War and Remembrance

by Herman Wouk

  And what a kid that Vic is! Handsome, affectionate, and deep. He’s very active and naughty, but in a stealthy way. His mischief is not impulsive but planned, like tactics, for maximum destruction and minimum detection. He’ll go far.

  Madeline finally dropped that grinning, pot-bellied, oleaginous radio mountebank I told you about, relieving me of the need to horsewhip him, which I was working up to. She’s living at home, working in a Washington radio station, and she’s taken up again with an old admirer, Simon Anderson, a first-rate naval officer who’s on duty here in new weaponry. Last week she had a long tearful talk with Rhoda on whether, and what, she should tell Simon about the radio man. I asked Rhoda what her advice was. She gave me a funny look and said, “I told her, wait till he asks you.” I would have advised Madeline to have it out with Sime, and start on an honest basis. No doubt that’s why she consulted Rhoda.

  There goes the telephone. It has to be my wife.

  It was.

  Okay. Now I can backtrack and tell you what happened last week. We were sitting around after dinner, the same day General Old let me know you were still unmarried. I said, “Rho, why don’t we talk about Hack Peters?” She didn’t turn a hair. “Yes, why not, dear? Better mix us a couple of stiff drinks.” Rhoda-like, she waited until I asked her. But she was quite ready for this showdown.

  She acknowledged the relationship, declared it’s the real thing, not guilty but deep. I believe her. Colonel Peters has been an “irreproachable gentleman,” thinks she’s twenty times as good as she is, and in short looks on her as the perfection of womankind. Rhoda says that it’s embarrassing to be so idolized, but also very sweet and rejuvenating. I asked her point-blank whether she’d be happier divorcing me and marrying Peters.

  Rhoda took a very long time to answer that one. Finally she looked me in the eye and said, yes, she would. The main reason, she said, is that she’s lost my good opinion and can’t get it back, though I’ve been kind and forgiving. After being loved by me for years, it’s wretched just to be tolerated. I asked her what she wanted me to do. She brought up that talk you had with her in California. I said that I had great affection for you, but since you were engaged, that was that. I told her to decide on her own best prospects for happiness, and that I would do whatever she wanted.

  She apparently had been waiting for this sort of green light from me. Rhoda’s always been a bit afraid of me. I don’t know why, since it seems to me I’ve been rather henpecked. Anyway, she said that she’d need some time. Well, she didn’t need much. That was what the phone call was about. Harrison Peters is dying to marry her. No question. She’s landed him. She expects to talk to our lawyer, and then to Peters’s lawyer, in the next couple of days. Peters also wants to talk to me “man to man” when I get back to Washington. I may forgo that delight.

  Well, Pamela darling, so I’ll be free, if by some miracle you’ll still have me. Will you marry me?

  I’m not a rich man — serving one’s country one doesn’t get rich — but we wouldn’t be badly off. I’ve saved fifteen percent of my salary for thirty-one years. Working in BuShips and BuOrd I could observe industrial trends, so I’ve invested and done well. Rhoda’s in fine shape, she’s got a substantial family trust. Anyway, I’m sure Peters will take excellent care of her. Am I being too mundane? I’m not expert at proposing. This is only my second try.

  If we do marry, I’ll take an early retirement so that we can be together all the time. There are many jobs for me in industry; I could even work in England.

  If we did have a kid or two, I’d want to give them a church upbringing. Is that all right? I know you’re a freethinker. I can’t make much sense out of life, myself, but none whatever without religion. Maybe in my fifties I’d make a hard-shelled mossy crab of a father; still, I get along pretty well with little Vic. I might in fact spoil kids now. I’d like the chance to try!

  So there it is! If you’re Lady Burne-Wilke by now, take my letter as a wistful farewell compliment to an unlikely and wonderful love. If I hadn’t casually booked passage on the Bremen in 1939, mainly to brush up on my German, I’d never have known you. I was happy with Rhoda, in love with her, and not inclined to look further. Yet despite the differences in age, nationality, and background, despite the fact that over four years we’ve spent perhaps three weeks together in all, the simple truth is that you seem to be my other half, found when it was all but too late. The bare possibility of marrying you is a glimpse of beauty that stops my breath. Very likely Rhoda’s been groping for that beauty outside our marriage, because it wasn’t quite there; she’s been a good wife (till she fell away) but a discontented one.

