The Winds of War

rs. 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

ther, 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 trying it for jokes. Pug said, 'Say, how well did this thing work, Digger? Could you understand Tom?" "Oh, five by five. Amazing." "Do 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." "Tell be what-two or three o'clock in the morning there?

us 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 Digg

spray on the glass wall of the dining room, making the candlelit Lacouture dinner seem the cosier. Victor Henry never did get it clear who all the ten people at table were, though one was the beribboned commandant of the naval air station. The person who mattered, it was soon obvious, was Congressman Isaac L-acouture, a small man with thick white hair, a florid face, and a way of half sticking out his tongue when he smiled, with an air of sly profundity. -How long are you going to be here, Commander Henry?" Lacouture called down the long table, as green-coated waiters passed two large baked fish on silver platters. 'You might like to come out and spend a day fishing, if the weatherman will Turn off this willawa. Your boy caught these two kingfish with me." Pug said that he had to return to New York in the morning to get his plane for Lisbon. Lacouture said, "Well, at that I suppose I'll be hurrying up to Washington myself for this special session. Say, how about that? What do you think of revising the Neutrality Act? How bad is the situation, actually? You should know." "Congressman, I think Poland's going to fall fast, if you call that bad." "Oh, hell, the Allies are counting on that! The European mind works in subtle ways. The President has sort of a European mind himself, you know. That mixture of Dutch and Englishis really the key to understanding him." Lacouture smiled, protruding his tongue. 'I've done a lot of business with the Dutch, they're very big in the hardwoods trade, and I tell you they are tricky boys. The gloomier things look in the next few weeks, why, the easier it'll be fOr Roosevelt to jam anything he wants through Congress. Right?" 'Have you talked to Hitler, Commander Henry? What is he really like?" said Mrs. Lacouture, a thin faded woman, with a placating smile and a sweet tone that suggested her social life consisted mainly of softening her husband's impact, or trying to. Lacouture said as though she had addressed him, "Oh, this Hitler is some kind of moonstruck demagogue. We all know that. But for years the Allies could have cleaned up him and his Nazis with ease, yet they just sat there. So it's their mess, not ours. Any day now we'll be hearing about the Germans raping nuns and boiling soldiers' corpses down for soap. British intelligence started both those yarns in 1916, you know. We've got the documentary evidence on that. How about it, Commander Henry? You've been living among the Germans. Are they really these savage Huns the New York papers make them out to be?" All the faces at the table turned to Pug. "The Germans aren't easy to understand," he said slowly. "My wife likes them more than I do. I don't admire their treatment of Jews." Congressman Lacouture held up two large hands. "Unpardonable! The New York press is quite understandable on that basis." Warren said firmly from the middle of the table, "I don't see how the President's revision would weaken our neutrality, sir. Cash and carry simply means anybody can come and buy stuff who has the ships to haul it off and the money to pay for it. Anybody, Hitler included." Lacouture smiled at him. "The administration would be proud of you, my boy. That's the line. Except we all know that the Allies have the ships and the money, and the Germans have neither. So this would put our factories into the war on the Allied side." 'But nobody ever stopped Hitler from building a merchant marine," Warren promptly came back. 'Piling up tanks, subs, and dive bombers instead was his idea. all aggressive weapons. Isn't that his tough luck?" 'Warren's absolutely right," Janice said. Lacouture sat back in his chair, staring at his daughter, who smiled back impudently. What both of you kids don't or won't understand," Lacouture said, is that this proposal is the camel's nose under the tent flap. Of course it seems fair. Of wurse it dens. That's the beauty of the package. That's the Roosevelt mind at work. But let's not be children. He isn't calling a special session to help Nazi Germany! He thinks he's got a mission to save the world from Hitler. He's been talking way since 1937-He's cracked on the subject. Now I say Adolf Hitler's neither the foulfiend nor the Antichrist. That's all poppycock. He's just another European politician, a little more dirty and extreme than the rest. This is just another European war, and it'll end up a lot dirtier than the rest. The way for us to save the world is to stay out of it. The citadel of sanity!" He rapped out the phrase and looked around the table, as though half expecting applause. "That's what we have to be. The Atlantic and Pacific are our walls. Broad, stout walls. The citadel of sanity! If we get in it we'll go bankrupt like the others and lose a couple of million of our finest young men. The whole world will sink into barbarism or Communism, which aren't so very different. The Russians will be the only winners." A small bald man with a hearing aid, seated across the table from Pug, said, 'Damn right." Lacouture inclined his head at him. ' "You and I realize that, Ralph, but it's amazing how few intelligent people do, as yet. The citadel of sanity. Ready to pick up the pieces when it's over and rebuild a decent world. That's the goal. I'm going back to Washington to fight like an alligator for it, believe you me. I'll be marked mud among a lot of my Democratic colleagues, but on this one I go my own way." When dinner ended, Janice and Warren left the club together, not waiting for coffee, and not troubling to explain. The girl smiled roguishly, waved a hand, and disappeared in a whirl of silky legs and pink chiffon. Warren belted long enough to make an early morning tennis date with his father. Victor Henry found himself isolated with Lacouture over rich cigars, coffee, and brandy in a corner of a lounge, in red leather armchairs. The congressman rambled about the charms of life in Pensacola-the duck-hunting, the game-fishing, the year-roun

