The Winds of War

She gave an exhilarated laugh. “Oh, to be sure. The Berlin radio. My God, it’s nice to talk to you. Well, it’s all quite true. We’ve mauled them today. But they’re still coming. I have to go back on duty in an hour. I’m just snatching a bite to eat. I heard one officer say it was the turning point of the war. By the way, if inspection tours are in order for you, you might bear in mind that I’m working at Group Operations, Number Eleven Fighter Group.”

“Will do. How’s your fiance?”

“Oh, Ted? Fit as a flea. He’s on the ground at the moment. He’s had a busy day! Poor fellow, old man of the squadron, just turned twenty-nine. Look here, any chance that we can see you? Ted’s squadron gets its spell off ops next week. We’ll undoubtedly come down to London together. How long will you be here?”

“Well, next week I should still be around.”

“Oh, lovely. Let me have your number then, and I’ll call you. I’m so glad you’re here.”

He went out for a walk. London wore a golden light that evening, the light of a low sun shining through clear air. He zigzagged at random down crooked streets, along elegant rows of town houses, and through a green park where swans glided on calm water. He came to Trafalgar Square, and walked on through the Whitehall government buildings and along the Thames to Westminster Bridge.

Out to the middle of the bridge he strolled, and stood there, looking at the untouched famous old city stretching on both sides of the river.

London’s top-heavy red buses and scuttling black little taxis streamed across the bridge amid an abundant flow of private cars. Berlin’s sparse traffic had been mostly government or army machines. London was a civilian city still, he thought, for all the uniforms. It had no Flakturm. The British seemed to have produced their navy and their RAF from the mere table scraps of the prosperity still visibly spread here. Now these table-scrap forces had to hold the line. His job was to make a guess whether they would: also, to see whether their new electronic stuff was really advanced. Looking at this pacific and rich scene, he doubted it.

He dined alone in a small restaurant, on good red roast beef such as one could only dream of in Berlin. The apartment was dark and silent when he returned. He went to bed after listening to the news. The claimed box score for the day was now a hundred thirty German planes down, forty-nine British. Could it be true?

* * *

The small bald moustached general, in perfectly tailored khakis smoked a stubby pipe as he drove, a severe look his foxy much-wrinkled face. It had occurred to Victor Henry, after the phone conversation, that he might be E. J. Tillet, the military author, whose books he admired. And so he was; Tillet more or less resembled his book-jacket pictures, though in those the man had looked twenty years younger. Pug was not inclined to start a conversation with this forbidding pundit. Tillet said almost nothing as he spun his little Vauxhall along highways and down back roads. By the sun, Pug saw they were moving straight south. The further south they went, the more warlike the country looked. Signposts were gone, place names painted out, and some towns seemed deserted. Great loops of barbed steel rods over-arched the unmarked roads. Tillet said, pointing, “To stop glider landings,” and shut up again. Victor Henry finally tired of the silence and the beautiful rolling scenery. He said, “I guess the Germans took a bad beating yesterday.”

Tillet puffed until his pipe glowed and crackled. Victor Henry thought he wasn’t going to reply. Then he burst out, “I told Hitler the range of the Messerschmitt 109 was far too short. He agreed with me and said he’d take it up with Goring. But the thing got lost in the Luftwaffe bureaucracy. It’s a great mistake to think dictators are all-powerful! They’re hobbled by their paper shufflers, like all politicians. More so, in a way. Everybody lies to them, out of fear or sycophancy. Adolf Hitler walks in a web of flattery and phony figures. He does an amazing job, considering. He’s got a nose for facts. That’s his mark of genius. You’ve met him, of course?”

“Once or twice.”

“I had several sessions with him. He’s a great admirer of mine, or so he says. His grasp is quick and deep. The gifted amateur is often like that. I said Goring was making the same mistake with his fighter planes — designing them for ground support — that the French were making with their tanks. You don’t have to give a ground support machine much range, because the fuel trucks are always close at hand to fill them up. Those French tanks were superb fighting machines, and they had thousands of them. But the wretched things could only run fifty, sixty miles at a crack. Guderian drove two hundred miles a day. Some difference! The French never could get it into their heads that tanks should mass and operate independently. God knows Fuller, de Gaulle, and I tried hard enough to explain it to them.”

