Chapter 7

The town was undamaged, and the hospital, a small brown brick building beside a church, was quiet and cool inside. Several nurses and nuns went off in a truck after Jastrow told his story. Byron was led to a white-painted room full of surgical equipment and buzzing flies. A fat old doctor in a white jacket and patched canvas trousers sewed up his head. The shaving of the hair around the wound hurt worse than the actual stitching. He suggested to Natalie, when he came out, that she get her knee taped, for she was limping again. "Oh, hell," Natalie said. 'Let's go. We can still reach Warsaw tonight, Yankel says. I'll get it fixed there." What with the tablespoon of pain-killer the doctor had given him, general weariness, and the aftermath of shock, Byron dozed. He did not know how much time had passed when he woke. On a broad cobbled square near a red brick railway station, two soldiers, rifles in hand, had halted the car. The station and a freight train were on fire; flame and black smoke billowed from their windows. Several buildings around the square were smashed or damaged; two were in flames. People were crowding around shops, passing out merchandise, carrying it off. Byron realized with surprise that this was looting. Across the square, men were pumping water at the burning railroad station from horse-drawn fire engines, such as Byron had not seen except in old silent movies. A crowd was watching all this as it would any peacetime excitement. "What is it?" Byron said. One of the soldiers, a big young blond fellow with a square red face marred by boils, walked around to the driver's window. A conversation ensued in Polish between the soldier, Yankel, and Jastrow. The soldier kept smiling with peculiar unpleasant gentleness, as though at children he disliked. His scrawny companion came and looked through the yellow glass, coughing continually over a cigarette. He spoke to the big one, addressing him repeatedly as Casimir. Byron knew by now that Zhid was a Polish epithet for "Jew"; Zhid was occurring often in this talk. Car addressed the driver again, and once reached in and gave his beard a caress, and then a yank, apparently displeased with his answers. Jastrow muttered something to Natalie in Yiddish, glancing at Byron. "What is it?" Byron said. Natalie murmured, "There are good Poles and bad Poles, he says. These are bad." Casimir 'gestured with his gun for everybody to get out. Jastrow said to Byron, "Dey take our automobile." Byron had a rotten headache. His ear had been nicked by the bullet, and this raw patch burned and throbbed, hurting him more than the stitched head wound. He had vague cramps, having eaten odd scraps and drunk dirty water in the past two days, and he was still doped by the medicine. He had seldom felt worse. "I'll try talking to Redface, he seems to be in charge," he said, and he got out of the car.
"Look," he said, approaching the soldiers, "I'm an American naval officer, and I'm returning to the embassy in Warsaw, where they're expecting us. This American girl"-he indicated Natalie-"is my fiancee, and we've been visiting her family. These people are her family." The soldiers wrinkled their faces at the sound of English, and at the sight of Byron's thick bloodstained bandage. "Amerikanetz?" the big one said. Jastrow, at the car window, translated Byron's words. Casimir scratched his chin, looking Byron up and down. The condescending snile made its reappearance. He spoke to Jastrow, who translated shakily into French, "He says no American Navy officer would ever marry a Jew. He doesn't believe you." "FeB him if we're not in Warsaw by tonight the American ambassador wig take action to find us. And if he's in doubt let's go to a telephone and call the embassy." 'Tassport," Casimir said to Byron, after Jastrow translated. Byron produced it. The soldier peered at the green cover, the English words, the photograph, and at Byron's face. He spoke to his coughing companion and started to walk off, beckoning to Byron. 'Briny, don't go away," Natalie said. 'I'll be back. Keep everybody quiet." The smaller soldier leaned against the car fender and lit another cigarette, hacking horribly and grinning at Natalie. Byron fojlowed Casimir down a side street, into a two-story stone building festooned outside with official bulletins and placards. They walked past rooms full of files, counters, and desks to a frosted glass door at the end of the ball. Car went inside, and after about ten minutes poked his head out and beckoned to the American. A pudgy man in a gray uniform, smoking a cigarette in an amber holder, sat behind the big desk at the window; an officer, to judge by his colored tabs and brass ornaments. The passport was open before the man. He sipped tea from a glass as he glanced at it, and tea dripped on Byron's picture. In the narrow grimy room, metal files and bookshelves were shoved in a corner, with dirty legal tomes tumbled about. The officer asked him if he spoke German. That was the language they used, though both were bad at it. He made Byron tell his story again and asked him how an American naval officer happened to be mixed up with Jews, and how he came to be wandering around Poland in wartime. When his cigarette was consumed to the last quarter inch, he lit another. He queried Byron hard about the head injury, and smiled sourly, raising his eyebrows at theaccount of strafing on the highway. Even if this were all true, he commented, Byron had been acting foolishly and could easily get himself shot. He wrote down Byron's answers with a scratchy pen, in long silent pauses between the questions; then clipped the scrawled sheets to the passport, and dropped them into a wire basket full of papers. "Come back tomorrow afternoon at five o'clock." 'I can't. I'm expected in Warsaw tonight." The officer shrugged. Byron wished his temples would stop throbbing. It was hard to think, especially in German, and his vision was blurry, too. "May I ask who you are, and by what right you take my passport, and by what right this soldier tried to take our car?" The unpleasant smile that Casimir had displayed-Casimir stood by the desk all through the interview with a wooden look-now appeared on the officer's face. "Never mind who I am. We have to make sure who you are.)) 