with this yarn and these documents.
A heated argument ensued, and Tudsbury finally said that even if he knew the story were true, he wouldn’t use it. This thing could backfire and keep America out of the war, he claimed, just as Hitler’s Jewish policy worked for years to paralyze the British. “
Well, I’ve just set down the bald facts of this. I didn’t mean to get so long-winded, but it’s been haunting me. If there’s even an element of truth in Jastrow’s yarn, then the Germans really have run amuck, and among other things Natalie and her infant, unless they’re out of Italy by now, are in grave hazard. Mussolini apes whatever Hitler does. But I assume they did get out; Slote tells me it was all set before her confinement.
Rhoda, when I think about Jastrow’s story my head spins and it seems to me the world I grew up in is dissolving. Even if it’s an exaggeration, just hearing such a story makes me think we’re entering some new dark age. It’s all too much for me, and the worst of it is I found it hard not to believe Jastrow. The man has a keen and dignified manner; not a man I mind having for a relative, strange as it felt to look on him as such.
It’s five minutes to six. I have to wrap this up and get on to the banquet.
This war has sure played hell with our family, hasn’t it? The days in Manila, with all three kids in school, and that house with a tennis court where I taught them all to play, seem a far-off dream. Those were the best days. And now here I am in Moscow. I hope you’re keeping up that weekly doubles game with Fred Kirby and the Vances. You always feel better when you get exercise. Give my best to Blinker and Ann, also to Fred and tell him I hope Foggy Bottom isn’t getting him down.
I miss you, busy as I am, but you sure wouldn’t care for Soviet Russia darling, in war or peace. Pamela Tudsbury says there isn’t a hairdresser in Moscow she’d go to. She cleans her own suits and dresses with gasoline.
You know, I’ve now met Hitler, Churchill Roosevelt, and tonight I may shake hands with Stalin. Considering that I’m nobody much, that’s something! My career’s taken a decidedly freakish turn. For my grandsons’ information (you already know this) I’d have preferred an entry in my record showing I’d been at sea these past two years. But there’s no changing that and in a way I guess it’s been an education. Only at this point I’ve had my bellyful and so help me God, I would gladly trade dinner in the Kremlin for one honest-to-God whiff of Navy stack gas.
Till the next time, with lots of love —
Victor Henry had arrived with the Harriman-Beaverbrook mission just as the Germans were starting their autumn smash toward Moscow. The panzer armies were breaking through less than a hundred miles away, but the Russians wined and dined their visitors, whirled them about the city in black limousines, took them to the ballet, and carried on long committee meetings, with no hint that anything was going wrong; though they did appear a bit brisk in laying on a farewell banquet less than a week after the guests had got there.
The Americans and the British understood that the Germans had been stopped east of Smolensk more than a month earlier in their central push, and had been pinned down there on the defensive ever since. In Moscow this halting of the Nazi hordes in the center was still talked of as a great feat of Soviet arms, a new “Miracle of the Marne.” Just as the French had stopped the Huns thirty miles from Paris in 1914 and snatched away their chance of quickly winning the war, so the Red Army had halted Hitler’s marauders, the assertion went, in their drive to seize Moscow before the winter set in. The Russians had even taken foreign correspondents to this central front, showing them recaptured villages, smashed Nazi tanks, and dead and captured Germans. Now the Germans claimed the march toward Moscow was rolling again, and the Russians were denying it. The fog of war effectively hid what was really happening.
Contrary to a notion popular at the time — a notion which has never quite died — the Wehrmacht was not a giant solid phalanx of tanks and armored cars, spitting flame and death as it clanked through whole nations. Hitler had a horse-drawn army. It was larger than Napoleon’s, but mainly it advanced into Russia as the Grande Armee had, by animal power and the march of men’s feet. He also had some armored divisions, spaced on the flanks of the three big groups invading the Soviet Union. The blitzkrieg worked so: the armored forces, the panzers, chugged ahead on either side of each attack front, slicing into the enemy lines, counting on surprise, terror, and punch to soften or panic the foe. The infantry came along between these two swathes as fast as it could, killing or capturing the forces which the panzer divisions had broken into or thinly encircled.
These armored divisions were a big success, and no doubt Hitler would have been glad to employ more of them. But he had started his war — as his generals had feebly grumbled — much too soon, only six years after he took power. He had not come near arming Germany to the full, though he had made frightening noises exactly as if he had, and Europe had believed him. He was therefore very low on panzer divisions, considering the vastness of the front.
In August, when his three-pronged attack had jabbed far into the Soviet Union, Hitler diverted the thin armored layers of the central formation north and south, to help wrap up the war on the flanks by taking Kiev and investing Leningrad. This done, the panzers were to come back on station and start driving again with the Center Group for the knockout blow on the capital. It was a move that military writers still argue about; but in any case, with the central armor thus peeled away, the infantry and horse-drawn artillery in the center perforce had to halt and dig in, to await the return of the panzers, the steel cutting edges, from their side excursions. This was the new “Miracle of the Marne.” The Russians were at first surprised, then immensely heartened, at this sudden stop of the huge force advancing on their capital; and disorganized though they were, they went over to counterattacks and won minor gains. The “Miracle” ceased at the end of September, when the panzer armies, back in their positions, and properly overhauled and gassed up, went slashing toward Moscow again, in two wide curving paths. That was when Harriman and Beaverbrook arrived, with the obscure Captain Henry in their train.
Chapter 52
The knot of Leslie Slote’s tie came lopsided twice in his shaky hurrying hands. He flung the tie in a corner, pulled another from his dresser, and managed a passable knot. He put on his jacket and sat in a heavy brown leather armchair to calm himself with a cigarette, flinging long legs on the ottoman. A German correspondent had abandoned this apartment on June 15, making a hasty deal with him. For Moscow, these were splendid digs: three rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, solid German furniture. Pamela Tudsbury liked the place and had cooked many a dinner here for Slote and some of their friends.
The English-speaking embassy people and correspondents — an isolated, gossipy little band — assumed that the British girl and the American Foreign Service officer were having an affair. So did Slote’s thickset Russian maid, Valya, who beamed on them and tiptoed about when Pamela was visiting. Slote yearned for such an affair. He had not gotten over the marriage of Natalie Jastrow, and nothing closed such an ego wound like a new romance. But Pam Tudsbury, whom he remembered from Paris as the warm-blooded girlfriend of Philip Rule — wild in her ways, candidly sensual, freshest and gayest when the dawn came up — brushed off his passes. She was in a gloomy state; she was being true, she said, to her fiance, a missing RAF pilot. Pam’s skin was fair as in the Paris days, her heart-shaped face with its thin bow of a mouth still a flower of English prettiness. She wore tailored wool suits, flat shoes, and glasses; but inside that secretarial uniform glowed the girl who had whipped off her stockings and splashed barefoot in the fountain on a midsummer night with Phil Rule, holding her red silk dress at mid-thigh. She still owned that dress, and sometimes wore it.
Slote had patiently been taking Pamela’s company on her terms, biding his chances to improve them. But the arrival of Captain Victor Henry deprived him of Pamela on any terms. When he glimpsed Pam with Henry, Slote knew at once he was looking at a woman in love. So much for fidelity to the missing airman! As for Captain Henry, this stumpy, sallow, tired-looking fellow of fifty or so seemed to the Foreign Service officer almost a caricature of the anonymous military man: short on small talk, quick on professional matters, poker-faced, firm, and colorless. One couldn’t even tell whether Henry liked Pamela Tudsbury. He made no visible return of her unguarded deep glances.
