Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance

by War

  Tehran is reachable from Washington in less than ten days, with all equipment pushing in fair weather. But we're told Tehran weather is unpredictable and horrendous- We're also told it's not all that bad.

  Nobody around here seems to know much about Persia. TO Washington types it's like the moon.

  I suggested that you fly down there, look around, ask some questions, and shoot us a word on the weather prospects at the end of-November, and on the security angle too, since we hear the place crawls with Axis spies.

  Also, the President is fortifying himself with facts and figures for talking with Stalin, and Lend-Lease is bound to come up. We have sheaves of reports, but we could use a good eyewitness account of how things are really going in the Persian supply corridor. Unlike most report-writers you have no axe to grind!

  General COnnolly is the man in charge at our Amirabad base outside Tehran. He's a good man, an old Army engineer. I knew him well years ago when I headed the WPA and he handled some big construction projects. I have cabled him about You. Connolly will give you a rapid tour of our Lend-Lease port facilities, rail and truck routes, factories, and depots. You can ask any questions, go anywhere, talk to anybody. The President will want to see you before he meets Stalin; and if you can sum up your observations on one sheet of paper that will be a real help.

  Incidentally, the landing craft problem has now reached a critical stage, as I foresaw. It's the strangling bottleneck of all our strategic plans. Production is increasing, but it could be a lot better. However, you'll soon be returning to your first love, the sea.

  The President is aware that you feel like a stranded whale.

  Yours, Harry Hopkins The letters came as a cheering reprieve.

  Admiral Standley had not lasted long after his outburst; Harriman had succeeded him, bringing a large military mission headed by a three-star general, which spelled the end of Victor Henry's job. But as yet he had received no orders, and he was beginning to think Bupers had lost track of him. Moscow was again snowbound. He had not heard from Rhoda or his children in months. At last he could escape from the boredom of Spaso House talk, the bitching of the frustrated vodkasoaked American newspapermen, and the unfriendly deviousness and obduracy of the Russian bureaucrats. The same afternoon that he got the letters he was on a Russian military plane to Kuibyshev, thanks to a last assist from General Yevlenko. Next day General Connolly met Pug at the airport, put him up in his own quarters on the huge newly built base in the desert, served him venison for dinner, and over coffee and brandy handed him an itinerary that made him blink.

  "It'll take you a week or so," said Connolly, a bluff West Pointer in his sixties who bit out rapid words, "but then you'll have something to tell old Harry Hopkins. What we're doing here is sheer lunacy. One country, the U.S.A is trying to deliver stuff to another country, the USSR, under the control, or rather interference, of a third country, England, through the territory of a fourth country, Persia, where none of us have any goddamned business being. And' "You lose me. Why should England interfere?"

  "You're new to the Middle East." Connolly blew out an exasperated breath. "Let me try to explain. The British are here by right of invasion and occupation, see? So are the Russia'is. They partitioned this country by armed force back in 1941, so as to suppress German activity here. That was the reason given, anyhow. Now, follow me carefully. We have no right to be here, because we haven't invaded Persia. See' Clear as mud, what? Theoretically we're merely helping the( British help Russia. The striped-pants boys are still dingdonging about all that. Meantime we're just shoving the goods through any old way, insofar as the Limeys win let us, and the Persians don't steal it, and the Russkis will come and get it. It keeps piling sky-high in the Soviet depots."

  "It does? But in Moscow they keep screaming for more."

  "Naturally. That has nothing todo with their own transport foul-up. It's monumental. I had to call an eight-day rail embargo back in August, till they came and took away a mountain of stuff at the northern railhead. Once their pilots, drivers, and railroad men get out of the workers' paradise they tend to linger outside. Being fresh from Moscow, you probably can't understand that."

  "Beats me." They grinned tart American grins at each other. Pug said, "I also have to look into the weather here."

  "What about the weather?"

  As Pug described the President's legal difficulty, General Connolly's face wrinkled in a pained frown. ",Are you kidding? Why didn't somebody ask me? The weather's changeable, and the dust storms are a nuisance, sure. But we've had maybe two scheduled military flights held up all year. He and Stalin must be playing games. Stalin wants to make him come all the way to his back fence, and the Great White Father is standing on his dignity. I hope he sticks to that.

  Old'Joe should move his tail himself. Russians don't admire people they can shove around."

  "General, there's a lot of ignorance about Persia in Washington."

  "Christ, you said a mouthful. Well, look, even assuming big winter storms at both ends"-Connolly scratched his head with a hand holding a thick smoking cigar -"that bill'he might want to veto could be delivered to Tunis in five days, and we could fly him there in a B-24. He'd go there and back and miss maybe one day here. It's not a real problem."

  "Well, I'll cable all that to Hopkins. I have to check into security here, too."

  "No sweat, I'll give you the whole drill. How's your backgammon game?" Connolly asked, pouring more brandy for both of them.

  Pug had played a lot of acey-deucey over the years. He beat the general two games running, and was winning the third when Connolly said, looking up at him from the board and half-closing one eye, "Say, Henry, we have a mutual acquaintance, don't we?"