'Then telephone the American embassy and ask for Leslie Slote, the political secretary. That won't take long." The officer drank off his cold tea and began signing papers with a mutter in Polish to Casimir, who took Byron's arm, pushed him out of the room, and led him back to the car. The station and freight cars were pouring steamy white smoke, and a smell of wet burned wood filled the street. The looting was over. Policemen stood in front of the wrecked shops. The faces of the three women looked out tensely through the yellowed car glass at Byron. Casimir spoke to his companion, who caused the bride to shrink from the window by knocking on the glass and winking at her; then they went off. Byron told Natalie what had happened and she recounted it in Yiddish to the others. Jastrow said they could stay the night in the home of a friend in this town. When Byron got in behind the wheel, Yankel seemed glad to retire to the back seat beside his wife. Following Berel's directions, Byron maneuvered to a crossroad. A large arrow pointing left, down a road through fields stacked with corn sheaves, read: WARSAW, 95 Ken. Jastrow told him to turn right, along a road which led past small houses toward an unpainted wooden church. Byron, however, shifted gears and swooped left, driving out into the fields. "That's a bad outfit back there," he said to Natalie. 'We'd better keep going." Natalie exclaimed, "Byron, stop, don't be crazy! You can't drive around among these people without your passport." "Ask Berel what he thinks.There was colloquy in Yiddish. "He says it's much too dangerous for you. Go back." 'Why? If we run into any trouble, I'll say I lost the passport in abombardment. I've got this hole in my head." Byron had the accelerator pressed to the floor, and the overloaded bumping old Fiat was doing its best speed, about thirty miles an hour. Overhead the pots were making a great din, and Byron had to shout. 'Ask him if it isn't safest for you and for the rest to get the hell out of here." He felt a touch on his shoulder and glanced around. Berel Jastrow's bearded face was fatigued and ashen, and he was nodding. It took them two days to go the ninety-five kilometers. While it was happening it seemed to Byron a saga that he would be telling his grandchildren, if he lived through it. But so much happened afterward to him that his five-day drive from Cracow to Warsaw soon became a garbled fading memory. The breakdown of the water pump that halted them for half a day on a deserted back road in a forest, until Byron, tinkering with it in a daze of illness, to his astonishment got it to work; the leak in the gas tank that compelled them to take great risks to buy more; the disappearance of the hysterical bride from the hayfield where they spent one night, and the long search for her (she had wandered to another farm, and fallen asleep in a barn); the two blood-caked boys they found asleep by the roadside, who had a confused story of falling out of a truck and who rode the last thirty kilometers to Warsaw sitting on wooden slats on the bouncing hood of the Fiat this dimmed. But he always remembered how ungocUy sick to the stomach he was, and the horrible embarrassment of his frequent excursions into the bushes; Natalie's unshakable good cheer as she got hungrier, dirtier, and wearier; and above all, never to be forgotten, he remembered the hole in his breast pocket w tie passport ha which seemed to throb more than the gashes in s ear and his scalp, because he now knew that there were Polish officers capable of ordering Men taken out and shot, and soldiers capable of doing it. Following Jastrow's directions, he wound and doubled on stony, muddy back roads to avoid towns, though it lengthened the journey and played hell with the disintegrating car. They arrived in the outskirts of Warsaw in the chill dawn, crawling among hundreds of horse-drawn wagons. All across the stubbled fields, women, children, and bent graybeards were digging trenches and putting up tank barriers of tangled iron girders. The buildings cluttered against the pink northeast horizon looked like the heavenly Jerusalem. The driver's immense wife, squeezed against Natalie for days and nights in an intimacy the girl had never known with another human being, smelling more and more like an overheated cow, embraced Natalie and kissed and hugged her. It took three more hours before the groaning, clanking car reached the embassy. The two boys jumped off the hood and ran away down a side street. 'Go ahead, go in quickly," the mushroom dealer said to Natalie in Yiddish, stepping out of the car to kiss her. "Come and see me later if you can." When Byron said good-bye, Berel Jastrow would not let his hand go. He clasped it in both his hands, looking earnestly into the young man's face. "Merci. Mimi lois merci. Tousand times tank you. American save Poland, yes, Byron? Save de vorld." Byron laughed. 'That a big order, but I'll pass it on, Berel.""What did he say?" Berel asked Natalie, still holding Byron's hand. When she told him Berel laughed too, and then astonished Byron by giving him a bear hug and a brief scratchy kiss. A lone marine stood watch at the closed gates. Gray sandbags lined the yellow stucco walls, ugly X-shaped wooden braces disfigured the windows, and on the red tile roof an enormous American flag had been painted. All this was strange, but strangest was the absence of the long line of people. Nobody but the marine stood outside. The United States embassy was no longer a haven or an escape hatch. The guard's clean-scraped pink suspicious face brightened when he heard them talk. 'Yes, ma'am, Mr. Slote sure is here. He's in charge now." He pulled a telephone from a metal box fastened on the gate, regarding them curiously. Natalie put her hands to her tumbled hair, Byron rubbed his heavy growth of red bristles, and they both laughed. Slote came running down the broad stairway under the embassy medallion. "Hello! God, am I ever glad to see you two!" He threw an arm around Natalie and kissed her cheek, staring the while at Byron's dirty blood-stained head bandage. "What the devil? Are you all right?" 'I'm fine. What's the news? Are the French and British fighting?" 'Have you been that out of touch? They declared war Sunday, after fussing at Hitler for three days to be nice and back his army out of Poland. I'm not aware that they've done anything since but drop leaflets." Over a wonderful breakfast of ham and eggs, the first hot food they had eaten in days, they described their journey. Byron could feel his racked insides taking a happy grip on this solid boyhood fare and calming down. He and Natalie ate from trays on the ambassador's broad desk. Washing. ton had ordered the ambassador and most of the staff out of Poland when the air bombing began; as the only bachelor on the number three level, Slote had been picked to stay. The diplomat was appalled at Byron's tale Of aban&rung his PassPort-"Ye. gods, man, in a country at war! It's a nmrvel you weren't caught and jailed or shot. That you're a German agent would be far more plausible than the real reason you've been wandering around. YOU two are an incredible pair. Incredibly lucky, too." "And incredibly filthy," Natalie said. "What do we do now?""Well, you're just in it, my love. There's no getting out of Poland at the moment. The Germans are overrunning the countryside, bombing and blasting. We have to find you places to stay in Warsaw until, well, until the situation clarifies itself one way or another. Meantime you'll have to dodge bombs like the rest of us." Slote shook his head at Byron. "Your father's been worrying about you. I'll have to cable him. We still have communication via Stockholm. He'll let A.J. know that Natalie's at least found and alive." 