Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance

by War

  "Je peux te promeure 1extase." His very words. With that, thank God, he tiptoed out. I fear he's going to try again. What shall I do?

  Shall I talk to his father? The old man's so formidable."

  Rabinovitz was rubbing a palm on a very worried face.

  "I'm thinking where I can put you in Marseilles. Unless you want to try that ecstasy." She said nothing, and again the puffy face reddened. "Sorry, I shouldn't make fun of you, I'm sure it's distressing."

  She replied a touch mischievously, "Oh, well, it's made me feel young and so forth. But no, I'll forgo Corsican ecstasy."

  He gave her a curious smile, with much sadness in it.

  "Good. Not for nice Jewish girls."

  "Oh, you don't know me," Natalie retorted, though not-to her surprise-annoyed by the description. On Rabinovitz's lips the words had a caressing sound. "I've always done exactly as I pleased, or God knows I wouldn't have married Byron Henry. Or put myself through other wringers that nice Jewish girls usually avoid. Anyway, you think you'll move us to Marseilles?"

  "Yes. I don't want trouble with the Gafforis. They're very important to me, especially Orlanduccio. And at the moment they're my one sure place for the Castelnuovos. Orianduccio's told me about this Pascal, he's no good. You might be better off in Marseilles anyway.

  When your papers come through, you can leave, one two three.

  That's an advantage.

  "And the Castelnuovos?"

  "They stay here."

  "But I don't want to abandon them."

  "Abandon them?" Rabinovitz's voice turned harsh as they walked across the terrace past the tumbledown guardhouse.

  "Don't use such a silly expression, please. The U.S. consul general will step in for you if anything goes wrong, but they'd have no protection, none whatever. Marseilles is full of police and informers.

  I can't possibly move them there. Please don't encourage the doctor with such ideas. I'm having enough trouble with him as it is."

  "All right. Don't be angry with me. Louis and Miriam are like brother and sister now."

  "I know. Listen, that Bastia raid was rotten luck. If the doctor will be sensible, he and his family will be all right."

  "While we're in Marseilles, will we see you now and then?"

  "Sure."

  "Well, that will be good."

  He hesitated, and spoke very gruffly. "I was disappointed when you left the Izmir."

  Natalie suddenly kissed his cheek. It felt bristly and cold.

  "Mrs. Henry, doing that is what got you into trouble."

  "I don't think I'll wake to find you in my bedroom."

  "To a Frenchman that's no compliment."

  They smiled uncertainly at each other, and descended into the town.

  That evening it was Natalie's turn to cook. As she served out a scrappy ratatouille in the little upstairs kitchen, a recipe from her Paris days, there was little talk. Even Miriam was grave. She went off to bed while the adults lingered in the kitchen over a coffee substitute made of roasted grains, mere sour brown water. Castelnuovo said, "Well, it'll be hard on the children, won't it?" This was the first open reference to their coming separation.

  She had stopped noticing his appearance from day to day, but now she was struck by the alteration in him since Siena.

  Then he had been a self-assured, charming, handsome Italian doctor. His good looks were fading, his eyes were hollow, the lids were heavy.

  "It'll be hard on me, I know that," she said.

  Aaron Jastrow said, "Isn't it possible we'll still rejoin, and go out together?"

  Castelnuovo's headshake was slow, emphatic, and weary.

  "What are his plans for you?" Jastrow insisted. "Can't we be frank with each other?"."

  "In Marciana we still hoped to go by ship to Algiers," said the doctor, "and make our way east to Palestine. But that's closed off. It seems we can go out illegally either to Spain or Switzerland. People go in groups, with guides who sneak them through the woods. I guess Spain's better. At least it's on the way to Lisbon."

  "The trouble is," Anna said, with a pointless smile, "that to get to Spain we have to cross the Pyrenees on foot. In November. There's no other way. Miles of walking in the wilds, with snow and ice, and the border patrols to watch out for."

  "What about Switzerland?" Natalie asked.

  "If they catch you, back to France you go," said Anna.

  "Into the hands of the French police."

  "Not necessarily!" Her husband spoke angrily to her.

  "Don't exaggerate. Every group has a different experience.

  There are rescue agencies in Switzerland, too, who can help you.

  Rabinovitz prefers Spain, but Anna is worried about Miriam walking over the mountains."

  "But the vessels that were going to South America," said Jastrow, "the fishing boats to Morocco-all those other possibilities we've talked about?"

  Castelnuovo's hopeless shrug and dark empty look made Natalie herself feel trapped as never before. "You'll be all right," she said, very cheerfully. "I trust him."

  "So do I," said the doctor. "He tells the truth. He knows what he's doing. It was I who decided to leave Italy, and I was right.

  We're not in a concentration camp. If Miriam has to walk over the Pyrenees in the snow, why, she'll walk over the Pyrenees. She's a strong healthy girl." He got up and hurried out.

  Natalie said to Anna Castelnuovo, whose eyes were wet, "Anna, can I take Miriam into my bed tonight?"

