Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance

by War

  "Mr. Aherne, are my wife and baby safe in that place?"

  "Considering that your wife is Jewish, Lieutenant, and that she was caught traveling illegally in German-occupied territory-for as you know, her journalist credentials were trumped up in Marseilles- she's lucky to have landed there.

  And as she herself writes, at the moment all is well."

  "Can you switch me to another office in your division, Mr. Leslie Slote?"

  "Ah- Leslie Slote? Leslie resigned from the State Department, quite awhile ago."

  "Where can I reach him?"

  "Sorry, I can't say."

  Byron asked Janice to try to call his mother, who might know where Slote was; and he went back to the Moray in as low a frame of mind as he had ever been.

  As soon as he left Janice began the beautifying routine that she had skipped for Byron's visit. Whether the feeling between them would ever warm up again she could not tell, but she knew that right now she had to keep her distance.

  Janice was very sorry for Natalie. She had never intended to steal Byron from her. But what indeed if she did not come back? The Theresienstadt letter struck Janice as ominous.

  She honestly wished Natalie would extricate herself and come home safely with the baby, but the chances seemed to be fading. Meantime, she enjoyed the cornucopia sense of pouring herself out to two men, each time the Moray made port. She preferred Byron on the whole; but Aster had his points, and he certainly deserved a good time when he returned from combat. Janice was, in fact, doing a very fair job of eating her cake and having it. She had given Byron his ritual lunch, and the next thing was the ritual rendezvous with Aster.

  Byron found Aster waiting in the Moray's wardroom, dressed for the beach and hollowly cheerful. "Well, Briny, the admiral was okay. All is forgiven. We get our Mark Eighteens, and a target ship for training runs. Two weeks for turnaround, and back to the Sea of Japan." He made a bravura flourish with his cigar. "Tomorrow, captain's inspection. Friday Admiral Nimitz comes aboard to give us a unit citation for the first patrol. Saturday, under way at 0600 for electric torpedo exercises. Questions?"

  "Hell, yes, what about rest and recreation for the crew?"

  "Coming to that. One week in drydock for the new sonar head, and repairs to the stern outer doors. Liberty for all hands. Three more days of training, and we're off to Midway and La Perouse Strait."

  "One week for the men isn't enough."

  "Yes, it is," Aster snapped. "This crew has been hurt in its pride. It needs victories a lot more than R and R. Why are you so down in the mouth, anyway? How's Janice?"

  "She's all right. Look, Captain, I thought we'd be getting a telephone line over from the dock today, but Hansen just told me no soap. Would you give her a ring while you're ashore?

  Tell her to call me at the officers' club about ten o'clock."

  "Will do," Aster said with a strange grimace, and he left.

  Byron assumed that Aster had a woman in Honolulu, but it had never once crossed his mind that the woman might be Janice. So far Aster had been playing along with Janice's pretense, but not liking it much. He thought she was making a fool of her brother-in-law. Byron's obtuseness troubled him; couldn't he sense what was going on? Aster saw nothing wrong in what he and Janice were doing. They were both free, and neither wanted marriage. He didn't think that Byron would mind, but Janice claimed that he would be shocked and alienated, and she insisted on discretion. That was that. It was a subject they no longer talked about, But he was in an evil mood and a lot of drinking did little to improve it. It grated on him when she telephoned the officers' club at ten o'clock, sitting up on the bed naked, her skin still glistening with amorous perspiration.

  "IE, Briny. Leslie Slote will be waiting for your call in his office tomorrow afternoon at one," she said with sweet calm, as though she sat at home with knitting in her lap. "That's seven in the morning -our time, you know. Here's the number." She read it off a, slip of paper.

  "Did you talk to Slote?"

  "No. Actually it was a Lieutenant commander Anderson who tracked him down, and called me back. Do you know him? Simon Anderson. He seems to be living temporarily at your mother's place. Something about a fire in his apartment house, and she's putting him up for a couple of weeks."

  "Simon Anderson's an old beau of Madeline's."

  "Oh, well'l maybe that explains it. Your mother wasn't there.

  Madeline came on the line first, sounding all bubbly.

  She was about to go out for a job interview, so she put Anderson on."

  "Madeline's back in Washington to stay, then?"

  "She seems to be."

  "Why, that's marvelous."

  "Will you come to lunch tomorrow, Briny?"

  "No can do. Captain's inspection."

  "Call me and tell me what Slote says."

  "I will."

  Aster had been around women; he had been in such a situation with the sweethearts of other men, and with a wife, too.

  He usually felt sympathy, tinged with contempt, for the poor fish on the other end of the line; but this was Byron Henry being taken in by Janice's coy charade.

  "Jesus Christ, Janice," Aster said when she hung up, "are you still playing games with Byron, when Natalie's in a goddamn concentration camp?"

  "Oh, just shut up!" Aster had been peevish and difficult all evening. He had said nothing whatever about the patrol, and he had gotten quite drunk; the sex in consequence had been a sputtering business, and Janice was feeling testy herself. "I didn't say she was in a concentration camp."

