The lonely cavernous house got on his nerves that evening, as his quiet-stepping Gestapo butler served him pork chops from Denmark at one end of the long bare dining table. Pug decided that if he had to come back he would'take a room at the Adlon. He packed suits and uniforms, the great weariness of an attache's existence: morning coa dress blues, dress whites, evening uniforn-4 khakis, civilian street clothes, civilian dinner jacket. He wrote letters to Rhoda, Warren, and Byron, and went to sleep thinking of his wife, and thinking, too, that in London he would probably see Pamela Tudsbury.
Next day Pug's assistant attache, a handsome co mander who spoke perfect German, said he would be glad to take over his duties and appointments. He happened to be a relative of Wendel! Willkie. Since the Republican convention, he had become popular with the Germans. "I guess I'll have to hang around this weekend, eh?" he said. "TOO bad.
I was going out to Abendruh with the Wolf Stellers- They've been awfully kind to me lately. They said Goering might be there."
"Go by all means," said Pug. "You might pick up some dope about how the Luftwaffe's really doing. Tell your wife to take along a pair of heavy bloomers-l' He enjoyed leaving the attache staring at him, mystified and vaguely offended.
And so he had departed from Berlin.
How the devil do you keep looking so fit?" he said to Blinker Vance, the naval attache who met him at the London airport. After a quarter of a century, Vance still batted his eyes as he talked, just as he had at Annapolis, putting the plebe Victor Henry on report for a smudged white shoe. Vance wore a fawn-colored sports jacket of London cut, and gray trousers. His face was dried and lined, but he still had the flat waist of a second classman.
"Well, Pug, it's pretty good tennis weather. I've been getting in a couple of hours every day."
"Really? Great war you've got here."
"Oh, the war. It's going on up there somewhere, mostly to the south."
Vance vaguely A,aved a hand up at the pellucid heavens. "We do get some air raid warnings, but so far the Germans haven't dropped anything on London. You see contrails once in a while, then you know the fighters are numng it up close by. Otherwise you just listen to the BBC for the knockdown reports. Damn strange war, a sort of airplane numbers game."
Having just toured bombed areas in France and the Low Countries, Henry was struck by the serene, wholly undamaged look of London, the density of the auto traffic, and the cheery briskness of Itbe well-dressed sidewalk crowds. The endless shop windows crammed with good things surprised him. Berlin, even with its infusion of loot, was by comparison a bleak military compound.
Vance drove Victor Henry to a London apartment off Grosvenor Square, kept by the Navy for visiting senior officers: a dark Hat on an areaway, with a kitchen full of empty beer and whiskey bottles, a dining room, a small sitting room, and three bedrooms along a hall. "I guess you'll be a bit crowded here," Vance said, glancing around at the luggage and scattered clothes of two other occupants in the apartment.
"Be glad of the company."
Blinker grimaced, winked his eyes, and said tentatively, "Pug, I didn't know you'd become one of these boffins."
"Boffins?"
"Scientific red-hots. That's what they call 'em here. The word is you came for a look-see at their newest stuff, with a green light from way high UP."
Victor Henry said, unstrapping his bags, "Really?"
The attache grinned at his taciturnity. "You'll hear from the Limeys next. This is the end of the line for me-until I can be of service to you, one way or another."
The loud coarse ring of a London telephone, quite different in rhythm and sound from the Berlin double buzz, startled Pug out of a nap. A slit of sunlight gleamed through drawn brovrn curtains.
"Captain Henry? Major-General Tillet here, office of military History." The voice was high, crisp, and very British. "I'm just driving down to Portsmouth tomorrow. Possibly drop in on a Chain Home station.
You wouldn't care to come along?"
Pug had never heard the expression C-n Honw. "That'll be fine, General. Thank you."
"Oh, really? jolly good!" Tillet sounded delighted, as though he had suggested something boring and Pug had been unexpectedly gracious.
"Suppose I pick you up at five, and we avoid the morning traffic?
You might take along a shaving kit and a shirt."
Pug heard whiskeyish laughter in the next bedroom, the boom of a man and the tinkling of a young woman. It was six o'clock. He turned on the radio and dressed. A mild Schubert trio ended, one he had often heard on the Berlin station, and news came on. In a calm, almost desultory voice, the broadcaster told of a massive air battle that had been raging all afternoon. The PAF had shot down more than a hundred German planes, and had lost twenty-five. Half the British pilots had safely parachuted. The fight was continuing, the announcer said. If there were any truth in this almost ludicrously understated bulletin, Pug thought, an astonishing victory was shaping up, high and invisible in the sky, while the Londoners went about their business.
He found Pamela Tudsbury's number in the telephone book and called her. A different girl answered, with a charming voice that became more charming when Victor Henry identified himself. Pamela was a W.A.A.F now, she told him, working at a headquarters outside London.
She gave him another number to call. He tried it, and there Pamela was.
"Captain Henry! You're here! Oh, wonderful! Well, you picked the right day to arrive, didn't you?"
"Is it really going well, Pam?"
"Haven't you heard the evening news?"
