Victor Henry sized all this up as an orgy in the making, to get him to talk about the British. After dinner, somewhat to his surprise, they went to a wood-panelled room where musical instruments were ready, and Stöller, the Luftwaffe general, the man from the foreign ministry, and a redheaded lady played quartets. In Pug’s previous visits, the banker had shown no musical skill, but Stöller played first violin quite well. The Luftwaffe general, a very tall dark cadaverous man with sickly hollow eyes, bowed and swayed over the cello, drawing forth luscious sounds. Pug had seen this man once before, at a distance at Karinhall in full uniform; he had looked far more formidable then than he did now in his dinner jacket and monocle. The musicians made mistakes, stopped a couple of times, joked swiftly, and took up the music once more. The foreign ministry man on the second violin, a roly-poly Bavarian with a drooping yellow moustache, was a superb fiddler. It was the best amateur music Pug had ever heard. Grobke sat with the submissiveness of most Germans in the presence of art, drinking a lot of brandy and stifling yawns. After a couple of hours of this, the ladies abruptly said good-night and left. If there had been a signal, Pug missed it.
“Perhaps we might have a nightcap outside,” said the banker to Pug, putting his violin carefully in its case. “The evening is warm. Do you like the tone of my Stradivarius? I wish I were worthy to play it.”
The broad stone terrace looked out on a formal garden, a darkly splashing fountain, and the river; beyond that, forest. A smudged orange moon in its last quarter was rising over the trees. In the light of reddish-yellow flares on long iron poles, shadows danced on the house and the flagstone floor. The five men sat, and a butler passed drinks. Melodious birds sang in the quiet night, reminding Pug of the nightingales at the British bomber base.
“Victor, if you care to talk about England,” said Stöller from the depths of an easy chair, his face in black shadow, “we would of course be interested.”
Pug forced a jocular tone. “You mean I have to admit I’ve been in England?”
The banker heavily took up the note. “Ha, ha. Unless you want to get our intelligence people in bad trouble, you’d better.” After everybody else laughed, he said, “If you prefer, we’ll drop the subject here and now for the weekend. Our hospitality hasn’t got—how do you say it in English?”—he switched from the German they were all speaking—“‘strings tied to it.’ But you’re in an unusual position, having travelled between the capitals.”
“Well, if you want me to say you’ve shot the RAF out of the sky and the British will quit next week, it might be better to drop it now.”
In a gloomy bass voice, the long shadowy form of the general spoke. “We know we haven’t shot the RAF out of the sky.”
“Speak freely. General Jagow is my oldest friend,” said Stöller. “We were schoolboys together. And Dr. Meusse”—he waved an arm at the foreign ministry man, and a long skeletal shadow arm leaped on the wall—“goes back almost that far.”
“We say in the Luftwaffe,” put in the general, “the red flag is up. That means we all talk straight. We say what we think about the Führer, about Göring, about anything and anybody. And we say the goddamnedest things, I tell you.”
“Okay, I like those ground rules,” said Victor Henry. “Fire away.” “Would an invasion succeed?” spoke up Dr. Meusse.
“What invasion? Can your navy get you across?”
“Why not?” said General Jagow in calm professional tones. “Through a corridor barricaded on both sides by mine belts, and cordoned off by U-boats, under an umbrella of Luftwaffe? Is it so much to ask of the Grand Fleet?”
Pug glanced at Grobke, who sat glumly swirling brandy in a bell glass. “You’ve got a U-boat man here. Ask him about the cordons and the mine belts.”
With an impatient gesture that flicked brandy into the air, Grobke said, in thick tones, “Very difficult, possibly suicidal, and worst of all, entirely unnecessary.”
General Jagow leaned toward Grobke, his monocle glittering in the flare light, his face stiff with anger.
Pug exclaimed, “Red flag’s up.”
“So it is,” Jagow said, with an unforgiving glare at the submariner, who slouched down in darkness.
“I agree with him,” Pug said. “Part of a landing force might get through—not saying in what shape. There’s still the invasion beaches—which I’ve seen close on. Which I personally would hate to approach from seaward.”