'I am dying for a bath," Natalie said. Slote scratched his head, then took keys from his pocket and slid them across the desk. 'I've moved in here. Take my apartment. It's on the ground floor, which is the safest, and there's a good deep cellar. When I was there last the water was still running and we had electricity." "What about Byron?" Byron said, "I'll go to the Methodist House." "It's been hit," Slote said. "We had to get everybody out, day before yesterday." 'Do you mind," Natalie said, "if he stays with me?" Both men showed surprise and embarrassment, and Byron said, "I think my mother would object." "Oh, for crying out loud, Byron. With all the running into the bushes you and I have been doing and whatnot, I don't know what secrets we have from each other." She turned to Slote. "He's like a loyal kid brother, sort of." "Don't you believe her," Byron said wearily. "I'm a hot-blooded beast. Is there a Y.M.C.A?" "Look, I don't mind," Slote said, with obvious lack of enthusiasm. "There's a sofa in the sitting room. It's up to Natalie." She scooped up the keys. "I intend to bathe and then sleep for several days-between bombings. How will we ever get out of Poland, Leslie?" Slote shrugged, cleared his throat, and laughed. "Who knows? Hitler says if the Poles don't surrender, Warsaw will be levelled. The Poles claim they've thrown the Wehrmacht back and are advancing into Germany. It's probably nonsense. Stockholm Radio says the Nazis have broken through everywhere and will surround Warsaw in a week. The Swedes and the Swiss here are trying to negotiate a safe-conduct for foreign neutrals through the German lines. That's how we'll all probably leave. Tillthat comes through, the safest place in Poland is right here." "Well then, we did the sensible thing, coming to Warsaw," Natalie said. "You're the soul of prudence altogether, Natalie." As the trolleybus wound off into the smaller residential streets, Byron and Natalie saw more damage than they had in Cracow-burned-out or smashed houses, bomb holes in the pavemen an occasional rubble-filled street roped off-but by and large Warsaw looked much as it had in peacetime, less than a week ago, though now seemingly in a bygone age. The threatened German obliteration was not yet happening, if it ever would. The other passengers paid no attention to Byron's bandage or growth of beard. Several of them were bandaged and most of the men were bristly. A thick human smell choked the car. Natalie said when they got off, "Ah-air! No doubt we smell just like that, or worse. I must bathe at once or ".U go mad. Somehow on the road I didn't care. Now I can't stand myself another minute." Slivers of sunlight through the closed shutters made Slote's flat an oasis of peaceful half-gloom. Books lining the sitting room gave it a dusty library smell. Natalie flipped switches, obviously quite at home in the place. 'Want to wash up first?" she said. 'Once I get in that tub there'll be no moving me for hours. There's only cold water. I'm going to boil up some hot. But I don't know. Maybe you should find a hospital, first thing, and get your head examined." After the phrase was out of her mouth it struck them both as funny. They laughed and laughed and couldn't stop laughing. "Well, while we still both stink," Natalie gasped, 'come here." She threw her arms around him and kissed him. "You damned fool, abandoning your passport to protect some dopey Jews." " My head's all right," Byron said. The touch of the girl's mouth on his was like birdsong, like flowers, exhausted and filthy though they both were. 'I'll clean up while you boil your water." As he shaved she kept coming into the bathroom emptying steaming kettles into the cracked yellow tub, humming a polonaise of Chopin. The music had introduced the noon news broadcast, in which Byron had understood only a few place-names: towns and cities more than halfway in from the western and southern borders toward Warsaw. "My God, how pale you are, Briny," she said, inspecting his cleanshaven face, nicked here and there by the cold-water shave, "and how Young! I keep forgetting. You're just a boy." 'Oh, don't exaggerate. I've already flunked out of graduate school," Byron said. 'Isn't that a mature thing to do?" "Get out of here. I'm diving into that tub."An unmistakable wailing scream sounded outside about half an hour later. Byron, on the sofa, dozing over an old issue of Time, snapped awake and took binoculars from his suitcase. Scarlet-faced and dripping, Natalie emerged from the bathroom, swathed in Slote's white terry-doth robe. 'Do we have to go to the cellar?" "I'll have a look." The street was deserted: no cars, no people. Byron scanned the heavens from the doorway with his naked eye, and after a moment saw the airplanes. Sailing forth from a white cloud, they moved slowly across the sky through a scattering of black puffs. He heard grumbling muffled thumps far away, like thunder without reverberations. As he stepped out on the sidewalk, binoculars to his eyes, a whistle shrieked. Down the street a little man in a white helmet and white arm. band was waving angrily at him. He dropped back into the doorway, and found the planes with the glasses: black machines, bigger than the one that had wounded him, with a different thick shape but painted with the same crosses and swastikas. The fuselages were very long; in the rainbow-rimmed field of the glasses they looked a bit like small flying freight cars. Natalie was combing her hair by candlelight at a hallway mirror. The electricity was off. "Well? Is that bombing?" "It's bombing. They're not headed this way, the planes I saw." "Well, I don't think I'd better get back in the tub." The thumps became louder. They sat on the sofa, smoking cigarettes and looking at each other. Natalie said in a shaky voice, "It's sort of like a summer electric storm coming toward you. I didn't picture it like this." A distant whistling noise became louder, and a sudden crash jarred the room. Glass broke somewhere, a lot of glass. The girl uttered a small shriek, but sat still and straight. Two more close explosions came, one right after the other. Through the abutters harsh noises echoed from the street: shouts and screams, and the grumble of falling brick walls. "Briny, shall we run for the cellar?" "Better sit tight." "Okay." That was the worst of it. The thumps went on for a while, some distant and faint, some closer; but there were no more explosions that could be felt in the air, in the floor, in the teeth. They died off. In the street outside bells clanged, running feet trampled on the cobblestones, men yelled. Byron pulled aside curtains, opened a window, and blinked in the strong sunshine at the sightof two smashed burning houses down the street. People were milling around scattered chunks of masonry and flaming wreckage, carrying pails of water into the tall thick red flames. Natalie stood beside him, gnawing her lips. 