  "Sure you did. In Czechoslovakia, you said."

  "Look, you're too smashed to know what I said. I'm sorry you had a disappointing patrol. The next one will be better.

  Suppose I just go home now?"

  "Do as you please, baby." Aster rolled on his side and went to sleep. After thinking it over, Janice did the same.

  By the next morning a telephone had been rigged aboard the Moray.

  Byron got his call through to Leslie Slote, though it took several hours. The connection was a scratchy one, and when he finished reading Natalie's letter there was such a long noisy pause that he asked, "Leslie, are you still there?"

  "I'm here." Slote uttered a sigh close to a groan. "What can I do for you, Byron? Or for her? What can anybody do?

  If you want my advice, just put all this from your mind."

  "How can I?"

  "That's up to you. Nobody knows much about that model ghetto. It does exist, and it may in fact prove a haven for her.

  I just can't tell you. Send her the letters and Red Cross packages, and keep sinking Japs, that's all. It doesn't help to go out of your head."

  "I'm not going out of my head."

  "Good. Neither am I. I'm a new man. I've made five training parachute jumps. Five! Remember.the incident on the Praha road?"

  "What incident?" Byron asked, though he never talked to Slote without thinking of his cowardly collapse under fire outside Warsaw.

  "You don't recall? I'll bet you do. Anyway, do you see me making parachute jumps?"

  "I'm in submarines, Leslie, and I always hated the Navy."

  "Bah, you're from a warrior family. I'm a diplomat, a linguist, altogether a bespectacled cream puff. I die forty deaths in every jump. Yet I enjoy myself in an eerie fashion."

  "Parachute jumps for what?"

  "O.S.S. Intelligence. Fighting a war is the best way to forget what it's all about, Byron. that's a novel perception for me, and enormously illuminating."

  "Leslie, what are Natalie's chances?"

  Another very long scratchy pause.

  "Leslie?"

  "Byron, she's in a damnable situation. She has been, ever since Aaron wouldn't leave Italy in 1939. As you recall, I begged him to.

  You were-sitting right there. They've done stupid and rash things, and now the fat's in the fire. But she's tough and strong and clever.

  Fight the war, Byron. Fight the war, and put your wife from your mind.

 
Her, and all the other Jews. That's what I've done. Fight the war, and forget what you can't help. If you're a praying man, pray. I wouldn't talk like this if I were still employed at State, naturally.

  Goodbye."

  When the Moray sailed, there were more defections from the crew than there had been in all previous patrols put together: requests for transfers, sudden illnesses, even some A.W.O.LS.

  The sky over Midway was low and gray, the wind dankly cold.

  Fueling was almost complete. Hands jammed in his windbreaker pockets, Byron paced the deck in a strong stench of diesel oil, making a last topside inspection before the long pull to Japan. Each departure from Midway made him think long dark thoughts. Somewhere around here, on the ocean floor in a shattered-airplane, his brother's bones lay.

  Leaving Midway meant sallying forth from the last outpost, on the long lonely hunt. It meant calculation of distances, chances, fuel capacity, food stores; also of the state of nerves of the captain and the crew. Aster emerged on the bridge in fresh khakis and overseas cap, with eyes cleared and color restored by a few sober days under way; very much the killer-captain, Byron thought, even laying it on a bit to cheer up his depressed and edgy sailors.

  "Say, Briny, Mullen's going with us, after all," he called down to the forecastle.

  "He is? What changed his mind?"

  "I talked to him."

  Mullen was the Moray's first-class yeoman. His orders to chiefs' school had arrived, and he was due to fly back to the States from Midway. But like all submarine sailors, the Moray crew were a superstitious lot , and many of them believed that this yeoman was the ship's good-luck charm, simply because his nickname was Horseshoes.

  The name had nothing to do with his luck; Mullen tended to lose at cards and dice, also to fall off ladders, get himself arrested by the shore patrol, and so on. Nevertheless, Horseshoes he was, so dubbed at boot camp years ago because he had won a horseshoe-pitching contest.

  Byron had overheard many foreboding comments by crewmen on the transfer of Mullen, but it jarred him that Aster had gone and worked the man over.

  He found Mullen thumping a typewriter in the tiny ship's office, a cigar thrust in his round red face; if Byron was not mistaken, one of the captain's Havanas. The tubby little sailor had been dressed in whites to go ashore, but he was wearing his washed-out dungarees again.

  "What's all this, Mullen?"

  "Just thought I'd grab one more patrol on this hell ship, sir.

  The food is so lousy I'll lose weight. The Stateside gals will like that."

  "If you want to get off, say so, and you'll go."

  The yeoman took a long puff at the expensive cigar, and his genial face toughened. "Mr. Henry, I'd follow Captain Aster to hell. He's the greatest skipper in SubPac, and now that we've got those Mark Eighteens, this is going to be the Moray Maru's greatest patrol. I'm not about to miss it. Sir, where is Tarawa?"

