by Herman Wouk
“Yes, Admiral.”
Holding Pug’s hand in a lingering clasp, looking deep in his eyes, Chester Nimitz said, “Good luck, Henry,” in a sad personal tone.
“Thank you, sir.”
Spruance took him to the crowded smoky operations room. “There’s your battle,” he said, pointing to a heavily marked chart of Guadalcanal on the wall, “as we’ve reconstructed it.” They passed into a small anteroom, where they sat down together on a sofa. “The Northampton was a beautiful ship,” Spruance said. “But there were stability problems.”
“I can’t fault my damage control people, Admiral. We were unlucky. We took two torpedoes aft of the armor belt. I should have turned away. Gotten the hell out of there, the way the Honolulu did. Maybe I’d still have my ship.”
“Well, the rage of battle is a factor. Your blood was up. You tried to reverse a rout.”
Victor Henry made no comment, but it was as though Spruance had cut ropes holding a heavy burden on his back. He took a deep breath and audibly sighed.
Spruance went on, “Where to next?”
“I have orders back to BuPers for reassignment, Admiral.”
“Last time around you were fighting shy of staff duty. I need a deputy chief of staff for planning and operations.”
Unable to help it, Victor Henry blurted like a boy, “Me?”
“If you’re interested.”
“Good God.” Pug involuntarily put a hand to his eyes. In the light of the huge growth of the Pacific Fleet, Spruance was offering him a golden prize; a long leap toward flag rank, toward responsibility on the scale of great men; precisely the second chance he had told Janice he could not expect. Victor Henry was not three weeks away from splashing naked through black oil toward a crowded raft, with his ship afire and sinking behind him. After a moment he said hoarsely, “You’ve achieved surprise, Admiral. I’m interested.”
“Well, let’s hope BuPers will go along. We’ve got some fine battle problems ahead, Pug. You should start thinking about them. Come.”
Dazed, Victor Henry followed Spruance back into the operations room, to a large yellow and blue table chart of the Pacific. Spruance began to talk with a curious enthusiasm, half-pedantic and half-martial. “At the College, did you get in on the old problem, the recapture of the Philippines after Orange invades and occupies? That’s more or less the war we’ve got.”
“No, sir, in my tour we did the Wake Island problem.”
“Oh, yes. Well, the thing boils down to two lines of attack. The geography dictates that. A drive across the Central Pacific, reducing the Jap island strong points, and consolidating in the Marianas for the jump to Luzon.” Spruance’s right hand moved over the chart as he talked, traversing thousands of ocean miles to pantomime a sweep through the Marshalls, the Marianas, and the Carolines to the Philippines.
“And a campaign northward from Australia — New Guinea, Morotai, Mindanao, Luzon.” His left hand passed from Australia across New Guinea, with the fingers doing a slow crawl as though to suggest — as they vividly did to Pug — armies slogging over tropical mountains. “General MacArthur naturally is hot for that second strategy. Land fighter. But in the water route you’ve got a mobile flank attack on the enemy supply lines that keeps him guessing. He can’t be sure where you’ll hop next. Makes him scatter his strength. The other is a frontal assault overland through mountainous jungle. Jap fleet on your flank, alert Jap armies opposing you.” Spruance shot Pug a puckish look. “To be sure, the general would strongly desire to lick some Jap armies.”
Spruance’s right index finger now stabbed at an island off New Guinea. “Still, even he concedes that the way is barred by Rabaul. That’s what he saw in the Guadalcanal operation, a stepping-stone toward Rabaul. In any case, we’re tooling up here for the Central Pacific. It’ll be a big effort. Meantime MacArthur will pursue his drive, of course.”
For Victor Henry, still shaken by this turn in his life, the unfolding horizons were magnificent. From command of a cruiser, a cramping task, he foresaw passing to the planning of gigantic sea campaigns. Ideas boiled up in his mind from War College problems and studies of Pacific war. Thin abstractions they had then seemed, algebraic toying with forces and situations that would never exist. Now they were materializing in thick and flaming realities. There surged in him a reviving sense of global combat as his own job to do, in an anonymous slot; all he could ask for.
Spruance tapped the chart at Guadalcanal. “You know, Tassafaronga was a pretty sour note for Admiral Halsey, after the magnificent way he turned that campaign around. Did you see him at all?”
