The General's Women

by Susan Wittig Albert

  Kay got the rest of the story from a pink-faced and sputtering Butch, who carried the dog downstairs a little later. As Ike and Marshall were chatting, Telek had jumped up on Marshall’s bed, hiked his leg, and peed on the pillow.

  “Just like a kid thumbing his nose at a mean old man,” Butch said, trying to smother his laughter. “Ike was red as a beet. I couldn’t decide whether he was mad at the dog or trying to keep from laughing.”

  Kay fought against a giggle. “Bad puppy,” she said sternly.

  She smuggled the disgraced Telek out of the house and kept him with her until Marshall had left Algiers. When she returned the dog to the villa the next morning, Ike took him with a gruff “thank you.” To Telek, he said, “Don’t you ever, ever do that again.”

  Telek licked his nose.

  • • •

  One good thing did come out of the uncomfortable visit. Concerned about Ike’s health, Marshall ordered him to lay off the sixteen-hour days and make time for some relaxation.

  “What I need is another Telegraph Cottage,” Eisenhower said, and Butch immediately went in search of it.

  A few days later, Kay drove Ike and Butch to take a look at the new retreat, ten miles outside of Algiers. It was a white stucco farmhouse with a red-tiled roof and three small bedrooms, surrounded by a courtyard fence. Its biggest attractions: a stable, a sandy beach on a quiet cove, a range of open woodland, and a gorgeous view of the Mediterranean from the clifftop. Butch gave it the name “Sailor’s Delight”—because, Kay suspected, he and Molly intended to make use of it, too.

  The Boss called it “the farm” and ordered Butch to find him some horses. “Get a couple,” he added, turning to Kay with the brusqueness that had become typical of his communications with her. “You want to ride too, Irish?”

  “That would be smashing,” Kay replied, because that was the truth. Then she hoped she hadn’t sounded too eager. She didn’t want him to misunderstand.

  “Good,” Ike said. To Butch, he said, “Let’s have the horses here next week, when Kay and I get back from the front.”

  “She’s driving you to Tebessa?” Butch slid a questioning glance at Kay. He lowered his voice. “You sure that’s a good idea?”

  Kay saw the General bristle. “Why not?” he growled.

  “Well, because . . .” Butch looked uncomfortable. “She’s . . . you know. A woman. She—”

  “Cut that crap, Butch,” the Boss said shortly. “There are nurses out there. Women have a job to do just like men. It’s a fact of life. The sooner everybody gets used to it, the better.”

  Butch shifted from one foot to the other. “That wasn’t exactly what I—”

  “I’ll leave it up to you, Irish,” the Boss said, interrupting again. “This is a combat drive and you’re a volunteer. If for any reason you don’t want to do it, you’re excused. I’ll get somebody else.”

  Kay knew what Butch was getting at. It was the appearance of the thing, especially given what Marshall had said. And she wasn’t sure she wanted to make the drive. It would be long and uncomfortable and dangerous. But maybe the General was doing this because of what Marshall had said. Maybe Ike wanted to prove—to Marshall, to the rest of them—that she was a soldier, just like everybody else. If that was it, she had to back him up.

  “I’ll do it, sir,” she said promptly.

  The Boss didn’t say thank you. “Be ready to leave at midnight,” he said. “It’s a two-day drive.”

  Kay straightened her shoulders. Good. The long trip would allow her to demonstrate to the General that their personal encounters were behind them, in the past, forgotten. She was a soldier and she was doing a soldier’s job. What’s more, she was engaged to Dick. He was first in her life and in her thoughts, as he should be.

  Her determination was strengthened by Dick’s almost daily letters. He was still in Oran, and still hoping that Fredendall would give him his own command at the front. And he had news:

  . . . the very best news! I’ve applied to my CO for permission to marry you and it’s been granted. In fact, it went all the way up to Eisenhower and came back with his John Henry on the bottom line. June 22 is the date I put down—which might have to be delayed if the Tunisian campaign drags on.

  So there it is, in black and white, my dear. You can’t back out now. I love you, Kay, more than I can ever say.

  “I love you, too,” she wrote back to him, “with all my heart.”

