Presidential Mission

by Sinclair, Upton;

  What was the attitude of the British? Rick said: “Winnie hoped to use him, and gave him every facility to set himself up. Winnie hated Darlan and all the Vichy crowd that had betrayed him when he went to France just before the end. But by now, I guess, he’s pretty tired of Big Charlie’s intransigence. Our Labor people don’t know what to make of the situation. They see the Americans putting the old Vichy gang in power, and they ask if that’s what we’re fighting the war for.”

  “I know, Rick, and I’ve done my share of worrying over it. We’ve invited De Gaulle to come and take a part of the responsibility, but with him it’s everything or nothing, and how can we undertake to clean out a government and set up a new crowd about whom we don’t know anything—except that they don’t know anything about the job in North Africa? Our Army people have to decide whether we’re going to fight the Germans or the French civil war. We are saying to the French: ‘Wait, and if you have to have your civil war, have it after the Germans are out of the way.’”

  III

  Rick, the eager publicist, plied his friend with questions, and there was no reason why Lanny shouldn’t tell all he knew about the invasion and what he had seen at that time. Rick, in turn, told the news about Britain. Politics had come to an end for the duration, and everybody, high and low, was doing what he could against the villainous foe. A man of the Left found it hard to say anything good about a Tory, but Rick had to say that Winnie’s speeches were magnificent, and the fact that he tried them out on everybody he knew made no difference to the public that heard them for the first time. The radio had brought back the art of public speaking, which had seemed to be put on the shelf by the more powerful art of printing.

  Rick reported that the American forces were still pouring onto these small islands in spite of so many going to North Africa. They were training incessantly, and with the vigor they had learned on their football fields. Ways had been found to make them feel at home, and Rick said that the islands would never be the same after the long sojourn of these easygoing and free-spending visitors. In spite of the food shortages the British people were living better than ever in their lives before, the reason being that what there was got distributed more fairly. The man of the Left proclaimed: “Winnie and his Tories will never be able to hold them this time!” His friend replied: “I hope not,” but he remembered the high expectations with which the pair of them had seen World War I come to its end, and the bitter disillusionment when the old crowd had come back stronger than ever.

  The baronet’s son reported that his family was well. “The Pater,” now in his seventies, was standing punishment marvelously; he was bossing all the war work in their district. Alfy, a flying instructor, had been advanced in rank and responsibility; and the younger was piloting a bomber—he had taken part in that recent tremendous raid over Berlin. “Well, I’ll be switched!” said Lanny, but he didn’t say what for. He saw himself cowering in the cellar of the Donnerstein palace, and wondered if his friend’s plane had dropped the bomb that had fallen on that particular building.

  IV

  Lanny took the morning train, and there was Frances with her little pony cart and a groom riding behind for safety. She rushed into Lanny’s arms and burst into tears right there on the platform of the little station. “Oh, Father, Father! They wouldn’t tell me what had happened to you!” He soothed her down as soon as he could, for he knew that her mother disapproved of emotionalism. “I was where I couldn’t get word to you, dear; but I’m all right again and you have nothing to worry about.”

  It was all right to thrill her by describing how it felt to come down out of the sky in a parachute, and how hot it had been in the desert, and how pleasant to hear the bells of a camel caravan, and how those great brutes had grumbled and complained. He didn’t say that the caravan had taken him into the German lines, but just that he had had a long way to travel with them and so had been delayed. That satisfied her, and it would be enough for everybody, both in Britain and America. He made up his mind that he wouldn’t tell even Laurel that he had been into Naziland; it would only terrify her and make it harder for her to be happy the next time he went away. Some day after it was all over—then she could write a novel about Germany in the midst of war!

  At the Castle nothing was changed very much. Irma said: “I’ll have to put you up at Mother’s again,” and Lanny replied: “All right, if Mother can put up with me.” Mother was a little more subdued, and Uncle Horace a little more feeble. Ceddy was the perfect country squire, talking about the tremendous crops he had had last autumn and about his spring plowing. A few refugee children were still on the place because, although the bombing had practically ended in the cities, the scarcity of homes remained an insoluble problem. Lanny played bowls with his little daughter—he would have to learn to call her his big daughter now, and that delighted her. He met her governess and her music teacher and her playmates; she was at the age where girls have wonderful “crushes,” and Frances was in a state of rapture over the little daughter of Ceddy’s London lawyer, who was staying at the Castle. Patricia, called “Patty,” must be in on everything, and Lanny had to agree that her red hair and freckles were lovely. He was pleased to do so, and told stories about the Dark Continent and its strange sights; altogether he was a delightful and romantic father home from the wars. England had known such fathers ever since men had lived upon its shores.

  After she had gone to bed Lanny sat with the mother and the stepfather and a couple of friends who had the right point of view. They thought that Lanny had come directly from North Africa, and he answered their questions with discretion. He was interested to discover that the famous “Wickthorpe set” was beginning to shift its position. The realization was dawning on them that maybe Britain was going to win after all, and that afterward, with American help, it might be able to restrain the predatory impulses of the Red hordes. Some of the things that the fourteenth Earl of Wickthorpe had said to Lanny scores of times, he now managed to forget that he had ever said—and Lanny would surely not have the bad taste to remind him.

