it was well cooked and Byron enjoyed it. He found the Grobkes disconcertingly normal, though he was prepared to detest them. When the talk got around to Byron’s experiences in Poland the woman listened with an unhappy, motherly look. “One never knows what to believe any more. Thank God it’s over, at least. Let there only be peace, real peace. We don’t want war. The last war ruined Germany. Another war will be the absolute end of our country.”

Rhoda said, “It’s so awful. Nobody in the world wants war, yet here we are in this mess.”

Grobke said to Victor Henry, “What do you think? Are the Allies going to discuss the Führer’s very reasonable offer?”

“Do you want me to be polite, or are you asking for information?”

“Don’t be polite, Henry. Not with me.”

“Okay. Germany can have peace if she gets rid of Hitler and his regime. You could even hang onto a lot of your gains. That gang has got to go.”

Grobke and his wife looked at each other in the candlelight. “Then it’s hopeless,” he said, playing with his empty wineglass. “If your people won’t understand one thing about Germany, we have to fight it out. You don’t know what this country was like in the 1920’s. I do. If the system had gone on another few years there would have been no navy, no economy, nothing. Germany would have fallen apart. This man stood up and put Germany back on the map. You have Roosevelt, we have him. Listen, Henry, I sat in a fancy club in New York and heard people call Roosevelt an insane socialist cripple. There are millions who hate him. Right? Now I’m not a Nazi, I’ve never said the Führer is a thousand percent right. But he’s a winner, damn it all. He gets things done, like Roosevelt. And you want us to get rid of him? First of all it isn’t possible. You know what the regime is. And if it were possible we wouldn’t do it. And yet there can be peace. It depends on one man, and he isn’t our Führer.”