Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance

by War

  There's a powder keg. The British can't keep the lid on much longer.

  When India blows, you're going to see Hindus and Sikhs and Moslems and Buddhists and Parsecs cutting each other's throats till hell won't have it. The Germans have killed a lot more Russians than Jews. This world is a slaughterhouse, man, it always has been, and that's what all these fucking pacifists keep forgetting."

  Iss ve wider Supermen?

  Aryan pure, Supermen?

  Yahl ve in der Supermen Sooper DOOPER Supermen!

  Fenton enjoyed the sound of his own voice - and he was getting worked up. He sat erect and poked love on the shoulder. "Tell me this. Is Stalin any better than Hitler? I say he's the same kind of murderer. Yet we're flying half of the bombers we're producing over to him-free, gratis, and for nothing, and some damn good pilots are getting killed at it, and I'm risking my own ass. And why? Because he's our murderer, that's why. We're not doing it for humanity, or for Russia, or for anything except to save our own asses. Christ, I feel sorry for the Jews, don't think I don't, but there just isn't a thing we can do about them but beat the shit out of the Germans."

  So ve Heil (phfft!) Heil (phfft!) Right... in... Der...

  Fuehrer's... face.

  At the enormous Canadian Air Force Base outside Montreal, Slote telephoned the Division of European Affairs, and the division chief told him to hurry along to the Montreal airport and catch the first plane to New York or Washington.

  While this was going on, Fenton passed the telephone booth.

  A tall pretty girl in a red fox ooat was clinging to his arm, hips rolling with each step, devouring the pilot with lustrous green eyes.

  A casual wave with his smoking cigar at the booth, a man-to-man grin, and the ferry pilot passed from view. A short life and a merry one, thought Slote, with a flicker of rueful envy.

  To his pleased surprise, Slote found that he did not mind the takeoff of the DC-3, or the bumpy climb through heavy clouds. The airliner seemed so huge, the interior so luxurious, the seat so broad and soft, the stewardess so entrancing, that it was more like being on the Queen Mary than on something flying through the air. He could not tell whether the bomber ride had cauterized, as it were, his fear of flying, or whether he just had no nerves left, and was on the verge of a total crack-up. Anyway, not to be frightened was delightful.

  He had snatched a Montreal Gazette from the newsstand.

  Now he unfolded it, and a picture of Alistair Tudsbury and Pamela on the first page made him sit up. They stood beside a jeep, Tudsbury grinning in balloonlike army fatigues, Pamela looking pinched and bored in slacks and a shirt.

  SUNSET ON KIDNEY RIDGE

  By Alistair Tudsbury By wireless from London. This dispatch, dated November 4, 1942, the famous British correspondent's last, was dictated shortly before he was killed by a landmine at El Alamein.

  Edited by his daughter and collaborator, Pamela Tudsbury, from an unfinished draft, it is reprinted by special permission of the London Observer.

  The sun hangs huge and red above the far duststreaked horizon.

  The desert cold is already falling on Kidney Ridge. This gray sandy elevation is deserted, except by the dead, and by two intelligence officers and myself. Even the flies have left. Earlier they were here in clouds, blackening the corpses. They pester the living too, clustering at a man's eyes and the moisture in the corners of his mouth, drinking his sweat. But of course they prefer the dead.

  When the sun climbs over the opposite horizon tomorrow, the flies will return to their feast.

  Here not only did these German and British soldiers die, who litter the ground as far as the eye can see in the fading red light.

  Here at- El Alamein the Afrika Korps died. The Korps was a legend, a dashing clean-cut enemy, a menace and at the same time a sort of glory; in Churchillian rhetoric, a gallant foe worthy of our steel.

  It is not yet known whether Rommel has made good his escape, or whether his straggle of routed supermen will be bagged by the Eighth Army. But the Afrika Korps is dead, crushed by British arms. We have won here, in the great Western Desert of Africa, a victory to stand with Crdcy, Agincourt, Blenheim, and Waterloo. Lines from Southey's "Battle of Blenheim" are haunting me here on Kidney Ridge: They say it was a shocking sight After the field was won, For many thotuand bodies here Lay rotting in the sun; But things like that, you know, must be After a famous victory.

  The bodies, numerous as they are, strike the eye less than the blasted and burned-out tanks that dot this weirdly beautiful wasteland, these squat hulks with their long guns, casting elongate'd blue shadows on the pastel grays, browns, and pinks of the far-stretching sands.

  Here is the central incongruity of Kidney Ridge - the masses Of smashed twentieth-century machinery tumbled about in these harsh flat sandy wilds, where one envisions warriors on camels, or horses, or perhaps the elephants of Hannibal.

  How far they came to perish here, these soldiers and these machines! What bizarre train of events brought lit youngsters from the Rhineland and Prussia, from the Scottish Highlands and London, from Australia and New Zealand, to-butt at each other to the death with flame-spitting machinery in faraway Africa, in a setting as dry and lonesome as the moon?

  But that is the hallmark of this war. No other war has ever been like it. This war rings the world. Kidney Ridge is everywhere on our small globe. Men fight as far from home as they can be transported, with courage and endurance that makes one proud of the human-race, in horrible contrivances that make one ashamed of the human race.

