Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance

by War

  But since my experience at the midnight Mass, I would under no circumstances-even back in the States, and offered a large fe'e -lecture about Jesus. Something has been happening to me that I have yet to fathom. In recent weeks I have found it harder and harder to work even on Martin Luther. Last night that something began to surface. I have still t'o focus on it and determine what it is. One of these days I shall trace in this-journal the path from my first glimpse of Christ crucified in Oswiecim, to my brief conversion to Christianity in Boston, eight years later. Just now Natalie has come in from her bedroom with Louis, all bundled up for her morning walk.

  In the open doorway our surly German shadow glowers.

  ON NEw surprised Rhoda by suggesting that they go to the Club.

  She knew he detested the noisemakers, and alcoholic kissing; rigrnarol( but tonight, he said, he wanted distraction. Rhoda loved the New Year's Eve nonsense, so she happily got herself up; and in the merry crowd of senior military men with their wives moving through the lobby, she felt that few women looked as pretty or glittery as she did in the silver dress from the old Bundles for Britain days. She had an uneasy moment when, as she and Pug entered the dining room, Colonel Harrison Peters stood up and waved to them to join him. Her conduct with Peters had been snowily blameless, but might he not mention Palmer Kirby, or show too much warmth?

  Arm in arm, feeling her hesitate, Pug gave her a questioning look.

  She decided she didn't give a damn. Let it come out at last!

  "Well, bless me! There's Colonel Peters. Let's join him, by all means," she said cheerily. "He's a fine man, I've met him at church.

  But where on earth did he get that CHORUS GIRL? Can I trust you at the same table with her?"

  Peters towered a head and a half over Pug Henry, shaking hands with him. His blonde bosomy young companion, in a white Grecian-drapery sort of dress that showed much rosy skin, was a secretary at the British Purchasing Council.

  Rhoda mentioned that they knew Pamela Tudsbury. "Oh, really? The next Lady Burne-Wilke?" the girl trilled, and her accent stirred an ache in Victor Henry. "Dear Pam! You could have knocked us all over with a feather at the Council.

  Pamela used to be our office mutineer. Always muttinying against the old slave driver! Now his lordship will pay for all that overtime, won't he just?"

  The hour before midnight melted away in dull war talk over dull club food and very flat champagne. An Army Air Corps colonel with purple bulldog jowls, sitting at his table by chance with his highly rouged wispy wife, railed at the neglect of the "C.B.I" theatre from which he had just returned, by which he meant China, Burma, and India.

  Half the human race lived there, said the colonel; even Lenin had once called it the richest war prize in the world. If it fell to the Japs, the white man had better find himself another planet to live on, because Earth would soon be too hot for him. Nobody in Washington seemed to grasp that.

  An Army brigadier general, with conspicuously more ribbons than either Peters or the C.B.I colonel, held forth on the assassination of Admirail Darian; whom, he said, he had come to know very well. in Algiers. "It's a great pity about Popeye. That's what we on Ike's staff all called Darlan, Popeye. The fellow looked like an insulted frog. of course he was a plain pro-Nazi, but he was a realist, and once we nabbed him, he delivered the goods, saved a whole lot of American lives. This de Gaulle fellow, now, thinks he's Joan of Arc.

  We'll get nothing from him but rhetoric and grief Try telling that to all these pinko typewriter strategists."

  Rhoda might have spared herself any concern about Colonel Peters.

  He was scarcely looking her way, sizing up instead the squat husband with the forbidding tired face. Pug was saying nothing at all.

  Peters at last asked how he thought the war was, going.

  "Where?" asked Pug.

  "All over. How does the Navy see it?"

  "Depends, Colonel, on where you sit in the Navy."

  "From where you sit, then."

  Puzzled by the idle probing of this big good-looking Army man, Pug answered, "I see plenty of hell behind and plenty ahead."

