War and Remembrance (152 page)

One
A
.
M
. and old Rhoda hasn’t called. My plane to Houston leaves at the crack of dawn, so I’ll break off. More tomorrow.

3 March

Houston

Hi.

Wild rainstorm here. Wind whipping the palm trees outside my room, rain lashing the windows. Texas weather, like the inhabitants, tends to extremes. However, Texans are okay once they understand (a) that you’re right, (b) that you mean business, and (c) that you have some negotiating strength. Haven’t heard from Rhoda yet, but expect to tonight, for sure.

More news: Byron’s passed through Washington, en route to his new duty post, exec of a submarine undergoing overhaul in Connecticut. He’s come through some bad personal ordeals.

[The letter narrates the death of Carter Aster, and the news about Natalie in Theresienstadt.]

I’ve obtained the record of the court of inquiry about Aster’s death. It was touch-and-go for Byron. He made a very poor witness for himself. He would not say that he
couldn’t
have saved the captain by a delay in submerging. But the old chief of the boat wrapped the thing up in his testimony when he said: “Maybe Captain Aster was wrong and he could have survived, but he was right that the
Moray
couldn’t have. He was the greatest submarine skipper of this war. He gave the right orders. Mr. Henry only obeyed them.” That’s what the court concluded. Forrestal is proposing a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor for Aster. Byron may get a Bronze Star, but it won’t help his spirits much.

Warren’s widow came back around Christmastime, and Rhoda took her in. She’s planning to go back to law school in the fall. She’s a beautiful woman with a fine son and her whole life ahead of her. Usually she’s very cheerful, but when Byron was with us she went into a deep depression. Byron looks more and more like Warren as he fills out. No doubt that got Janice down. A couple of times Rhoda came on her crying. Since he left she’s been okay.

And what a kid that Vic is! Handsome, affectionate, and deep. He’s very active and naughty, but in a stealthy way. His mischief is not impulsive but
planned,
like tactics, for maximum destruction and minimum detection. He’ll go far.

Madeline finally dropped that grinning, pot-bellied, oleaginous radio mountebank I told you about, relieving me of the need to horsewhip him, which I was working up to. She’s living at home, working in a Washington radio station, and she’s taken up again with an old admirer, Simon Anderson, a first-rate naval officer who’s on duty here in new weaponry. Last week she had a long tearful talk with Rhoda on whether, and what, she should tell Simon about the radio man. I asked Rhoda what her advice was. She gave me a funny look and said, “I told her, wait till he asks you.” I would have advised Madeline to have it out with Sime, and start on an honest basis. No doubt that’s why she consulted Rhoda.

There goes the telephone. It has to be my wife.

It was.

Okay. Now I can backtrack and tell you what happened last week. We were sitting around after dinner, the same day General Old let me know you were still unmarried. I said, “Rho, why don’t we talk about Hack Peters?” She didn’t turn a hair. “Yes, why not, dear? Better mix us a couple of stiff drinks.” Rhoda-like, she waited until I asked her. But she was quite ready for this showdown.

She acknowledged the relationship, declared it’s the real thing, not guilty but deep. I believe her. Colonel Peters has been an “irreproachable gentleman,” thinks she’s twenty times as good as she is, and in short looks on her as the perfection of womankind. Rhoda says that it’s embarrassing to be so idolized, but also very sweet and rejuvenating. I asked her point-blank whether she’d be happier divorcing me and marrying Peters.

Rhoda took a very long time to answer that one. Finally she looked me in the eye and said, yes, she would. The main reason, she said, is that she’s lost my good opinion and can’t get it back, though I’ve been kind and forgiving. After being loved by me for years, it’s wretched just to be tolerated. I asked her what she wanted me to do. She brought up that talk you had with her in California. I said that I had great affection for you, but since you were engaged, that was that. I told her to decide on her own best prospects for happiness, and that I would do whatever she wanted.

She apparently had been waiting for this sort of green light from me. Rhoda’s always been a bit afraid of me. I don’t know why, since it seems to me I’ve been rather henpecked. Anyway, she said that she’d need some time. Well, she didn’t need much. That was what the phone call was about. Harrison Peters is dying to marry her. No question. She’s landed him. She expects to talk to our lawyer, and then to Peters’s lawyer, in the next couple of days. Peters also wants to talk to me “man to man” when I get back to Washington. I may forgo that delight.

Well, Pamela darling, so I’ll be free, if by some miracle you’ll still have me. Will you marry me?

I’m not a rich man — serving one’s country one doesn’t get rich — but we wouldn’t be badly off. I’ve saved fifteen percent of my salary for thirty-one years. Working in BuShips and BuOrd I could observe industrial trends, so I’ve invested and done well. Rhoda’s in fine shape, she’s got a substantial family trust. Anyway, I’m sure Peters will take excellent care of her. Am I being too mundane? I’m not expert at proposing. This is only my second try.

If we do marry, I’ll take an early retirement so that we can be together all the time. There are many jobs for me in industry; I could even work in England.

If we did have a kid or two, I’d want to give them a church upbringing. Is that all right? I know you’re a freethinker. I can’t make much sense out of life, myself, but none whatever without religion. Maybe in my fifties I’d make a hard-shelled mossy crab of a father; still, I get along pretty well with little Vic. I might in fact spoil kids now. I’d like the chance to try!