  In the Persian garden you suggested that this whole thing might be a romantic illusion. I’ve given that a lot of thought. If we’d been snatching at our rare meetings to go to bed together, I might agree. But what have we ever done but talk, and yet feel this closeness? Marriage will not be, I grant you, like these tantalizing encounters in far-off places; there’ll be shopping, laundry, housekeeping, the mortgage, mowing the lawn, arguments, packing and unpacking, headaches, sore throats, and all the rest. Well, with you, all that strikes me as a lovely prospect. I don’t want anything else. If God gives me that much, I’ll say — with everything that’s gone wrong with my life, and all my scars — that I’m a happy man, and I’ll try to make you happy.

  I hope this letter doesn’t come too late.

  All my love,

  Pug

  The battle for Imphal was already on when Pug wrote. Since Burne-Wilke’s headquarters was no longer in New Delhi but at the forward base at Comilla, the letter did not reach her until mid-April, after Burne-Wilke had disappeared in a flight over the jungle, and while a search was still on for him.

  Luck figures not only in war, but in the writing of war journalism and history. Imphal was a British victory which lifted the cloud of Singapore; a classic showdown like El Alamein, fought out on worse terrain over a larger front. It was unique among modern battles, in that the RAF did at Imphal what the Luftwaffe failed to do at Stalingrad: it supplied a surrounded army by air for months until breakout and victory. But the Normandy invasion and the fall of Rome, with hordes of reporters and cameramen in attendance at both events, spanned the same block of time. So at Imphal, in a remote valley near the Himalayas, two hundred thousand men fought a long series of sanguinary engagements unnoticed by the newspapers. History continues to overlook Imphal. The dead of course do not care. The survivors with their faded recollections are passing from the scene unnoticed.

  Imphal itself is a real-life Shangri-La, a cluster of native villages around golden-domed temples, on a fertile and beautiful plain in the northeast corner of vast India bordering Burma, ringed by formidable mountains. The freakish tides of world war brought the British and the Japanese to death-grips there. Ignominiously kicked out of Malaya and Burma by the Japanese in 1942, the British had one war aim in Southeast Asia, to retrieve their Empire. The conquering Japanese armies had halted at the great mountain ranges that separate Burma from India. The Americans, from Franklin Roosevelt down, had no interest in the British war aim, regarding it as backward-looking, unjust, and futile. Roosevelt had even told Stalin at Tehran that he wanted to see India free. But the Americans did want to clear a corridor through northern Burma to keep China supplied and fighting, and to set up bases on the China coast for bombing Japan.

  The beautiful plain of Imphal was the key to such a supply corridor, a gateway among the mountain passes. The British had been building up here for counterattack, and perforce they accepted the American strategy. Their commanding general, a brilliant warrior named Slim, piled in a large army of mingled English and Asian divisions, with the mission of fighting through northern Burma to join hands with Chinese divisions driving south under the American General Stilwell, thus opening the supply corridor. At this, the Japanese too moved up north in force to confront Slim. His appetizing buildup offered a chance to destroy India’s defenders with a counterstroke; and t
hen perhaps to march in and set up a new puppet government of India under Subhas Chandra Bose, a red-hot Indian nationalist who had defected to Japan.

  The Japanese attacked first, employing their old jungle-fighting tactics against the British: rapid thrusts far beyond supply lines with quick flanking encirclements, feeding and fueling their army from captured supply dumps as they advanced. But this time Slim and his field commander, Scoones, accepting battle on the Imphal plain, bloodily fought the Japanese to a standstill there, denying them their usual replenishment until they starved, wilted, and ran. This took over three months. The battle evolved into two epic sieges — of a small British force surrounded at a village called Kohima, and of Slim’s main body at Imphal itself, invested by a seasoned and fierce Japanese jungle army.