  Anna nodded. The drowsy little girl came to Natalie's bed herself later, without a word, and fell asleep in a moment.

  Natalie loved the feeling of the small warm body snuggled beside her.

  When the sun woke Natalie next morning Miriam was gone. The girl had crawled into the crib and was sleeping with Louis in her arms.

  A GRAND ARMADA was now on the high seas, converging upon North-Africa. Not since the Japanese Imperial Fleet had set out for Midway, and before that never in all history, had the oceans of earth home such a force. Aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, troop transports, and newfangled landing ships crammed full of small craft, tanks, trucks, and mobile guns; also destroyers, minesweepers, submarines, and assorted supply vessels; from several directions, in far-flung formations, these warships of shapes and many sizes, painted gray or in gaudy camouflage colors, were crawling the watery curve of the planet. They came thronging south from the British Isles, and, in an ocean-home assault new in size and reach, they came steaming east from North America.

  Axis intelligence knew nothing of all this. The speculations at a Corsican dining table were being echoed aboard Hitler's command train heading for a Party rally in Munich. Though mounted in chatterbox democracies, the great attack was being kept as secret as the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor.

  Winston Churchill had closed his defiant oration after Dunkirk with a pledge to carry on the struggle "until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old." Now it was happening, two and a half years later, the Churchillian dithyramb coming to majestic life: a swarm of fresh seapower with the ever-rising roar of American technology behind it, bearing veteran British divisions and the first wave of America's newly recruited soldiery. If romance could exist in industrialized war, this was a romantic hour, the approaching hour of Torch.

  But the American invaders, despite a Patton here and there, would have been embarrassed by Churchillian dithyrambs about what they were doing. The career challenges and the technical risks interested the professional soldiers; otherwise, generals and privates alike regarded Torch and the whole war as a dirty job to get over with.

  George Marshall disapproved altogether of Torch as a diversion from the big landing in France, and the commander-in-chief of the expedition himself, a newcomer on the world scene named Dwight Eisenhower, feared that the decision for Torch "might go down as the blackest day in history." Still, given their orders, he and his staff had methodically set
about the business.

  Loading the odds in their favor was much to be desired, however unromantic; and if a fight could be avoided altogether, so much the better. So the notion had arisen to bring into the combined Anglo-American high command a famous French general in a window-dressing role, to induce the Vichy forces in North Africa not to fight, no matter what their German-ruled government might order. Thus began a comedy worthy-except for the magnitude of the stakes-of a Parisian boulevard farceur's pen.

  In this scherzo interlude in the heavy march of the war, Byron Henry became caught up. The reader therefore needs a brief sketch of what the foolery was about.

  For this role of high-brass catspaw Charles de Gaulle was available in London, where he was sounding forth as the voice of "Free France," exhorting his countrymen to resist their conquerors. The trouble with de Gaulle was that Vichy's generals and admirals loathed him to a man. Nor did the Resistance much love him. Sonorous defiance from a London hotel suite did not greatly charm French hearts just then. The personage the Allies hit on instead was one General Henri Giraud. Giraud had fought well against the Germans in 1940, had been captured, and had escaped from a German prison, He was now lying low in France, and the plan was to hunt him up, spirit him from his hideout to the Mediterranean coast, take him aboard an Allied submarine, and speed him to Gibraltar to join Eisenhower.

  This was a complicated project, and when secretly approached, Giraud made it more complicated. On points of honor General Giraud turned out to be a fussy man. Earlier in the war British warships had bombarded a French fleet to prevent its falling into German hands, Henri'Giraud therefore would not consent to be rescued by a British submarine.

  But the only suitable subs on hand at the moment flew British flags. A British submarine had to be put under nominal command of an American captain, with a couple of other American officers along for verisimilitude, to fetch the Frenchman. The British skipper and crew naturally operated the boat as before; the Americans rode along and tried to act busy. This "American" submarine duly picked up General Giraud off the coast near Toulon, and brought him to Gibraltar.

  There-to round out the Giraud epic, before narrating Byron Henry's small part in it-on being ushered into the presence of Eisenhower in his command-post cave, Giraud calmly thanked the American generalissimo for his services to date, and informed him that he, Henri Giraud, would now relieve him as commander-in-chief, and would himself conduct the invasion of North Africa. This happened less than forty-eight hours before the start of the assault, with some four hundred fifty ships approaching the landing beaches.

  Details of this remarkable chat are lacking, but we know that Giraud was deaf to argument. Taking supreme command was, he insisted, a point of honor with him. But Eisenhower insensitively declined to be relieved. The Frenchman thereupon went into a profound sulk and played no part in the invasion.

  As things turned out he was not missed. In the early hours of the landing a certain Admiral Darlan, the most influential Vichyite in Northwest Africa, noted chiefly for his extraordinary hatred of England, America, and Jews, fell into the invaders' hands. Knife to his throat, they pressed him into the Giraud role. He did a fine job of pacifying the French forces, terminating the sporadic resistance, and establishing order under the Allies. Willy-nilly, Darlan prevented the deaths Of many American and British soldiers, far better than Giraud could have.