'Those horrible German bastards. Oh my God, Briny, look. Look!" Men were starting to carry limp figures out of the clouds of smoke. One tall man in a black rubber coat held a child dangling in each arm. "Can't we help? Can't we do something?" "There must be volunteer squads, Natalie, that neutrals can work in. Nursing, rescue, cleanup. I'll find out." "I can't watch this." She turned away. Barefoot, a couple of inches lower without her heels, wrapped in the oversize robe, the eyes in her upturned unpainted face shiny with tears, Natalie Jastrow looked younger and much less formidable than usual. "It was so close. They may kill both of us." "We probably should dive for the cellar next time we hear the siren. Now we know." "I got you into it. That keeps eating at me. Your parents in Berlin must be sick with worry about you, and-" "My people are Navy. It's all in the day's work. As for me, I'm having fun." "Fun?" She scowled at him-'What the devil? Don't talk like a child." "Natalie, I've never had a more exciting time, that's all. I don't believe I'm going to get killed. I wouldn't have missed this for anything." "Byron, hundreds of people have probably died out there in the last half hour! Didn't you see the kids they pulled out of the building?" "I saw them. Look all I meant was-" Byron hesitated because what he had meant was that he was having fun. "it's just such a stupid, callous thing to say. Something a German might say." She hitched the robe around her closer. "Fun Leslie thinks I'm screwy. You're really peculiar." With an unfriendly headshake at him, she stalked to the bathroom. omiNG back to Washington from Berlin jolted Pug, as had his reC Turn in 1931 from Manila to a country sunk in the Great Depression. This time what struck him was not change, but the absence of it. After the blaring pageantry and war fevers of Nazi Germany, it was a bit like coming out of a theatre showing a technicolor movie into a gray quiet street. Even Rotterdam and Lisbon hadbeen agog with war reverberations. Here, where the Capitol dome and the Washington Monument shimmered in ninety-degree heat, people were plodding apathetically about their business. The roaring invasion of Poland, already looking like one of the historic conquests of all time, was as remote from this city as a volcanic eruption on Mars. He sat in the dining room of the Arzny and Navy Club, breakfasting on Kippers and scrambled eggs. His arrival the day before had proved a puzzling letdown. The man in the German section of the State Department to whom he had reported-a very minor personage, to judge by his small office, shoddy furniture, and lack of a window-had told him to expect a call in the morning; nothing more. "Well, well, our cookie-pushing friend!" "There's your striped pants, Pug?" Grinning down at him were three classmates: Digger Brown, Paul Munson, and Harry Warendorf. Though Pug had not encountered any one of them for years, they joined him and began exchanging jokes and gossip as though they saw each other every day. He looked at them with interest, and they at him, for gain of fat and loss of hair. Munson had learned to fly way back in 1921, and now he was air operations officer of the Saratoga. Digger Brown, Pug's old room-mate, had an assured if pasty look. Well he might, the first officer of the class to make exec of a battleship! Warendorf, the brain of the three, was a hard-luck man like Tollever. Following orders of his commodore, he had piled a destroyer on the rocks off the California coast in a fog, with half a dozen others. He had fallen into minesweepers, and there he was still. Under the rough banter about his pink-tea job, they were curious and respectful. They asked remarkably naive questions about the European war. All of them assumed that the Nazis were twice as strong in the field as they were and that the Allies were all but impotent. It struck Pug again how little Americans knew of Europe, for all the flood of lurid newspaper and magazine stories about the Nazis; and how little most men ever knew beyond their constricted specialties. 'y the hell are the Germans running away with it in Poland, Pug, if all this is so?" Warendorf said. They had been listening, attentive but unconvinced, to his estimate of the opposed forces. "That's anybody's guess. I'd say surprise, superior materiel on the spot, concentration of force, better field leadership, better political leadership, better training, a professional war plan, and probably a lot of interior rot, confusion, and treason behind the Polish lines. Also the French and British seem to be sitting on their dulls through the best strategic opportunity against Hitler they'll ever have. You can't win a game if you don't get out on the field." A page boy called him to the telephone. "Commander Henry? Welcome to these peaceful shores. I'm Carton.
Captain Russell Carton. I think we were briefly at the War College togather, fighting the japs on a linoleum checkerboard floor." 'That's right, Captain, 1937. The japs beat hell out of us, as I recall." Pug did his best to suppress the astonishment in his voice. Russell Carton was the name of President Roosevelt's naval aide. The voice chuckled. "I hope you've forgotten that I was the admiral who blew the engagement. When shall I pick you up? Our appointment's at noon." "How far do we have to go?" "Just around the corner. The White House. You're seeing the President.... Hello? Are you there?" "Yes, sir. Seeing the President, you said. Do I get a briefing on this?" "Not that I know of. Wear, dress whites. Suppose I pick you up at eleven-thirty." "Aye aye, sir." He went back to his table and ordered more coffee. The others asked no questions. He kept his face blank but it was hard to fool these old friends. They knew it was strange that he was back from Berlin so soon. They probably guessed that he had received a startling call. That didn't matter. Munson said, "Pug, don't you have a boy in Pensacola? I'm flying down there day after tomorrow to drop some pearls of wisdom about carrier landings. Come along." "If I can, Paul. I'll call you." Pug was sorry when they left. The shoptalk about a combat exercise they were planning had brought back the smell of machinery, of sea air, of coffee on the bridge. Their gossip of recent promotions and assignments, their excitement over the quickening world events and the improving chances for action and glory-this was his element, and he had been out of it too long. He got a haircut, brilliantly shined his own shoes, put a fresh white cover on his cap, donned his whites and ribbons, and sat in the lobby for an eternally long forty-five minutes, puzzling over the imminent encounter with Franklin Roosevelt, and dreading it. He had met him before. A sailor came through the revolving door and called his name. He rode the few blocks to the White House in a gray Navy Chevrolet, dazedly trying to keep up chitchat with Captain Carton, a beefy man with a crushing handgrip on whose right shoulder blue-and-gold 'loafer's loops' blazed. This marked him as a presidential aide, to those who knew; otherwise staff aiguillettes belonged on the left shoulder. Pug kept step with the captain through the broad public rooms of the Mute House, along corridors, up staircases. 