“Yes, sir, when I passed through Nouméa he sent for me.”
“How is he?”
“On top of the world. He’s got everybody in SoPac on their toes, I’ll say that. When I got to his office he was roaring mad about something or other. Everybody in sight was quailing. Next minute with me he was gentle as a parson. Very sympathetic about the Northampton.” Pug hesitated and added, “Said at least I went after the bastards.”
“How is Warren’s wife?”
“I’ve just seen her.” Pug’s voice roughened. “She’s all right. She’s working for the Military Government.”
“What about your submariner’s wife? Did she ever get out of Europe?”
“I’m hoping there’ll be news of her at home, sir.”
“Warren was an outstanding fighting man.” Spruance shook hands. “I’ll never forget him.”
Victor Henry said abruptly, “Thank you, Admiral,” and he left. It was less than an hour to his plane time. He turned in the car at the pool office, and caught a cab to the NATS terminal. There, at a small newsstand inside the shed, he picked up a Honolulu Advertiser, not having read a newspaper in months. Banner headlines bawled of Allied breakthroughs in Morocco, the flight of Rommel, the encirclement of the Germans at Stalingrad. These things he had seen, put in less bubbling terms, on the Cincpac teletype board. Lower on the page a smaller headline hit him like a blow in the face.
ALISTAIR TUDSBURY
KILLED AT EL ALAMEIN
49
ALISTAIR TUDSBURY’S sixty-year-old secretary put her white head in through the doorway. “A Mr. Leslie Slote is here, Pamela.”
In the tiny old office on Pall Mall, Pamela sat in her father’s big swivel chair, crying. A cold wind was rattling the loose windows, purple with December gloom at midday. Even bundled in her gray lambskin coat, with a wool shawl tied over her head and ears, she was chilled. The ancient oil heater was having little effect in the room; the place smelled hot, so to say, but no more.
Dabbing her eyes with both hands, Pamela jumped up as Slote came in. He carried a Russian fur-lined greatcoat and a big brown fur hat. He had always been lean, but now his pinstripe suit hung in folds on him, and his eyes burned redly in black sockets.
“Hello, Leslie.”
“I’m very sorry about your father, Pam.”
“I wasn’t weeping over his death. I’m used to that. What brings you to London? Are you finished in Bern so soon? Will some whiskey warm you up?”
“God, it’ll save me.”
She pointed at a typescript on the desk. “That’s the last thing he wrote. He didn’t quite finish it. The Observer wants it. I’m winding it up, and I’m afraid it brought on the tears.”
“What is it? A news dispatch?”
“Oh, no, that would be dead as mutton. It’s a battlefield sketch. He called it ‘Sunset on Kidney Ridge.’ “ She handed him half a tumbler of neat whiskey, and gestured with another. “Cheers. He was dictating it, actually, when Monty’s press chap rang to say that the interview was on.”
Pamela’s careworn countenance, the swollen eyes, the slipshod hair, the flat voice, could be ascribed to grief, Slote was thinking, but she seemed altogether quenched. At her lowest in other days — and Pamela had been very low — she had not lost a certain defiant sparkle, an enticing bravura beneath the quiet surface. Slote was looking now at a dull sad woman past thirty.
“Do you believe in presentiments?” Her voice was hoarse from the whiskey.
“I’m not sure. Why?”
“Talky had one. I know. I was supposed to go in that jeep. I’d even been cleared by Montgomery’s press chap, quite a break for a female. Talky suddenly, mulishly, bumped me. He was downright nasty about it, and I got nasty too. We parted in anger, and that’s why I’m alive, sitting here now, drinking with you.” She raised her glass sadly, and drained it. “I’m an utter skeptic, Leslie, I believe only in things you can see and hear and measure, and all that. Still, he knew. Don’t ask me how. Hitting a land mine is a random accident, I realize, yet he knew. That piece on Kidney Ridge is a deathbed sort of thing.”
“You remember Byron Henry?” Slote asked.
“Why, of course.”