  My jeep will take me back to Cairo shortly, and I will dictate a dispatch about what I see here. What I am looking at, right now as the sun touches the horizon, is this. Two intelligence officers, not fifty yards from me, are lifting the German driver out of a blasted tank, using meat hooks. He is black and charred. He has no head.

  He is a trunk with arms and legs. The smell is like gamy pork.

  The legs wear good boots, only a bit scorched.

  I am very tired. A voice I don't want to listen to tells me that this is England's last land triumph; that our military history ends here with a victory to stand with the greatest, won largely with machines shipped ten thousand miles from American factories. Tommy Atkins will serve with pluck and valor wherever he fights hereafter, as always; but the conduct of the war is passing out of our hands.

  We are outnumbered and outclassed. Modern war is a clangorous and dreary measuring of industrial plants.

  Germany's industrial capacity passed ours in 1905. We hung on through the First World War by sheer grit.

  Today the two industrial giants of the earth are the United States and the Soviet Union. They more than outmatch Germany and Japan, now that they have shaken off their surprise setbacks and sprung to arms.

  Tocqueville's vision is coming to pass in our time. They will divide the empire of the world.

  The sun going down on Kidney Ridge is setting on the British Empire, on which-so we learned to say as schoolboys-the sun never set.

  Our Empire was born in the skill of our explorers, the martial prowess of our yeomanry, the innovative genius of our scientists and engineers.

  We stole a march on the world that lasted two hundred years.

  Lulled by the long peaceful protection of the great fleet we built, we thought it would last forever.

  We dozed.

  Here on Kidney Ridge we have erased the disgrace of our somnolence. If history is but the clash of arms, we now begin to leave the stage in honor. But if it is the march of the human spirit toward world freedom, we will never leave the stage. British ideas, British institutions, British scientific method, will lead the way in other lands, in other guises. English will become the- planetary tongue, that is now certain. We have been the Greece of the new age.

  But, you object, the theme of the new age is socialism.

  I am not so sure of that. Even so, Karl Marx, the scruffy Mohammed of this spreading economic Islam, built his strident dogmas on the theories of B
ritish economists.

  He created his apocalyptic visions in the hospitality of the British Museum. He read British books, lived on British bounty, wrote in British freedom, collaborated with En limen, and lies in London grave. People will forget all that.

  The sun has set. It will get dark and cold quickly now.

  The intelligence officers are beckoning me to their lorry.

  The first stars spring forth in the indigo sky. I take a last look around at the dead of El Alamein and mutter a prayer for all these poor devils German and British, who Turn and Turn about sang "Lili Marlene" in the cafes of Tobruk, hugging the same sleazy girls. Now they lie here together, their young appetites cold, their homesick songs stilled.

  "Why, "twas a very;, wicked thing!"

  Said little Wilheimine.

  "NaY, naY mY little girl!" quoth he Pamela Tudsbury writes: ".The telephone rang just at that moment, as my father was declaiming the verse with his usual relish. It was the summons to the interview with General Montgomery. He left at once. A lorry brought back his body next morning. As a World War I reserve officer, he was buried with honors in the British Militay Cemetery outside Alexandria.

  The London Observer asked me to complete the article.

  I have tried. I have his handw?itten notes for three more paragraphs. But I cannot do it. I can, however, complete Southey's verse for him. So ends my father's career of war reporting "It was a famous victory."

  The airplane was humming above the weather now, the sky was bright blue, the sunlight blinding on the white cloud cover. Slote slumped sadly in his chair. He had come a long way from Berne, he was thinking, not only in miles but in perception. In the hothouse of the Swiss capital, under the comfortable glass of neutrality, his obsession about the Jews had sprouted like some forced plant. Now he was coming back to realities.

  How could one arouse American public opinion? How get past the horselaugh of "Der Fuehrer's Face," the acid cynicism of Fenton? Above all, how overcome the competition of Kidney Ridge? Tudsbury's piece was touching and evocative, describing a great slaughter; but there was no Kidney Ridge for the Jews of Europe. They were unarmed. it was no fight. Most of them did not even comprehend that a massacre was going on. Sheep going to the slaughter were uncomfortable to contemplate.

  One turned one's eyes elsewhere. One had an exciting world drama to watch, a contest for the highest stakes, in which the home team was at last pulling ahead. Treblinka had small chance against Kidney Ridge.

  IN SEffEMBER 1941, Victor Henry had left a country at peace, but with isolationists and interventionists in a screechy squabble, the production of munitions a trickle, despite all the "arsenal of democracy" rhetoric; the military services shuddering over Congress's renewal of the draft by one vote; a land without rationing, with business booming from defense spending, with lights blazing at night from coast to coast, with the usual cataracts of automobiles on the highways and the city streets.

  Now as he returned, San Francisco from the air spelled War: shadowy lampless bridges under a full moon, pale ribbons of deserted highways, dimmed-out residential hills, black tall downtown buildings.

  In the dark quiet streets and in the glare of the hotel lobby the swarms of uniforms astounded him.- Hitler's Berlin had looked no more martial.