“Clearing beach obstacles is a technical task,” Jagow said, with a swift return to offhand tones. “We have special sappers well trained for that.”
“General, our Marine Corps has been studying and rehearsing beach assaults intensively for years. It’s the toughest attack problem in the book. I don’t believe the Wehrmacht ever thought about it until a few weeks ago.”
“German military ingenuity is not negligible,” said Dr. Meusse.
“No argument,” said Victor Henry.
Jagow said, “Of course we can’t land without wastage. We would take big but endurable losses. Once we obtained a solid lodgment, you might see Churchill fall. The Luftwaffe would fight for the beachhead to the last plane. But I believe the RAF would run out of planes first.”
Victor Henry made no comment.
“What is the bombing of London doing to British morale?” Stöller asked.
“You’re making Churchill’s job easier. They’re fighting mad now. Knocking hell out of London won’t win the war. Not in my judgment. Not to mention that bombers can fly east as well as west.”
The general and the banker looked at each other. The general’s voice was sepulchral. “Would it surprise you if some people here agreed with you?”
“Churchill cleverly provoked the Führer by bombing Berlin on the twenty-sixth,” said Stöller. “We had to hit back, for morale reasons. The trick worked, but the British people must now pay. There’s no political alternative but a big reprisal.”
“Let’s be honest,” said Dr. Meusse. “Field Marshal Göring wanted to go after London and try to end it.”
Jagow shook his head. “He knew it was too soon. We all did. It was those six days of bad weather that saved the RAF. We needed another week against those airfields. But in the long run it will all be the same.”
Stöller said, “They’re a brave people. I hate to see them prolong the agony.”
“They don’t seem to mind,” Victor Henry said. “By and large, they’re having a good time. They think they’re going to win.”
“There is the weakness,” said Dr. Meusse, pulling on his moustache. “National megalomania. When a people loses touch with reality, it is finished.”
Stöller lit a thick cigar. “Absolutely. The course of this war is fixed now by statistics. That is my department. Would you care to hear them?”
“Gladly. Especially if you’ll give away some secrets,” said Victor Henry, evoking friendly laughter from all the Germans except Grobke. The submariner was sunk in gloom or sleep.
“No secrets,” said Stöller. “The financial stuff may be a little new to you. But take my word for it, my figures are right.”
“I’m sure of that.”
“Good. England lives at the end of—how would you put it—a revolving bucket chain of ships. She always has. This time the buckets are being shot off the chain faster than she can replace them. She started the war with about twenty million tons of shipping. Her own, and what she could scrape up elsewhere. That tonnage is disappearing fast. The rate now is—what’s the latest?” He spoke condescendingly to Grobke.
The submariner covered a yawn. “That figure is secret. Victor must have a damn good idea from what he heard in London.”
Pug said, “I have.”
“All right. Then you know the curve is upward. Nothing else matters in this war. England will soon run out of fuel and food, and that will be that. When her machines stop, and her planes are grounded, and her people are clamoring for food, Churchill will fall. There’s no way out.”
“Isn’t there?
My country has a lot of fuel and food—and steel and shipyards too—and we’re open for business.”
The banker coldly smiled. “Yes, but your Neutrality Act requires that England pay cash for everything. Cash and carry. That is the one sensible thing your people learned from the last war, when England repudiated her war debts. Roosevelt, Willkie, it doesn’t matter now. There isn’t a chance—you bear me out on this, Victor—that your Congress will ever make another war loan to England. Will they?”
“No.”
“All right. Then she is kaput. She started the war with about five billions in foreign exchange. Our intelligence is she’s already spent more than four. The planes and supplies and ships she needs right now to keep going will wipe out the last billion or so like a snowball on a hot stove. By December the British Empire will be broke. Bankrupt! You see, dear fellow, they got into a war they couldn’t fight and couldn’t pay for. That is the simple fact. And it was the political genius of the Führer, Victor—whatever you think of him—to foresee this, through all the fog of the future. Just as he foresaw that the French wouldn’t fight. Such leadership brings victory.” Stöller leaned forward, with a disdainful hand-wave. “Yes, Churchill’s words are very eloquent, very touching, very spiritual. But he was England’s worst Chancellor of the Exchequer. He hasn’t the slightest notion of logistical or financial realities. Never has had. His pretty literary soap bubbles are all going to pop. Then there will be peace.”