  V

  Next morning the guest had a talk with his former wife. They had agreed that the welfare of their child required them to be friends in spite of any impropriety the world might find in that course. Now Lanny had an idea that his father had suggested and that he had been considering ever since. Employing that tact which he had spent a lifetime in acquiring, he began: “There is something serious that I ought to tell you, Irma. I know you have information that the Germans are preparing new weapons against Britain—jet-propelled missiles, rockets—that may develop a speed greater than any airplane and may carry a warload ten times as heavy as the present bombs. There will be no defense against such weapons, so far as I have been able to learn. I don’t know when they will begin coming, it may be a long time or it may be this year. One thing is certain, they will come suddenly, probably some night, and surely without warning. So I do not like to think of Frances being in England.”

  Irma’s face went white. “You think they will be aimed at places as unlikely as Wickthorpe?”

  “My guess is they will be aimed at the biggest target in this war, which is London. But they may be flying hundreds of miles, and they may not always be accurate. I think Newcastle would be a much safer place for our daughter than Wickthorpe. I am not proposing to take her now. I am asking you to think it over, as something to be done when I come again.”

  Irma drew a deep breath, and her voice betrayed her emotion. “Lanny, she has never been separated from her mother. I cannot bear the thought!”

  He tried to divert her with playfulness. “There is another aspect of the matter. If the bombs begin failing on London, you will have what you had before—hundreds of refugee children having to be put up and cared for here. You found that so inconvenient, you remember; Frances was associating with children of whom you disapproved.”

  Irma saw no humor in the idea. “All this is dreadfully hard for me to face,” she exclaimed.

&n
bsp; “Hard for you, Irma, but best for Frances. She would have Robbie’s and Esther’s other grandchildren for playmates. And it would please Robbie and Esther to have them all together for a while. She would have everything a child wants, just as she has here. It would be good for her in many ways, as you will realize once you have thought it over.”

  “But what about the danger of such a trip in wartime! It seems a terrible idea to me.”

  “The Germans are not troubling the planes to Lisbon—they need to use the same port themselves. From there to the Azores and Bermuda; hundreds of planes are making that trip every day; it is like one of the ferries across the Thames.”

  “You say that after having two crashes in a year and a half!”

  “In one of them I was shot down over enemy territory; and the other was in a storm near the Arctic. There is nothing like that to be expected by the southern route.”

  Irma had known that this was bound to come sooner or later; and always it brought to her mind a fear even older than the war. Frances was an heiress, and America was the land of gangsters and kidnapers! She brought up this argument now, but Lanny only chuckled. “The kidnapers are all in the Army, getting ready to work upon the Germans!” Then he added: “I’ll tell Robbie and Esther you are thinking it over. You can write to them, or to me.”

  VI

  A telephone call came from Fordyce asking if it would be agreeable for him to take Mr. Budd at nine that evening. Lanny said: “Fine,” knowing all about the nocturnal habits of Churchill. He understood that he was going to the very agreeable estate called Chequers Court, which he had visited once as a boy, when it had belonged to Lord and Lady Lee, and they had given a grand garden party for some charity. Now it had been donated as a national home for the head of the government, a British “White House” without an office. The brick building dated from the days of Queen Elizabeth, and the grounds comprised some two or three square miles. The place, like Wickthorpe, was in “Bucks,” and not more than a half-hour’s drive distant.

  The B4 man entertained Lanny with talk about the submarine situation, upon which the whole war depended. The armies in North Africa were being supplied with very small shipping loss, only about two per cent; but this was at the expense of the rest of the Atlantic, where losses were running dangerously high. Fordyce said there were new detection devices; he didn’t claim to know about them, but those who ought to know declared that they were in production and soon would be in use, and they would give the U-boat crews a very unhappy summer. The wonders of radar were multiplying fast, and our technology was fast outstripping the enemy’s.

  They drove through the elaborate iron gates into the grounds of Chequers. Whatever week-end guests may have been there saw nothing of Lanny, for he was taken upstairs by what was presumably a servants’ stairway and escorted into a large sitting-room. They sat before a grate fire, waiting until the hunched figure of the Prime Minister appeared. He was wearing what he called his siren-suit, a costume he had devised for war emergencies; it was made like a child’s teddybear costume, all one piece and closed in front by zippers—the idea being that you could slip into it quickly and hop to an air-raid shelter without exposure to cold. Winnie was proud of it and wore it on all possible occasions; he had even made the mistake of wearing it on his recent trip to Moscow, but the Russians hadn’t liked it; they considered it undignified and something of an affront.

  Fordyce excused himself, and the other two settled themselves for a long chat. Churchill confirmed Lanny’s guess, that Roosevelt had mentioned him in one of those telephone chats that had become almost a nightly habit. “How the devil does a man get from the Sahara to Stockholm?” demanded the P.M., and when Lanny told him, he exclaimed that he would give up his present honors to be young enough to go and have an adventure like that. The son of Budd-Erling replied: “I’m really not young enough, and I only had it because I couldn’t help it. Now I try to apply Cicero’s principle, and look back upon my past pains with pleasure.”

