Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance

by War

  "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 mind-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. Yve 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 governmentin-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. " 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 bookof 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.

  But when she offered to go to Washington and write some stories on the war effort there, he brightened. "Well, why not? Do try your hand, Pam. We know you were drafting Talky's copy toward the last.

  When will you let us have 'Sunset on Kidney Ridge'? We're frightfully anxious for it.

  Slote knew of two Foreign Service officers who had disappeared on ferry command bomber flights between Scotland and Montreal- The North Atlantic sky was not the route of choice, certainly not in midwinter.

  Big comfortable airliners flew the.".southern route-down to Dakar, a hop across sunny seas to the bulge of Brazil, then north to Bermuda and so on to Baltimore. But that was for big shots.

  The choices offered him were a ten-day voyage in a convoy, or an R.A.F ferry Command trip.

  On the train to the Scottish airport, he fell in with an American ferry pilot going the same way: a
wiry middle-sized Army Air Corps captain with a toothbrush mustache, a wild eye, three banks of ribbons on his khaki tunic, a richly obscene vocabulary, and a great store of flying stories. The two men had a compartment to themselves. The ferry pilot kept nipping brandy, explaining that he was getting plastered and intended to stay plastered until they were well off the Prestwick runway. Crashing on takeoff was a hazard at Prestwick. He had attended two mass funerals of pilots who had died on the runway.

  Dangerous overloads of gasoline had to be accepted, when you were flying westward into North Atlantic gales. The ferry command had to keep hauling pilots back, because shipping disassembled aircraft by sea was slow and cumbersome, and the U-boats got too many of them. It was the ferry pilots who were really building up the Allied air forces in the war zones. Nobody gave a shit about them, but they were the key to the whole war.

  As the old dusty train clanked its -slow way through snowy fields, the pilot regaled Slote with his autobiography. His name was Bill Fenton. A barnstormer before the war, he had since 1937 been doing various flying jobs, civilian and military, for various governments.

  He had flown cargo carriers on the India-China run ("over the hump," he called it); taking off from a runway that had to be cleared of cows and water buffalo by a honking jeep, then climbing five miles and more to get over icy storms that whirled higher than Everest. He had joined the Royal Canadian Air Force to ferry planes to England.

  Now he was flying bombers for the Army Air Corps via South America to Africa, and on across to Persia and the Soviet Union. He had crash-landed in the desert. He had floated for two days in the Irish Sea on a rubber raft.

  He had parachuted into Japanese-held territory in Burma, and walked out to India on foot.

  By the time they reached Prestwick in a snowstorm, Slote was not only tired, sleepy, and drunk from his share of Bill Fenton's brandy; he had a whole new vision of the war. In his fumed brain pictures reeled of aircraft crisscrossing the globe-bombers, fighters, transports, by the thousands-battling the weather and the enemy, bombing cities, railroads, and troop columns; crossing oceans, deserts, high mountain ranges; a war such as Thucydides had never imagined, filling the skies of the planet with hurtling machines manned by hordes of Bill Fentons. He had not until now given the war in the air a thought.

  For once, the everlasting Wannsee Protocol, the map of Poland with the three black circles, and the European trains carrying hundreds of thousands of Jews each month to their deaths faded from his mind. He was moreover so scared at the prospect of the flight that he could hardly walk off the train.

  When they arrived at the airfield the plane was warming up.

  Waddling out of the check-in office in cumbersome flying suits, heavy gloves, and life vests, with parachutes dangling behind their knees, they could not at first see the aircraft through the falling snow.

  Fenton led him toward the motor sound. It was inconceivable to Leslie Slote that a machine could take off in this weather. Inside the four-engine bomber there were no seats. On the board floor about a dozen returning ferry pilots sprawled on pallets. Slote's armpits coldly dripped and his heart raced as the plane heavily took off.

  Fenton screamed into his ears, over the engine roar and the groan of retracting wheels, that the weather briefing predicted headwinds of a hundred miles an hour. They might well have to put down in Greenland, the asshole of the Arctic.

  Leslie Slote was a coward. He knew it. He had given up fighting it.

  Even riding in a car with a fast driver gave him bad nerves.

  Every airplane ride, just a one-hour hop in a DC-3, was an ordeal.

  This man now found himself in a stripped down four-engine bomber, setting out to cross the Atlantic westward in December; a howling rattletrap that sucked in the cold through whining and whistling air leaks, climbed through hail that make a machine gun racket on the fuselage, and bucked, dipped, and swerved like a kite. Slote could see, in dim light from iced-up windows, the greenish faces of the sprawled pilots, the sweat-beaded foreheads, the shaking hands bringing cigarettes or bottles to tight mouths. The fliers looked fully as terrified as he felt.

