The Winds of War

“‘Well, I didn’t know you were about to fall out of the sky. I was going to dinner and the theatre with the kids.”

“What kids?”

“You know. Just kids I’ve met at CBS. A couple of writers, musicians, an actress, some other new girls like me. There are eight of us, sort of a gang.”

“I daresay there’ll be some bright-eyed ensigns in the junior mess.”

“Yes, exactly. Ensigns.”

“Look, I don’t want to drag you anywhere.”

“It’s just that you’ll end up talking to Commander Brown, Dad, and I’ll spend another evening with ensigns. Can’t we have breakfast tomorrow? I’ll come to your hotel.”

“That’ll be fine. These kids of yours, I’d think the young men would be these show business fellows, pretty flimsy characters.”

“Honestly, you’re wrong. They’re serious and intelligent.”

“I think it’s damn peculiar that you’ve fallen into this. It’s the furthest thing from your mother’s interests or mine.”

Madeline looked aslant at him. “Oh? Didn’t Mother ever tell you that she wanted to be an actress? That she spent a whole summer as a dancer in a travelling musical show?”

“Sure. She was seventeen. It was an escapade.”

“Yes? Well, once when we were up in an attic, it must have been at the Nag’s Head house, she came on the parasol she had used in her solo dance. An old crinkled orange paper parasol. Well, right there in that dirty attic Mama kicked off her shoes, opened the parasol, picked up her skirt, and did the whole dance for me. And she sang a song. ‘Ching-ching-challa-wa China Girl.’ I must have been twelve, but I still remember. She kicked clear to the ceiling, Mama did. God, was I ever shocked.”

“Oh, yes, ‘Ching-ching-challa-wa China Girl’!” said Pug. “She did it for me too, long long ago. Before we were married, in fact. Well, I’m off to the Colorado. Tomorrow after breakfast I fly down to Pensacola to see Warren. Next day I return to Berlin, if I can firm up my air tickets.”

She left her desk and put her arms around him. She smelled sweet and alluring, and her face shone with youth, health, and happiness. “Please, Dad. Let me work. Please.”

“I’ll write or cable you from Berlin. I’ll have to discuss it with Ching-ching-challa-wa China Girl.”

* * *

The harbor smell in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the destroyers nesting in a row with red truck lights burning, the Colorado lit up from stem to stern, its great main battery guns askew for bore sighting — these things gave Victor Henry the sense of peace that other men get by retiring to their dens with a cigar and a drink.

If he had a home in the world it was a battleship. Put together at different times and places of different steel plates and machines, embodied in many forms under many different names, a battleship was always thing: the strongest kind of warship afloat. This meant a thousand ever-changing specifications of size, design, propulsion, armor, armament, interior communication, interior supply systems; a thousand rituals and disciplines binding the crew, from the captain to the youngest striker, into one dependable corporate will and intelligence. In this sense there had been battleships in the days of Phoenicia and Rome, and there would always be battleships — a living peak of human knowledge and craft, a floating engineering structure dedicated to one aim: the control of the sea. It was the only thing to which Victor Henry had ever given himself whole; more than to his family, much more than to the sprawling abstraction called the Navy. He was a battleship man.

With other top men, he had gone to a battleship straight from the Academy in 1913. He had served time in smaller ships, too. But he was marked battleship, and he had kept coming back to them. His shining service achievement was winning the “meatball pennant,” the fleet gunnery competition, two years in a row as gunnery officer of the West Virginia. His improvised system for speeding sixteen- inch shells from the magazines to the turrets had become standard Navy doctrine. All he wanted in this life was to be executive officer of a battleship, then a captain, then an admiral with a BatDiv flag. He could see no further. He thought a BatDiv flag was as fine a thing as being a president, a king, or a pope. And he reflected, as he followed the erect quick-marching gangway messenger down the spotless white passageway to the senior officers’ mess, that every month he spent in Berlin was cutting the ground from under his hopes.

Digger Brown had been exec of the Colorado only six weeks. Sitting at the head of the table, Digger was making too many jokes, Pug thought so as to put himself at ease with the ship’s lieutenant commanders and two-stripers. That was all right. Digger was a big fellow and could turn on impressive anger at will. Pug’s style was more of a monotone. His own sense of humor, such as it was, went to jabbing ironies. As an executive officer — if he ever achieved it — he planned to be taciturn and short. They would call him a dull sour son of a bitch. One had plenty of time to warm up and make friends, but the job had to be done right from the hour one reported aboard. It was a sad fact of life that everybody, himself included, jumped to it when the boss was a son of a bitch, especially a knowledgeable son of a bitch. In the West Virginia he had been a hated man until that first meatball pennant had broken out at the yardarm. Thereafter he had been the ship’s most popular officer.

The immediate target of Digger’s raillery was his communications officer, a lean morose-looking Southerner. Recently the Colorado had received a new powerful voice radio transmitter which bounced waves off the Heaviside layer at a shallow angle. If atmospheric conditions were right, one could talk directly to a ship in European waters. Digger had chatted with his brother, the engineering officer in the Marblehead, now anchored off Lisbon. The communications officer had since been romancing an old girlfriend in Barcelona via the Marblehead radio room. Digger had found this out three days ago, and was still milking it for jokes.

Pug said, “Say, how well did this thing work, Digger? Could you understand Tom?”

“Oh, five by five. Amazing.”

“D’you suppose I could talk to Rhoda in Berlin?” It occurred to Pug that this was a chance to tell her about Madeline, and perhaps reach a decision.

The communications officer, glad of an opportunity to stop the baiting, said at once, “Captain, I know we can raise Marblehead tonight. It ought to be simple to patch in the long-distance line from Lisbon to Berlin.”

“It’ll be what — two or three o’clock in the morning there?” Brown said.

“Two, sir.”

“Want to break in on Rhoda’s beauty sleep, Pug?”

“I think so.”

The lieutenant carefully rolled his napkin in a monogrammed ring, and left.

The talk turned to Germany and the war. These battleship officers, like most people, were callowly inclined to admire and overestimate the Nazi war machine. One fresh-faced lieutenant said that he hoped the Navy was doing more work on landing craft than he’d been able to read about. If we got into the war, he said, landing would be almost the whole Navy problem, because Germany would probably control the entire coastline of Europe by then.

Digger Brown brought his guest to the executive officer’s quarters for coffee, ordering around his Filipino steward and lolling on the handsome blue leather couch with casual pride of office. They gossiped about their classmates: a couple of juicy divorces, a premature death, a brilliant leader turned alcoholic. Digger bemoaned his burdens as a battleship exec. His captain had gotten where he was with sheer luck, charm, and a marvellous wife — that was all; his ship-handling was going to give Digger a heart attack. The ship was slack from top to bottom; he had made himself unpopular by instituting a stiff program of drills; and so forth. Pug thought that for an old friend Digger was showing off too much. He mentioned that he had come back from Berlin to talk to the President. Digger’s face changed. “I’m not surprised,” he said. “Remember that phone call you had at the Army and Navy Club? I told the fellows, I bet that’s from the White House. You’re flying high, fella.”

Having taken the wind out of Digger’s sails, Victor Henry was content to say nothing more. Digger waited, stuffed his pipe, lit it, then said, “What’s Roosevelt really like, Pug?”

Henry said something banal about the President’s charm and magnetism.

There was a knock on the door and the communications officer came in. “We raised the Marblehead, no strain, sir. It took all this time to get through to Berlin. What was that