  Airlift tipped the balance of the sieges. The British consumed supplies more rapidly than the Japanese, whose soldiers could survive for a while on a bag of rice a day; but American transport planes daily flew in hundreds of tons of supplies, landing some at overburdened airfields, the crews kicking the rest out of open plane doors to parachute down. Burne-Wilke’s tactical command protected the airlift, and harried the Japanese army with bombing and strafing.

  Upon investing Imphal, however, the Japanese overran several radar warning outposts, and for a while the air picture was not good. Burne-Wilke decided in a conference at Comilla to fly into Imphal to see things for himself. His Spitfire squadrons stationed on the plain were reporting that without adequate radar warning, maintaining control of the air was becoming a problem. He took a reconnaissance aircraft and flew off solo, ignoring Pamela’s mutterings.

  Burne-Wilke was a seasoned pilot, a World War I flyer and a career RAF man. The premature death of his older brother had made him a viscount, but he had stayed in the service. Too senior now to fly in combat, he seized chances to fly alone when he could. Mountbatten had already reprimanded him once for this. But he loved flying over the jungle without the distracting chatter of a co-pilot. It afforded him something like the calming peace of flight over water, this solid green earth cover passing underneath for hours, unbroken except by the rare brown crooked crawl of a river speckled with green islands. The bouncing curving ride through mountain passes amid thick-timbered peaks towering high above his wings, ending in a sudden view of the gardened valley and the gleaming gold domes of Imphal, with here and there on the broad plain a smoky plume of battle, gave him a dour delight that helped shake off his persisting fatalistic depression.

  For to Duncan Burne-Wilke, Imphal was a battle straight out of the Bhagavad-Gita. He was not an old Asia hand, but as an educated British military man he knew the Far East. He thought American strategic ideas about China were pitifully ignorant; and the gigantic effort to open the north Burma corridor, into which they had pushed the British, a futile waste of lives and resources. In the long run, it would not matter much who won at Imphal. The Japanese, slowly weakening under the American Pacific assault, now lacked the punch to drive far into India. The Chinese under Chiang Kai-shek would not fight worth a damn; Chiang’s concern was holding off the Chinese communists in the north. In any case, Gandhi’s unruly nationalist movement would shove the British out of India, once the war was over. The handwriting was on the wall; so Burne-Wilke thought. Still, events had swirled into this vortex, and a man had to fight.

  As usual, talking to the combatants on the spot proved worth it. Burne-Wilke gathered his pilots in the large bamboo canteen at Imphal, and asked for complaints, observations, and ideas. Out of the crowd of hundreds of young men came plenty of response, especially complaints.

  “Air Marshal, we’ll take the red ants and the black spiders, the heat rashes and the dysentery,” spoke up one Cockney voice from the rear, “the short rations, the itches and the sweat, the cobras, and the rest of this jolly show. All we ask in return, sir, is enough petrol to fly a combat air patrol from dawn to dusk. Sir, is that askin’ so bleedin’ much?” This brought growls and applause, but Burne-Wilke had to say that Air Transport could not bring in that much fuel.

  An idea surfaced, as the meeting went on, which the fliers had been discussing among themselves. The Japanese raiders came and went over the Imphal plain through two passes in the mountains. The notion was to scramble not after the raiders, but directly into patrol positions in the passes. Returning Jap pilots would either face the superior Spitfires in these narrow traps, or they would crash from engine failure or lack of fuel, trying to evade over the mountains. Burne-Wilke seized on the idea, and ordered it put into effect. He promised alleviation of other shortages, if not of fuel, and he flew off to cheers. On this return flight, he disappeared in a thunderstorm.

  Pamela endured a bad week before word came from Imphal that some villagers had brought him in alive. It was during this week that Pug’s letter arrived from New Delhi, in a batch of delayed personal mail. She was busier than usual, working for the deputy tactical commander. The disappearance of Burne-Wilke was preying on her mind. As his fiancée, she was the focus of all the concern and sympathy on the base. These pages typed on stationery of the Jeffersonville Plaza Motor Hotel seemed to come from another world. For Pamela, everyday reality was now Comilla, this hot mildewy Bengali town two hundred miles east of Calcutta, its walls stained and rotting from monsoons, its foliage almost as green and rank as the jungle, its main distinction a thick sprinkling of monuments to British officials murdered by Bengali terrorists, its army headquarters aswarm with Asian faces.