  And of course she did. A June bride, she told herself, smiling a little. She would be a June bride, and the gang in Eisenhower’s office could help them celebrate. The thought of Eisenhower pulled her back to Dick’s letter. The General had approved his request to marry—and he hadn’t said anything to her about it? That was odd.

  But no matter. She would be a June bride, Dick’s bride. And when the war was over, she would go home with him to America and they would live happily ever after. If she thought with a half-furtive pleasure of horseback riding with Ike at the farm, she quickly pulled a curtain over the thought.

  • • •

  It was a chilly, rainy midnight on February 12 when Kay began her first combat drive. They were taking the Cadillac, which she seldom drove in town because Mickey had been right: it was big and as hard to maneuver as a tank. But it was heavy enough to take the punishment of the mountain roads and armored against attack, so that’s what she was driving. She was dressed for the trip in slacks, a man’s battle blouse, a fleece-lined leather RAF jacket that had turned up in St. George’s lost and found, brown boots, and a steel helmet.

  Ike chuckled when he saw her. “Well, we’ve got the tank,” he said, putting a hand on the Cadillac’s hood. “All you need are a pair of ivory-handled revolvers and you could pass for Georgie Patton.”

  “I have my gun, sir,” Kay said firmly, and pulled out the Beretta that replaced the one she had lost when the Strathallan went down. The front was 720 miles away and the two-lane road was known to be dangerous. If there was trouble, she was determined to hold up her end as well as one of the boys.

  “That’ll do.” Ike said. “Let’s get on the road, Irish.”

  The five-vehicle convoy set off. The lead scout car went first, followed by Kay and Eisenhower in the Cadillac, his flag fluttering on the hood. A weapons carrier followed, and a backup sedan (in case the Caddy was disabled), with a second scout car bringing up the rear. The convoy moved as fast as conditions allowed, but the twisting two-lane road was crowded with large trucks carrying equipment and supplies to the front and ambulances carrying the wounded back. Bands of rain and low fog slicked the macadam surface. Kay found herself hunched over the wheel, her attention fixed on the narrow pavement ahead. If her backseat passenger had asked her a question, personal or otherwise, she couldn’t have answered him.

  The grueling, white-knuckle drive was broken by an overnight stop in the ancient walled city of Constantine, where Brigadier General Truscott had established an advance command post in an empty orphanage. There, in that all-male enclave, Kay found herself the target of a barrage of grins, muted wolf-whistles, and pointed remarks. Eisenhower, hearing it, flushed red, glowered, and muttered about the lack of discipline.

  Kay wasn’t offended. She knew that the men hadn’t seen a woman for months and would whistle at anybody who looked remotely female, even in slacks and a battle-scarred flight jacket. But in one or two of the remarks, she caught an assumption about her and Eisenhower that made her distinctly uncomfortable. She could only hold her head high and hope that Dick wouldn’t hear any of it.

  That was bad enough, but what happened at Tebessa was worse. The convoy left Constantine at dawn and pushed on through showers of sleet and cold rain toward the front, a couple of hundred miles farther east. Truscott had joined Eisenhower in the backseat and Kay could hear the tension in their voices as they discussed plans to meet a threatened Axis attack. At Tebessa, in the late afternoon, the biting wind that swept down from the highlands was filled with spurts of icy rain. Eisenhower ordered
Kay to stay at the command post. He picked up another car and driver and headed out into the desert to the American airfields at Thélepte and Fériana.

  Kay could sense a deep uneasiness among the men at the post. The recent action had produced casualties, and the post hospital was full. She overheard low-voiced, edgy talk of intelligence reports of a German attack in the next few hours, although nobody seemed to know where it might occur or how the Allies would respond. She heard a couple of worried officers saying that the danger of ambush was so high that the General should fly back to Algiers, rather than drive. They seemed to be concerned about their four-star guest out on the desert, too—especially after they lost radio contact with Eisenhower’s party. And she caught a couple of raised eyebrows and quizzical glances and understood what was behind them. The sentries’ code-word challenge, “Snafu” and the countersign, “Damned right” summed up the general apprehension.

  Kay ate at the officers’ mess, then decided to get some sleep in order to be ready for the trip home—or for whatever else might happen. A corporal directed her to the VIP tent, which boasted a pebble floor rather than the usual mud, and a pair of army cots with just enough room for a thin soldier to sidle between them. Fully dressed and still wearing her boots, she climbed into her sleeping bag, pulled it over her head, and went to sleep.

