Presidential Mission

by Upton Sinclair

  President Roosevelt, back in Washington, had trimmed his sails to the blast of protest. He had issued a statement to the effect that our agreement with Darlan was “a temporary expedient, justified solely by the stress of battle.” This, naturally, upset Darlan, and caused him to protest: “I see they are going to treat me like a lemon, to be squeezed and then thrown away.” Murphy had had a hard time pacifying him and didn’t want any more of it. He had to be careful in hinting a criticism of the head of his own government, but he made it plain to Lanny that he thought this was a bad time to be trying to apply the New Deal in Africa, and that he hoped Lanny would support the Army’s policy of leaving French politics in statu quo until after the German Army had been licked.

  VI

  The struggle over the French Fleet was settled when the Germans tried to rush Toulon, and the French scuttled the ships, in many cases standing on guard while the ships filled and sank. A few smaller vessels got away to the Allies, but all the large ones went down. This was a tragedy to those who were thinking about the future of France, but it was all right with the Allies because it made certain that the vessels would not be used by the Germans. To raise them would take a year, and then their machinery would be found damaged by salt water and their elaborate electrical installations completely ruined. Lanny wondered what had happened to Raoul Palma and his little group of friends, but there was no way to find out at present. One thing was certain: they had done their job.

  In the midst of these events arrived a cablegram for Lanny, several days delayed. It was from Robbie, informing him that he had an eight-pound son, and that both mother and child were well; Esther was with Laurel in New York. This excited Lanny so that he had to do something to celebrate, and after sending a message of love and devotion to his wife he invited Denis to a dinner in the fashionable Restaurant de Paris. They did their best to be cheerful, but Denis had to wipe the tears out of his eyes once or twice. Lanny knew that he was thinking about his own wife and little ones, whom he had not seen for more than two years, since he had fled the Château de Bruyne where he had been recovering from his war wounds. Under the pressure of defeat and suffering this capitaine had become reserved and rather severe in manner, but underneath he was still the tenderhearted boy whom Lanny had loved; he had a Frenchman’s devotion to family, and being separated from them all, and politically estranged from his father and brother, was pain from which he was never free.

  This news from home brought Lanny to a decision that it was time to return. He had been told to come every two or three months, and he had stayed four because of the pressure of events. Now it was time to make a personal report to his Boss, and say things that he was not free to say to Robert Murphy. He paid off the faithful Hajek and said good-by to his friends and took the train to Casablanca. From there he cabled Robbie, according to their arrangement, and while waiting for the reply he had a sit-down with Jerry Pendleton and heard the story of days and nights as full of events as those which Lanny had spent in Algiers.

  Things hadn’t been so easy in Morocco, for the stubborn General Noguès had stood out against the Americans, and General Béthouart in Rabat had been unable to accomplish anything except to get himself in jail, where he still was. An amazing thing, the Americans who were so brave in battle seemed to be paralyzed when it came to any political struggle, and they didn’t have the courage to stand by their friends. This from a travel-bureau agent who was not at all a political person. Lanny said it was too bad; he didn’t attempt to explain it, but made a mental note that Béthouart would be one of the subjects he would surely bring up to F.D.R. The P.A. had become quite fond of the amiable French officer with the round face and prominent eyes and small mustache; he held more liberal views than most career soldiers.

  The “iron coast” of Morocco was extremely unfavorable to landing parties. There were few beaches, great numbers of treacherous rocks, and ocean swells high beyond belief; the invaders had had to be prepared to lose many of their fine new landing craft, and also many of their fine young men. The only air cover was from carriers, vulnerable to submarines; and the troops defending the shore were natives who enjoyed fighting, and did not have ideas, like the French troops at Oran and Algiers. General Mast and the other officers at Cherchell had given their opinion that Casablanca could not be taken from the sea, and the Americans had assigned to the job their toughest fighting man, “Old Blood and Guts” Patton, who carried two pearl-handled revolvers and exploded into an oath with every other sentence. He gave his troops a directive: “We shall attack and attack, and when we are exhausted we shall attack again.”

