Winds of War (78 page)

“How do I let you know when we’re through?” Pug jerked a thumb at the blank-faced soldier. “If I get up and walk toward the door, for instance, that might confuse him.”

“Very true.” The lieutenant inclined his head and his eye twitched. “Then kindly raise the telephone for a few moments and replace it in the cradle. I will then return. Permit me to mention that the general hopes you will join him for lunch at advance headquarters, a drive of forty kilometers from here.”

As the door closed, Pug pulled out his cigarettes, and lit one for the pilot.

“Ah! God bless you.” Gallard inhaled the smoke as a man emerging from under water gulps air. “Does Pam know? Did anybody see me parachute?”

“One of your mates claimed he had. She’s sure you’re alive.”

“Good. Now you can tell her.”

“That’ll be a rare pleasure.”

The wall clock ticked very loudly. Flicking the cigarette clumsily with his left hand, Gallard glanced at the guard, who stood like a post, machine gun slanted in his white-knuckled hands. The beetling line of the German helmet gave the farm-boy face a stern, statuesque look.

“Puts a bit of a chill on the small talk, eh?”

“He’s rather a ripe one.” Pug said.

The guard, staring straight ahead, was giving off a corrupt unwashed smell in the close little room, though his face was clean enough.

“Rather. I say, this is the surprise of my life. I thought I was in for a rough grilling, or maybe for getting whisked to Germany. They never told me a thing, except that I’d get shot if I misbehaved. You must have good friends in the Luftwaffe.”

“What do you want me to tell Pamela?”

“Will you be seeing her?”

“I don’t think so. I’m going back to Washington shortly. I can wire or write her.”

“There’s so much to tell. First of all, I’m all right, more or less. Some burns around the face and neck.” He lifted the slung arm. “Luckily the bullet only broke the bone, didn’t shatter it. I can’t fault the medical attention. The food’s been bloody awful - moldy black bread, vile margarine with a petroleum aftertaste, soup full of rotten potatoes. The other day it mysteriously improved. Just in my ward. Last night we had a really passable stew, though it might have been Lille cats and dogs. Tasted good. I suppose all that was apropos of your little visit. I’m terribly grateful to you. Really, it’s splendid that you’ve managed to do this, Captain Henry. How is Pam? Tell me about her. When did you last see her? How did she look?”

“I saw her several times after you disappeared. She’d come down to London, and I’d take her to dinner and to cheerful places. For a while she was peaky and wouldn’t eat. But she was coming around. Practically the last thing she told me was that she expected you back. That she was going to wait for you and marry you.”

The pilot’s eyes grew moist. “She’s a marvellous girl, Pamela.” He looked around at the guard. “Say, he does smell bad, doesn’t he?” Watching the soldier’s dull unchanging face, he said in an offhand tone, “Will you look at that face? Explains a lot, doesn’t it? Eighty million docile dangerous swine like this fellow. No wonder Hitler’s their leader.” There was not a flicker in the soldier’s eyes. “I really don’t think he understands English.”

“Don’t count on it,” said Pug, dry and fast.

“Well, tell her I admit she was right. When I get back I’ll take the headquarters job. That’s where I belong.” He shook his head. “Silly clot that I am. These Jerries were ahead of me and below, Me-110’s, three sitters - a great chance. But I missed my shot, didn’t pull up in time, dove right down between them, and next thing I knew I felt a slam on the shoulder, just like a very hard punch. My engine caught fire. I pulled back hard on my stick and by God it was loose as a broken neck. I looked around and saw I had no tail section. Shot clean off. Well, I released the hood and the harness pin, and crawled out of there. I don’t even remember getting burned, but the flames got to my face, mostly around the mouth. I only felt it when the salt water stung. Gallard sighed and glanced around the room, his dejected eyes coming to rest on the rigid malodorous soldier. “And here I am. What’s happening in the war? The Hun doctors say it’s practically over. Of course that’s a lie.”

Victor Henry made his account as cheerful as possible. The pilot nodded and brightened. “That’s more like it.”

The clock ticked. The soldier startled them by contorting his face and sneezing twice. Tears ran down his face, but he stood rigid as before.

“Ruddy idiotic,” said Gallard, “that you’ll walk out of here to lunch with a Luftwaffe general, and I’ll still be a prisoner at gunpoint. I suppose you’d better be cracking off.”