  It was pitch black when she was awakened by the General’s gruff voice outside the tent. The corporal was saying, “Your driver’s in there, sir. Hang on and I’ll find her another tent.”

  “Hell, no,” Eisenhower rasped. “She didn’t dump me in the goddamned ditch. She’s gotta get me back to Algiers tomorrow. Let her sleep.”

  No! Kay thought. What was he thinking? She was struggling to get out of her sleeping bag so Eisenhower could have the place to himself, but he had already come in and was snapping the tent flaps. A moment later, he had spread his sleeping bag on the cot next to hers and was climbing in, fully dressed and wearing his battle jacket. Another few minutes, and he was snoring—loudly.

  Kay gave up and lay still, hoping that whoever was standing outside the tent could hear the General’s snores and understand that nothing else was going on inside.

  The next day, she learned that the soldier at the wheel of Ike’s car, exhausted from the strain of driving a four-star passenger a hundred blackout miles over terrible roads in enemy territory, had dumped his vehicle in a ditch. She didn’t blame the poor guy. She knew exactly how he felt. But she wished that Ike had let the corporal find her another place to sleep. The General might be going out of his way to treat her like one of the boys, but she wasn’t, and the whole camp knew it.

  The German attack happened after they left, and they learned the bad news when they got back to Algiers. The Fifth Panzer Army had broken through at Faïd Pass. Tanks of the First Armored Division had run into an ambush of infamous Krupp eighty-eights, high-velocity anti-aircraft guns. “It was murder,” an observer wrote. “The First Armored rolled right into the muzzles of the concealed eighty-eights. All I could do was stand by and watch tank after tank blown to bits.”

  Things would go from bad to worse. A week later, Eisenhower would blame himself for the mauling at Kasserine Pass that cost some ten thousand casualties. The errors of the Allied field commanders—British, French, and American—would be laid at Eisenhower’s door, and at a press conference in Algiers, he took full responsibility for the defeat. Then he sat down to study his mistakes—and wait to see if he would be relieved. For him, Kasserine Pass would be one of the lowest points of the war. In his diary, Butch would write that “the proud and cocky Americans today stand humiliated by one of the greatest defeats in our history.”

  For Kay, the bad news took a different form. One afternoon a couple of weeks after the trip to the front, she was at her desk, sorting cables. It had already been a difficult day. Montgomery was being insufferable and Patton, whom Eisenhower had put in command of II Corps, was wooing the war correspondents with speeches like “Tomorrow we attack. If we are not victorious, let no one come back alive”—not exactly what the mothers and wives back home wanted to hear. Eisenhower was in a rotten mood and everybody in the office was staying out of his line of fire.

  His arms full of folders, Tex stopped at her desk. He bent over and said, in a low voice, “Kay, I think you ought to know that there’s a lot of gossip going the rounds. About you and the Old Man.”

  “That’s just too bloody bad,” Kay said shortly. She took a deep breath. “What kind of gossip?”

  Tex shifted awkwardly. “Well, they’re saying that out there at Tebessa, you . . .” He coughed. “The two of you slept together.”

  “Well, for once ‘they’ got it right.” Kay managed a wry chuckle. “We both slept in the VIP tent. But we never got our clothes off.” She told Tex what had happened. “And to be honest,” she added, “I hope it’s the last time I ever have to sleep with that guy. He snores like a one-man artillery bombardment.”

  Tex shook his head disapprovingly. “The Old Man should have had better sense. It’s not right for him to compromise you.” He shifted his armload of folders. “I’ll pass the word, where I can.”

  But Kay understood that the real story wouldn’t make it very far. Sadly, she reflected that Dick would likely hear the gossip.

  • • •

  Eisenhower was feeling better. The Marines were kicking the Japs off of Guadalcanal. The remaining German forces had surrendered to the Soviet army at Stalingrad. And with the coming of spring, the North African situation had improved. In March, the German army under Rommel and von Arnim—outflanked and outgunned—was pinched between the Allied Eighth under Montgomery and the First under Anderson. There was hard fighting, but the Germans and Italians were cut off from support by their naval and air forces based in Sicily. They were weakening.