  "Who?"

  "Hack Peters." At Pug's blank look he elaborated, "Colonel Harrison Peters, Engineers. Class of 1913. Big tall guy, bachelor."

  "Oh, right. I met him at the Army-Navy Club."

  Connolly heavily nodded. "He wrote me about this Navy captain who was Harry Hopkins's boy in Moscow. Now here we meet in this godforsaken neck of the woods. Small world."

  Pug played on without further comment, and lost. The general happily folded away the elegantly inlaid board and the ivory counters.

  "Hack's working on something that can end this war overnight.

  He's cagey about it, but it's the biggest job the Army engineers have ever tackled."

  "I don't know anything about that."

  Bedding down in the chilly desert night on an austere Army-issue bed under three coarse blankets, Pug wondered what Colonel Peters could have written about him, after meeting him for a casual raucous hour of drinking champagne and wearing paper hats at a club table. Rhoda had mentioned Peters now and then as a church acquaintance. A possible connection with Palmer Kirby through the uranium bomb crossed Pug's mind, giving him a sick ugly qualm. After all, why had Rhoda's letters ceased? Communication with Moscow was difficult, but possible. Three silent months... His fatigue and the brandy helped him blot out these thoughts in sleep.

  General Connolly's itinerary called for Pug to traverse Iran, south to north, by railroad and truck convoy; a man from the British legation, Granville Seaton, would go along partway on the train trip.

  The truck convoys were an all-American show to back up the rail. road, which suffered so Connolly said-from sabotage, washouts, pilferin breakdowns, collisions, hijacking raids, and the general inefficiency built in by the Germans, and compounded by Persian and British mismanagement.

  "Granville Seaton really knows the whole Persian setup," said Connolly. "He's a history scholar, a strange duck, but worth listening to. He loves bourbon. I'll give you some Old Crow to pack along."

  On the flight down to Abadan the small plane was too noisy for talk. In the long sweaty tour of an astonishingly large American airplane assembly plant on the desolate seasidp flats, where the temperature must have been well over a hundred degrees, Granville Seaton trudged alongside Pug and the factory manager, smoking and saying noth
ing. Then they drove up to Bandar Shahpur, the rail terminal on the Persian Gulf. Seaton chatted over their dinner at a British officers' mess, but the flutey sing-song words came out so blurry and strangled That he might as well have been talking Persian.

  Pug had never seen a man smoke so much. Seaton himself looked rather smoked; dried-out, brownish, weedy, with a wide gap between large yellow upper front teeth. Pug had the fancy that if injured the man would bleed brown as-a tobacco stain.

  . Next day at breakfast Pug produced the hole of Old Crow. At this Seaton smiled like a boys "Most deradent," he said, and held."out his water glass.

  The single-track railway crossed dead salt flats and twisted up toward dead mountains. Seen from an airplane the barrenness of this country was bad enough, but from a train window it was worse. No brush grew, miles. without end; sand, sand, sand. The train halted to take on another diesel locomotive and they got off to stretch their legs.

  Not so much as a jackrabbit or a Hurd moved on the sand. Only flies swarmed.

  "This may have been the actual garden of Eden, Seaton 'suddenly spoke up. "It could be again, given water, energy, and a people to work the ground. But Iran lies on this landscape inert as a jellyfish on a rock. You Americans could help. And you had better."

  They got back aboard. Clanking and groaning, the train ascended a rocky gorge on a hairpin-turning roadbed. Seaton unwrapped Spam sandwiches, and Pug brought out the Old Crow.

  "What should we do about Iran?" Pug asked, pouring bourbon into paper cups.

  "Save her from the Russians," replied Seaton. "Either because you're as altruistic and anti-imperialist as you say, or because you'd rather not see the Soviet Union come out of this war dominating the earth."

  "Dominating the earth?" Pug asked skeptically. "Why?

  How?"

  "The geography." Seaton drank bourbon, giving Pug a severe stare.

  "That's the key. The Iranian plateau bars Russia from warm-water ports. So she's landlocked half the year.

  Also bars her from India. Lenin hungrily called India the depot of the world. Said it was the main prize of his policy in Asia. But Persia, jammed by a thoughtful Providence against the Caucasus like a huge plug, holds back the Bear. It's as big as all western Europe, and mostly it's harsh mountains and salt deserts, such as you're looking at. The people are wild mountain tribes, nomads, feudal villagers, wily lowlanders, all very independent and unmanageable." His paper cup was 'empty. Pug quickly poured more bourbon. "Ah, thank you.

  The prime truth of modern Persian history, Captain, is simply this and remember it: Russia's enemy is Iran's friend. That's been the British role since 1800. Though on the whole we've bungled it, and come off as perfidious Albion."

  The train howled into a long inky tunnel. When it clattered back into the sunglare, Seaton was toying with his empty paper cup. Pug refilled it. "Ah, lovely."

  "Perfidious Albion, you were saying."