  "Concur,"? said Peters, as the lights in the noisy dining room blinked and darkened, and that's a better year-end summary than I've read in all the newspapers. Well, five minutes to midnight, ladies and gentlemen. Allow me, Mrs. Henry." She was sitting beside him, and in an oddly gentle and pleasing way, to which she felt Pug couldn't possibly take exception, he placed on her head a paper shepherdess's bonnet, then tilted a gilt cardboard helmet on his own handsome gray hair. Not everybody at the table put on paper hats, but to Rhoda's astonishment her husband did.

  Not since the children's early birthday parties had she seen that happen.

  On Victor Henry's head a pink hat with gold frills, far from looking playful or funny, brought out a terrible sadness in his face.

  "Oh, Pug! No."

  "Happy New Year, Rhoda."

  Champagne glasses in hand, the guests stood up to kiss all around and sing "Auld LangSyne" in candlelight. Pug gave his wife an absent kiss, and yielded her to a polite buss from Colonel Peters. His mind was drifting back over 1942. He was thinking of Warren leaning in the doorway of the cabin on the Northampton, with one hand on the overhead, saying, "Hi, Dad. If you're too busy for me, say so"; and of the officers and men lying entombed in the sunken hull of the Northampton, in the black waters off Guadalcanal. And he was thinking, in the depths of bitter sorrow, that he would ask Hopkins to try to get Natalie and her baby out of Lourdes, after all. She at least was alive.

  Harry Hopkins's bedroom in the White House was at one end of a long dark gloomy hall, a few doors down from the Oval Office. In a gray suit that hung on him like a scarecrow's rags, he stood looking out toward the sunlit Washington Monument. "Hello there, Pug. Happy New Year."

  He kept skinny hands clasped behind his back as he turned.

  This stooped, shabby, emaciated, yellow-faced civilian made a sharp contrast to the beefy Rear Admiral Carton, red of cheek and straight as a pole, standing near him in tailored blue and gold with a golden froth of shoulder cords. In newspaper accounts Hopkins sometimes seemed a Dumas figure, a sort of shadowy gliding in the presidential back rooms; but face to face he looked to Pug more like a debauched playboy, by the glint in his eye and his fatigued grin still hoping for fun. At a glance Pug took in the dark Lincoln painting and the plaque saying the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed here; also the homey touches of a rumpled red dressing gown flung over the unmade four-poster bed, a frilly negjigee beside it, pink Mules on the floor, and bottles of medicines lined up on the bedside table.

  "Thank you for seeing me, sir."

  "Always a pleasure. Sit you down." Carton left, and Hopkins faced Pug on a wine-colored couch seedily worn at the arms. "So!

  Cincpac wants YOU, too. Popular fella, aren't you?" Caught by surprise, Pug made no comment. "I suppose that would be your choice?"

  "I naturally prefer combat operations."

  "What about the Soviet Union?"

  "I'm not interested, sir." Hopkins cr bone-thin legs and rubbed a hand over his long curving jaw. "Do you remember a general Yevienko?"

  "Yes. Big burly gent. I met him on my trip to the Moscow front.

  "Just so. He's now Russia's top dog on Lend-Lease' Admiral Standley thinks you could help a lot in that area Yevleriko has mentioned you to Standley. Also Alistair Tudsbury's daughter, who I gather went along on that trip."

  "Yes, she did."

  "Well, you both made quite an impression on him. You know, Pug, your report about the Moscow front last December was a big help. I was a lonely voice around here, maintaining that the Russians would hold.

  The Army's intelligence estiznate was all wrong. Your paper impressed the President. He thinks you have horse sense, which is always in short supply around these parts."

  "I thought I'd queered myself by my gratuitous letter about the Minsk Jews."

  "Not at all." Hop casu kins ally waved away Pu
g's words.

  "Between you and me, Pug, the whole Jewish situation is a fearsome headache. The President has to keep dodging delegations of rabbis.

  The State Department tries to deflect them, but some do get through.

