The Winds of War

green hedge-bounded fields, the pleasant England of the picture books, the paintings, and the poems.

This was the end of a tedious week-long journey for Pug via Zurich, Madrid, Lisbon, and Dublin. It had begun with the arrival in Berlin of a wax-sealed envelope in the pouch from Washington, hand-addressed in red ink: Top Secret — Captain Victor Henry only. Inside he had found a sealed letter from the White House.

Dear Pug:

Vice CNO says you are a longtime booster of “radar.” The British are secretly reporting to us a big success in their air battle with something called “RDF.” How about going there now for a look, as we discussed? You’ll get dispatch orders, and our friends will be expecting you. London should be interesting now, if a bit warm. Let me know if you think it’s too warm for us to give them fifty destroyers.

FDR

Pug had had mixed feelings about these chattily phrased instructions. Any excuse to leave Berlin was welcome. The red-ink blare and boasts in the meager newspapers were becoming intolerable; so were the happy triumphant Germans in government offices, chortling about the pleasant postwar life that would start in a month or so; so were the women strolling the tree-lined boulevards, looking slyly complacent in French silks and cosmetics. Pug even felt guilty eating the plunder in the improved restaurant menus: Polish hams, Danish butter, and French veal and wine. The gleeful voices of the radio announcers, claiming staggering destruction of British airplanes and almost no Luftwaffe losses, rasped his nerves as he sat alone in the evenings in the Grunewald mansion looted from a vanished Jew. An order to leave all this behind was a boon. But the letter dismayed him, too. He had not walked the deck of a ship now in the line of duty for more than four years, and this shore-bound status appeared to be hardening.

Walking home that afternoon he passed the rusting olive-painted Flakturm, and like nothing else it made him realize how glad how glad he would be to get out of Berlin. People no longer gawked at the high tower bristling at the top with guns, as they had when the girder frame and the thick armor plates had been going up. Guesses and rumors about it had run fast and wild for weeks. Now the story was out. It was an A.A. platform for shooting at low-flying bombers. No high building could get in the lines of fire, for it rose far above the tallest rooftops in Berlin, a crude eyesore. So far the few English raiders had hugged maximum altitude, but the Germans seemed to think of everything. This gigantic drab iron growth, over the playing children and elderly strollers in the pretty Tiergarten, seemed to Victor Henry to epitomize the Nazi regime.

The lonely cavernous house got on his nerves that evening as his quiet-stepping Gestapo butler served him pork chops from Denmark at one end of the long bare dining table. Pug decided that if he had to come back he would take a room at the Adlon. He packed suits and uniforms, the great weariness of an attache’s existence: morning dress blues, dress whites, evening uniform, khakis, street clothes, civilian dinner jacket. He wrote to Rhoda, Warren, and Byron, and went to sleep thinking of his wife, and thinking, too, that in London he would probably see Pamela Tudsbury. The next day, Pug’s assistant attache, a handsome commander who spoke perfect German, said he would be glad to take over his duties and appointments. He happened to be a relative of Wendell Willkie. Since the Republican convention, he had become popular with the Germans. “I guess I’ll have to hang around this weekend, eh?” he said. “Too bad. I was going out to Abendruh with the Wolf Stollers. They’ve been awfully kind to me lately. They said Goring might be there.”

“Go by all means,” said Pug. “You might pick up some dope about how the Luftwaffe’s really doing. Tell your wife to take along a pair of heavy bloomers.” He enjoyed leaving the attache staring at him, mystified and offended.

And so he had departed from Berlin.

* * *

“How the devil do you keep looking so fit?” he said to Blinker Vance, the naval attache who met him at the London airport. After a quarter of a century, Vance still batted his eyes as he talked, just as he had at Annapolis, putting the plebe Victor Henry on report for a smudged white shoe. Vance wore a fawn-colored sports jacket of London cut, and gray trousers. His face was dried and lined, but he still had the flat waist of a second classman.

“Well, Pug; it’s pretty good tennis weather. I’ve been getting in a couple of hours every day.”

“Really? Great war you’ve got here.”

“Oh, the war. It’s going on up there somewhere, to the south.” Vance vaguely waved a hand up at pellucid heavens. “We do get some air raid warnings, but so far the Germans haven’t dropped anything on London. You see contrails once in a while, then you know the fighters are mixing it up close by. Otherwise you listen to the BBC for the knockdown reports. Damn strange war, a sort of airplane numbers game.”

Having just toured bombed areas in France and the Low Countries, Henry was struck by the serene, undamaged look of London, the density of the auto traffic, and the cheery briskness of the well-dressed sidewalk crowds. The endless shop windows crammed with good things surprised him. Berlin, even with its infusion of loot, was by comparison a bleak military compound.

Vance drove Victor Henry to a London apartment off Grosvenor Square, kept by the Navy for visiting senior officers: a dark flat on an areaway, with a kitchen full of empty beer and whiskey bottles, a dining room, a small sitting room, and three bedrooms along a hall. “I guess you’ll be a bit crowded here.” Vance said, glancing around at the luggage and scattered clothes of two other occupants in the apartment.

“Be glad of the company.”

Blinker grimaced, winked his eyes, and said tentatively, “Pug, I didn’t know you’d become one of these boffins.”

“Boffins?”

“Scientific red-hots. That’s what they call ‘em here. The word is you came for a look-see at the newest stuff, with a green light from way high up.”

Victor Henry said, unstrapping his bags, “Really?”

The attache grinned at his taciturnity. “You’ll hear from the Limeys next. This is the end of the line for me — until I can be of service to you, one way or another.”

The loud coarse ring of a London telephone, quite different in rhythm and sound from the Berlin double buzz, startled Pug out of a nap. A slit of sunlight gleamed through drawn brown curtains.

“Captain Henry? Major-General Tillet here, Office of Military History.” The voice was high, crisp, and very British. “I’m just driving down to Portsmouth tomorrow. Possibly drop in on a Chain Home station. You wouldn’t care to come along?”

Pug had never heard the expression Chain Home. “That’ll be fine, General. Thank you.”

“Oh, really? Jolly good!” Tillet sounded delighted, as though he had suggested something boring and Pug had been unexpectedly gracious. “Suppose I pick you up at five, and we avoid the morning traffic. You might take along a shaving kit and a shirt.”

Pug heard whiskeyish laughter in the next bedroom, the boom of a man and the tinkling of a young woman. It was six o’clock. He turned on the radio and dressed. A mild Schubert trio ended, one he had often heard on the Berlin station, and news came on. In a calm, almost desultory voice, the broadcaster told of a massive air battle that had been raging all afternoon. The RAF had shot down more than a hundred German planes, and had lost twenty-five. Half the British pilots had safely parachuted. The fight was continuing, the announcer said. If there were any truth in this almost ludicrously understated bulletin, Pug thought, an astonishing victory was shaping up, high and invisible in the sky, while the Londoners went about their business.

He found Pamela Tudsbury’s number in the telephone book and called her. A different girl answered, with a charming voice that became more charming when Victor Henry identified himself. Pamela was a WAAF now, she told him, working at a headquarters outside London. She gave him another number to call. He tried it, and there Pamela was.

“Captain Henry! You’re here! Oh, wonderful! Well, you picked the right day to arrive, didn’t you?”

“Is it really going well, Pam?”

“Haven’t you heard the evening news?”

“I’m not used to believing the radio.”