  Three landing places had been chosen: the shore at a town called Safi, some distance south of Casablanca; the beach at Fedala, a resort known as the “African Riviera,” immediately above Casablanca; and Port Lyautey, a harbor on a river close to the border of Spanish Morocco. At Safi two of those old four-stacker destroyers were sacrificed; one of them rushed the beach, loaded with troops, and these troops got ashore and proceeded to clean out the town. The other landed at the pier and took possession of the loading facilities; other troops could then come ashore, and they started a march to Casablanca, resisted fiercely all the way. At Fedala the first wave got ashore in the darkness, but then enemy searchlights were turned on and enemy batteries opened fire; these were manned by French marines, and they fought off all land attacks until their batteries were knocked out by the ships. At Port Lyautey fast launches dashed in, defying heavy machine-gun fire, and cut the net which blocked the river; a destroyer then brought in raiders, and they seized the airport, making it possible for planes from the carriers to land, and more planes to come quickly from Gibraltar.

  But the heaviest fighting was at Casablanca, where Jerry had witnessed it. He and the other agents had a secret radio sender and had been in communication with the ships before H-hour, reporting damage to the enemy and movements of enemy troops. A dangerous job, but they had many French helpers; the most efficient had been those of the left wing, and Jerry Pendleton, a conventional American businessman, said: “Damn them, I don’t like them, but they know what they want and they work like the devil.”

  There had been two light cruisers in the harbor and several destroyers. These had sallied out to meet the invaders—everybody had warned the Americans that the Navy would fight. The French vessels were knocked out and beached. Also there was an almost completed battleship, the Jean Bart, and its heavy guns went on firing even after it had been hit ten times by sixteen-inch shells and airplane bombs. That went on for two days and nights, and by that time Algiers and Oran had surrendered, and Old Blood and Guts was the only one behind schedule.

  A bombardment of Casablanca was ordered for seven o’clock on the morning of the 11th—which was Armistice Day of World War I. The agents were ordered to get out, and Jerry and Faulkner took their overcoats and blankets and went back into the hills—it was bitterly cold everywhere in North Africa at night. They hid out and in the morning they stood on a height and waited for the firing to begin. But it didn’t, and when they saw the American ships coming into the harbor, they knew that the town must have surrendered. They went down and saw the crowds welcoming the landing parties with wild cheering. This was the phenomenon which so greatly puzzled the G.I.’s; first they were killed and then they were cheered. The G.I.’s had been well trained in shooting, but nobody had troubled to explain to them the class struggle which existed in France; how the great mass of the people wanted peace and bread, while the higher officers of Army and Navy wanted la gloire and l’honneur.

  VII

  Vice-Consul Pendar had come to Casablanca, and Lanny met him there and heard a frank account of what was going on behind the scenes in this center of gossip and intrigue. The consequences of the deal with the Darlan-Noguès outfit were the same here as in Algiers; perhaps even a little worse, because of General Patton, himself a reactionary martinet. The deal had saved many American lives, but it imperiled American principles and exposed American officers to
temptations against which they had no weapons. Pendar said that he had talked with many of them soon after the invasion and found that they saw the Vichy crowd in their true colors; but after a dinner at the Residency, where they were received with a fanfare of Moroccan trumpets and given a welcoming escort of Spahi guards, they would come away dazzled and with a different point of view about Noguès.

  Pendar told an amusing story about the American commander. The vice-consul had been sent to find out what had happened to a letter that President Roosevelt had written to the Sultan of Morocco, telling him the purposes of the Americans in coming to that country and saluting him as the head of a friendly state! This letter was supposed to have been delivered by General Noguès to the Sultan on D-day, but of course Noguès hadn’t delivered it; Pendar had a copy and took it to General Patton, who had set up his headquarters in the very sumptuous offices of the Shell Oil Company. Patton took the letter and read it, said he didn’t like it, and proceeded to make alterations.