The car was bumping along a muddy detour past concrete dragons’ teeth and a stone wall, ringed in barbed wire, that blocked the highway. Masked workmen were raising clouds of gray dust with pneumatic hammers and drills.

“There’s foolishness for you.” Tillet pointed at the tank trap with his pipe. “Intended to halt invaders. What this rubbish actually would do is reduce the maneuverability of our reserve to zero. Happily Brooke’s taken charge now. He’s cleaning all this out.”

Pug said, “General Alan Brooke, is that?”

“Yes, our best man, a genius in the field. He managed the Dunkirk retreat. I was with his headquarters. I saw him demoralized only once. Headquarters was shifting from Armentieres to Lille.” Tillet knocked out his pipe in a dashboard tray and shifted his cold gray eyes to Pug. “The roads were crammed with refugees. Our command cars could hardly move. The Armentieres lunatic asylum had been bombed. All the boobies had got out. There must have been two thousand of them all over the road, in loose brown corduroy pajamas, moping, drooling, and giggling. They swarmed around our car, and looked into the windows, dripping saliva, making silly faces, waggling their hands. Alan turned to me. ‘It’s a rout, Ted,’ he said. We’re lost, you know, the whole BEF’s lost. We’ve lost damned war.’ That’s when I said, ‘Never mind, Alan. There are a lot more lunatics on the German side of the hill, including the boss.’ Well, that made him laugh, for first time in days. After that he became himself again. A word in season, the Good Book says.”

“Do you think Hitler’s crazy?” Henry said.

Tillet chewed at his pipe, eyes on the road. “He’s a split personality. Half the time he’s a reasonable, astute politician. When he’s beyond his depth he gets mystical, and silly. He informed me that the English Channel was just another river obstacle, and if he wanted to cross, why, the Luftwaffe would simply operate as artillery, and the navy as engineers. Childish. All in all, I rather like the fellow. There’s an odd pathos about him. He seems sincere, and lonely. Of course, there’s nothing for it now but to finish him off. — Hullo, we almost missed the turn. Let’s have a look at the airfield.”

This was Pug’s first look at a scene in England that resembled beaten Poland and France. Bent blackened girders hung crazily over wrecked aircraft in the hangars. Burned-out planes stood in sooty skeletal rows on the field, where bulldozers were grinding around rubble heaps and cratered runways. “Jerry did quite a job here,” said Tillet cheerfully. “Caught us napping.” The ruined airfield lay amid grassy fields dotted with wild flowers, where herds of brown cattle grazed and lowed. Away from the burned buildings, the air smelled like a garden. Tillet said as they drove off, “Goring’s just starting to make sense, going for the airfields and plane factories. He’s wasted a whole bloody month bombing harbors and pottering about after convoys. He’s only got till the equinox, the damned fool — the Channel’s impassable after about September the fifteenth. His mission is mastery of the air, not blockade. Define your mission!” he snapped at Victor Henry like a schoolmaster. “Define your mission! And stick to it!”

Tillet cited Waterloo, lost for want of a few handfuls of nails and a dozen hammers, because a general forgot his mission. Marshal Ney’s premature cavalry charge against Wellington’s center, he said, surprised and overran the British batteries, gaining a golden chance to spike the guns. But nobody had thought of bringing along hammers and nails. “Had they spiked those guns,” said Tillet through his teeth — puffing angrily at his clenched pipe, chopping a hand on the steering wheel. and getting very worked up and red-faced — “had Marshal Ney remembered what the hell his charge was all about, had one Frenchman among those five thousand thought about his mission, we’d be living in a different world. With our artillery silenced, the next cavalry charge would have broken Wellington’s center. We’d have had a French-dominated Europe for the next hundred and fifty years, instead of a vacuum into which the German came boiling up. We fought the Kaiser in 1914 and we’re fighting Adolf right now because that ass Ney forgot his mission at Waterloo — if he ever knew it.”

“For want of a nail the kingdom was lost,” said Pug.

“Damned right!’

“I don’t know much about Waterloo, but I never heard that version. I just remember Blucher and his