  "Tarawa? Down in the Gilberts. Why?"

  "Marines are catching hell there. Look at this." He was making carbon copies of the latest news broadcast from Pearl Harbor. The tone of the bulletin was grave: fierce opposition... very heavy casualties... outcome in'doubt...

  "Well, the first day of a landing is the worst."

  "People think we've got rough duty." Horseshoes shook his head. "Those Marines sure bought the shit end of this war."

  The Moray left Midway in a melancholy drizzle. For days the weather kept worsening. The submarine never rode well on the surface, and in these frigid stormy latitudes, shipboard life was a bruising routine of treacherous footing, seasickness, cold meals half-spilled, and hang sleep through interminable dull days and nights. In the northwest Pacific, an inactive waste of tempestuous black water, the Japanese were unlikely to be doing much patrolling, and visibility was poor. Still, Aster maintained a combat alert all day. Frostbitten lookouts and OODs were coming off watch cracking ice from their clothes.

  Making a transit of the rocky Kuriles within air range of Japan, Aster sailed on at fifteen knots, merely doubling the lookouts. The Mc*ay was not a submarine, but a "submersible," he liked to say-that is, a surface ship that could dive-and skulking under the sea was no way to get places.

  Byron agreed, but he thought Aster sometimes crowded the line between courage and rashness. By now several submarines had Patrolled the Sea of Japan; the Wahoo had disappeared there; the enemy might well have an air patrol OUt-Fortunately the Moray was travelling most of the time in fog and sleet. Byron's dead reckoning was getting a hard workout.

  Seven days out of Midway, a shift in the wind thinned the fog, and the hills of Hokkaido ridged the gray horizon ahead.

  To starboard a higher black lump showed: the headlands of Sakhalin.

  "Soya Kaikyo!" Aster jocularly hailed La Pdrouse Strait by the Japanese name, and clapped Byron's shoulder. "Well done, Mister Navigator." The Moray was wallowing on heavy quartering swells, and a bitter stern wind whipped the captain's thick blond hair as he squinted landward. "Now then, how close do we go before we pull the plug? Do the Japs have radar yet on those hills, or not?"

  "Let's not find out," said Byron. "Not now."

  With a slow reluctant nod, Aster said, "Concur. Clear the bridge."

  Riding at periscope depth was a restful change after a week of plunging and rolling. Seasick sailors climbed out of their bunks and ate sandwiches and hot soup at level tables. At the periscope, Byron was struck by the romance of the view in the glass. As the Moray neared the eastern entrance, the setting sun shot red rays under the low clouds, haloing in rosy mist the Hokkaido hill called Maru Yama.

  Across Byron's mind there flashed an old lovely vision. Japanese art had charmed him in his undergraduate days; the paintings, novels, and poetry had conjured up fairyland landscapes, delicately exotic architecture, and quaintly costumed little people with perfect manners and subtle esthetic tastes. This picture did not mesh at all with "the Japs," the barbarians who had smashed Pearl Harbor, raped Nanking, taken the Philippines and Singapore, killed his brother, and stolen an empire. He took grim pleasure in torpedoing "Japs." But this glimpse of misty Maru Yama in the sunset brought back that early vision. Did "theJaps"-itoccuriedtohimtowonder-considerAmericans barbarians? He did not feel like a barbarian, nor did the dungareed sailors on watch look barbarous. Yet the Moray was approaching the quaint fairyland to murder by stealth asmany "Japs" as it could.

  In short, war.

  Byron summoned the captain to show him through the scope two vessels steaming eastward with running lights on: sparks of red, green, and white vivid in the twilight.

  "Russkis, no-doubt," said Aster. "Are they in the designated Russian route?"

  "Dead on," said Byron, "Good. That's where the mines aren't."

  Last time, Aster had commented wryly on this freak aspect of the war: Soviet ships plying the Lend-Lease run through Jap waters with impunity, though Germany's defeat was bound to drag down Japan. Now, peering through the Periscope, he remarked in businesslike tones, ,Say, why don't we go through showing lights? If the Nips have installed radar up here, that's better deception than running darkimed."

  "Suppose we're challenged?"

  "Then we're stupid Russians who didn't get the word."

  "I'm for it, Captain."

  In full view of the Japanese coast, about an hour after dark, the dripping Moray turned on its lights. For Byron, standing on the bridge in the strong fitezing wind, it was the strangest moment of the war.

  He had never yet sailed on an illuminated submarine. The white masthead lights fore and aft dazzled like suns; the red and green glows seemed to shoot out to port and starboard half a mile. The ship was so visibly, so horribly a submarine! But only from the bridge; surely nothing could be seen from the Japanese headland ten miles away but the lights, if that much.

  The lights were seen. As the Moray plunged along through the coal-dark strait, a signal searchlight on Hokkaido blinked.

  Aster and BYron were flailing their arms and stamping on the bridg
e. The signaller blinked again. And yet again. "No spikka da ioponese", said Xster.