  After he had finished he read the letter aloud and asked if he hadn’t improved it. Pendar, a petty civilian official in the presence of a blood-thirsty warrior, muttered something about not being sure that anybody had a right to revise a letter of the President without his knowledge. Whereupon the General banged his desk and exclaimed: “God damn it, I’ll take full responsibility for the letter.” To this Pendar replied: “Very well, sir, I shall tell Mr. Murphy when I telephone him tonight.” The old warrior glowered and shouted in his strange high-pitched voice: “God damn it, I won’t have you or any other Goddamned fool talking about this letter over the telephone. Don’t you know the wires are tapped?” The vice-consul replied: “Yes, sir, they’ve been tapped for a year and a half.”

  “The old boy’s curses are not to be taken personally,” explained Pendar. “We had a talk about conditions here, and I told him about the situation of General Béthouart and the other French officers who had failed in their efforts to help us. Noguès was actually proposing to ship them to Algiers by airplane to be tried for treason and was only deterred from it by the protest of French patriots. Patton’s answer to me was: ‘General Noguès, and I have a perfect understanding, and I have left all these problems of personnel up to him. Morocco is an extremely difficult country to manage.’ And then he started talking about the Jewish problem. You see how it stands—Noguès has used one of the Fascists’ favorite devices to distract Patton’s attention from the fate of our brave friends.”

  Lanny said very mildly: “I suppose the General has his mind centered on getting his troops off to Tunis.”

  VIII

  Lanny received his instructions about returning; he was to be flown back in an Army transport plane from Marrakech. Specialists of many sorts were being rushed to North Africa by this route, and the planes carried lightly wounded men back. Marrakech had been chosen as the landing place because of its almost perpetual sunshine, and a thousand-year-old oasis had suddenly become the busiest air center in this part of the world. When Lanny told Pendar that he was to fly from there in three days, the vice-consul offered to drive him; he had business in the town. They drove southward, through rolling country covered with broom sage, and looking very much like southern California desert.

  On this drive Lanny absorbed a mass of information about an ancient land, so suddenly and startlingly brought into the spotlight of history. He had never told Pendar that he was reporting directly to the President, but it must have been evident to the alert young Harvard man that his fellow traveler was fulfilling some important function. Civilians didn’t fly back home in Army planes unless that was the case, and Pendar had a lot of things on his mind that he thought needed to be known in Washington. He wasn’t a regular State Department career man and therefore was free to think for himself and to judge his superiors as if he had been their equal.

  In Marrakech this vice-consul dwelt in a splendor which impressed both French and natives. It happened that a wealthy widow who had moved to America had let him have the use of the most elaborate and most famous villa in the province. Lanny was invited to this home, and didn’t have to waste his time hunting hotel accommodations in a small city which had suddenly become one of the world’s great traffic centers.

  The villa La Saadia was soon to have the spotlight of history turned upon it; but Lanny Budd, not being psychic, had no intimation of that fact. The villa was built in imitation of an ancient South Moroccan casbah, or castle, with pinkish walls of great thickness; one story high, it had a tower of six stories from which there was a marvelous view of the town and its environs, with a background of the snowy Atlas range. There was a high wall about the estate, and two inner court-yards with orange trees, geraniums, and bougainvillaea around black marble fountains which an art expert might have been glad to buy. Everything was indirectly lighted by electricity, giving an undersea effect. The grounds spread out in gardens full of flowers, with rivulets running through them and a large pool with many strange fishes. An immense terrace led down to the pool, and the vice-consul, telling Lanny about it, said: “You will think you are in the Arabian Nights.”