  Fenton had explained on the train that the NOrth Atlantic head winds were strongest at low altitudes. Planes flew high to climb over the weather and conserve fuel in the thinner air; but up there they could accumulate ice too fast for the deicers to work. Also, the carburetors could get chilled from pulling in subzero air, and they could ice up. Then the engines would quit. That no doubt was the way so many planes vanished. When ice began to build up you could keep trying to climb above the wet cold into the dry cold, where one needed an oxygen mask to survive. Otherwise you had to drop back down fast, maybe down to the wave tops, where warmer air would melt your ice.

  Against his better judgment, Slote had asked him, "Can't the icing conditions prevail right down to the water?"

  "Hell, yes," Fenton had answered. "Let me tell you what happened to me." And he had launched into a long hideous anecdote about a near-spin into the water off Newfoundland under a heavy ice load.

  The plane kept climbing and climbing; loose things persisted in sliding toward the rear. Some pilots huddled under ragged blankets and snored. Fenton too stretched out and closed his eyes. A sudden metallic crashing and banging along the fuselage stopped Slote's heart, or so he felt. Fenton blinked, grinned at Slote, and pantomimed ice forming along the wings, and rubber deicers cracking it off.

  Slote wondered how anybody could sleep in this howling torture chamber in the sky, hammered at by breaking ice. He could as soon sleep, he thought, nailed to a cross. His nose was freezing. There was no sensation in his hands or feet. Yet he did doze, for a nasty sensation woke him: a smell of rubber, a cold thing pressed to his face as in anesthesia. He opened his eyes in the dark. Fenton's voice yelled in his ear, "Oxygen." Somebody lit a dim battery lamp. A shadowy figure was stumbling here and there with masks that trailed long rubber tubes. Slote thought he had never been so cold, so numb, so sick all over, so ready to die and get it over with.

  All at once the plane dived, roaring. The pilots sat up and looked about with white-rimmed eyes. It was an obscure comfort in Slote's agony that these skilled men were so scared, too. After a horrendously steep long dive, ice crashed along the fuselage once more.

  The floor levelled off.

  "Never make Newfoundland," Fenton yelled in Slote's ear.

  "Greenland it is."

  ...

  VenDer Fuehrer says, "Ve iss der Master Race," Ve Heil (phfft!) Heil (phfft!) Right in Der Fuehrer's face.

  In the wooden barracks beside the Greenland runway, this song was grinding out of the phonograph, hour after hour. It was the only record on hand. The airfield, a treeless spread of steel netting sunk into mud and drifted over with snow, was a drearier place than Slote had imagined could exist on earth.

  The runway was short and chancy, so the refueled aircraft had to wait for endurable takeoff conditions.

  Not to luff Der Fuehrer Iss a great disgrace So ve Heil (phfft!) Heil (phfft!) Right in Der Fuehrer's face.

  Here in this witless ditty, Slote thought, was the fatally soft American idea of Hitler and the Nazis-the ranting boob, the dumbbell followers, the hells and the razzes- The musical arrangement mixed various funny noises-cowbells, toy trumpets, tin cans,-with the oom-pahs of a German band.

  The pilots were playing cards or lolling about, and when the record ended somebody simply moved the needle back to the start.

  Fenton lay on the bunk underneath Slote's, leafing a girlie magazine.

  Slote leaned over and asked him what he thought of "Der Fuehrer's Face." Fenton yawned that it was getting to be a pain in the ass. Climbing down, Slote sat beside the captain and unburdened himself about the massacre of the Jews, bitterly observing that when a song like that could amuse people, it was small wonder that nobody believed what was happening.

  Turning the pages of naked females, Bill Fenton calmly remarked, "Shit, man, who doesn't believe it? I belie
ve it.

  Those Germans have to be weird people, to follow a nut like Hitler. Some of them are fine aviators, but taken as a nation they're a menace."

  Ven Herr Goebbels says, "Ve own de Vorld und Space, Ve Heil (phfft!) Heil (phfftl) Right in Herr Goebbels'face.

  Ven Herr Goering says, "Dey'll neffer bomb displace, Ve Heil (phfftt) Heil (phftt!) Right in Herr Goering's face...

  "But what can anybody do about the Jews?" Fenton tossed the magazine aside, stretching and yawning. "Fifty million people will die before this war's over. The Japs have been fighting the Chinese since 1937. Do you know how many Chinese have starved to death? Nobody does. Maybe ten million. Maybe more. You ever been to India?