“Why the hell are the Germans running away with it in Poland, Pug, if all this is so?” Warendorf said. They had been listening, attentive but unconvinced, to his estimate of the opposed forces.
“That’s anybody’s guess. I’d say surprise, superior matériel on the spot, concentration of force, better field leadership, better political leadership, better training, a professional war plan, and probably a lot of interior rot, confusion, and treason behind the Polish lines. Also the French and British seem to be sitting on their duffs through the best strategic opportunity against Hitler they’ll ever have. You can’t win a game if you don’t get out on the field.”
A page boy called him to the telephone. Briskly, an unfamiliar voice said, “Commander Henry? Welcome to these peaceful shores. I’m Carton. Captain Russell Carton. I think we were briefly at the War College together, fighting the Japs on a linoleum checkerboard floor.”
“That’s right, Captain, 1937. The Japs beat hell out of us, as I recall.” Pug did his best to suppress the astonishment in his tones. Russell Carton was the name of President Roosevelt’s naval aide.
The voice chuckled. “I hope you’ve forgotten that I was the admiral who blew the engagement. When shall I pick you up? Our appointment’s at noon.”
“How far do we have to go?”
“Just around the corner. The White House. You’re seeing the President…. Hello? Are you there?”
“Yes, sir. Seeing the President, you said. Do I get a briefing on this?”
“Not that I know of. Wear dress whites. Suppose I pick you up at eleven-thirty.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
He went back to his table and ordered more coffee. The others asked no questions. He kept his face blank, but it was hard to fool these old friends. They knew it was odd that he was back from Berlin so soon. They probably guessed that he had received a startling call. That didn’t matter. Munson said, “Pug, don’t you have a boy in Pensacola? I’m flying down there day after tomorrow to drop some pearls of wisdom about carrier landings. Come along.”
“If I can, Paul. I’ll call you.”
Pug was sorry when they left. The shoptalk about a combat exercise they were planning had brought back the smell of machinery, of sea air, of coffee on the bridge. Their gossip of recent promotions and assignments, their excitement over the quickening world events and the improving chances for action and glory—this was his element, and he had been out of it too long. He got a haircut, brilliantly shined his own shoes, put a fresh white cover on his cap, donned his whites and ribbons, and sat in the lobby for an eternally long forty-five minutes, puzzling over the imminent encounter with Franklin Roosevelt, and dreading it. He had met him before.
A sailor came through the revolving door and called his name. He rode the few blocks to the White House in a gray Navy Chevrolet, dazedly trying to keep up chitchat with Captain Carton, a beefy man with a crushing handgrip on whose right shoulder blue-and-gold “loafer’s loops” blazed. This marked him as a presidential aide, to those who knew; otherwise staff aiguillettes belonged on the left shoulder. Pug kept step with the captain through the broad public rooms of the White House, along corridors, up staircases. “Here we are,” Carton said, leading him into a small room. “Wait a moment.” The moment lasted twenty-seven minutes. Pug Henry looked at old sea-battle engravings on the wall, and out of the window; he paced, sat in a heavy brown leather chair, and paced again.
He was wondering whether the President would remember him, and hoping he wouldn’t. In 1918, as a very cocky Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Roosevelt had crossed to Europe on a destroyer. The wardroom officers, including Ensign Henry, had snickered at the enormously tall, very handsome young man with the famous family name, who made a great show of using nautical terms and bounding up ladders like a seadog, while dressed in outlandish costumes that he kept changing. He was a charmer, the officers agreed, but a lightweight, almost a phony, spoiled by an easy rich man’s life. He wore pince-nez glasses in imitation of his great relative, President Teddy Roosevelt, and he also imitated his booming manly manner; but a prissy Harvard accent made this heartiness somewhat ridiculous.
One morning Ensign Henry had done his usual workout on the forecastle, churning up a good sweat. Because there was a water shortage, he had hosed himself down from a saltwater riser on the well deck. Unfortunately the ship was pitching steeply. The hose had gotten away from him and spouted down into the hatchway to the wardroom, just as Roosevelt was coming topside in a gold-buttoned blazer, white flannel trousers, and straw hat. The costume had been wrecked, and Pug had endured a fierce chewing out by his captain and the dripping Assistant Secretary of the Navy.