So there it is! If you’re Lady Burne-Wilke by now, take my letter as a wistful farewell compliment to an unlikely and wonderful love. If I hadn’t casually booked passage on the
Bremen
in 1939, mainly to brush up on my German, I’d never have known you. I was happy with Rhoda, in love with her, and not inclined to look further. Yet despite the differences in age, nationality, and background, despite the fact that over four years we’ve spent perhaps three weeks together in all, the simple truth is that you seem to be my other half, found when it was all but too late. The bare possibility of marrying you is a glimpse of beauty that stops my breath. Very likely Rhoda’s been groping for that beauty outside our marriage, because it wasn’t quite there; she’s been a good wife (till she fell away) but a discontented one.

In the Persian garden you suggested that this whole thing might be a romantic illusion. I’ve given that a lot of thought. If we’d been snatching at our rare meetings to go to bed together, I might agree. But what have we ever done but talk, and yet feel this closeness? Marriage will not be, I grant you, like these tantalizing encounters in far-off places; there’ll be shopping, laundry, housekeeping, the mortgage, mowing the lawn, arguments, packing and unpacking, headaches, sore throats, and all the rest. Well, with you, all that strikes me as a lovely prospect. I don’t want anything else. If God gives me that much, I’ll say — with everything that’s gone wrong with my life, and all my scars — that I’m a happy man, and I’ll try to make you happy.

I hope this letter doesn’t come too late.

All my love,

Pug

The battle for Imphal was already on when Pug wrote. Since Burne-Wilke’s headquarters was no longer in New Delhi but at the forward base at Comilla, the letter did not reach her until mid-April, after Burne-Wilke had disappeared in a flight over the jungle, and while a search was still on for him.

Luck figures not only in war, but in the writing of war journalism and history. Imphal was a British victory which lifted the cloud of Singapore; a
classic showdown like El Alamein, fought out on worse terrain over a larger front. It was unique among modern battles, in that the RAF did at Imphal what the Luftwaffe failed to do at Stalingrad: it supplied a surrounded army by air for months until breakout and victory. But the Normandy invasion and the fall of Rome, with hordes of reporters and cameramen in attendance at both events, spanned the same block of time. So at Imphal, in a remote valley near the Himalayas, two hundred thousand men fought a long series of sanguinary engagements unnoticed by the newspapers. History continues to overlook Imphal. The dead of course do not care. The survivors with their faded recollections are passing from the scene unnoticed.

Imphal itself is a real-life Shangri-La, a cluster of native villages around golden-domed temples, on a fertile and beautiful plain in the northeast corner of vast India bordering Burma, ringed by formidable mountains. The freakish tides of world war brought the British and the Japanese to death-grips there. Ignominiously kicked out of Malaya and Burma by the Japanese in 1942, the British had one war aim in Southeast Asia, to retrieve their Empire. The conquering Japanese armies had halted at the great mountain ranges that separate Burma from India. The Americans, from Franklin Roosevelt down, had no interest in the British war aim, regarding it as backward-looking, unjust, and futile. Roosevelt had even told Stalin at Tehran that he wanted to see India free. But the Americans did want to clear a corridor through northern Burma to keep China supplied and fighting, and to set up bases on the China coast for bombing Japan.

The beautiful plain of Imphal was the key to such a supply corridor, a gateway among the mountain passes. The British had been building up here for counterattack, and perforce they accepted the American strategy. Their commanding general, a brilliant warrior named Slim, piled in a large army of mingled English and Asian divisions, with the mission of fighting through northern Burma to join hands with Chinese divisions driving south under the American General Stilwell, thus opening the supply corridor. At this, the Japanese too moved up north in force to confront Slim. His appetizing buildup offered a chance to destroy India’s defenders with a counterstroke; and then perhaps to march in and set up a new puppet government of India under Subhas Chandra Bose, a red-hot Indian nationalist who had defected to Japan.

The Japanese attacked first, employing their old jungle-fighting tactics against the British: rapid thrusts far beyond supply lines with quick flanking encirclements, feeding and fueling their army from captured supply dumps as they advanced. But this time Slim and his field commander, Scoones, accepting battle on the Imphal plain, bloodily fought the Japanese to a standstill there, denying them their usual replenishment until they starved, wilted, and ran. This took over three months. The battle evolved into two epic sieges — of a small British force surrounded at a village called Kohima, and
of Slim’s main body at Imphal itself, invested by a seasoned and fierce Japanese jungle army.

Airlift tipped the balance of the sieges. The British consumed supplies more rapidly than the Japanese, whose soldiers could survive for a while on a bag of rice a day; but American transport planes daily flew in hundreds of tons of supplies, landing some at overburdened airfields, the crews kicking the rest out of open plane doors to parachute down. Burne-Wilke’s tactical command protected the airlift, and harried the Japanese army with bombing and strafing.

Upon investing Imphal, however, the Japanese overran several radar warning outposts, and for a while the air picture was not good. Burne-Wilke decided in a conference at Comilla to fly into Imphal to see things for himself. His Spitfire squadrons stationed on the plain were reporting that without adequate radar warning, maintaining control of the air was becoming a problem. He took a reconnaissance aircraft and flew off solo, ignoring Pamela’s mutterings.