The Winds of War

news vendor at the corner hoarsely chanted.

“Bless your little heart,” Cleveland said as she came into the office. He was banging rapidly at a typewriter. “Cooper just called. He likes the idea and he’s in.” Ripping the yellow sheet out of the machine, he clipped it with others. “He remarked on what a nice girl you were. What did you say to him?”

“Hardly anything.”

“Well, you did a good job. I’m off to interview him now. There’s tomorrow’s script. Do a smooth copy of the red-checked pages, then get the whole thing to mimeo instanter. Room 3094.” Cleveland stepped into his shoes, straightened his tie, and threw on a rust-colored sports jacket. He scratched his heavy blond hair, and grinned at her, raising thick humorously arched eyebrows. She felt she would do anything for him. He was charming, she decided, rather than actually handsome. There was something infectiously jovial about him, a spark of devilish amusement in his lively blue eyes. She was a bit disappointed to see, when he stood up, that though he could not be more than thirty-one or so, his stomach bulged. But it didn’t matter.

He paused at the door. “Do you mind working nights? You’ll get paid overtime. If you come back here around eight-thirty tonight, you’ll find Thursday’s rough on my desk, with the Cooper spot.”

“Mr. Cleveland, I haven’t been hired yet.”

“You have been. I just talked to Mrs. Hennessy. After you get that script to mimeo, go down and fill out your papers.”

Madeline toiled for five hours to finish the script. She turned it in, messy though her work was, hoping it would not end her radio career then and there. At the employment office she learned she was starting at thirty-five dollars a week. It seemed a fortune. She took her aching back to the drugstore, made a quick dinner of a chocolate drink and a bacon and tomato sandwich, and walked back to CBS. Over the tall black Madison Avenue buildings, checkered with gold-lit windows, a misty full moon floated in a. sunset sky. This day when Hitler’s war began was turning out the most delightful in Madeline Henry’s life.

On Cleveland’s desk the interview with Garry Cooper now lay, a mass of crude typing, quick scrawls and red crayon cuts. The note clipped to it said: Try to copy it all over tonight. See you around ten. Madeline groaned; she was terribly tired.

She put in a call to Warren at the bachelor officers’ quarters of the Pensacola flying school. He wasn’t there, but an operator with a Southern accent like a vaudeville imitation offered to track him down. In the smoky newsroom, girls kept crisscrossing with long teletype strips or paper cups of coffee, men were talking loud and fast, and the typewriter din never stopped. Through the open door Madeline heard contradictory rumors: Poland was already collapsing, Hitler was on his way to Warsaw, Mussolini was flying to Berlin, the French were pressing England for another Munich deal, Hitler was offering to visit Chamberlain.

The telephone rang at ten o’clock and there was Warren on the line, with music and laughter in the background. He was at the beach club, he said, at a moonlight dance on a terrace lined with palm trees. He had just met a marvelous girl, the daughter of a congressman. Madeline told about the CBS job, and he seemed amused and impressed.

“Say, I’ve heard Who’s in Town,” he said. “This fellow Hugh Cleveland has an interesting voice. What’s he like?”

“Oh, very nice. Do you think it’s all right? Will Dad be furious?”

“Matty, you’ll be back at school in three weeks, before he even knows about it. Where will you stay?… Oh, yes, that’s an all-women hotel, I know that one. Ha! Little Madeline on the town.”

“You don’t object?”

“Me? Why, I think it’s fine. Just be a good girl, and all that. What’s the word at CBS, Madeline? Is the war on? The scuttlebutt down here is that England is chickening out.”

“Nothing but rumors here too, a dozen an hour. Is your date really the daughter of a congressman?”

“You bet, and she is a dish.”

“Tough life you’re leading. How’s the flying coming?”

“I ground-looped on my second solo landing, but don’t write Dad that. I’m doing much better now. It’s great.”

“Good, you’re still here,” Cleveland said, walking into the office a few minutes after this conversation. With him was a tall beauty in a black straw hat much wider than Madeline’s, and a gray silk dress. Her gardenia perfume was too strong for the small office. Cleveland glanced at Madeline’s typed pages. “Need a little practice, eh?”

“I warm up as I go along.” Her voice trembled. She cleared her throat.

“Let’s hope so. Now look, do you by any chance know of an admiral named Preble? Is he some high mucky- muck?”

“Preble? Do you mean Stewart Preble?”

“Stewart Preble, exactly. Who is he?”

“Why, he’s the Chief of Naval Operations.”

“That’s a big job, eh?”

Madeline was used to civilian ignorance of the armed forces, but this shocked her. “Mr. Cleveland, there’s nobody higher in the United States Navy.”

“Fine. Then he’s our boy. I just found out he’s at the Warwick. We keep tabs on the big hotels, Madeline. Now let’s get off a letter to him.” He leaned on the edge of the desk and started to dictate. The yawning beauty crossed glorious legs, lit a cigarette, and leafed the Hollywood Reporter. Madeline desperately tried to keep up, but had to plead with him to go slower.

“Don’t you know shorthand?”

“I can learn it quickly enough.”

Cleveland glanced at his watch and at the beauty, who drooped her eyelids contemptuously at Madeline. Madeline felt like a worm. Cleveland rumpled his hair and shook his head. “Look, you know these Navy characters. Write him a letter, that’s all. Invite him to come on the Thursday morning show. Mention Gary Cooper, if you want to. Sign my name, and take it over to the Warwick. Can you do that?

“Certainly.”

“Fine. Wendy and I want to catch a ten o’clock movie. She plays a bit in it. Say, this Preble fellow, does he know your father? How about that, Wendy? This kid’s father is our Navy Attache in Berlin.”

Wendy yawned.

“Madeline said coldly, “Admiral Preble knows my father.”

“Well, how about mentioning that, then?” He gave her his persuasive impish smile. “I’d really like to get him, Madeline. Admirals and generals are usually crappy guests. Too cautious and stiff to say anything interesting. But there’s a war on, so for the moment, they’re hot. See you in the morning. I go on at nine, you know, so get here not later than eight.”

* * *

As he had told Madeline, Warren was dancing away this first night of the war in moonlight, with a congressman’s pretty daughter.

The moon floats out in space, some thirty diameters of the earth away, shining on the just and the unjust as the cloud cover allows. It had lent dim but helpful light to columns of young Germans in gray uniforms, miles and miles long, trudging across the Polish border. Now Europe had rolled into the sun giving the Germans better illumination to get on with the work, and the same moon was bathing the Gulf of Mexico, and the terrace of Pensacola’s Harbor View Club. The German General Staff had carefully planned on the moonlight, but the silver glow fell on Warren Henry and Janice Lacouture by a pleasant chance.

Everyone said it was the best club dance in years. The big headlines, the excited radio broadcasts, had created a pleasurable stir in flat quiet Pensacola. The student aviators felt more important and the girls found them more glamorous; war was in the air, and however remote the combat, these were warriors. The talk about the German attack soon gave way to homier topics, however: the horse show, the new base commander, recent flying accidents, recent romances. Der Fuhrer, for these happy people, remained the queer hoarse German of the newsreels, with the wild gestures and the funny moustache, who had managed to start up a European mess, but who could scarcely menace the United States just yet.

Lieutenant (junior grade) Henry took a different view. The invasion really interested him, and that was how he first caught the interest of Janice Lacouture. At the Academy he had excelled on the subject of the World War. They sat in a far corner of the terrace in the moonlight soon after they met, and instead of talking aviation or