A door opened. “All right. Come on in, Pug,” Captain Carton said.
The President waved at him from behind the desk. “Hello there! Glad to see you!” The warm commanding aristocratic voice, so recognizable from radio broadcasts, jarred Pug with its very familiarity. He got a confused impression of a grand beautiful curved yellow room cluttered with books and pictures. A gray-faced man in a gray suit slouched in an armchair near the President. Franklin Roosevelt held out a hand: “Drop your bonnet on the desk, Commander, and have a chair. How about some lunch? I’m just having a bite.” A tray with half-eaten scrambled eggs, toast, and coffee stood on a little serving table by the President’s swivel chair. He was in shirt-sleeves and wore no tie. Pug had not seen him, except in newsreels and photographs, in more than twenty years. His high coloring was unchanged, and he was the same towering man, gone gray-headed, much older and very much heavier; and though he had the unmistakable lordly look of a person in great office, a trace remained in the upthrust big jaw of the youthful conceit that had made the ensigns on the Davey snicker. His eyes were sunken, but very bright and keen.
“Thank you, Mr. President. I’ve eaten.”
“By the way, this is the Secretary of Commerce, Harry Hopkins.”
The gray-faced man gave Henry a brief winning smile, with a light tired gesture that made a handshake unnecessary.
The President looked archly at Victor Henry, his big heavy head cocked to one side. “Well, Pug, have you learned yet how to hang onto a saltwater hose at sea?”
“Oh, gawd, sir.” Pug put a hand to his face in mock despair. “I’ve heard about your memory, but I hoped you’d forgotten that.”
“Ha, ha, ha!” The President threw his head back. “Harry, this young fellow absolutely ruined the best blue serge blazer and straw hat I ever owned, back in 1918. Thought I’d forget that, did you? Not on your life. Now that I’m Commander-in-Chief of the United States Navy, Pug Henry, what have you got to say for yourself?”
“Mr. President, the quality of mercy is mightiest in the mightiest.”
“Oh ho! Very good. Very good. Quick thinking, Pug.” He glanced at Hopkins. “Ha, ha, ha! I’m a Shakespeare lover myself. Well said. You’re forgiven.”
Roosevelt’s face turned serious. He glanced at Captain Carton, who still stood at attention near the desk. The aide made a smiling excuse and left the room. The President ate a forkful of eggs and poured himself coffee. “What’s going on over there in Germany, Pug?”
How to field such a facetious question? Victor Henry took the President’s tone. “I guess there’s a war on of sorts, sir.”
“Of sorts? Seems to me a fairly honest-to-goodness war. Tell me about it from your end.”
Victor Henry described as well as he could the peculiar atmosphere in Berlin, the playing down of the war by the Nazis, the taciturn calm of the Berliners. He mentioned the blimp towing a toothpaste advertisement over the German capital on the first day of the war—the President grunted at that and glanced toward Hopkins—and the pictures in the latest Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung which he had picked up in Lisbon, showing happy German crowds basking at the seashore and frolicking in folk dances on village greens. The President kept looking at Hopkins, who had what Victor Henry thought of as a banana face: long, meager, and curved. Hopkins appeared sic
k, possibly feverish, but his eyes were thoughtful and electrically alive.
Roosevelt said, “Do you suppose he’ll offer peace when he finishes with Poland? Especially if he’s as unprepared as you say?”
“What would he have to lose, Mr. President? The way things look now, it might work.”
The President shook his head. “You don’t know the British. Not that they’re any better prepared.”
“I’ll admit I don’t, sir.”
For the first time, Hopkins spoke, in a soft voice. “How well do you know the Germans?”
“Not at all well, Mr. Secretary. They’re hard people to make out. But in the end there’s only one thing you have to know about the Germans.”
“Yes? What’s that?”
“How to lick them.”