  Ike was making more trips to the front, flying now, which was quicker than driving. But he had to admit (to himself—he couldn’t discuss this with Butch or Beetle) that he was keeping Kay out of the limelight in order to protect her. While it was more or less reasonable (he couldn’t decide which) to ask her to drive to the front, it had been unforgivably stupid to bed down with her in the same tent. The event had lit a wildfire of rumor that blazed from post to post along the front. Eisenhower generally put his head down and ignored gossip, but he would have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to be aware of this story.

  In late March, Ike and Beetle flew to Gafsa to confer with Patton, who was whipping II Corps into shape. Beetle went to bed early and Ike stayed up for a few drinks with Patton. Their friendship dated back to 1920, when Ike was at Camp Meade as the second-in-command of the 305th Tank Brigade and George commanded the 304th. Tonight, they discussed the comparative virtues of the heavily armored German Tiger tank, which was designed to knock out other tanks in the front lines, and the American Grants and Shermans, designed to smash through enemy defenses and raise holy hell in the rear—the traditional role of cavalry. In fact, Ike parenthetically reported, Marshall had just disbanded the Chief of Cavalry’s office. The horse was out of a job now, replaced by armored vehicles and tanks.

  “Speaking of armored vehicles,” Patton said, with a great deal of amusement, “that reminds me of a story that’s going the rounds out here. You want to hear it?”

  “Maybe,” Ike said, not sure that it was the right answer.

  Patton grinned. “Well, it seems that you and Kay were on your way back from the front late one evening. You were still fifty-some miles from Algiers when that armored Cadillac of yours developed engine trouble. Kay went under the hood to see what was wrong, but wasn’t having any luck finding the problem. After a while, you got out, opened the trunk, and took out a tool. ‘Screwdriver?’ you asked, and handed it to her. ‘Might as well,’ she said. ‘I can’t get the bloody thing started.’”

  Slapping his knee, Patton roared with laughter. “Get it?” he asked, when Ike stared at him, stone-faced. “Screwdriver. Screw driver.”

  Ike could feel
himself flushing and the veins in his temples throbbed. “Some goddamned idiots don’t have anything better to do than flap their goddamned mouths,” he growled.

  “Hey, sorry, Ike.” Patton’s laughter faded into a frown. “Hell, I thought you’d find it amusing, after the night the two of you spent in the VIP tent in Tebessa.” He eyed Ike, paused, and tried again. “You know, I’ve met your Irish gal. She’s charming, smart as a whip, too. Not only that, she has got to be the best-looking driver in any man’s army, anywhere. I don’t wonder that you—”

  “She is also engaged,” Ike interrupted testily. “To one of Truscott’s engineers. A colonel named Richard Arnold, whom she is scheduled to marry on June 22.” The date—which he had seen on Arnold’s permission to marry request—had somehow got stuck in his mind. “In fact, she came to North Africa just to be near him. Her being here has nothing to do with me. As for that night at Tebessa, I was so tired I wasn’t thinking straight. I should’ve found another place to bunk. Bad mistake.”

  Patton eyed him for a moment, one eyebrow cocked. Then he lifted his glass. “Well, then,” he said. “To the happy bridegroom. A man to be envied.” After a moment, he added, with unaccustomed delicacy, “Until the wedding, you might consider moving her out of AFHQ. Maybe to Oran.”

  “Nothing doing,” Ike growled. “She’s the best goddamned driver I’ve got. She’s never put me in the ditch.”

  While the gossip made Ike feel that he had to protect Kay, it also made him dig in his heels. His mother had always said he was stubborn as a Missouri mule, and by damn, he was going to be stubborn about this. There was nothing between him and Kay Summersby, nothing at all—which would become quite evident shortly, when she and Arnold were married. What’s more, the military needed women and lots of them, to release men for combat. A female driver behind the wheel of the general’s car meant a man with a gun on the front line. So he and Kay were going to drive to the front when that was necessary, enjoy their evenings at bridge, and—now that the weather was decent—get out with the horses for an afternoon’s ride. Which was, after all, what Marshall had ordered him to do. Wasn’t it? Take a break from the war every now and then?