“I met him in Lisbon last week. I fear there’s more bad news. The Northampton’s gone down.” Slote had been looking forward with sour relish, of which he was slightly ashamed, to making this disclosure. Not that he wished her ill, or Victor Henry either, but in their romance he had briefly figured as a feeble also-ran, and the bad taste lingered. She showed no emotion. “You’re very well connected here, Pam, aren’t you? Can you find out whether Captain Henry survived, and cable Byron? The only word he could get in Lisbon, from some Navy people there, was that the ship was sunk in battle.”
“What about your naval attache here?”
“He’s off in Scotland.”
“All right,” she said briskly, almost gaily, “let’s find out about Captain Henry.” It was a peculiar reaction to grave news, Slote thought; mighty peculiar. Merely talking about the man animated her. She told the secretary to call Air Vice Marshal Burne-Wilke. “Well! And what news about Byron? And Natalie?”
“He found her. Found her, and the baby.”
“I’ll be damned. Found her! Where?”
“In Marseilles. Told me about it for two hours over dinner. It’s a saga.”
“Honestly, that family! How did he do it? Where’s Natalie now?”
Slote had just started on Byron’s tale when the telephone rang, It was Burne-Wilke. Pamela told him about Pug Henry and Byron in a quick affectionate way, calling him “darling.” She hung up and said to Slote, “They have a direct line through to Washington. He’ll get on it as soon as he can. Have you ever met my fiance?”
“Once. On a receiving line at your embassy in Washington. You were there, but he wasn’t your fiance then.”
“Oh, of course. And Captain Henry was there, and Natalie, too. Now go on with what happened in Marseilles. More whiskey?”
“Absolutely, if you can spare it.”
“People have been kind. I’ve bottles and bottles.”
Slote told the story of the encounter at some length, and said Byron was still trying to learn his family’s fate. On the day the Allies had invaded North Africa, the telephone lines to Marseilles had shut down. Intermittent contact had since been restored, with long delays, but none of his calls had gone through. He had thirty days’ leave, and he was spending them hanging around the rescue agencies’ offices in Lisbon.
“What on earth came over Natalie to balk like that? I don’t blame Byron for being furious,” Pamela said.
Slote stared at her. Blankly he repeated, “What came over her?”
“Leslie, that’s the girl who climbed up to your second-story window on the rue Scribe, when you lost your latch key. Remember? Remember how she faced down the gendarmes in Les Halles, when I cracked Phil’s head open with a soup bowl? The lioness, we called her.”
“What’s all that got to do with it? She’d have been insane to try to run the border with Byron.”
“Why? He had his diplomatic pass. How could she be worse off than she is now?”
The eyes in the dark sockets luridly flared. Slote looked to Pamela as though he were running a high temperature. He replied with soft exaggerated calm, “Why, sweetheart, I’ll try to tell you exactly how much worse off she could be. Can I have just a tot more of your firewater?”
He pulled a pen from his breast pocket, and while she poured, he sat down at her desk and began to sketch on a yellow sheet. “Look, this is prewar Poland. All right? Warsaw to the north, Cracow to the south, Vistula connecting them.” It was a skilled rough map, drawn as quickly as the hand could move. “Hitler invades. He and Stalin partition the country. Zip! To the west of this line is German-held Poland. The Government General.” The irregular stroke cut Poland in two. Slote drew three heavy ink circles on the western side. “Now, you’ve heard about concentration camps.”
“Yes, I have, Leslie.”
“You haven’t heard of these. I’ve just spent four days talking to Polish government-in-exile people here. That’s actually why I came to London. Pam, this is quite a news story. You’re carrying on your father’s work, aren’t you?”
“Trying to.”
“Well, this may prove the biggest story of the war. The reporter who breaks it will have a place in history. In these three places — there are more, but the Polish government-in-exile has eyewitness accounts on these right here in London — the Germans are exterminating human beings like rats, in multitudes. They ship them here from all over Europe in trains. It’s a massacre by railroad. When the Jews arrive, the Germans kill them with carbon monoxide or rifle squads, and they burn up the bodies.” The pen darted from circle to circle. “This place is called Treblinka. This one is Lublin. This is Oswiecim. As I say, there are more, but on these there is proof.”
“Leslie, concentration camps aren’t news. We’ve had these stories for years.”