The President laughed, the hearty guffaw of a man who loved life and welcomed any chance to laugh. “A warmonger, eh? Are you suggesting, Pug, that we ought to get into it?”
“Negative in the strongest terms, Mr. President. Not unless and until we have to.”
“Oh, we’ll have to,” Roosevelt said, hunching over to sip coffee.
This struck Victor Henry as the most amazing indiscretion he had heard in his lifetime. He could hardly believe the big man in shirtsleeves had said the words. The newspapers and magazines were full of the President’s ringing declarations that America would stay out of the war. Roosevelt went blandly on with a compliment about Combat Readiness of Nazi Germany, which he said he had read with great interest. His next questions showed that he had retained little of the analysis. His grasp of the important strategic facts about Germany was not much better than Harry Warendorfs or Digger Brown’s, and his queries were like theirs, even to the inevitable “What’s Hitler really like? Have you talked to him?” Pug described Hitler’s war speech in the Reichstag. Franklin Roosevelt exhibited a lively interest in this, asking how Hitler used his voice and hands, and what he did when he paused.
“I’m told,” Roosevelt said, “that they type his speeches on a special machine with perfectly enormous letters, so he won’t have to wear glasses.”
“I wouldn’t know about that, sir.”
“Yes, I got that from a pretty reliable source. ‘Führer type,’ they call it.” Roosevelt sighed, turned his chair away from the food, and lit a cigarette. “There’s no substitute for being in a place yourself, Pug, seeing it with your own eyes, getting the feel. That’s what’s missing in this job.”
“Well, Mr. President, in the end it all boils down to cold facts and figures.”
“True, but too often all that depends on who writes the reports. Now that was a fine report of yours. How did you really foresee he’d make a pact with Stalin? Everybody here was stupefied.”
“I guess mathematically somebody somewhere was bound to make that wild guess, Mr. President. It happened to be me.”
“No, no. That was a well-reasoned report. Actually, we did have some warning here, Pug. There was a leak in one German embassy—never mind where—and our State Department had predictions of that pact. Trouble was, nobody here was much inclined to believe them.” He looked at Hopkins, with a touch of mischief. “That’s always the problem with intelligence, isn’t it, Pug? All kinds of strange information will come in, but then—”
The President all of a sudden appeared to run out of conversation. He looked tired, bored, and withdrawn, puffing at a cigarette in a long holder. Victor Henry would have been glad to leave, but he thought the President should dismiss him. He was feeling a bit firmer about the meeting now. Franklin Roosevelt had the manner, after all, of a fleet commander relaxing over lunch, and Pug was used to the imperious ways of admirals. Apparently he had crossed the Atlantic in wartime to kill an off-hour for the President.
Hopkins glanced at his watch. “Mr. President, the Secretary and Senator Pittman will be on their way over now.”
“Already? The embargo business? Well, Pug.” Henry jumped up, and took his cap. “Thank you for coming by. This has been grand. Now if there’s anything else you think I should know, just anything that strikes you as significant or interesting, how about dropping me a line? I’ll be glad to hear from you. I mean that.”
At this grotesque proposal for bypassing the chain of command, which ran counter to Henry’s quarter century of naval training and experience, he could only blink and nod. The President caught his expression. “Nothing official, of course,” he said quickly. “Whatever you do, don’t send me more reports! But now that we’ve gotten acquainted again, why not stay in touch? I liked that thing you wrote. I could just see that submarine base emptying out at five o’clock. It said an awful lot about Nazi Germany. Sometimes one little thing like that—or what a loaf of bread costs, or the jokes people are repeating, or like that advertising blimp over Berlin—such things can sometimes suggest more than a report umpteen pages long. Of course, one needs the official reports, too. But I get enough of those, heaven knows!”
Franklin Roosevelt gave Commander Henry the hard look of a boss who has issued an order and wants to know if it’s understood.
“Yes, Mr. President,” Henry said.