'Here we are," Carton said, leading him into a small room. "Wait a moment."The moment lasted twenty-seven minutes. Pug Henry looked at old sea-battle engravings on the wall, and out of the window; he paced, sat in a heavy brown leather chair, and paced again. He was wondering whether the President would remember him, and hoping he wouldn't. In 1918, as a very cocky Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Roosevelt had crossed to Europe on a destroyer. The wardroom officers, including Ensign Henry, had snickered at the enormously tall, very handsome young man with the famous family name, who made a great show of using nautical terms and bounding up ladders like seadog, while dressed in outlandish costumes that he kept changing. He was a charmer,(a) the officers agreed, but a lightweight, almost a phony, spoiled by an easy rich man's life. He wore pince-nez glasses in imitation of his great relative, President Teddy Roosevelt, and he also imitated his booming manly manner; but a prissy Harvard accent mac e t s ness somewhat ridiculous. One morning Ensign Henry had done his usual workout on the forecastle, churning up a good sweat. Because there was a water shortage, he had hosed himself down from a saltwater riser on the well deck. Unfortunately the ship was pitching steeply. The hose had gotten away from him and spouted down into the hatchway to the wardroom, just as Roosevelt was coming topside in a gold-buttoned blazer, white flannel trousers, and straw hat. The costume had been wrecked, and Pug had endured a fierce chewing out by his captain and the dripping Assistant Secretary of the Navy. A door opened. "All right. Come on in, Pug," Captain Carton said. The President waved at him from behind the desk. 'Hello there! Glad to see you!" The warm commanding aristocratic voice, so recognizable from radio broadcasts, jarred Pug with its very familiarity. He got a confused impression of a grand beautiful curved yellow room cluttered with books and pictures. A gray-faced man in a gray suit slouched in an armchair near the President. Franklin Roosevelt held out a hand: 'Dmp your bonnet on the desk, Commander, and have a chair. How about some lunch? I'm just having a bite." A tray with half-eaten scrambled eggs, toast, and coffee stood on a little serving table by the President's smivel chair. He was in shirt-deeves and wore no tie. Pug had not seen him, except in newsreels and photographs, in more than twenty years. His high coloring was unchanged, and he was the same towering man, gone gray-headed, much older and very much heavier; and though he had the unmistakable lordly look of a person in great office, a trace remained in the up-thrust big jaw of the youthful conceit that had made the ensigns on the Davey snicker. His eyes were sunken, but very bright and keen. "Thank you, Mr. President. I've eaten." "By the way, this is the Secretary of Commerce, Harry Hopkins." The gray-faced man gave Henry a brief winnin smile, with a light tired gesture that made a handshake unnecessary. 9The President looked archly at Victor Henry, his big heavy head cocked to one side. "Well, Pug, have you learned yet how to hang onto a saltwater hose at sea?" "Oh, gawd, sir." Pug put a hand to his face in mock despair. "I've heard about your memory, but I hoped you'd forgotten that." "Ha, ha, ha!" The President threw his head back. 'Harry, this young fellow absolutely ruined the best blue serge blazer and straw hat I ever owned, back in 1918. Thought I'd forget that, did you? Not on your life. Now that I'm commander-in-chief of the United States Navy, Pug Henry, what have you got to say for yourself?" "Mr. President, the quality of mercy is mightiest in the mightiest." 'Oh ho! Very good. Very good. Quick thinking, Pug." He glanced at Hopkins. 'Ha, ha, ha! I'm a Shakespeare lover myself. Well said. You're forgiven.n Roosevelt's face turned serious. He glanced at Captain Carton, who still stood at attention near the desk. The aide made a smiling excuse and left the room. The President ate a forkful of eggs and poured himself coffee. "What's going on over there in Germany, Pug?" How to field such a facetious question? Victor Henry took the Pr ident's tone. 'I guess there's a war on of sorts, sir." 'Of sorts? Seems to me a fairly honest-to-goodness war. Tell me about it from your end." Victor Henry described as well as he could the peculiar atmosphere in Berlin, the playing down of the war by the Nazis, the taciturn calm of the Berliners. He mentioned the blimp towing a toothpaste advertisement over the German capital on the first day of the war-the President grunted at that and glanced toward Hopkins-and the pictures in the latest Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung which he had picked up in Lisbon, showing happy German crowds basking at the seashore and frolicking in folk dances on village greens. The President kept looking at Hopkins, who had what Victor Henry thought of as a banana face: long , meager, and curved. Hopkins appeared sick, possibly feverish, but his eyes were thoughtful and electrically alive. Roosevelt said, 'Do you suppose he'll offer peace when he finishes with Poland? Especially if he's as unprepared as you say?" What would he have to lose, Mr. President? The way things look now, it might work." The President shook his head. "You don't know the British. Not that they're any better prepared." "I'll admit I don't, sir." For the first time, Hopkins spoke, in a soft voice. "How well do you know the Germans?" "Not at all well, Mr. Secretary. They're hard people to make out.
