War and Remembrance (131 page)

The scenes in Supreme Headquarters when Mussolini fell were horrendous. Hitler was beside himself with rage, howling and storming at the treachery of the Italian court, and the Vatican, and the Fascist leaders who had deposed Mussolini. His crude language and his threats were frightful. He would take Rome by force, he said, and get hold of “that rabble, that scum” — by which he meant King Victor Emmanuel, the royal family, and the whole court — and make them creep and crawl. He would seize the Vatican, “clean out all that pus of priests,” shoot the diplomatic corps hiding in there, lay hands on all the secret documents, then say it was a mistake of war.

He kept trying to get Göring on the phone. “There’s an ice-cold fellow,” he said. “Ice-cold. At times like these you need a man who’s ice-cold. Get me Göring, I say! Hard as steel. I’ve been through any number of tough ones with him. Ice-cold, that fellow. Ice-cold.” Göring hurriedly came, but all he did was agree with everything Hitler said, using vulgar language and bad jokes. That constituted being ice-cold.

The hundred urgent decisions and moves for keeping Italy in the war, at least while we peaceably introduced enough German troops to take over the country, were hammered out in our OKW headquarters. Hitler spent that time feverishly plotting a coup d’etat in Rome to restore Mussolini, which was impossible to execute and which he dropped; also the parachute rescue of the imprisoned Duce, which did come off and may have made them both feel better, but accomplished nothing. In fact, the photograph flashed around the world of a jolly uniformed Hitler, greeting the shrunken cringing ex-Duce in an ill-fitting black overcoat and black slouch hat, with a sickly smile on his white face, proclaimed louder than any headlines that the famous Axis was dead, and that Fortress Europe was doomed.

All this had the surprising and unwelcome effect of restoring me to Hitler’s favor. He asserted that I had seen through the Italian treachery before anybody else, that “the good Armin has a head on his shoulders,” and so on. Also, he had heard of Helmut’s death, and he put on a tragic face to commiserate with me. He praised me at briefings, and — a rare thing for a General Staff officer in those days — invited me to dinner. Speer, Himmler, and an industrialist were his other guests that night.

It was a miserable experience. Hitler must have talked for five consecutive hours. Nobody else said anything except a perfunctory word of agreement. It was all a high-flown jumble of history and philosophy, with a great deal about the Jews. The real trouble with the Italians, he said, was that the marrow of the nation had been eaten out by the cancer of the Church. Christianity was just a wily Jewish scheme to get control of the world by exalting
weakness over strength. Jesus was not a Jew, but the bastard son of a Roman soldier. Paul was the greatest Jewish swindler of all time. And so on, ad nauseam. Late in the evening he made some interesting observations about Charlemagne, but I was too numbed to pay close attention. Everybody was stifling yawns. All in all the verbal flatulence was as unbearable as the physical flatulence. No doubt that was a weakness he could not control, due to his bad diet and irregular habits, but sitting near the Führer at table was no privilege. How a man like Bormann endured it for years I cannot imagine.

I was not asked again, but my hope of escaping from Headquarters and serving in the field went by the board. Jodl and Keitel now were all smiles to me. I did get a month’s medical leave, and so was able to see my wife and console her. By the time I returned to Wolfsschanze, Italy had surrendered and our long-planned Operation Alaric to seize the peninsula was in full swing.

And so the drain to the south was to go on to the last. Adolf Hitler could not face the political setback of giving up Italy. While our armies humiliated the far stronger Anglo-Saxons there, forcing them to inch up the boot with heavy losses, it was all a terrible military mistake. This obtuse political egotism of Hitler, wasting our strength southward when we could have held the Alps barrier with a fraction of Kesselring’s forces, set the stage for total national collapse under the squeeze from east and west.

* * *

T
HOUGH
plunged in passion often, Pamela Tudsbury had experienced romantic love just once; and she flew from Washington to Moscow in August for a last glimpse of Captain Henry, the man for whom she felt that love, before she married somebody else.