  To quote Cicero was an elegant and English thing to do, and put the visitor upon a plane of equality with his host. Lanny was subjected to an elaborate inquisition as to whom he had met in Germany and what he had seen there. When he told about the Führer’s rage over the fall of Kharkov, the Führer’s antagonist chortled with glee and exclaimed: “We’ve got the bastard, worried!” When Lanny repeated the message he had been asked to deliver “if possible,” about how Britain was to come over to Adi Schicklgruber’s side and accept his permission to live, the Duke of Marlborough’s descendant snorted. “All that tripe all over again!”

  Lanny said: “Excuse me for mentioning it. It’s what he said, and of course I had to pretend to take it seriously and promise to do my very best to get it to you.”

  “Righto, you have done it,” said Winnie.

  Lanny went on to tell about Göring and then about Schacht. “That old rogue!” the Prime Minister called the former president of the Reichsbank, and seemed to know him well. “He wants us to go easy on the western front, does he? Well, we’ll oblige him—for a while! I have stood out for the principle that we shall not cross the Channel until we have such forces that we can drive and keep driving and not let up until we get to Berlin. That’s the schedule, Budd!” Like all Englishmen, he pronounced it “shedule,” but he didn’t say that he had learned the pronunciation in a “shool.”

  VII

  The Right Honourable Winston Spencer Churchill lighted one of those big Havana cigars without which he could not be happy for very long. He took a couple of puffs and slid his pudgy body a little deeper into the armchair. Then he started plying his visitor with questions again. What were the conditions in Berlin? What were the people eating and wearing? What were they saying? He enjoyed the jokes from the night club; and then he wanted to know about the damage from the recent bombing, and the reaction of the populace to it. Everybody knew how the British had taken it, and now everybody wanted to know if the Germans would do as well. “Better they couldn’t do,” boasted the P.M.

  Then the business of rocket bombs. Lanny told about his adventures with the professors and what he had learned about Peenemünde. “Yes, we have that from several sources,” declared the other. “We haven’t done anything about it, because it appears that they are still in the construction stage. If you bomb a place then, you get nothing but a bunch of common workers; but if you wait until they have finished their installations and have started production, you get the skilled workers and the experts, and possibly even some of the scientific devils.”

  “I guessed that might be it,” Lanny answered. “And one thing more, their heavy-water project. I suppose you know that that has to do with the efforts at atomic fission. I was assigned to get the facts from Germany a year and a half ago, but I got smashed up in a plane. I don’t know how much you may have learned in the meantime, but I happened to get the name of the place where they are making the heavy water. It’s called Rjukan, in southern Norway. I sent the name in by the O.S.S. I don’t know if it will have come to you.”

  “When did you send it in?” demanded the other, peering at his guest through sharp eyes well surrounded by flesh.

  “I’d have to figure up the exact day,” was the reply. “I would guess about the twenty-sixth of last month.”

  “Well, it will interest you to know that we blew the insides out of the place on the night of the twenty-seventh.”

  “That was certainly quick work!” exclaimed the P.A.

  “Don’t’fool yourself!” chuckled the other. “We have had the spot marked for the past year and a half, and have been working on the wrecking project for I don’t know how long. It was an inside job—sabotage—and don’t mention it to anybody, but we’re not through yet. I am sorry if you wasted time on it.”

  “As it happens, I didn’t,” said Lanny. “A young SS officer dropped the name by accident, and I caught it. That’s the way it goes if you stay around among the right people.”

  “You have shown discriminati
on in your choices!” remarked the head of the British Empire. He meant it for a compliment, and Lanny did not miss it.

  VIII

  It was the visitor’s duty to offer to leave, and he did so. But the P.M. liked to talk, and apparently he had found a satisfactory listener. He had heard some of Lanny’s adventures, and now he wanted it to be known that he, too, had not lived without them. He told how, when he was young, he had been sent as a war correspondent to South Africa, and how the Boers had captured him and what they had done to him. He told the story at length; what Louis Botha had said to him and what he had said to Louis Botha, how he had escaped from Pretoria by climbing over a garden wall and hiding in some coalsacks on board a “goods” train. He had no doubt told that story many times, and he knew every point that counted, every gesture, every intonation. He had told it once before to the son of Budd-Erling, by the swimming-pool of Maxine Elliott’s villa on the Riviera, six years ago—but he had forgotten that.

  This genial British bulldog hadn’t, it appeared, the slightest remorse over having helped to conquer the Boers. He believed in “the Empah,” and held it as worth what it had cost. In those days an “Empah” had had to have gold and diamonds, and nowadays it had to have oil. Winnie was deeply concerned about the oil in the Near East, and said it was a race with the Russians, and no use blinking the fact. He was troubled because Roosevelt kept trying to blink it, and wrapping it up in fine phrases about democracy and internationalism. It appeared as if he wanted this P.A. to help persuade his Boss to revise the country’s military plans and make some landings in the neighborhood of that oil, so as to be on hand when the time came for the dividing up. “You know how it is at the end of a war,” he said.