“No hurry. Take a few cigarettes. I’d give you the pack, but Rosebud might think it was funny business and get confused.”

“Ha! Rosebud is good. Damned thoughtful of you, sir.” Gallard pulled out several cigarettes, and then impulsively extended the pack toward the soldier. The German’s eyes shifted down and up, and he briefly shook his head like a horse driving off flies.

Gallard chain-lit a cigarette. “Look here, I don’t know how you’ve managed this, but thank you. Thank you! It’s helped more than you can guess.”

“Well, it was mainly luck, but I’m glad I tracked you down.”

With a distorted grin - the left side of Gallard’s bandaged mouth seemed frozen - the pilot said, “Of course Pam thinks you can do anything.”

Pug glanced up at the old clock. The numbers were too faded to read, but the hands were almost closed at noon. “I guess I’d better not keep the general waiting.”

“Certainly not, sir.” The pilot looked at the guard and added, “Anyway, while I’ll never forget Rosebud, he’s making me ill.”

The clock pock-pocked a dozen times while Victor Henry held the telephone receiver up off the hook. He replaced it.

“Tell Pam I’ll be seeing her,” said Gallard, in firm tones implying an intention to escape.

“Be careful.”

“Trust me for that. I’ve got a lot to live for, you know. You’re elected to be best man, if you’re within a thousand miles.”

“If I am, I’ll come.”

Driving through Lille, Pug marked again, as he had in the restaurant car, how German de had serenely settled in. In the drizzly gray streets and boulevards of this large industrial town, the French were going about their business, directed by French policemen, driving French cars with French license plates, amid French shops and billboards. Only here and there an official poster in heavy black German type, a sign on a street or over a building entrance often containing the word VERBOTEN - and the jarring sight of German soldiers cruising in army cars, reminded one that Hitler was the master of Lille. No doubt the city was being politely and methodically plundered. Pug had heard about the techniques: the worthless occupation currency with which the Germans bought up most things, and the meaningless custody receipts given by outright looters. But the process was nowhere visible. The busy pedestrians of Lille looked glum, but Victor Henry had never seen the French when they were not looking glum. Here, as on the train, the New Order appeared good for a thousand years.

In a tall Luftwaffe cap, shiny black boots, and a slick blue-gray military raincoat to his ankles, the cello player looked taller, leaner, and considerably fiercer. The lieutenant’s slavish bows and heel clicks, the scrambling obsequiousness of everybody at headquarters, amply showed that Jagow was most high brass. He offered Victor Henry his choice of a decent lunch at a “rather comfortable” château nearby, commandeered by the Luftwaffe, or a mere bite here at the airfield. Nodding approval of Pug’s preference, he doffed his raincoat, dropping it from his shoulders without looking around at the lieutenant who caught it.

On a cloth-covered table in an inner office, the general and his guest ate soup, trout, veal, cheese, and fruit, all served up in gold-trimmed china by gliding, smiling French waiters, with three superb wines. General Jagow picked at the food and hardly tasted the wine. Recognizing the cyanosed pallor of heart trouble, Victor Henry made no comment. He was hungry and dug in heartily while the general smoked cigarettes and talked, in a clipped exact German which his lieutenant evidently had been imitating. Often he interrupted himself to cover his mouth and cough carefully.

The United States Navy, Jagow said, was the only military machine in the world professionally comparable to the German army. He had visited it as an observer in the thirties, and had brought back to Göring the dive-bombing idea. So the Luftwaffe had developed the Stuka. “Whether you approve or not,” he said with a tired smile, “the success of our blitzkrieg owes a sizable debt to your Navy.”

“Well, maybe we’ll take that bow after the war, General.”

The American Army, Jagow went on with a wry nod at Pug’s irony, was in no way comparable. The doctrine and practice, like that of all modern armies, derived from German General Staff concepts. But he had noticed an amateurishness, a lack of spirit in the maneuvers, and the numbers were pitiful. Essentially, the United States was a great sea power, he said, linking the two world oceans. The state of the armed forces reflected that geopolitical fact.

That started him on Spengler, who he said had failed, like all too many Germans, to understand the United States. That was the fallacy in
The Decline of the West
. The United States was white Christian Europe again, given a second chance on a rich virgin continent. America allied to a modernized orderly Europe could bring on a vast rebirth of the West, a new golden age. At least this was what Pug made out of the general’s cloudy high-flown talk, so much like the evening conversations at Abendruh.