But in the end there's only one thing you have to know about the Germans." "Yes? What's that?" 'How to lick them." The President laughed, the hearty guffaw of a man who loved life and welcomed any chance to laugh. "A warmonger, eh? Are you suggesting, Pug, that we ought to get into it?" 'Negative in the strongest terms, Mr. President. Not unless and until we have to." "Oh, we'll have to," Roosevelt said, hunching over to sip coffee. this struck Victor Henry as the most amazing indiscretion he had heard in his lifetime. He could hardly believe the big man in shirt-sleeves had said the words. The newspapers and magazines were full of the President's ringing declarations that America would stay out of the war. Roosevelt went blandly on with a compliment about Combat Readiness of Nazi Germany, which he said he had read with great interest. His next questions showed that he had retained little of the analysis. His grasp of the important strategic facts about Germany was not much better than Harry Warendorf's or Digger Brown's, and his queries were like theirs, even to the inevitable 'What's Hitler really like? Have you talked to him?" Pug described Hitler's war speech in the Reichstag. Franklin Roosevelt exhibited a lively interest in this, asking how Hitler used his voice and hands, and what he did when he paused. "I'm told," Roosevelt said, "that they type his speeches on a special machine with perfectly enormous letters, so he won't have to wear glasses." "I wouldn't know about that, sir." "Yes, I got that from a pretty reliable source. 'Fuhrer type," they call it." Roosevelt sighed, turned his chair away from the food, and lit a cigarette. 'There is no substitute for being in a place yourself, Pug, seeing it with your own eyes, getting the feel. That's what's missing in this job." "Well, Mr. President, in the end it all boils down to cold facts and figures." 'True, but too often all that depends on who writes the reports. Now that was a fine report of yours. How did you really foresee he'd make a pact with Stalin? Everybody here was stupefied." 'I guess mathematically somebody somewhere was bound to make that wild guess, Mr. President. It happened to be me." "No, no. That was a well-reasoned report. Actually, we did have some seaming here, Pug. There was a leak in one Cernian embassynever mind where-and our State Department had predictions of that pact. Trouble was, nobody here was much inclined to believe them." He looked at Hopkins, with a touch of mischief. 'That's always the problem with intelligence, isn't it, Pug? All kinds of strange information will come in, but then-' The President all of a sudden appeared to run out of conversation. He looked tired, bored, and withdrawn, puffing at a cigarette in a long holder. Victor Henry would have been glad to leave, but he thought the President should dismiss him. He wasfeeling a bit firmer about the meeting now. Franklin Roosevelt had the manner, after all, of a fleet commander relaxing over lunch, and Pug was used to the imperious ways of admirals. Apparently he had crossed the Atlantic in wartime to kill an off-hour for the President. Hopkins glanced at his watch, "Mr. President, the Secretary and Senator Pittman will be on their way over now." 'Already? The embargo business? Well, Pug." Henry jumped up, and took his cap. Thank you for coming by. This has been grand. Now if there's anything else you think I should know, just anything that strikes you as significant or interesting, how about dropping me a line? I'll be glad to hear from you. I mean that." At this grotesque proposal for bypassing the chain of command, which ran counter to Henry's quarter century of naval training and experience, he could only blink and nod. The President caught his expression. "Nothing official, of course," he said quickly. "Whatever you do, don't send me more reports! But now that we've gotten acquainted again, why not stay in touch? I liked that thing you wrote. I could just see that submarine base emptying out at five o'clock. It said an awful lot about Nazi Germany. Sometimes one little thing like that-or what a loaf of bread cost, or the jokes people are repeating, or like that advertising blimp over Berlinsuch things can sometimes suggest more than a report umpteen pages long. Of course, one needs the official reports, too. But I get enough of those, heaven knows!" Franklin Roosevelt gave Commander Henry the hard look of a boss who has issued an order and wants to know if it's understood. "Yes, Mr. President," Henry said. 'And, oh, by the way, here's a suggestion that's just come to my desk, Pug, for helping the Allies. Of course we're absolutely neutral in this foreign war, but Still-" The President broke into a sly grin. His tired eyes sparkled as he glanced here and there on his cluttered desk, and took up a paper. 'Here we are. We offer to buy the Queen Mary and the Normandie, and we use them for evacuating Americans from Europe. There are thousands stranded, as you know. What do you think? It would give the Allies a pile of much needed dollars, and we'd have the ships. Theyre fine luxury liners. How about it?" Victor Henry looked from Hopkins to the President. Evidently this was a serious question. They were both waiting for his answer. "Mr. President I'd say those ships are major war assets and they'd be insane to sell them. They're magnificent troop transports. They're the fastest vessels for their tonnage of anything afloat, they can outrun any submarine at cruising speed, they hardly have the re las and strength to zigzag SO withe interiors stripped their carrying capacity is gigantic." The President said dryly to Hopkins, 'Is that what the Navy replied?" "I'd have to check, Mr. President. I think their response went mainly to the question of where the money'd come from." Franklin Roosevelt cocked his head thoughtfully, and smiling atVictor Henry, held out a long arm for a handshake. "Do you know why I didn't make more of a fuss about those clothes? Because your skipper said you were one of the best ensigns he'd ever seen. Keep in touch, now. "Aye aye, sir." "Well, how did it go?" The President's aide was smoking a cigar in the anteroom. He rose, knocking off the ash. 'All right, I suppose." "It must have. You were scheduled for ten minutes. You were in there almost forty." "Forty! It went fast. What now?" "How do you mean?" "I don't have very specific instructions. Do I go straight back to Berlin, or what?" "What did the President say?" "It was a pretty definite good-bye, I thought." Captain Carton smiled. "Well, I guess you're all through. Maybe you should check in with C.N.O. You're not scheduled here again." He reached into a breast pocket. 