Dr. Meusse put in, “We are sinking ships now at a rate we never reached until the best months of 1917. Do you know that?”
“I know that,” said Captain Henry. “And as I said to Ernst the other day, that’s when we came in.”
The silence on the terrace lasted a long time. Then Wolf Stöller said, “And that is the world tragedy that must not occur now, Victor—Germany and America, the two great anti-Bolshevik powers, going to war. The only victor will be Stalin.”
The voice of Grobke, coarse and fuddled, issued from the depths of his chair. “It won’t happen. It’ll all be over too fast. Wait till January, when we get ourselves some U-boats.”
The weekend proved cold, dull, rainy, and—for Pug—very heavy on music and culture. The five ladies, all in their thirties, all mechanically flirtatious, were available for talks, for walks, for dancing; and when the rain briefly stopped, for tennis. Pug assumed they were available for the night, too. He had trouble telling them apart.
Ernst Grobke slept a lot and left early on Sunday. The other three men had been indifferent to the submariner, though markedly warm and agreeable to Victor Henry. Obviously Grobke had served his purpose. Obviously his telephone call and the encounter with Stöller in the restaurant had been arranged. These big shots were incapable of carrying further a pretense of cordiality to a German four-striper.
Pug was asked, and he answered, many more questions about his trip to England. Except for one probe by the gaunt Luftwaffe man about the radar stations—which Pug answered with a blank, stupid look—there was no effort to pump hard intelligence out of him.
Rather, there seemed to be an effort to pump him full of German politics, philosophy, and poetry. These three old comrades were mightily fond of intellectual talk, and kept pressing on Henry books from Stöller’s library that came up in conversation. He tried to read them at bedtime. After fifteen minutes, night after night, he fell into deep restful slumber. Germany’s strange literature usually had that effect on Victor Henry. He had long since given up trying to understand the fantastic seriousness with which Germans took themselves, their “world-historical” position, and every twist and turn of their murky history since Charlemagne. From a military standpoint, all this river of ink about German destiny, German culture, German spirituality, Germanophilism, pan-Germanism, and the rest, kept underlining one fact. Here was an industrial people of eighty million that had spent a century uniting itself, talking to itself, rolling up its sleeves to lick the world, and convincing itself that God would hold Germany’s coat and cheer it on. That was worth bearing in mind.
The sun broke through late Sunday when they were having cocktails on the terrace. Stöller offered to show Victor Henry his prize pigs, and walked him a long way down the river to the pens. Here amid a great stink, the host told Henry the pedigrees of several remarkably large hairy porkers, lying in muck and hungrily grunting. As they strolled back, the banker said, “Have you been badly bored, Victor?”
“Why, not in the least,” Pug lied.
“I know it’s been a different sort of weekend. Meusse and Jagow are very spiritual fellows. We have been pals forever. Jagow was my first real contact with Göring. Before that I was very close to von Papen, who as you know was the Nazis’ biggest opponent, until he himself in 1933 saw where destiny was pointing. He actually made Hitler chancellor.” Stöller idly struck at purple flowering thistles with his heavy black stick, knocking off their heads. The broken flowers gave off a fresh rank smell. “Jagow thinks the world of you.”
“He plays a hell of a cello,” said Pug, “for a fly-fly boy.”
“Yes. He is brilliant. But he is not well. Victor, he especially appreciates your willingness to talk about England. Most friendly of you.”
“I haven’t revealed anything. Not intentionally.”
Stöller laughed. “You’re an honorable servant of your government. Still, your observations have been illuminating. What strikes all of us is your sense of honor. Honor is everything to a German.”
Flattery made Pug Henry uncomfortable. He met it as usual with silence and a dulled look.
“If there’s anything that General Jagow could do for you, I know it would give him pleasure.”
“That’s very kind, but not that I know of.”