'I'm not used to believing the radio." She gave an exhilarated laugh. "Oh, to be sure. The Berlin Radio.
MY God, it's nice to talk to YOU. Well, it's all quite true.
We've mauled them today. But they're still coming. I have to go back on duty in an hour.
I'm just snatching a bite to eat. I heard one officer say it was the turning POirlt of the war. By the way, if inspection tours are in order for you, you might bear in mind that I'm working at Group Operations, Number Eleven Fighter Group."
"Will do. How's your fiance?"
"Oh, Ted? Fit as a flea. He's on the ground at the moment. He's had a busy day! Poor fellow, old man of the squadron, just turned twenty-nine. Loo here, any chance that we can sec you? Ted's squadron gets its spell off ops next'week. We'll undoubtedly come down to London together. How long will you be here?"
"Well, next week I should still be around."
"Oh, lovely. Let me have your number then, and I'll call you.
I'm so glad you're here."
He went out for a walk. London wore a golden light that evening, the light of a low sun shining through clear air. He zigzagged at random down crooked streets, along elegant rows of town houses, and through a green park where swans glided on calm water. He came to Trafalgar Square, and walked on through the Whitehall government buildings and along the Thames to Westminster Bridge. Out to the middle of the bridge he strolled, and stood there, looking at the untouched famous old City stretching on both sides of the river.
London's top-heavy red buses and scuttling black little taxis streamed across the bridge amid an abundant flow of private cars.
Berlin's sparse traffic had been mostly government or army machines.
London was a no Flakturmcivilian city still, he thought, for all the uniforms. It had The British seemed to have produced their navy and their R.A.F from the mere table scraps of the prosperity still visibly spread here. Now these table-scrap forces had to hold the line. His job was to make a guess whether they would; also, to see whether their new electronic stuff was really advanced. Looking at this pacific and rich scene, he doubted it.
He dined alone in a small restaurant, on good red roast beef such as one could only dream of in Berlin. The apartment was dark and silent when he returned. He went to bed after listening to the news.
The claimed box score for the day was now a hundred thirty German planes down, forty-nine British. Could it be true?
>
The small bald moustached general, in perfectly tailored khakis, smoked a stubby pipe as he drove, a severe look on his foxy much-wrinkled face. It had occurred to Victor Henry, after the phone conversation, that he might well be E. J. Tillet, the military author, whose books be greatly admired. And so he was; Tillet more or less resembled his book-jacket pictures, though in those the man had looked twenty years younger. Pug was not inclined to start a conversation with this forbidding pundit. Tillet said almost nothing as he spun his little Vauxhall along highways and down back roads. By the sun, Pug saw they were moving straight south.
The further south they went, the more warlike the country looked.
Signposts were gone, place names painted out, and some towns seemed deserted. Great loops of barbed steel rods overarched the unmarked roads.
Tillet said, pointing, "To stop glider landings," and shut up again. Victor Henry finally tired of the sin e and the beautiful rolling scenery. He said, "I guess the Germans too Ikea chad beating yesterday."
Tillet puffed until his pipe glowed and crackled. Victor Henry thought he wasn't going to reply. Then he burst out, "I told Hitler the range of the Messerschmitt log was far too short. He agreed with me, and said he'd take it up with Goering. But the thing got lost in the Luftwaffe bureaucracy. It's a great mistake to think dictators are all-powerful!
They're hobbled by their paper shutters, like all politicians.
More so, in a way. Everybody lies to them, out of fear or sycophancy.
Adolf Hitler walks in a web of flattery and phony figures. He does an amazing job, considering. He's got a nose for facts. That's his mark of genius. You've met him, of course?"
"Once or twice." great admirer of mine, or so
"I had several sessions with him. He's a he says. His grasp is quick and deep. The gifted amateur is often like that. I said Goering was making the same mistake with his fighter planes designing them for ground support-that the French were making with their tanks. You don't have to give a ground support machine much range, because the fuel trucks are always close at hand to fill them up. Those French tanks were superb fighting machines, and they had thousands of them. But the wretched things could only run fifty, sixty miles at a crack.
Guderian drove two hundred miles a day. Some difference! The French never could get it into their heads that tanks should mass and operate independently. God knows Fuller, de Gaulle, and I tried hard enough to explain it to them."
The car was bumping along 4 muddy detour past concrete dragons' teeth and a stone wall, ringed in barbed wire, that blocked the higbwa-".
Masked workmen were raising clouds of gray dust with pneumatic hammers and drills. "There's foolishness for you." Tillet pointed at the tank trap with his Pipe. "Intended to halt invaders. What this rubbish actually would do is reduce the maneuverability of our reserve to zero. Happily Brooke's taken charge now. He's cleaning all this out."
Pug said, "General Alan Brooke, is that?"
"Yes, our best man, a genius in the field. He managed the Dunkirk retreat. I was with his headquarters. I saw him demoralized only once.
Headquarters was shifting from Armentires to Lille." Tillet knocked out his pipe in a dashboard tray and shifted his cold gray eyes to Pug. "The roads were crammed with refugees. Our command cars could hardly move.