'One more thing. This came to my office a little while ago, from the State Department." It was an official dispatch envelope. Henry ripped it open and read the flimsy pink message form: FOr X BYRON HENRY SMM WIELL WARSAW X AWMTING EVACUATION ALL NEUTRALS NOW UNDER NEGOTIATION GIERMAN GOVIE NT X Slote Vctor Henry disappointed Hugh Cleveland when he walked into the broadcaster's office; just a squat, broad-shouldered, ordinary-looking man of about fifty, in a brown suit and a red bow tie, standing at the receptionist's desk. The genial, somewhat watchful look on his weathered face was not sophisticated at all. As Cleveland sized up people-having interviewed streams of them-this might be a professional ballplayer turned manager, a lumberman, maybe an engineer; apple-pie American, fairly intelligent, far from formidable. But he knew Madeline feared and admired her father, and day by day he was thinking more highly of the young girl's judgmen so he took a respectful tone. "Commander Henry? It's a pleasure. I'm Hugh Cleveland." " Hello. Hope I'm not busting in on anything. I thought I'd just drop by and have a look-see." "Glad you did. Madeline's timing the script. Come this way." They ked along the cork floor of a corridor walled with green soundproofing slabs. 'She was amazed. Thought you were in Germany." 'For the moment I'm here."In a swishing charcoal pleated skirt and gray blouse, Madeline came scampering out of a door marked zqo ADmrrrANcm, and kissed him. "Gosh, Dad, what a surprise. Is everything all right?" 'Everything's dandy." He narrowed his eyes at her. She looked a lot more mature, and brilliantly excited. He said, "If you're busy, I can leave, and talk to you later." Cleveland put in, "No, no, Commander. Please come in and watch. I'm about to interview Edna May Pelham." "Oh? The Getwal's Lady? I read it on the plane. Pretty good yarn." In the small studio, decorated like a library with fake wood panelling and fake books, Cleveland said to the sharp-faced, white-haired authoress, 'Here's another admirer of the book, Miss Pelham. Commander Henry is the American naval attache in Berlin." 'You don't say! Hi there." The woman waved her pince-nez at him. "Are we going to stay out of this idiotic war, Commander?" "I hope so." 'So do I. My hopes would be considerably higher if that man in the White House would drop dead." Pug sat to one side in an armchair while they read through the script. The authoress, passing vinegary judgments on current literature, said that one famous author was obscene, another sloppy, a third superficial. His mind wandered to his meeting yesterday with 'that man in the White House." It seemed to him that he had been summoned on a haphazard impulse; that he had spent a couple of thousand dollars of public money on a round trip from Germany for pointless small talk over scrambled eggs. The morning paper showed that yesterday had been a crowded, portentous day for the President. The leading story, spread over many columns, was Roosevelt Proclaims Limited National Emagency. Three other headlines on the front page began FDR or President; he had reorganized two major government boards; he had lifted the sugar quota; he had met with congressional leaders on revision of the Neutrality Act. all these things had been done by the ruddy man in shirt-sleeves who never moved from behind his desk, but whose manner was so bouncy you forgot he was helpless in his chair. Pug wanted to believe that he himself might have said one thing, made one comment, that by illuminating the President's mind had justified the whole trip. But he could not. His comments on Germany, like his original report, had rolled off the President, who mainly had sparked at details of Hitler's oratorical techmque and touches of local Berlin color. The President's request for gossipy letters still struck him as devious, if not pointless. In the first few minutes Victor Henry had been attracted by President Roosevelt's warmth and goodhumor, by his remarkable memory and his ready laughter. But thinking back on it all, Commander Henry wasn't sure the President would have behaved much differently to a man who had come to the office to shine his shoes. "Fourteen minutes and twenty seconds, Mr. Cleveland." Madeline's speaker-distorted voice roused him. 'That's fine. Ready to record, Miss Pelham?" 'No. All this about Hemingway is far too kind. I'd like about half an hour with this script. And I'd like some strong tea, with lemon." "Yes, ma'am. Hear that, Madeline? Get it." Cleveland invited the naval officer to his office, where Pug accepted a cigar. The young broadcaster displeased him by hitching a leg over the arm of his chair. Pug had used considerable severity to cure Byron of that habit. 'Sir, you can be proud of Madeline. She's an unusual girl." "Unusual in what way?" "Well, let's see. She understands things the first time you tell them to her. Or if she doesn't, she asks questions. If you send her to fetch something or do something, she fetches it or she does it. She never his a long story about it. I haven't heard her whine yet. She isn't afraid of people. She can talk straight to anybody without being fresh. She's reliable. Are reliagle people common in the Navy? In this business they're about as common as g[ant pandas. Especially girls. I've had my share of lemons here. I understand that you want her to go back to school, and that she'll have to quit next week. I'm very sorry about that." The girl's nineteen." "She's better than women of twenty-five and thirty who've worked for me." Cleveland smiled. This easy-mannered fellow had an infectious grin and an automatic warmth, Pug thought, that in a trivial way was like the President's. Some people had it, some didn't. He himself had none of it. In the Navy the quality was not overly admired. The name for it was 'grease." Men who posed it had a way of climbing fast; they also had a way of relying upon it, till they got too greasy and slipped. "I wish she'd show some of these 4.o qualities at school. I don't appreciate the idea of a nineteen-year-old girl loose in New York." "Well, sir, I don't mean to argue with you, but Washington's no convent either. it's a question of upbringing and character. Madeline is a superior, trustworthy girl." Pug uttered a nonconnnittal grunt. 'Sir, how about coming on our show? We'd be honored to have you." 'As a guest? You're kidding. I'm nobody." "America's naval attache in Nazi Germany iscertainly somebody. You could strike a blow for preparedness, or a two-ocean Navy. We just had Admiral Preble on the show." 'Yes, I know. That's how I found out what my little girl's doing these days." "Would you consider it, sir?" 