The Winds of War

Kampf, Bill?”

“Campaign document of a thirty-year-old hothead,” snapped the military attache, “written eighteen years ago in jail. Now he’s the head of state. He’s never moved beyond his strength. Mein Kampf’s all about tearing off the southern half of Russia and making a German breadbasket of it. That’s an old Vienna coffeehouse fantasy. It went out of the window once and for all with the pact. The Jewish business is bad, but the man’s doing his job with the crude tools at hand. That unfortunately includes anti-Semitism. He didn’t invent it. It was big on the German scene before he was born.”

“Yes, time for you to go home,” said Fearing, gulping Moselle.

“Well, what’s your version?” Now plainly irritated, the military attache put on an imitation of the broadcaster’s voice. “That Adolf Hitler the mad house painter is out to conquer the world?”

“Oh, hell, Hitler’s revolution doesn’t know where it’s going, Bill, any more than the French or Russian revolutions did,” exclaimed Fearing, with an exasperated wave of his corncob. “It’s just racing along the way those did and it’ll keep going and spreading till it’s stopped. Sure he moves peacefully where he can. Why not? Everywhere he’s pushed in there have been welcoming groups of leading citizens, or traitors, you might say. In Poland they swarmed. Why, you know that France and England have parties ready right this second to cooperate with him. He just has to strike hard enough in the west to knock out the ins and bring in the outs. He’s already got Stalin cravenly feeding him all the Russian oil and wheat he needs, in return for the few bones he threw him in the Baltic.”

With swinging theatrical gestures of the smoking pipe, Fearing went on, “By 1942, the way things are going, you may see a world in which Germany will control the industries of Europe, the raw materials of the Soviet Union and armies of England and France. Why, the French fleet would go over to him tomorrow if the right admiral sneezed. He’ll have a working deal with the Japs for exploiting Asia and the East Indies and ruling the Pacific and Indian oceans. Then what? Not to mention the network of dictatorships in South America, already in the Nazis’ pocket. You know, of course, Bill, that the United States Army is now two hundred thousand strong, and that Congress intends to cut it.”

“Well, I’m against that, of course,” said Colonel Forrest.

“I daresay! A new bloody dark age is threatening to engulf the whole world and Congress wants to cut down the Army!”

“An interesting vision,” smiled the charge. “Slightly melodramatic.”

Rhoda Henry raised her wineglass, giggling noisily. “Lawks-a mercy me! I never heard such wild-eyed poppy-cock. Freddy, you’re the one who should go home. Merry Christmas.”

Fred Fearing’s face reddened. He looked up and down the table. “Pug Henry, I like you. I guess I’ll go for a walk.”

As the broadcaster strode away from the table, the charge rose and hurried after him, but did not bring him back. The Henrys went home early. Pug had to hold up Rhoda as they left, because she was half-asleep, and unsteady at the knees.

The next pouch of Navy mail contained an Alnav listing changes of duty for most of the new captains. They were becoming execs of battleships, commanding officers of cruisers, chiefs of staff to admirals at sea. For Victor Henry there were no orders. He stared out of the window at Hitler’s chancellery, at the black-clad SS men letting snow pile on their helmets and shoulders like statues. Suddenly, he had had enough. He told his yeoman not to disturb him, and wrote three letters. The first expressed regret to the Stollers that, due to unforeseen official problems, he and Rhoda would not be coming back to Abendruh. The second, two formal paragraphs to the Bureau of Personnel, requested transfer to sea duty. In the third, a long handwritten letter to Vice-Admiral Preble, Pug poured out his disgust with his assignment and his desire to go back to sea. He ended up:

I’ve trained twenty-five years for combat at sea. I’m miserable, Admiral, and maybe for that reason my wife is miserable. She’s falling apart here in Berlin. It’s a nightmarish place. This isn’t the Navy’s concern, but it’s mine. If I have been of any service to the Navy in my entire career, the only recompense I now ask, and beg, is a transfer to sea duty.

A few days later another White House envelope came with a scrawl in black, thick, slanting pencil. The postmark showed that it had crossed his letter.

Pug -

Your report is really grand, and gives me a helpful picture. Hitler is a strange one, isn’t he? Everybody’s reaction is a little different. I’m delighted that you are where you are, and I have told CNO that. He says you want to return briefly in May for a wedding. That will be arranged. Be sure to drop in on me when you can spare a moment.

FDR

Victor Henry bought two of Rosenthal’s Oriental carpets and a set of English china that Rhoda particularly loved, at the prices the man named. His main motive was to cheer her up, and it worked; she gloated over the gains for weeks, and never tired of saying, truly enough, that the poor Jewish man’s thankfulness to her had been overwhelming. Pug also wrote the Stollers about this time that, if the invitation held, he and Rhoda would come back to Abendruh after all. If his job was intelligence, he decided, he had better get on with it; moreover, the moral gap between him and Stoller seemed to have narrowed. Notwithstanding Rosenthal’s pathetic gratitude for the deal, his possessions were Objekte.

Chapter 23

New Year’s Eve

Midnight

Briny dear -

I can’t think of a better way to start 1940 than by writing to you. I’m home, typing away in my old bedroom, which seems one-tenth as large as I remembered it. The whole house seems so cramped and cluttered, and God, how that smell of insecticide wipes away the years.

Oh, my love, what a marvellous place the United States is! I had forgotten, completely forgotten.

When I reached New York, my father was already out of the hospital — I learned this by phoning home — so I blew two hundred of my hard-earned dollars on a 1934 Dodge coupe, and I drove to Florida! I really did. Via Washington. I wanted to see the Capitol dome and the Monument. Yes, I wanted to see Slote too. More of that later, but let me assure you that he got little comfort out of the meeting. But so help me, Briny, I mainly wanted to get the feel of the country again. Well, in dead of winter, in lousy weather, and despite the tragic Negro shantytowns that line the roads down South, the Atlantic states are beautiful, spacious, raw, clean, full of wilderness still, exploding with energy and life. I loved every billboard, every filling station. It’s really the New World. The Old World’s mighty pretty in its rococo fashion, but it’s rotten-ripe and going insane. Thank God I’m out of it.

Take Miami Beach. I’ve always loathed this place, you know. It’s a measure of my present frame of mind that I regard even Miami Beach with affection. I left here a raging anti-Semite. It jars me even now to see these sleek Jews without a care in the world ambling about in their heavy tans and outlandish sun clothes — often wearing furs, or pearls and diamonds, my dear, with pink or orange shirts and shorts. The Miami Beachers don’t believe in hiding what they’ve got. I think of Warsaw, and I get angry, but it passes. They’re no different in their obliviousness to the war, from the rest of the Americans.

The doctors say my father’s coming along fine after a heart attack that all but did him in. I don’t like his fragile look, end he doesn’t do much but sit in the sun in the garden and listen to the news on the radio. He’s terribly worried about Uncle Aaron. He never used to speak much of him (actually he used to avoid the subject) but now he goes on and on about Aaron. My father is terrified of Hitler. He thinks he’s a sort of devil who’s going to