The Armentieres lunatic asylum had been bombed. All the boobies had got out. There must have been two thousand of them all over the road, in loose brown corduroy pajamas, moping, drooling, and giggling.
They swarmed around our car and looked into the windows, dripping saliva, making silly faces, waggling their hands. Alan turned to me.
it's a rout,.
Ted," he said. 'We're lost, you know, the whole BEF's lost.
We've lost the damned war." That's when I said, 'Never mind, Alan.
There are a lot more lunatics on the German side of the hill, including the boss." Well, that made him laugh, for the first time in days.
After that he became himself again. A word in season, the Good Book says."
"Do you think Hitler's crazy?" Henry said.
Tillet chewed at his pipe, eyes on the road. "He's a split personality. Half the time he's a reasonable, astute politician. When he's beyond his depth he gets mystical, pompous, and silly. He informed me that the English Channel was just another river obstacle, and if he wanted to cross, why, the Luftwaffe would simply operate as artillery, and the navy as engineers. Childish. All in all, I rather like the fellow. There's an odd pathos about him. He seems sincere, and lonely. Of course"there's nothing for it now but to finish him off.-Hullo, we almost missed that Turn. Let's have a look at the airfield."
This was Pug's first look at a scene in England that resembled beaten Poland and France. Bent blackened girders hung crazily over wrecked aircraft in the hangars. Burned-out planes stood in sooty skeletal rows on the field, where bulldozers were grinding around rubble heaps and cratered runways. "Jerry did quite a job here," said Tillet cheerfully.
"Caught us napping." The ruined airfield lay amid grassy fields dotted with wild flowers, where herds of brown cattle grazed and lowed.
Away from the burned buildings, the air smelled like a garden.
Tillet said as they drove off, 'Goering's just starting to make sense, going for the airfields and plane factories. He's wasted a whole bloody month bombing harbors and pottering about after convoys.
He's only got till the equinox, the damned fool-the Channel's impassable after about September the fifteenth.
His mission is mastery of the air, not blockade. Define your mission!" he snapped at Victor Henry like a schoolmaster. "Define your mission! And stick to it!"
Tillet cited Waterloo, lost for want of a few handfuls of nails and a dozen hammers, because a general forgot his mission. Marshal They's premature cavalry charge against Wellington's center, he said, surprised and overran the British batteries, gaining a golden chance to spike the guns.
But nobody had thought of bringing along hammers and nails. "Had the), spiked those guns," said Tillet through his teeth-puffing angrily at his clenched pipe, chopping a hand on the steering wheel, and getting very worked up and red-faced-"had Marshal They remembered what the hell his charge was all about, had one Frenchman among those five thousand thought about his mission, we'd be living in a different world. With our artillery silenced, the next cavalry charge would have broken Wellin ton's center. We'd have had a French-dominated Europe for the next hundred and fifty years, instead of a vacuum into which the German came boiling up. We fought the Kaiser in 1914 and we're fighting Adolf right now because that ass They forgot his mission at Waterloo-if he ever kne", it."
"For want of a nail the kingdom was lost," said Pug.
"Damned right!"
"I don't know much about Waterloo, but I never heard that version.
I just remember Blucher and his Prussians showing up at sunset and saving the day."
"Wouldn't have been worth a tinker's dam if They had fetched along his hammers and nails. By sunset Wellington would have been in full flight. Napoleon had routed Blucher three days earlier. He'd have done it again with ease."
The car went over the crest of a hill. Ahead, beyond green empty pastureland, lay the blue Channel, shining in the sun, and a hairline of French coast all ajong the horizon. They got out and stood amid high grass and red poppies blowing in a cool sea breeze. After an impressive silence, broken only by birdsong, Tillet said, Well, there we are. You're looking at Hitler's France."
Turn by Turn they scanned the coast through a telescope Tillet brought out of the car's trunk. Small images of houses and ships shimmered on the far shore.
"That's as close as Jerry's ever come," Tillet said. "Close enough, too."
"The Germans took all the neutral attaches on a tour of France not long ago," Pug said. "Brought us clear to the coast. The Poppies are growing over there, too. We saw your chalk cliffs, and the Maginot Line guns they were pointing at you. Now I'm looking down the wrong end of those gu
ns."
Tillet said, "They're no problem. They lob a few shells over for terror, but they fall in the fields. Nobody's terrorized."
Running westward along the coast, they passed through siicnt
boarded-up villages, thickly tangled with barbed wire.
Camouflaged pillboxes stood thick along the hills and in the towns.
Pug saw a children's merry-go-round with the snouts of cannon peeking from under the platform of painted horses. Along the Hat stony beaches, jagged iron rods spiked up, festooned with wire. As waves rose and fell, queerly shaped tangles of pipe poked above the water.
Pug said, "Well, you're not exactly unprepared."
"Yes. Adolf was decent enough to give us a breather, and we've used it. Those pipes out beyond the waterline are just the old Greek fire idea.
Herman Wouk - The Winds Of War Page 55