  It's all terribly pitiful, but what can he tell them? They just go over and over the same depressing ground- Invading France and breaking up that insane Nazi system is the only way to keep faith with the Russians, save the Jews, and end this damned war. And the key to that is landing craft, my friend." Hopkins leaned back on the couch with a shrewd look at Pug.

  Trying to stave off that tricky topic, Pug asked, "Sir, why don't we take in a lot more refugees?"

  "Modify the immigration laws, you mean," Hopkins replied briskly.

  "that's a tough one." He picked a blue book off a side table, and handed it to Pug. The title was America's Ju-DeaL "Ever see this?"

  "No, sir." Pug made a disgusted face and dropped it. "Nazi propaganda?"

  ."Possibly. The FBI says it's been widely circulated for years.

  It came in the mail, and should have gone into the wastebasket, but it reached my desk, and Louise saw it. It sickened her. My wife and I get a flood of hate mail, Pug.

  Half of it in various filthy ways calls us Jews, which would be funny if it weren't tragic. It's hit a peak since the Baruch dinner."

  Victor Henry looked puzzled.

  "Were you still abroad? Barney Baruch threw a sort of belated-and frankly, ill-advised-wedding dinner for us.

  Some reporter got hold of the menu. You can imagine, Pug, a Baruch blowout! Pitd de foie gras, champagne, caviar, the works. With all the discontent about rationing and shortages, I took my lumps again. That, plus the damned lie that: Beaverbrook gave Louise an emerald necklace worth half a million as a wedding present, really made things rough around here. I've got a rhinoceros hide, but I've exposed Louise to all this by marrying her. It's terrible." He made a gesture of loathing at the book. "Well, try to pass a new immigration law, and that poison will boil up all over the land. We'd probably get beaten on the KII. Certainly the war effort would suffer. And in the end what good would it do?

  We can't pry the Jews out of the German clutches." He gave Victor Henry an inquisitive. "Where's your daughterin-law now?"

  "Sir, that's why I asked to see you."

  Pug described Natalie's predicament, and Slote's idea for getting her out of Lourdes. Asking a favor came hard to him, and he somewhat fumbled his words. Hopkins listened with his thin mouth pursed. His reaction was quick and hard.

  "That's negotiating with the enemy. It would havp, to go to the President, and he'd bump it over to Welles. Lourdes, eh?

  Who's this fellow at State, again?" He pencilled Leslie Slote's name and telephone number on a bit of paper fished from his pocket.

  "Let me look into this."

  "I'm very grateful, sir." Pug made a move to rise.

  "Sit where you are. The President will call me soon. He has a cold and he's sleeping late." With a grin Hopkins unfolded a' yellow sheet from his breast pocket. "Just an average basket of crabs for him today. Like to hear it? One. Chinese calling home thetr military mission. Now, there's a bad business, Pug.

  Their demands for aid are just moonshine, in view of what we need in EuroPe. On the other hand, the Chinese front is a running sore for Japan. They've been fighting this war longer than any of us, and we have-to keep them placated.

  I "Two. Heating oil crisis in New England. God, what a flap!

  The wesither's fooled us, it's been a much colder winter than predicted. EverYbodY's freezirfg from New Jersey to Maine.

  The-Big Inch pipeline has fallen behind half a year. More controls, more trouble."

  Thus he read off and commented dourly on a list of topics: 3. Snag over the Siberian route for Lend-Lease.

  4. Sudden acute shortage of molybdenum.

  5. Pessimistic revised report on rubber.

  6. Another rash of U-boat sinkings in the Atlantic.

  7. German reinforcements in Tunisia throwing back Eisenhower's advance, and famine in Morocco threatening his supply lines.

  8. General MacArthur again, more troops and air power in New Guinea desperately needed.

  9. Revision of the State of the Union speech.

  10. Plans for a meeting with Churchill in North Africa.

  "Now that one's top secret, Pug." Hopkins rattled the paper at him. "We'll be going in 'about a week to Casablanca, P Joint Chiefs of Staff and all. Stalin begged off because of the Stalingrad battle, but we'll keep him informed. We're going to settle strategy for the rest of the war. The President hasn't been in an airplane in nine years, not since he took office.