Long after she had given up on the Soviet Union, in fact after she had given up on journalism and had decided to join Burne-Wilke in New Delhi, the visa suddenly came through. At once she changed her travel route so as to include Moscow, and to justify that, she put off quitting her job with the
Observer.
If Pamela’s nature was excessively passionate, her head was on fairly straight, and she now knew beyond a doubt that her writing was but a thin echo of a dead man’s. Cobbling up her father’s dispatches when he was ill or weary had been one thing; but producing fresh copy with his insights and his verve was beyond her. She was not a journalist, but a ghost. Nor did she deceive herself about her reasons for marrying Burne-Wilke. Like the attempt at journalism, that decision had whirled into the vacuum left by Tudsbury’s death. He had proposed at a vulnerable moment, when her life had loomed sad and empty. He was a gracious man, an extraordinary catch, and she had consented. She did not regret it. They could be happy enough together, she thought, and she was lucky to have attracted him.

Why then was she detouring to Moscow? Mainly because of what she had seen of Rhoda Henry in casual encounters at dances and parties, usually in the company of a tall gray-haired Army colonel. Rhoda had acted sprightly and cordial toward her, and — so it had struck Pamela — rather proprietary toward the imposing Army man. Before leaving Washington Pam had telephoned her, figuring she had little to lose. Rhoda had told her gaily that Byron was exec of his submarine now; Pamela must be sure to give Pug this news, and “tell him to watch his weight!” Not a trace of jealous concern or artificial sweetness; very puzzling. What had happened to the marriage? Had the reconciliation been so complete that Rhoda could act as she pleased? Or was she betraying Pug again, or working up to it? Pamela had absolutely no idea.

Since Midway she had had no word from him, not so much as a note of condolence on the much-publicized death of her father. Wartime mails were uncertain. In her letter from Egypt about Burne-Wilke, she had invited him
to object to the engagement; no answer. But had it reached him before the sinking of the
Northampton?
Again, she had absolutely no idea. Pamela wanted to know how things stood with Victor Henry, and the only way to find out was to face the man. The thousands of extra miles of wartime travel in midsummer were nothing.

Nothing, yet prostrating. She all but collapsed into the embassy car that met her at the Moscow airport. Flying stop-and-go across North Africa, and then waiting three days in the dusty fly-ridden inferno of Tehran, had done her in. The driver, a little Cockney dressed in proper black, not visibly suffering from the Moscow heat, kept glancing at her in his rearview mirror. Weary though she was, Lord Burne-Wilke’s slim fiancée, so un-Russian and so elegant in a white linen suit and white straw hat, looked to the homesick man every inch a future viscountess, and he was thrilled to be driving her. He was sure she must be doing newspaper work as a lark.

Moscow itself appeared much the same to the exhausted Pamela: flat stretches of drab old buildings, many unfinished structures abandoned to wind and weather because of the war, and fat barrage balloons still floating in the sky. But the people were changed. When she and her father had hastily left in 1941, with the Germans nearing the city and all the big shots skedaddling to Kuibyshev, the bundled-up Muscovites had looked a pinched harassed lot, trudging through the snowdrifts or digging tank traps. Now they strolled the sidewalks in the sunshine, the women in light print dresses, the men in sport shirts and slacks if they were not in uniform; and the pretty children were running and playing with carefree noise in the streets and the parks. The war was far away.

The British embassy, on a fine river-front site facing the Kremlin, had once been a czarist merchant’s mansion like Spaso House. When Pamela stepped through the french windows in the rear, she came on the ambassador lounging stripped to the waist in the sunshine amid a loudly clucking flock of white chickens. The formal gardens had been turned into an enormous vegetable patch. Philip Rule, slouched on a campstool beside the ambassador, got up with a mock bow. “Ahhh! Lady Burne-Wilke, I presume?”

She returned drily, “Not quite yet, Philip.”

The ambassador gestured around at the garden as he rose to shake hands. “Welcome, Pam. You see some alterations here. One’s most likely to eat regularly in Moscow when food grows in the back yard.”

“I can imagine.”

“We tried to book you into the National, but they’re jammed. Next Friday you’ll get in, and we’ll put you up here meantime.”

“Very kind of you.”

“Why do that?” Rule said. “I didn’t know there was a problem. The
U.P. just gave up a suite at the Metropole, Pam. The living room’s an acre in size, and there’s not a fancier bathroom in Moscow.

“Can I get it?”

