saved the RAF. We needed another week against those airfields. But in the long run it will all be the same.”
Stoller said, “They’re a brave people. I hate to see them prolong the agony.”
“They don’t seem to mind,” Victor Henry said. “By and large, they’re having a good time. They think they’re going to win.”
“There is the weakness,” said Dr. Meusse, pulling on his moustache. “National megalomania. When a people loses touch with reality, it is finished.”
Stoller lit a thick cigar. “Absolutely. The course of this war is fixed now by statistics. That is my department. Would you care to hear them?”
“Gladly. Especially if you’ll give away some secrets,” said Victor Henry, evoking friendly laughter from all the Germans except Grobke. The submariner was sunk in gloom or sleep.
“No secrets,” said Stoller. “The financial stuff may be a little new to you. But take my word for it, my figures are right.”
“I’m sure of that.”
“Good. England lives at the end of — how would you put it — a revolving bucket chain of ships. She always has. This time the buckets are being shot off the chain faster than she can replace them. She started the war with about twenty million tons of shipping. Her own, and what she could scrape up elsewhere. That tonnage is disappearing fast. The rate now is — what’s the latest?” He spoke condescendingly to Grobke.
The submariner covered a yawn. “That figure is secret. Victor must have a damn good idea from what he heard in London.”
Pug said, “I have.”
“All right. Then you know the curve is upward. Nothing else matters in this war. England will soon run out of fuel and food, and that will be that. When her machines stop and her planes are grounded, and her people are clamoring for food, Churchill will fall. There’s no way out.”
“Isn’t there? My country has a lot of fuel and food — and steel and shipyards too — and we’re open for business.”
The banker coldly smiled. “Yes, but your Neutrality Act requires that England pay cash for everything. Cash and carry. That is the one sensible thing your people learned from the last war, when England repudiated her war debts. Roosevelt, Willkie, it doesn’t matter now. There isn’t a chance — you bear me out on this, Victor — that your Congress will ever make another war loan to England. Will they?”
“No.”
“All right. Then she is
Dr. Meusse put in, “We are sinking ships now at a rate we never reached until the best months of 1917. Do you know that?”
“I know that,” said Captain Henry. “And as I said to Ernst the other day, that’s when we came in.”
The silence on the terrace lasted a long time. Then Wolf Stoller said, “And that is the world tragedy that must not occur now, Victor — Germany and America, the two great anti-Bolshevik powers, going to war. The only victor will be Stalin.”
The voice of Grobke, coarse and fuddled, issued from the depths of his chair. “It won’t happen. It’ll all be over too fast. Wait till January, when we get ourselves some U-boats.”
The weekend proved cold, dull, rainy, and — for Pug — very heavy on music and culture. The five ladies, all in their thirties, all mechanically flirtatious, were available for talks, for walks, for dancing; and when the rain briefly stopped, for tennis. Pug assumed they were available for the night, too. He had trouble telling them apart.
Ernst Grobke slept a lot and left early on Sunday. The other three men had been indifferent to the submariner, though markedly warm and agreeable to Victor Henry. Obviously Grobke had served his purpose. Obviously his telephone call and the encounter with Stoller in the restaurant had been arranged. These big shots were incapable of carrying further a pretense of cordiality to a German four-striper.
Pug was asked, and he answered, many more questions about his trip to England. Except for one probe by the gaunt Luftwaffe man about the radar stations — which Pug answered with a blank, stupid look — there was no effort to pump hard intelligence out of him.
Rather, there seemed to be an effort to pump him full of German politics, philosophy, and poetry. These three old comrades were nightly fond of intellectual talk, and kept pressing on Henry books from Stoller’s library that came up in conversation. He tried to read them at bedtime. After fifteen minutes, night after night, he fell into deep restful slumber. Germany’s strange literature usually had that effect on Victor Henry. He had long since given up trying understand the fantastic seriousness with which Germans took themselves, their “world-historical” position, and every twist and turn of their murky history since Charlemagne. From a military standpoint, all this river of ink about German destiny, German culture, German spirituality, Germanophilism, pan-Germanism, and the rest, kept underlining one fact. Here was an industrial people of eighty million that had spent a century uniting itself, talking to itself, rolling up its sleeves to lick the world, and convincing itself that God would hold Germany’s coat and cheer it on. That was worth bearing in mind.
The sun broke through late Sunday when they were having cocktails on the terrace. Stoller offered to show Victor Henry his prize pigs, and walked him a long way down to the pens. Here amid a great stink, the host told Henry the pedigrees of several remarkably large hairy porkers, lying in muck and hungrily grunting. As they strolled, back, the banker said, “Have you been badly bored, Victor?”
“Why, not in the least,” Pug lied.
“I know it’s been a different sort of weekend. Meusse and Jagow are very spiritual fellows. We have been pals forever. Jagow was my first real contact with Goring. Before that I was very close to von Papen, who as you know was the Nazi’s’ biggest opponent, until he himself in 1933 saw where destiny was pointing. He actually made Hitler chancellor.” Stoller idly struck at purple flowering thistles with his heavy black stick, knocking off their heads. The broken flowers gave off a fresh rank smell. Jagow thinks the world of you.”
“He plays a hell of a cello,” said Pug, “for a fly-fly boy.”
“Yes. He is brilliant. But he is not well. Victor, he especially appreciates your willingness to talk about England. Most friendly of you.”
“I haven’t revealed anything. Not intentionally.”
Stoller laughed. “You’re an honorable servant of your government. Still your observations have been illuminating. What strikes all of us is your sense of honor. Honor is everything to a German.”
Flattery made Pug Henry uncomfortable. He met it as usual with silence and a dulled look.
“If there’s anything that General Jagow could do for you, I know it would give him pleasure.”
“That’s very kind, but not that I know of.”
“Installations you might care to visit?”
“Well, our air attache would jump at such an invitation.”
“As you wish. Jagow would take a more personal interest in you.”
“There’s one thing, a bit out of the ordinary. An RAF pilot, a good friend of mine, went down in the Channel several weeks ago. Your people might have picked him up.”
With a wave of the knobby stick, Stoller said, “That should be simple to find out. Give Jagow this pilot’s name, rank, and so forth. You’ll have your answer shortly.”
“I’ll be much obliged.”
“If your friend is a prisoner, you might even be able to visit him.”
“That would be great.”