ther had already lost that point. They shook hands. Then Warren did something that embarrassed them both. He threw an arm around his father's shoulder. 'I feel mixed up. I'm damn sorry to see you go, and I've never been happier in my life." "Take it easy," Pug said. "That girl's fine, but the hell with the lumber business. The Navy needs officers." Paul Munson, recovering from a hard night's drinking with some old friends on the Pensacola staff, said little until his plane finished its climb and levelled off, heading northeast over Georgia. 'By the way," he shouted above the engine roar into his face mike, "how'd your boy do in those squadron assignments?" Pug held up five fingers. Munson slapped his shoulder. "Outstanding. My boy washed out o

arriers in the gray dawn fight, overpowering the few guards, setting foot on the foreign roads they had been watching through field glasses-all that was exhilarating. But once the Polish border garrisons opened fire there was much halting, panicking, running away, and stalled confusion. Luckily for the Germans, the Poles were even more panicked and confused, with the added disability of acting on the spur of the moment. World War II started in a messy amateurish style. But the Germans, however terrorized each individual may have been, were at least moving according to Plan. They had more guns at key points, more ammunition, and a clearer idea of where and when to fire. They had, in fact, achieved surprise. If two men are standing and amiably chatting, and one suddenly punches the other's belly and kicks his groin, the chances are that even if the other recovers to defend himself, he will be badly beaten up, because the first man has achieved surprise. There is no book on the militaryart that does not urge the advantage of this. It may not seem quite decent, but that is no concern of the military art. Possibly the Poles should not have been surprised, in view of the Germans' open threats and preparations, but they were. Their political leaders probably hoped the German menaces were bluster. Their generals probably thought their own armies were ready. A lot of wrong guessing goes with the start of a war. The German plan for conquering Poland, Case White, provided the scenario for what ensued. They had many such plans, like Case Green, the invasion of Czechoslovakia (which they never had to use), and Case Yellow, the attack on France. Color-coded master plans for smashing other countries, far in advance of any quarrel with them, were a modern military innovation of the Germans. all advanced nations came to imitate this doctrine. The United States, for instance, by 1939 had a Plan Orange for fighting japan, and even a Plan Red for fighting England; and it finally entered the war under Plan Rainbow Five. Historians still argue, and w

to stay on in this horror! The shrill laugh had welled up out of him. With a quizzical look the ambassador had let it pass. Most of the people in Warsaw had reacted well to the air attacks, swinging over to almost lighthearted determination and stoicism, once the first bombs failed to kill them. But for Slote the hell went on and on. Every sounding of an air raid alarm all but deprived him of the ability to think. Down into the thickwalled embassy cellar he would dart with everybody else, ahead of most, and invariably he would stay down until the all clear sounded. In a way, being in charge was a help. It looked proper for him to move out of his apartment into the embassy, to stay there, and to set an example of strict compliance with air raid rules. Nobody guessed his trouble. Dawn of September the seventeenth found him at the big desk, a smoking pipe clenched in his teeth, carefully redrafting his latest dispatch to the State department on the condition of the embassy and of the hundred or so Americans trapped in Warsaw. He was trying to retain all the urgency and gravity of the message, while editing out traces of his private hysteria. It was a hairline to walk, the more so as no replies were coming in to any of these dispatches, and he could not tell whether the American government had any idea of the plight of its nationals in the Polish capital. "Come in," he called to a knock at the door. "It's broad daylight outside," Byron Henry said hoarsely as he walked in. 'Shall I open the curtains?" "Anything going on out there?" Slote rubbed his eyes. 'Nothing unusual." "Okay, let's have some daylight," Slote laughed. They both pulled back the heavy black curtains, admitting pallid sunshine in broken patterns through the diagonally crossed timbers in the windows. "What about the water, Byron?" "I brought it." With the curtains open, one could hear the dull far-off thumps of Gemian artillery. Slote would have preferred to leave the curtains closed for a while longer, shutting out these daytime noises of gray, broken, burning Warsaw. The quiet of the black-curtained room lit by a desklamp might be illusory, a false conjuring up of peaceful student days, but he found it comforting. He peered between the timbers. "Such smoke! Are there that many fires?" "God, yes. The sky was terrific until the dawn came up. Didn't you see it? all red and smoky wherever you looked. Dante's Inferno. And these big orange star shells popping all over, way high up, and slowly floating down. Quite a sight! Over on Walewskaya they're still trying to put out two huge fires with shovels and sand. It's the water problem that's going to lick them, more than anything." "They should have accepted the German offer yesterday," Slote said. "They'd have had at least half a city left. There's no future in this. How on earth did you fetch the water? Did you manage to find some gasoline, after all?" Byron shook his head, yawned, and dropped on the long brown leather couch. His sweater and slacks were covered with brick dust and soot, his long shaggy hair was in a tangle, and his eyes glowed dully in purple rings. 'Not a chance. From now on we can forget about the truck. I saw fire engines stalled in the middle of the street. Gasoline's finished in this town. I just scouted around OBI found a cart and a horse. It took me most of the night." He grinned at Slote, his lower lip pulled in with exhaustion. 'The Government of the United States owes me one hundred seventy-five dollars. The hardest part was getting the boiler off the truck and onto the cart. But this peasant who sold me the cart helped me. It was part of the deal. A little sawed-off fellow with a beard, but strong. Jesus!" 'You'll get paid, of course. Talk to Ben." "Can I stretch out here for a minute?" "Don't you want breakfast?" 'I'm not sure I have the energy to chew. I just need a half hour or so. It's quiet in here. That cellar is a madhouse." Byron put up his feet and collapsed on the leather cushions, a meager long dirty figure. 'There's no water at the opera house cor