“Installations you might care to visit?”
“Well, our air attaché would jump at such an invitation.”
“As you wish. Jagow would take a more personal interest in you.”
“There’s one thing, a bit out of the ordinary. An RAF pilot, a good friend of mine, went down in the Channel several weeks ago. Your people might have picked him up.”
With a wave of the knobby stick, Stöller said, “That should be simple to find out. Give Jagow this pilot’s name, rank, and so forth. You’ll have your answer shortly.”
“I’ll be much obliged.”
“If your friend is a prisoner, you might even be able to visit him.”
“That would be great.”
Wolf Stöller called him early in October, when Victor Henry had almost forgotten the strange weekend. “Your man is alive.”
“Who is?”
Stöller reeled off Gallard’s name, rank, and serial number. “He is in France, still in a hospital but in good condition. General Jagow invites you, as his personal guest, to visit Luftwaffe Headquarters close by. You are invited as a friend, not as an American attaché. This telephone call is the only communication there will be. No reciprocity is necessary.”
After a moment Pug said, “Well, that’s good news. The general is mighty kind.”
“As I told you, you made a hit with him.”
“I’ll have to call you back.”
“Of course.”
The chargé d’affaires, when Pug told him about this, drooped his eyes almost shut, leaned back in his chair, and ran his thumb back and forth on his moustache. “The Luftwaffe man wants something of you.”
“Naturally.”
“Well, you have my approval. Why not jump at it? You might learn something, and you’ll see this flier. Who is he?”
“Well—he’s engaged to the daughter of a friend of mine.” The charge’s eyes opened a little wider and he stroked his moustache. Pug felt pressed to add something. “Alistair Tudsbury’s daughter, in fact.”
“Oh, he’s Pam’s fiancé, is he? Lucky boy. Well, by all means go ahead and see how Pam Tudsbury’s fiancé is,” said the chargé, with a wisp of irony that did not escape, and that irritated, Victor Henry.
The weather was bad.
Pug went to Lille by train. Rail travel was surprisingly back to normal in German-ruled Europe. The train left on time and roared through tranquil rainy autumn landscapes. Germany, Belgium, and northern France looked all alike in October mist and drizzle, one large flat plain of farms, evergreens, and yellowing trees. The cities looked alike too, hodgepodges of ornate venerable buildings at the center, rimmed by severe modern structures; some were untouched by the war, some were scarred and blotched with rubble. In the crowded restaurant car, amiably chatting Germans, Dutchmen, Frenchmen, Belgians, a few with wives, wined and dined amid rich good smells and a cheery clatter. Uniformed Wehrmacht officers, at a table apart, glanced with contempt at the civilians and gave the scurrying waiters curt commands. Otherwise it was business as usual under the New Order, except for the absence of Jews. The Jews had been the busiest travellers in Europe, but on this train none were to be seen. In the Berlin-Lille express, the Third Reich looked a good bet to last a thousand years, by right of natural superiority and the ability to run things. Trains headed the other way, jammed with cheerful young troops, gave Victor Henry his first solid hint that the invasion—if it had ever been on—might be off.
An emissary of General Jagow, a rigid thin lieutenant with extra gold braid on a shoulder, a splotch of ribbons, and a twitching eye muscle, met the American naval officer at the station, drove him to a grimy stone building with a façade of wet statues in the middle of Lille, and left him in a cheerless, windowless little office containing an ink-stained desk and two chairs. The dusty yellow walls had clean squares and oblongs where pictures of French officials had been removed. Behind the desk was a bright new red, white, and black swastika flag, and the popular picture of Hitler scowling in his soldier’s coat, cowlick falling over one eye, a photo crudely touched up to make him look younger. The room had the loudest-ticking pendulum wall clock Pug had ever heard; its face was green and faded with age.
The door opened. A helmeted German soldier with a submachine gun tramped in, wheeled at the desk, and crashed his boots to stiff attention. Gallard followed him, his right arm in a sling, his face puffy, discolored, and bandaged, and behind him came the lieutenant with the twitching eye. The pilot wore his flying suit, in which large rips were crudely patched up.