  "Just so. You see, from time to time we've needed Russia's help in Europe-against Napoleon, against the Kaiser, and now against Hitler -and each time we've had to Turn a blind eye to Persia, and the Bear each time has seized the chance to claw off a chunk. While we were allied against Napoleon, the Czar snatched the whole Caucasus. The Persians fought to regain their land, but we couldn't support them just then, so they had to quit. That's how Russia happen's to possess the Baku and Maikop oil fields."

  "All this," said Pug, "is complete news to me."

  "Well, the tale gets sorrier. In 1907, when Kaiser Bill was getting nasty, we needed Russia in Europe again. The Kaiser was probing the Middle East with his Berlin-Baghdad railway, so we and the Russians oartitioned Persia: sphere of influence in the north for them, in the south for us, with a neutral desert belt in between. Quite without consulting the Persians. And now again we've divided the country by armed invasion. Not pretty, but the Shah was decidedly proGerman, and we had to do it to secure our Middle East position.

  Still, one can't blame the Shah, can one? From his viewpoint, Hitler was striking at the two powers who've gnawed at Persia north and south for a century and a half."

  "You're being very frank."

  "Ah, well, among friends. Now look at it from Stalin's viewpoint for a moment, if you can. He partitioned Poland with Hitler. That we consider sinful. He partitioned Persia with us. That we consider quite all right. Appealsto his better nature may therefore confuse him a bit. You Americans have just got to take this thing firmly in hand."

  "Why should we get into this mess at all?" asked Pug.

  "Captain, the Red Army now occupies northern Iran.

  We're in the south. The Atlantic Charter commits us to get out after the war. You'll want us to comply. But what about the Russians?

  Who gets them out? Czarist or communist, Russia acts exactly the same, I assure you."

  He gave Pug a long solemn stare. Pug stared back, not replying.

  "Do you see the picture? We vacate. The Red army stays.

  How long will it be before they control Iranian politics, and advance by invitation to the Persian Gulf and the Khyber Pass?

  Changing the world balance beyond recall, Without firing a shot?"

  Aftei a gravelled silence, Pug asked, "What do we do about it?"

  "Here endeth the first lesson," said Seaton. He tilted his yellow straw hat over his eyes and fell asleep. Pug dozed, too.

  When the train jolted them awake, they were in a huge railway yard crowded with locomotives, freight cars, flatcars, tank cars, cranes, and trucks, where a great noisy activity went on: loading, unloading, shunting about of train sections on sidings, with much shouting by unshaven American soldiers in fatigues, and a wild gobble from crowds of native workers. The sheds and carbams were newly erected, and most of the rails looked freshly laid. Seaton took Pug on a jeep tour of the yard. Breezy and cool despite a strong afternoon sun, the yard filled hundreds of acres of sandy desert, between a little town of mud-brick houses and a range of steep brown dead crags.

  "Yankee energy endlessly amazes me. You've conjured up all this in months. Does archeology bore you?" Seaton pointed at a flinty slope. "There are Sassanid rock tombs up there. The has-reliefs are worth a look."

  They got out of the jeep and climbed in gusty wind. Seaton smoked as he went, picking his way upward like a goat. His stamina violated-all physical rules; he was less out of breath than Pug when they reached the-dark holes in the hillside, where the wind-eroded carvings, to Pug's unpracticed eye, looked Assyrian: bulls, lions, stiff curly-bearded warriors.

  Here all was quiet. Far below, the railroad yard clanged and squealed, a small busy blotch on the ancient silent desert.

  "We can't stay in Iran once the war's won," Pug remarked, pitching his voice above the wind. "Our people don't think that way. All that stuff down there will just rust and rot."

  "No, but there are things to do before you leave."

  A loud hollow groan sounded behind them in the tomb.

  Seaton said owlishly, "The wind across the mouth of the sepulchre.

  Odd effect, what? Rather like blowing over an open bottle."

  "I damned near jumped off this hill," said Pug.

  "The natives say it's the souls of the ancients, sighing over Persia's fate. Not inappropriate. Now look here. In 1941, after the invasion and partition, the three governments Iran, the USSR, and my country-signed a treaty. Iran promised to expel the German agents and -make no more trouble, and we and Russia agreed to get out after the war.

  Well, Stalin will just ignore that scrap of paper. But if you join in the treaty-that is, if Stalin promises Roosevelt he'll get out-that's something else. He may actually go. With grunts, shoves, and growls, but it's the only chance."

  "Is it in the works?"

  "Not at all."

  "Why not?"

  Seaton threw up skinny brown hands.

  Toward evening the train passed a string of smashed freight cars lying twisted and overturned by the roadbed. "This was a bad one," said Seaton."

/>   "German agents planted the dynamite. Tribesmen looted the cars. They had good intelligence.

  The cargo was food. Worth its weight in-gold, in this country.

  The big shots are hoarding all the grain, and most other edibles.

  The corruption here boggles the Western mind, but it's how things are done in the Middle East. Byzantium and the Ottomans have left their mark."

  He talked far into the night about the ingenious pilfering and raiding devices of the Persians, which were a real drain on Lend-Lease.

  To them, he said, this river of goods suddenly rushing through their land, south to north, was just another aspect of impetfalist madness.