“And, oh, by the way, here’s a suggestion that’s just come to my desk, Pug, for helping the Allies. Of course we’re absolutely neutral in this foreign war, but still—” The President broke into a sly grin. His tired eyes sparkled as he glanced here and there on his cluttered desk, and took up a paper. “Here we are. We offer to buy the Queen Mary and the Normandie, and we use them for evacuating Americans from Europe. There are thousands stranded, as you know. What do you think? It would give the Allies a pile of much needed dollars, and we’d have the ships. They’re fine luxury liners. How about it?”
Victor Henry looked from Hopkins to the President. Evidently this was a serious question. They were both waiting for his answer. “Mr. President, I’d say those ships are major war assets and they’d be insane to sell them. They’re magnificent troop transports. They’re the fastest vessels for their tonnage of anything afloat, they can outrun any submarine at cruising speed, they hardly have to zigzag they’re so fast, and with the interiors stripped their carrying capacity is gigantic.”
The President said dryly to Hopkins, “Is that what the Navy replied?”
“I’d have to check, Mr. President. I think their response went mainly to the question of where the money’d come from.”
Franklin Roosevelt cocked his head thoughtfully, and smiling at Victor Henry, held out a long arm for a handshake. “Do you know why I didn’t make more of a fuss about those clothes? Because your skipper said you were one of the best ensigns he’d ever seen. Keep in touch, now.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Well, how did it go?” The President’s aide was smoking a cigar in the anteroom. He rose, knocking off the ash.
“All right, I suppose.”
“It must have. You were scheduled for ten minutes. You were in there almost forty.”
“Forty! It went fast. What now?”
“How do you mean?”
“I don’t have very specific instructions. Do I go straight back to Berlin, or what?”
“What did the President say?”
“It was a pretty definite good-bye, I thought.”
Captain Carton smiled. “Well, I guess you’re all through. Maybe you should check in with CNO. You’re not scheduled here again.” He reached into a breast pocket. “One more thing. This came to my office a little while ago, from the State Department.”
It was an official dispatch envelope. Henry ripped it open and read the flimsy pink message form:
FORWARDED X BYRON HENRY SAFE WELL WARSAW X AWAITING EVACUATION ALL NEUTRALS NOW UNDER NEGOTIATION GERMAN GOVERNMENT X SLOTE
Victor Henry disappointed Hugh Cleveland when he walked into the broadcaster’s office; just a squat, broad-shouldered, ordinary-looking man of about fifty, in a brown suit and a red bow tie, standing at the receptionist’s desk. The genial, somewhat watchful look on his weathered face was not
sophisticated at all. As Cleveland sized up people—having interviewed streams of them—this might be a professional ballplayer turned manager, a lumberman, maybe an engineer; apple-pie American, fairly intelligent, far from formidable. But he knew Madeline feared and admired her father, and day by day he was thinking more highly of the young girl’s judgment, so he took a respectful tone.
“Commander Henry? It’s a pleasure. I’m Hugh Cleveland.”
“Hello. Hope I’m not busting in on anything. I thought I’d just drop by and have a look-see.”
“Glad you did. Madeline’s timing the script. Come this way.” They walked along the cork floor of a corridor walled with green soundproofing slabs. “She was amazed. Thought you were in Germany.”
“For the moment I’m here.”
In a swishing charcoal pleated skirt and gray blouse, Madeline came scampering out of a door marked NO ADMITTANCE, and kissed him. “Gosh, Dad, what a surprise. Is everything all right?”
“Everything’s dandy.” He narrowed his eyes at her. She looked a lot more mature, and brilliantly excited. He said, “If you’re busy, I can leave, and talk to you later.”
Cleveland put in, “No, no, Commander. Please come in and watch. I’m about to interview Edna May Pelham.”
“Oh? The General’s Lady? I read it on the plane. Pretty good yarn.”
In the small studio, decorated like a library with fake wood panelling and fake books, Cleveland said to the sharp-faced, white-haired authoress, “Here’s another admirer of the book, Miss Pelham. Commander Henry is the American naval attaché in Berlin.”
“You don’t say! Hi there.” The woman waved her pince-nez at him. “Are we going to stay out of this idiotic war, Commander?”
“I hope so.”
“So do I. My hopes would be considerably higher if that man in the White House would drop dead.”