after a while noticed him standing near the anchor among the sailors, in a khaki uniform and a brown windbreaker, hands in his back pockets, trousers flapping in the breeze. It was the first time she had ever seen Byron in a uniform; it made him seem different, remote, and older. Aster was shouting orders through a megaphone. Colored signal flaps ran up. The sailors hauled in the lines. Byron walked along the forecastle and stood opposite his bride, almost close enough to reach out and clasp hands. She blew him a kiss. His face under the peaked khaki cap was businesslike and calm. A foghorn blasted. The submarine fell away from the dock and black water opened between them.
“You come home, now,” he shouted.
“I will. Oh, I swear I will.”
“I’ll be waiting. Two months!”
He went to his duty station. With a swish of water from the propellers, the low black submarine dimmed away into the drizzle.
Natalie hurried up the quay, past the Gestapo men, past the line of escaping Jews, whose eyes were all fixed in one direction — the gangway table they still had to pass, where the Portuguese officials and the three Germans were comparing papers and laughing together. Natalie’s hand sweatily clutched the American passport in her pocket.
“Hello, old Slote,” she said, when she found a telephone and managed to make the connection. “This is Mrs. Byron Henry. Are you interested in buying me a breakfast? I seem to be free. Then let’s push on to Italy, dear, and get Aaron out. I have to go home.”
Chapter 39
In Washington Victor Henry was reassigned to War Plans. He did not hear from Roosevelt at all. People said the President was unaccountable, and from firsthand knowledge, the naval captain was beginning to believe it. But he was untroubled by the assignment, though he had craved and expected sea duty.
More than anything else — more than the gray hairs beginning to show at his temples, more than the sharper lines on his forehead and around his mouth, more than his calmer pace on the tennis court — his contentment with still another desk job showed how Victor Henry was changing.
Washington in January 1941, after London and Berlin, struck him as a depressing panorama of arguments, parties, boozing, confusion, lethargy, and luxury, ominously like Paris before the fall. It took him a long time to get used to brilliantly lit streets, rivers of cars, rich overabundant food, and ignorant indifference to the war. The military men and their wives, when Pug talked to them, discussed only the hairline advantages that the distant explosions might bring in their own tiny lives. Navy classmates of his caliber were stepping into the major sea commands that led to flag rank. He knew he was regarded as a hard-luck guy, a comer sunk by bureaucratic mischance. But he had almost stopped caring. He cared about the war; and he cared about the future of the United States, which looked dark to him.
The Navy was as preoccupied as ever by Japan. Every decision of the President to strengthen the Atlantic Fleet caused angry buzzes and knowing headshakes in the Department, and at the Army and Navy Club. When he tried to talk about the Germans, his friends tended to regard him askance; a bypassed crank, their amused glances almost said, trying to inflate his importance by exaggerating minor matters he happened to know about. The roaring debate over Lend-Lease, in Congress and the newspapers, seemed to him a farrago of illogic and irrelevance. It suited Hitler’s book at the moment not to declare war on the United States — that was all. It apparently suited the American people in turn to fake neutrality while commencing a sluggish, grudging effort on the British side, arguing every inch of the way. These two simple facts were being lost in the storm of words.
Pug Henry was content in the War Plans Division because here he worked in another world, a secret, very small world of hard-boiled reality. Early in January, with a few other officers in War Plans, he had begun “conversations” with British military men. In theory, Lord Burne-Wilke and his delegation were in Washington on vague missions of observing or purchase. Supposedly the talks were low-level explorations binding on nobody, and supposedly the President, the Army Chief of Staff, and the Chief of Naval Operations took no cognizance of them. In fact, by the first of March these conferences were finishing up a written war operations plan on a world scale. The assumption was that Japan would sooner or later attack, and the key decision of the agreement lay in two words: “Germany first.” It heartened Victor Henry that the American Army and Air Corps planners concurred in this, and also, to his considerable surprise and pleasure, Admiral Benton and two other naval colleagues who had thought the war through — unlike the rest of the Navy, still rolling along in the greased grooves of the old drills and war games against “Orange,” the code name for Japan.
It was clear to Pug Henry that if Japan entered the war, with her annual steel production of only a few million tons, she could not hold out long if Germany were beaten. But if the Germans knocked out the British and got the fleet, they could go on to conquer whole continents, getting stronger as they went, whatever happened to Japan.
From his conversations at the Army and Navy Club he knew that this “Germany first” decision would, if it came out, create a fearsome howl. He was one of a handful of Americans — perhaps less than twenty, from the President downward — who knew about it. This was a peculiar way to run national affairs, perhaps; but to his amazement, which never quite faded, this was how things were going. To be part of this crucial anonymous work satisfied him.
It was passing strange to arrive in the morning at the drab little offices in a remote wing of the old Navy Building, and sit down with the British for another day of work on global combat plans, after reading in the morning papers, or hearing on the radio, yesterday’s shrill Lend-Lease argument in Congress. Pug could not get over the cool dissembling of the few high officials who knew of the “conversations.” He kept wondering about a form of government which required such deviousness in its chiefs, and such soothing, cajoling fibs to get its legislators to act sensibly. Once the planners, weary after a hammering day, sat in their shirt-sleeves around a radio, listening to General Marshall testify before a Senate committee. They heard this Army Chief of Staff, whose frosty remote uprightness made Henry think of George Washington, assure the senators that no intention existed for America to enter the war, and that at present there was no need for any large buildup of its armed forces. The planners had just been discussing an allocation of troops based on an American army of five million in 1943, a projection of which Marshall was well aware.
“I don’t know,” Pug remarked to Burne-Wilke, “Maybe the only thing you can say for democracy is that all the other forms of government are even worse.”
“Worse for what?” was the air commodore’s acid reply. “If other forms are better for winning wars, no other virtue counts.”
Pug got along well with Burne-Wilke, who had fully grasped the landing craft problem. Among the planners, a labored joke was spreading about Captain Henry’s girlfriend, “Elsie”; this was in fact a play on l.c. (landing craft), which he kept stressing as the limiting factor of operations in all theatres. Pug had worked up formulas converting any troop movement across water into types and quantities of landing craft, and these formulas threw cold water on many an ambitious and plausible plan. Somebody would usually say, “Pug’s girl Elsie acting up again”; and Burne-Wilke always supported his insistence on the bottleneck.
Henry seldom encountered Pamela Tudsbury, whom the air commodore had brought along as his typist-aide. Tucked in an office in the British Purchasing Mission, she evidently worked like a dog, for her face was always haggard. A glad shock had coursed through him when he first saw Pamela, standing at Burne-Wilke’s elbows, regarding him with glowing eyes. She had not written that she was coming. They met for a drink just once. Pug amplified all he could on his letter about the meeting with Ted Gallard. She looked extremely young to him; and his gust of infatuation with this girl after the bombing mission seemed, in the bustling Willard bar in Washington, a distant and hardly believable episode. Yet the hour with her was warmly pleasurable. Any day thereafter when he saw her was a good day for him. He left these encounters to chance. He did not telephone her, nor ask her to meet him again; and while she always acted glad to see him, she made no move to do so more often.
As a college boy thinks about fame, and an exile about going home, this Navy captain of forty-nine once in a