Over the coffee - terrible stuff tasting like burned walnut shells - Jagow said, “Would you care to have a look at the aerodrome? The weather is rather disagreeable.”

“I’d like that very much, if one of your aides can spare the time.”

The weary smile reappeared. “I finished my work on this campaign long ago. The rest is up to the field commanders. I am at your disposal.”

They drove around the aerodrome in a small closed car, full of the sulphurous fumes of German gasoline. In wan sunlight, from holes of bright blue opening in the low overcast sky, stubby Messerschmitt 109’s stood half-concealed in dispersal bunkers, their painted crosses and swastikas much the worse for wear. It was just like a British fighter base: repair shops, hangars, dispersal huts, crisscrossing air strips, set among peaceful farms, and rolling pastures where herds of cows grazed. Fading signs in French showed that this was an expanded base of the defeated French air force. Most of the buildings were raw new structures of wood or cement. Cracked old landing strips stood beside broad fresh ones like autobahns.

“You’ve done all this since June?” said Pug. “Pretty good.”

Jagow for a moment looked like a flattered old man, showing his sparse teeth in a pleased soft grin. “You have the professional eye. The Western newspaper smart alecks want to know why the Luftwaffe waited six precious weeks before commencing the attack. What do they know about logistics?”

While Hitler left the operation of the air force strictly to Göring, said the general, he had insisted on one point which showed his military genius. After the conquest of the Low Countries and northern France, advanced air bases had had to be set up on his orders. Only then would he allow the Luftwaffe to strike at England. Advanced bases would double or triple German air power. The same plane could make two or three times as many attacks in the same number of hours, and on these shortened runs kilograms of bombs could replace kilograms of gasoline.

“The simplest strategic thinking,” said Jagow, “and the soundest.”

They visited a dispersal hut, where worn-looking German youngsters, strangely like the RAF fighter pilots, lounged in flying suits, ready to go. But when they saw Jagow they sprang to attention as the British pilots never had. The hut was more roughly built, and the plump simpering pinup girls on the wooden walls, next to mimeographed watch notices and regulations, offered doughy German sexiness rather than the bony Anglo-American variety. Otherwise it was all the same, including the mildewy smell of bedding and flying clothes.

As Jagow’s car drove along the field, an air raid siren went off. Pilots came scrambling out of their huts. “Stop the car,” he said to the driver, adding to Victor Henry, “A nuisance raid, high level. A sound tactic, we must respond and it throws our pilots off balance. But the British pay with a lot of bombers. Flimsy planes, poorly armed. Shall we get out and watch?”

Messerschmitt after Messerschmitt wheeled into position and roared off, a steady stream of steep-climbing fighters.

“To me this is a depressing sight,” said Jagow, hugging his lean body in the shiny long coat with both arms, as though chilled. “Germans fighting Englishmen. Diamond cut diamond. It is civil war in the West, plain suicidal foolishness. The English could have a decent honorable peace tomorrow. That bulldog Churchill is counting on one thing and one thing only - American help.”

“General, he’s counting on the courage of his people and the quality of his air force.”

“Captain Henry, if Roosevelt cut off all help and told Churchill he wanted to mediate a peace, how long would this war go on?”

“But that’s impossible.”

“Very true, because your President is surrounded by Morgenthaus, Frankfurters, and Lehmans.” General Jagow held up a long skinny hand in a long gray glove as Pug started to protest. “I am not a Nazi. I came into the Luftwaffe from the army. Don’t ever think anti-Semitism is a German problem. All over Europe the attitude toward the Jews is exactly the same. The Führer has been realistic in spelling it out, that’s all. Some of his Party followers have committed silly excesses. But you can’t indict a whole people for the crudeness of a few. Those American Jews around Roosevelt make the same mistake that our Nazi fanatics do.”

“General Jagow,” Pug broke in earnestly, “you can’t make a greater mistake than to believe that the Jews are behind our hostility to Hitler’s regime.” He was hoping to penetrate this hardened German obsession just once. Jagow was unusually intelligent. “A lot of our people deeply admire the Germans. I do. But some things Hitler has done are unforgivable to any American.”