  Newspapers and magazines that he read next day on the eastbound flight mirrored the change. In the advertisements, all was bellicose patriotism. Where heroic-looking riveters, miners, or soldiers and their sweethearts were not featured in the ads, a toothy Jap hyena, or a snake with a Hitler mustache, or a bloated scowling Mussolini-like pig took comic beatings. The news columns and year-end summaries surged with buoyant confidence that at Stalingrad and in North Africa the tide of the war had turned. The Pacific was getting short treatment. Sketchy references to Midway and Guadalcanal, perhaps through the fault of the closemouthed Navy, miserably missed the scope of these battles. As for the sinking of the Northampton, Pug saw that if released the story would have been ignored. This calamity in his life, this loss of a great ship of war, would have been a dark flyspeck on a golden picture of optimism.

  And it was all mighty sudden! Island-hopping across the Pacific in recent days, he had been reading in airplanes and waiting rooms scuffed periodicals of the past months. With one voice they had bemoaned the dilatory Allied war effort, the deep German advances into the Caucasus, the pro-Axis unrest in India, South America, and the Arab lands, and Japan's march across Burma and the Southwest Pacific. Now with one voice the same journals were hailing the inevitable downfall of Adolf Hitler and his partners in crime. This civilian change of mood struck Pug as frivolous. If the strategic Turn was at hand, the main carnage in the field was yet to come. Americans had only begun to die.

  To military families, if not to military columnists, this was no small thingHe had called Rhoda from San Francisco, and she had told him that there was no news of Byron. In wartime, no news, especially about a son in submarines, was not necessarily good news.

  His orders to Bupers and the talk with Spruance were much on his mind as the plane bounced and tossed through the wintry gray skies.

  The key man at the Bureau for four-striper assignments was Digger Brown, his old Academy chum. Pug had drilled the ambitious Brown, who couldn't learn languages, through three years of German, boosting him to top grades which had raised Brown's class standing and helped his whole career. Pug expected to be ordered back to Cincpac without trouble, for nobody in the Navy swung much more weight right now than Nimitz and Spruance; still, if there were any bureaucratic shuffling about it, he meant to look Digger Brown in the eye and tell him what he wanted. The man could not refuse him.

  What about Rhoda? What could he say in the first moments? How should he act? He had been puzzling over this while he flew halfway around the globe, and the quandary was still with him. In the dark marble-tiled foyer of the big Foxhall Road house, she wept in his arms.

  His bulky bridge coat was flecked with snow, his embrace was awkward, but she clung to him against the cold wet blue cloth and the bumpy brass buttons, exclaiming through sobs, "I'm sorry, oh, I'm sorry, Pug.

  I didn't mean to cry, truly I didn't. I'm so glad to see you I COUld DIE. Sorry, darling! Sorry I'm such a crybaby."

  "It's all right, Rho. Everything's all right" And in this first tender moment he really thought everything might turn out all right.

  Her body felt soft and sweet in his embrace. In all their long marriage he had seen his wife in tears only a few times; for all her frothy ways she had a streak of stoical self-control. She clutched him like a child seeking comfort, and her wet eyes were large and bright.

  "Oh, damn, damn, I was going to carry this off with a smile and a martini.

  The martini is probably still a SCRUMPTIOUS idea, isn't it?"

  "At high noon? Well, maybe, at that." He tossed his coat and cap on a bench. She led him hand in hand into the living room, where flames leaped in the fireplace, and ornaments glittered on a large Christmas tree that filled the room with a smell of childhood, of family joy.

  He took both her hands. "Let's have a good look at you."

  "Madeline's coming here for Christmas, you know," she chattered, "and not having a maid and all, I thought I'd just buy a tree early and trim the dam thing up, and-well, well, SAY something!" She shakily laughed, freeing her hands.

  "This captain's inspection is giving me the Wim-Wams. What do you think of the old hulk?"

  It was almost like sizing up another man's wife. Rhoda's skin was soft, clear, scarcely lined. In the clinging jersey dress her figure was as seductive as ever; if anything, a shade thin.

  Her hip bones jutted. Her movements and gestures were lithe fetching, feminine. Her comic waggle of ten spread fingers at him when she said "WIM-WAMS." brought back her roguish charm in their first dates.

  "You look marvelous."

  The admiring tone brought instant radiance to her face.

  She spoke huskily, her voice catching, "You would say that.


  And you look so smart! A bit grayer, old thing, but it's attractive." He walked to the fire, holding out his hands. "This feels good.

  "Oh, I'm being ever so patriotic. Also practical. Oil's a problem. I keep the thermostat down, close off most of the rooms, and burn a lot of wood. Now, YOU WRETCH! Why didn't you call me from the airport? I've been pacing the house like a LEOPARD."

  "The booths were jammed."

  "Well, I've been FALLING on the phone for an hour. It kept ringing. That fellow Slote called from the State Department.

  He's back from Switzerland."

  "Slote! Any news of Natalie? Or of Byron?"

  "He was in a terrific hurry. He's going to call again. Natalie seems to be in Lourdes, and-"