  The son of Budd-Erling had seen many kinds of showplaces, on Long Island and in California, in England and France and Germany, and he knew that there is a ritual to be gone through in all cases. The host or hostess will take you about, or perhaps assign the steward or some friend of the family to this duty. You will gaze and do your best to express admiration—new words are not necessary, all possible words having been heard before. Unless the owner is a vulgar person, he will never mention what anything has cost; but sooner or later some fellow guest will whisper it to you with awe in his voice, and you will reply in the same spirit. Never by chance will you say anything about there being starvation outside the gates; and if the owner takes you to the Episcopal Church or the Catholic, you will not quote what you hear about laying up for yourselves treasures on earth, or about how “the Lord hath put down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.”

  ’Tis well that such seditious songs are sung

  Only by priests, and in the Latin tongue!

  IX

  Lanny went promptly to see his family at the Hotel Mamounia, and found them well and contented with their fate. Beauty wouldn’t have been Beauty if her first words hadn’t dealt with the telegram Lanny had sent her, announcing that she was a grandmother for the third time. She wanted more information, but Lanny hadn’t any. He told her that he was going home, and she made him swear to write her all those details with which men seldom care to bother: the color of the baby’s hair if he had any, and which of his parents or grandparents he most “favored.” Laurel had stood far down on the list of Beauty’s choices for a daughter-in-law, but now that Lanny had made the choice Beauty wanted it to stick, and no nonsense about it. The arrival of a son would be a bond, and Lanny assured her that he felt all the proper thrills, and there surely wasn’t going to be any “nonsense.”

  In the matter of the move from Bienvenu, Beauty understood now a lot of things about which she had been guessing hitherto. “You were wise,” she declared; “we are in exactly the right place.” It was a certainty that if they had remained in Juan, they would now be in a German internment camp, and on a very restricted diet; whereas here they enjoyed everything, as at Bienvenu in the old days of peace and plenty. Only one matter troubled Beauty, and that was that they had left Emily Chattersworth behind. Lanny explained why he had not been at liberty to suggest bringing her. As they learned later, there was no need to worry; their old and best friend had passed away several days before D-day of Operation Torch. More than two years were to elapse before Lanny received word that his near-fostermother had bequeathed to him securities of more than a million dollars’ value, with the direction that he was to use them in the effort to prevent another World War.

  Parsifal Dingle had been busily proving his thesis that God is everywhere, and that He is in all th
e religions. One of Parsifal’s Mohammedan friends had brought him a sick child and Parsifal had healed it, or at any rate, the child had recovered. That was enough, and great numbers of brown-skinned people, most of them poor and ragged, desired to visit this miracle man from overseas. It was hardly the proper thing for the ultra-fashionable hotel, now the playground of American and French generals, so the man of God had established a sort of spiritual clinic in the courtyard of one of the Mohammedan scholars.

  He went there every morning, and had a hard time getting away, because so many people came with dreadful diseases, all the way from trachoma of the eyes down to sores which made their ankle bones break through the skin. Not all got well, but some did, and it was enough to excite the displeasure of zealots of the Prophet, who insisted that it didn’t count unless you did it in the Prophet’s name. The onetime realtor from the corn and hog country of the Middle West was thinking seriously of becoming a convert to this faith. He believed in all the religions, and why shouldn’t he join them all?

  He never missed his daily session with Madame; and a curious development had come. Parsifal had had to move to the French Riviera in order to get communications from India, and now he had had to move to Morocco to get communications from Connecticut. Lanny’s great uncle, Eli Budd, had taken to sending messages through Tecumseh, and Lanny spent an afternoon reading a mass of notes which his step-father had accumulated. It was for the most part not very convincing, for the former Unitarian clergyman spent most of his time discussing metaphysical matters. But then, those were the matters which the old gentleman had discussed with the adolescent Lanny Budd, and the library he had willed to Lanny contained hundreds of books on the subject Parsifal had studied these books, including marginal notes written by the ex-preacher; so the skeptic found it perfectly natural that Parsifal’s mind should be full of the ex-preacher’s personality. But how had a Polish ex-servant got hold of all this?