  Jeffersonville, Indiana! What did it look like? What sort of people were there? The name was so like Victor Henry himself — square, American, obscure, unprepossessing, yet with the noble hint of “Jefferson” in it. Pug’s marriage proposal, with its sober financial statement and brief clumsy words of love, both amused and dizzied Pamela. It was endearing, but she could not cope with it at this bad time, so she did not write an answer. When she thought about the letter, in the ensuing turbulence of Burne-Wilke’s return, it seemed less and less real to her. At bottom, she could not believe that Rhoda Henry would bring off this latest maneuver. And it was all happening so far, far away!

  After a few days in the Imphal hospital, Burne-Wilke was flown to Comilla. His collarbone was broken, both ankles were fractured, and he was running a high fever. Worst of all, at least to look at, were his suppurating sores from leeches. He ruefully told Pamela that he had done this to himself, tearing the leeches off his body and leaving the heads under his skin. He knew better, but he had regained consciousness in a swamp with his uniform almost torn off, and black fat leeches clustering on him. In dazed horror he had begun plucking at them, before remembering the rule to let them drink their fill and drop off. The plane had spun in, he said, but he had managed to level off at the tree tops for a stalling crash. Coming to, he had hacked through the jungle to a riverbed, and stumbled along it for two days until the villagers came on him.

  “I was rather lucky, actually,” he said to Pamela. He lay in a hospital bed, swathed in bandages, his wanly smiling face puffed and hideously discolored by the leech sores. “One’s told the Nagas are headhunters. They could have helped themselves to my head, and nobody would have been the wiser. They were dashed kind. Frankly, my dear, I don’t care if I never see another tree.”

  She was at his bedside for hours every day. He was very low, and movingly dependent on her for affection and encouragement. They had been close before in a quiet way but they now seemed really married. Pamela finally and rather despairingly wrote to Pug on her plane trip from New Delhi to London. After two weeks in hospital, Burne-Wilke was being sent back, very much against his will, for further treatment. She recounted what had happened to explain her delay in replying, and went on,

  Now, Pug, about your proposal. I put my arms around your neck and bless you. I find it very hard to go on, but the fact is that it mustn’t be. Duncan’s sick as a dog. I can’t jilt him. I don’t want to. I’m terribly fond of him, I admire him, and I love him. He’s a superb man. I’ve never pretended t
o him — or to you — that I feel for him the strange love that has bound us. But I’m about ready to give up passion as a bad job. I’ve not had much luck with it!

  He’s never pretended, either. At the outset, when he proposed, I asked, “But why do you want me, Duncan?” With that shy subtle smile he answered, “Because you’ll do.”

  My dear, I really don’t quite believe your letter. Don’t be angry with me. I just know that Rhoda hasn’t landed her new fellow yet. Until he’s marched her into a church, she won’t have done. There’s many a slip! The unattainable other man’s wife, and the prospective spouse, may look very different to a confirmed bachelor threatened with the altar.

  You will always take Rhoda back, and actually I feel you should. It’s impossible to blame you. I can’t give you a Warren (I wouldn’t mind the church upbringing, you dear thing, but — oh well) and whatever ties us, it’s nothing like that thick rope of memories between you and Rhoda.

  I look back at these hastily scrawled paragraphs and find it hard to believe my blurring eyes.

  I love you, you know that, and I always will. I’ve never known anyone like you. Don’t stop loving me. The whole thing was just fated not to be; bad timing, bad luck, interfering commitments. But it was beautiful. Let’s be great friends when this damned war ends. If Rhoda does get her man, find some American beauty who will make you happy. They abound in your country, oh my sweet, like daisies in a June meadow. You have just never looked around. Now you can. But don’t ever forget

  Your poor loving