  What's more, no President has ever flown abroad. He's as excited as a boy."

  Victor Henry was wondering at Hopkins's chatty expansiveness, but now came the explanation. Hopkins hunched forward and touched Pug's knee. "You know, Stalin's howling for a Channel crossing this year.

  That'll get thirty or forty German divisions off his back, and then he probably could throw the Germans out of Russia. He claims we welshed on a second front in '42. But we didn't have the landing craft, and we weren't ready in any respect The British hate the whole idea of invading France. At Casablanca they're bound to plead the landing craft shortage again."

  Drawn in despite himself, Pug asked, "What are the numbers now, sir?"

  "Come here." Hopkins led, Henry into another room, small, airless, full of dowdy old furniture, with one incongruous card table piled with files and papers.;"Have a seat. The Monroe Room, they call this, Pug. He signed the Doctrine here-now, what the devil! I was just looking at those figures." He shuffled papers on the table, and some fell off.

  Hopkins ignored these, pulling out and brandishing an ordinary file card, while Pug marvelled at this slapdash casualness at the hub of the war. "Here you are. Figures as of December fifteenth. They're cloudy, Pug, because the losses in North Africa aren't firmed up yet."

  .

  Victor Henry knew by heart the landing craft projections he had brought to the Argentia conference, and he was shocked by the statistics on the card that Hopkins read off.

  "Mr. Hopkins, what in God's name has happened to production?"

  Hopkins threw down the card. "A nightmare! We've lost a year!

  Not only in landing craft, but across the board. The trouble was priorities. Tugs of war between the Army, industry, the home economy, squabbles between this board and that board, jealous infighting among some fine men. All at each other's throats. Everybody was brandishing triple-A priorities, and nobody was getting anything delivered. We had a crazy sort of priority inflation, Pug. Priorities were getting meaningless as old German marks. The mess was beyond description.

  Then along came Victor Henry."

  Hopkins laughed at Pug's astonished blink. "Not really you, of course. Your sort. Ferdie Eberstadt is his name. One of these fellows nobody hears about, who can get things done.

  You'll have to meet him. A stockbroker, would you believe it? A Princeton type straight out of Wall Street. Never in government. They got him down here on the War Production Board, and Ferdie worked out a brand-new priorities scheme.

  The Controlled Materials Plan, he calls it. It gears all production plans to the flow of three materials-steel, copper, and aluminum. That stuffs being allotted now in a vertical Pattern, according to the thing that's being produced.

  Destroyer escort, long-range bomber, heavy truck for the Soviets, whatever it is, those -materials get allotted to make every single component of the thing. Not horizontally, some here, some there, some to the armed forces, some to the factories"-Hopkins waved his long arms wildly about"depending on who has the coziest inside track in Washington. Well, it's a miracle. Production figures are shooting up all over the country."

  He.was pacing as he talked, his lean clever face electrically alive. He dropped in a chair beside Henry's. "Pug, you can't imagine what was going on before Eberstadt did this.

  Piecemeal ins
anity! Waste to frighten the gods! Ten thousand tank tracks, and no tanks to put them on! A football field full of airplane frames, without engines or controls even being manufactured!

  A hundred LCIs docked and rusting away, for want of winches to drop and raise the ramps! That awful time is Over, and we can get the landing craft we need, but the Navy has to run a coherent show. That means one good man, a Ferdie Eberstadt, in charge. I've talked to Secretary Forrestal and to Vice Admiral Patterson. They know your record.

  They're for you." Hopkins leaned back in his chair spectacle frames to his mouth, his eyes twinkling. "Well, old top? Will you sign on the dotted line?"

  The telephone on the card table rang. "Yes, Mr. President.