'Not on your life." The sudden frost in Pug's tone rose not only from the desire to be final, but the suspicion that the praise of Madeline had been a way of greasing him. "No harm in asking, I hope," Cleveland grinned, running a hand through his heavy blond hair. He had a pink harborshop sunburn and looked well in a collegiate jacket and slacks, though Victor Henry thought his argyle socks were too much. He did not like Cleveland, but he could see that Madeline would relish working for such a Broadwayish fellow. Later Madeline showed her father around the studios. Certain corridors were like passageways in the bowels of a ship, all jammed with electronic gear and thousands of bunched colored wires. These interested Pug. He would have enjoyed seeing the controlling diagrams and learning how radio amusement was pumped out of this nerve center all over the country. The performing studios, with their giant cardboard settings of aspirin bottles, toothpaste tubes, and gasoline pumps, their blinking red lights, posturing singers, giggling audiences, grimacing and prancing funny men, not only seemed tawdry and silly in themselves, but doubly so with Poland under attack. Here, at the hart of the American communications machine, the Hitler war seemed to mean little more than a skim-dsh among Zulus. "Madeline, what attracts you in all this balderdash?" They were leaving the rehearsal of a comedy program, where the star, wearing a fireman's ha was spraying the handleader, the girl singer, and the audiences with seltzer bottles. "That man may not amuse you, Dad, but millions of people are mad for him. He makes fifteen thousand dollars a week." "That's kind of obscene right there. It's more than a rear admiral makes in a year." "Dad, in two weeks I've met the most Marvelous people. I met Gary Cooper. just today I spent two hours with Miss Pelham. Do you know that I had lunch with the Chief of Naval Operations? Me?" 'So I heard. What's this fellow Cleveland like?" "He's brilliant." "Is he married?" 'He has a wife and three children." 'when does your school start?" "Dad, do I have to go back?" 'When did we discuss any other plan?""I'll be so miserable. I feel as though I've joined the Navy. I want to stay in." He cut her off with a cold look. They went back to her little partitioned cubicle outside C'Ieveland's office. Smoking one cigarette and then another, Pug silently sat in an annchair and watched her work. He noted her neat files, her checkoff lists, her crisp manner on the telephone, her little handmade wall chart of guests invited or scheduled in September, and of celebrities due in New York. He noted how absorbed she was. In their walk around CBS she had asked only perfunctory questions about the family and none on Germany; she hadn't even asked him what Hitler was really like. He cleared his throat. 'Say, incidentally, Madeline, I'm going out to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to have dinner aboard the Colorado. Digger Brown's the executive officer. You know, Freddy Brown's father. Like to come along? What's the matter? Why the face?" Madeline sighed. 'Oh, I'll come, Dad. After all, I see you so seldom. I'll meet you at five or so-" 'Got something else planned?" "Well, I didn't know you were about to fall out of the sky. I was going to dinner and the theatre with the kids." "What kids?" "You know. just kids I've met at CBS. A couple of writers, musicians, an actress, some other new girls like me. There are eight of us, sort of a gang. "I daresay there'll be some bright-eyed ensigns in the junior mess." "Yes, exactly. Ensigns." "Ok, I don't want to drag you anywhere." "it's just that you'll end up talking to Commander Brown, Dad, and I'll spend another evening with ensigns. Can't we have breakfast tomorrow? I'll come to your hotel." "That'll be fine. These kids of yours, I'd think the young men would be these show business fellows, pretty flimsy characters." "Honestly, you're wrong. They're serious and intelligent." "I think it's damn peculiar that you've fallen into this. It's the furthest thing from your mother's interests or mine." Madeline looked aslant at him. 'Oh? Didn't Mother ever tell you that she wanted to be an actress? That she spent a whole summer as a dancer in a travelling musical show?" "Sure. She was seventeen. It was an escapade." "Yes? Well, once when we were up in an attic, it must have been at the Nag's Head house, she came on the parasol she had used in her solo dance. An old crinkled orange paper parasol. Well, right there in that dirty attic Mama kicked off her shoes, opened the parasol, picked upher skirt, and did the whole dance for me. And she sang a song. 'Ching-chingchalla-wa China Girl." I must have been twelve, but I still remember. She kicked clear to the ceiling, Mama did. God, was I ever shocked." "Oh, yes, 'Ching-ching-challa-wa China Girl'!" said Pug. "She did it for me too, long long ago. Before we were married, in fact. Well, I'm off to the Colorado. Tomorrow after breakfast I fly down to Pensacola to see Warren. Next day I return to Berlin, if I can firm up my air tickets." She left her desk and put her arms around him. She smelled sweet and alluring, and her face shone with youth, health, and happiness. "Please, Dad. Let me work. Please." 'I'll write or cable you from Berlin. I'll have to discuss it with Chingching-challa-wa China Girl." The harbor smell in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the destroyers nesting in a row with red truck lights burning, the Colorado lit up from stem to stern, its great main battery guns askew for boresighting-these things gave Victor Henry the sense of peace that other men get by retiring to their dens with a cigar and a drink. If he had a home in the world, it was a battleship. Put together at different times and places of different steel plates and machines, embodied in many forms under many names, a battleship was always one thing: the strongest kind of warship afloat. This meant a thousand everchanging specifications of size, design, propulsion, armor, armament, interior communication, interior supply systems; a thousand rituals and disciplines binding the crew, from the captain to the youngest striker, into one dependable corporate will and intelligence. In this sense there had been battleships in the days of Phoenicia and Rome, and there would always be battleships-a living peak of human knowledge and craft, a floating enginearing structure dedicated to one aim: the control of the sea. It was the only thing to which Victor Henry had ever given himself whole; more than to his family, much more than to the sprawling abstraction called the Navy. He was a battleship man. With other top men, he had gone to a battleship straight from the Academy in 1913. He had served time in smaller ships, too. But he was marked battleship, and he had kept coming back to them. His shining service achievement was winning the "meatball pennant," the fleet gunnery competition, two years in a row as gunnery officer of the West Virginia. His improvised system for speeding sixteen-inch shells from the magazines to the turrets had become standard Navy doctrine. All he wanted in this life was to be executive officer of a battleship, then a captain, then an admiral with a BatDiv flag. He could see no further. He thought a BatDiv flag was as fine a thing as being a president, a king, or a pope. And he reflected, as he followed the erect quick-marching gangway messenger down the spotless white passageway to the senior officers' mess, that every month he spent in Berlin was cutting the ground from under his hopes. Digger Brown had been exec of the Colorado only six weeks.