“Come along, and let’s see. It’s five minutes from here. The manager’s a distant cousin of my wife.”

“The bathroom decides me,” Pamela said, passing a hand over her wet brow. “I’d like to soak for a week.”

The ambassador said, “I sympathize, but be sure to come to our party tonight, Pam. Best spot for watching the victory fireworks.”

In the car Pam asked Rule, “What victory?”

“Why, the Kursk salient. You know about it, surely.”

“Kursk didn’t get much play in the States. Sicily’s been the big story.”

“No doubt, typical Yank editing. Sicily! It toppled Mussolini, but militarily it was a sideshow. Kursk was the biggest tank battle of all time, Pamela, the true turn of the war.”

“Wasn’t it weeks ago, Phil?”

“The breakthrough, yes. The counterattack swept into Orel and Belgorod yesterday. Those were the key German strong points of the salient, and the backbone of Jerry’s line is broken at last. Stalin’s ordered the first victory salute of the war, a hundred and twenty artillery salvos. It’ll really be something.”

“Well, I’d better come to the party.”

“Why, you’ve got to.”

“I’m perishing for sleep, and I feel rotten.”

“Too bad. The Narkomindel’s taking out the foreign press on a tour of the battlefields tomorrow. We’ll be on the hop for a week. You can’t miss that, either.”

Pamela groaned.

“Incidentally, the whole Yank mission’s coming to the embassy to watch the fireworks, but Captain Henry won’t be there.”

“Oh, won’t he? You know him, then?”

“Of course. Short, athletic-looking, fifty or so. A bit dour, what? Doesn’t say much.”

“That’s the man. Is he the naval attaché?”

“No, that’s Captain Joyce. Henry does special military liaison. The inside word is that he’s Hopkins’s man in Moscow. Right now he’s off in Siberia.”

“Just as well.”

“Why?”

“Because I look like death.”

“Now, Pam, you look smashing.” He touched her arm.

She pulled it away. “How’s your wife?”

“Valentina? Fine, I guess. She’s out touring the front with her ballet group. She dances on flatcars, on the backs of trucks, on air strips, wherever she can do a leap without breaking an ankle.”

The suite at the Metropole was as Philip Rule had described it. The drawing room contained a grand piano, a vast Persian rug, and a cluttered array of very poor statues. Pamela said, peering into the bathroom, “Look at that tub! I shall be doing laps.”

“Do you want the suite?”

“Yes, whatever it costs.”

“I’ll arrange it. And if you’ll give me your papers, I’ll check you in at the Nark for the battlefield tour. Suppose I call for you at half past ten? The guns and fireworks go off at midnight.”

She was taking off her hat at a spotty mirror, and behind her he was frankly admiring her. Rule was going to fat, his blond hair was much thinner, his nose seemed bigger and broader. Except as a disagreeable memory, he meant nothing to her. Since the episode in the rainstorm on Christmas Eve in Singapore, she felt squeamish at being touched by him, that was all. She knew she still attracted him, but that was his problem, not hers. Kept at a distance, Philip Rule was quite tame, even helpful. She thought of his flowery eulogy for her father at the Alexandria cemetery:
An Englishman’s Englishman, a reporter’s reporter, a bard with a press card, singing the dirge of Empire to the thrilling beat of a triumphal march.

She turned and with an effort gave him her hand. “You are kind, Phil. See you at ten-thirty.”

Pamela was used to being undressed by men’s glances, but a stripping by female eyes was a novelty. The Russian girls at the British embassy party stared her up and down, hair to shoes. She might have been a model, paid to go on display under hard scrutiny. There was no bitchiness in the looks, no deliberate rudeness, only intense wistful curiosity; and no wonder, considering their evening dresses; some long, some short, some flouncy, some tight, all atrociously cut and hideously colored.

Men soon surrounded Pam: Western correspondents, officers and diplomats relishing the sight of a chic woman from their world, and Russian officers in uniforms as smart as their women’s dresses were dowdy, silently gazing at Pamela as at an objet d’art worth millions. The long wood-panelled room was not at all crowded by the forty or fifty guests, many clustered at a silver punch bowl, others dancing to an American jazz record on a bared patch of parquet floor, the rest talking and laughing, glasses in hand.