Prussians showing up at sunset and saving the day.”
“Wouldn’t have been worth a tinker’s dam if Ney had fetched along his hammers and nails. By sunset Wellington would have been in full flight. Napoleon had routed Blucher three days earlier. He’d have done it again with ease.”
The car went over the crest of a hill. Ahead, beyond green empty pastureland, lay the blue Channel, shining in the sun, and a hairline of French coast all along the horizon. They got out and stood amid high grass and red poppies blowing in a cool sea breeze. After an impressive silence, broken only by birdsong, Tillet said, “Well, there you are. You’re looking at Hitler’s France.”
Turn by turn they scanned the coast through a telescope Tillet brought out of the car’s trunk. Small images of houses and ships shimmered on the far shore.
“That’s as close as Jerry’s ever come,” Tillet said. Close enough, too.”
“The Germans took all the neutral attaches on a tour of France not long ago,” Pug said. “Brought us clear to the coast. The poppies are growing over there, too. We saw your chalk cliffs, and the Maginot Line guns they were pointing at you. Now I’m looking down the wrong end of those guns.”
Tillet said, “They’re no problem. They lob a few shells over for terror, but they fall in the fields. Nobody’s terrorized.”
Running westward along the coast, they passed through silent boarded-up villages, thickly tangled with barbed wire. Camouflaged pillboxes stood thick along the hills and in the towns. Pug saw a children’s merry-go- round with the snouts of cannon peeking from under the platform of painted horses. Along the flat stony beaches, jagged iron rods spiked up, festooned with wire. As waves rose and fell, queerly shaped tangles of pipe poked above the water.
Pug said, “Well, you’re not exactly unprepared.”
“Yes. Adolf was decent enough to give us a breather, and we’ve used it. Those pipes out beyond the waterline are just the old Greek fire idea. We set the sea ablaze with petroleum, and fry the Germans we don’t drown.”
Barrage balloons came in sight over the hills to the west. “Ah. Here we are.” Tillet pulled up under a spreading old tree. “Portsmouth has two possible restaurants, but the city’s taken a pasting. They may be short of crockery. I have some sandwiches and coffee in the boot.”
“Perfect.”
Pug trotted up and down the road, restoring circulation to his numb heavy legs, then sat beside Tillet under the tree. They ate the lunch wordlessly. Tillet appeared to have no small talk whatever. Pug did not mind, being more or less like that himself. “Look there.” Tillet said, gesturing with the last of his sandwich. In the blue sky a patch of orange was flowering over the city, a barrage balloon on fire. “They’re back today, after all. More coffee?”
“No thanks.”
“Now, what’s the damned fool doing hitting poor Portsmouth again? Yesterday he was going inland where he should be.” Tillet deftly packed the lunch things and got his binoculars. The air vibrated with the distant thump of A.A. firing and the hum of planes. “Shall we get along down there? I imagine it’s a feint. It doesn’t look like much of a show.”
“Right.”
Climbing in the car, Pug paused, and scanned the sky high to the east. “Look there, General.”
Tillet squinted skyward, saw nothing, and used his binoculars. His eyes widened. “Yes. That’s more like it.” He passed the binoculars to Victor Henry. The binoculars resolved the gray moving dot into swarms of airplanes moving north in tight V’s across the cloudless blue.
“Heinkels, a lot of 109’s, and some 110’s,” Pug said. “More than a hundred of them.”
“No Stukas? They’re sitting birds. Our pilots say it’s hardly sporting to go after them.”
“I don’t see any crooked wings up there. But they’re pretty far off.”
“Care to join our observer corps, Captain Henry?” Tillet’s voice to him was slightly more cordial.
More barrage balloons over Portsmouth burst into flame and went writhing lazily down in black smoke. Fires were burning on the docks: white smoke trails crisscrossed the blue sky. The car passed a black plane nose down, burning in a grassy field, its markings hidden by flames. By the time they reached Portsmouth, fire fighters were streaming water on the blazes, and people were out in the streets gawking. Though buildings were smashed and burning and rubble heaps blocked many streets, the town did not look anything like Rotterdam, or even some of the badly hit French towns.
“Care to inspect the damage? You’re welcome to, but it’s a dreary sight. I’m thinking we might go straight on to the Chain Home station. Since Jerry does seem to be coming over today, you might find it interesting.”
“Sure thing.”
They had the ferry to themselves. The old wooden boat rolled nauseatingly on the little stretch of open water to the Isle of Wight.
“People forget how choppy this Channel is,” said Tillet, clinging to a stanchion and raising his voice above the wind and the engine thump. “If the Germans do cross, they may arrive too seasick to fight. It’s a factor.”
An olive-painted military car awaited them at the landing. They drove across the bucolic island passing one mansion after another shuttered and dead amid rolling wide lawns and shrubbery sprouting and flowering rankly.
They saw no other car on their way to a cluster of iron and wooden huts around steel towers thrusting toward the sky, a grim blotch on the green holiday island.
A tubby man with a scarlet face, the group captain in charge of the station, offered them tea in his little office, chatting about the raid on Portsmouth. He also mentioned with some pride a large sea bass which he had hauled from the surf at dawn. “Well, shall we have a look at how things are going? There’s rather a large attack been laid on today, I believe.”
Victor Henry’s first glimpse of British radar scopes at Ventnor, in a small stuffy room lit by one red light and foul with smoke, was a deep shock. He listened intently to the talk of the pale, slender man in gray tweed called Dr. Cantwell, a civilian scientist, as they inspected the scopes. But the sharp green pips were news enough. The British were miles ahead of the United States. They had mastered techniques that American experts had told him were twenty years off.
The RAF could measure the range and bearing of a ship down to a hundred yards of less, and read the result off a scope at sight. They could do the same to a single incoming airplane, or count a horde of airplanes, and give the altitude too. These instruments were marvels compared to the stuff that he had seen tested on the
“We have nothing like this,” he said.
“Mm?” said Dr. Cantwell, lighting a cigarette. “Are you sure? They’re pretty far along at MIT, we understand, with this sort of thing.”
“I know what we’ve got.” Pug saw on General Tillet’s face, in the red light, the shadowy gleam that comes of drawing a good hand of cards: a deepening of lines, a brightening of eyes, nothing more. “How the devil do you obtain such a sharp beam? I pressed our boys on this. The answer was that it was a question of stepping down to shorter and shorter wavelengths. Beyond a certain point you can’t do that, they say, and still get the power to shoot out the pulses to any distance.”
The scientist nodded, his eyes almost shut, his face as blank as possible. But he too, Pug thought, was a happy man.
“Mm, yes, that’s the problem, isn’t it?” he mumbled. “But they’ll certainly get around to the answer. It’s a question of tube design, circuitry, and so forth. Our cavity magnetron does a pretty good job, at that. We’re not entirely displeased with it.”
“Cavity magnetron?”