  A loud long cry at once went up in the Allied press against this cynical use of such a bad man. Political trouble ensued.

  General Eisenhower contemplated resigning, and President Roosevelt underwent prolonged newspaper savaging, more strident than usual. Then by another lucky chance of war the matter was cleared up. An idealistic French student shot Darlan. Some time afterward, at the Casablanca Conference, General Giraud, yielding to a lot of coaxing, consented to pose sullenly for pictures with Churchill, Roosevelt, and de Gaulle. So it is that one knows today what the man of honor looked like. He was tall and thin, but not as tall and thin as de Gaulle. He had the larger mustache.

  It was during the frantic spate of communications back and forth about Giraud's honor that Byron Henry got sucked into the affair.

  Oddly, his submarine experience had nothing whatever to do with it. He was swept like a cork in an eddying stream, from Gibraltar to Marseilles, around and around, with no inkling of what the propelling force was, simply because he had a high American security clearance.

  Gibraltar was chronically short of American couriers; with invasion imminent, even more so-. Since his encounter with the Tudsburys, Byron had been sent on several of these errands, but never before to Marseilles, though he had been in touch with the consulate by mail and telephone, inquiring about Natalie.

  Like everybody at the Rock he knew that a big operation was afoot.

  The power hum vibrating throughout the base, the gathering of warships and warplanes, the descent of high brass with their scurrying self-important staffs, all brought to his mind Pearl Harbor before Midway. But whether the objective was Africa, Sardinia, the south of France, or even Italy, Byron did not know. He had never heard of General Henri Giraud. Nor was the name mentioned to him now. At eight in the morning, black with grease, he was aboard a decrepit S-boat alongside the Maidstone, trying to get a defunct air compressor to work; and by noon, hastily cleaned up and in civilian clothes, with the courier's leather pouch once more chained to his wrist and the diplomatic passport in his pocket, he was on his way to Marseilles.

  He had heard nothing from Leslie Slote in over two months. His repeated inquiries to the Marseilles consulate had proven fruitless.

  Still, since he was going there, he meant to check around. His instructions were to hand the locked pouch of documents to a certain vice consul, wait for a coded reply, and bring it back posthaste. He would have time, he figured, to press a few inquiries. And so it was that he did find Natalie, though the final linkup was fortuitous. Had she not left Italy, and had he not gotten himself to Gibraltar, "it naturally could not have happened, but the gap was closed by luck.

  Arriving in a pouring cold rain at the consulate, he unchained the pouch and delivered it to the vice consul, a man named Sam Jones, with a nondescript face and nondescript clothes to match; a good inconspicuous sort to be handling covert military intelligence. As Byron doffed his dripping raincoat he asked Jones, "Is Lucius Babbage still stationed here?"

  "Luke Babbage? Sure. Why?"

  "I want to talk to him. How much time have I got?"

  An incongruous foxy look creased Jones's average face; the intelligence man, peeping through the drab vice consul."

  "You've got time. Luke's office is down the hall. Frosted glass panel door."

  A pinch-faced woman with a tight net on her grizzled hair was typing away inside the frosted glass door, at a desk stacked with official forms. Refugees crowded the anteroom, most of them looking as though they had been sitting there for days. The secretary's cold glance dissolved in a charming smile as she took in his face, and the American sport jacket and slacks in which he ran his courier errands.

  He had no trouble getting past her to see Babbage.

  Pale watery light from the wide windows of the inner office fell on life-sized frairned photographs of President Roosevelt and Cordell Hull; also on a large bad reproduction of George Washington Crossing the Delaware. Behind the desk a plump bald pink man rose to shake hands with Byron, his blue eyes twinkling through gold-rimmed glasses.

  "Lieutenant Henry, eh? I recall your letter, Lieutenant. Your phone calls, too.

  Lousy connection to Gibraltar. Good old American name, Henry. No relation to Patrick? Ha ha! Submariner, isn't it?

  My son wanted to join the Navy but couldn't make it. Eyes.

  He's in the Air Corps, quartermasters. How's the war looking from Gibraltar? I guess these courier trips are interesting, but I'd think you'd be out in the Pacific. Well, sit down, sit down."

  Lucius Babbage wanted to know when Byron had last been in the States and whether he
had seen any major league baseball games.

  Rocking back and forth in a squeaky swivel chair, he said the agitation to draft stars like DiMaggio and Feller was fomented by people of dubious motives. If a few great ball players could keep millions of laborers diverted while turning out planes and tanks, where was the sense in marching them off to carry rifles in the mud, leaving the big leagues to Army rejects and misfits? During this aimless persiflage the prominent eyes stared through the gold rims, and Babbage kept rubbing the back of his hand on jowls as smooth-shaven as a priest's.

  "Well!" Babbage said, changing his tone as though with a flip of a switch, "the problem is your wife, as I recall it.

  Suppose you tell me the story again, and save me pulling out your letter again? There's an uncle, too, isn't there?"