Slote gave her a ghastly smile. “You don’t grasp what I’m saying.” He achieved emphasis by dropping his voice to a grinding whisper. “I’m talking about the systematic execution of eleven million people. It’s well under way as you and I are talking. A fantastic plan, a gargantuan secret operation with vast facilities built to carry it out! You don’t call that a story? What is a news story then? This is the most enormous crime in the history of the human race. It dwarfs all wars that have ever been fought. It’s a new aspect of life on this planet. And it’s happening. It’s about half-accomplished right now. Isn’t that a news story, Pamela?”
Pamela had read stories of gassing chambers and of mass rifle slayings. There was nothing new about any of it. Of course, the Gestapo was a gang of monstrous thugs. The war was worth fighting, just to rid the world of them. The plan to wipe out all the Jews of Europe was naturally a morbid exaggeration, but she had read of this, too. Somebody obviously had sold the whole package to Slote; and, perhaps because his career was going badly, or because he had never gotten over Natalie, and was now having guilt feelings about having jilted a Jewess he adored, he had fastened on this thing. She murmured, “It’s quite beyond me to handle, dear.”
“Well, I don’t think so, but we were discussing Natalie. Refusing Byron took amazing guts, a hell of a lot more than climbing to a second-story window. She didn’t have her exit visas. The Gestapo swarms on those trains. If there’d been a snag, they’d have taken her and her baby off the train. Then they might have put her in a camp. Then they might have put her on another train going east. Then they might have murdered her and her baby, and burned them to ashes. Now that was a bad risk, Pam, and if she didn’t know the details she sensed that in her bones. She knew that exit visas were coming. She knew the Germans have a lunatic respect for official paper, it’s the one talisman that restrains them. She did the right thing. When I tried to tell Byron that, he turned white with rage, and —”
The telephone was ringing. She made an apologetic silencing gesture.
“Hello? What, so quickly?” Her eyes opened enormously, and went brilliant as jewels. She nodded hard at Slote. “Well! Marvelous. Thank you, thank you, dearest. See you at eight.” She hung up, and smiled radiantly at Slote. “Captain Henry’s all right! You know, getting that information out of our Admiralty would have taken a week. Your War Department put Duncan through to Navy
Personnel, and he had the answer almost at once. Captain Henry is on his way back to Washington. Shall I cable Byron, or will you?”
“Here’s his address in Lisbon, Pam. You do it.” Slote hastily scrawled in a notebook and tore out the sheet. “And look, the Poles here are amassing a book of their documents. I can get you the galley proofs. What’s more, they’ve got a man who escaped from Treblinka, this camp up here” — a skinny finger jabbed at the sketch on the desk — “near Warsaw. He made his way clear across Nazi Europe on sheer nerve, just to bring photographs and tell the story. I’ve spoken to him through interpreters. It’s impossible not to believe him. His story is an Odyssey. A terrific scoop, Pamela.”
Pam was finding it hard to pay attention. Pug Henry alive and safe! Returning to Washington! This put a new light on her plans, on her life. As for Slote’s “scoop,” he seemed to her more than a bit obsessed. She could almost hear her father saying, “No chance. None whatever. Old stuff” The new stuff was victory — victory in North Africa, in Russia, in the Pacific; victory too against the U-boats, after four years of catastrophe, the true great turn of the war. That the Germans were terrorizing Europe and maltreating the Jews was as familiar as the tide tables.
“Leslie, I’ll talk to my editor-in-chief tomorrow.”
Slote thrust an emaciated hand straight at her. The palm was wet, the grip loose. “Splendid! I’ll be here two more days. Call me either at the Dorchester or the American embassy, extension 739.” As he put on his fur coat and cap, the old Paris smile lit the gaunt face and haunted eyes. “Thank you for the booze, old girl, and for listening to the Ancient Mariner.”
He stumbled out.
The editor-in-chief listened to her next day in a bored slump, gnawing at his cold pipe, nodding and grunting. The Polish government-in-exile, he said, had long since offered him all this material. He had run some pieces. She could see these in the files, standard propaganda stuff. By any journalistic standards the stories could not be verified. The business about the plan to kill all the Jews was coming from Zionist sources, to pressure Whitehall into opening up Palestine for Jewish immigration. Still, he would be willing to see Mr. Slote next week. Oh, the man was leaving tomorrow? Too bad.