War and Remembrance (153 page)

Burne-Wilke was a seasoned pilot, a World War I flyer and a career RAF man. The premature death of his older brother had made him a viscount, but he had stayed in the service. Too senior now to fly in combat, he seized chances to fly alone when he could. Mountbatten had already reprimanded him once for this. But he loved flying over the jungle without the distracting chatter of a co-pilot. It afforded him something like the calming peace of flight over water, this solid green earth cover passing underneath for hours, unbroken except by the rare brown crooked crawl of a river speckled with green islands. The bouncing curving ride through mountain passes amid thick-timbered peaks towering high above his wings, ending in a sudden view of the gardened valley and the gleaming gold domes of Imphal, with here and there on the broad plain a smoky plume of battle, gave him a dour delight that helped shake off his persisting fatalistic depression.

For to Duncan Burne-Wilke, Imphal was a battle straight out of the
Bhagavad-Gita.
He was not an old Asia hand, but as an educated British military man he knew the Far East. He thought American strategic ideas about China were pitifully ignorant; and the gigantic effort to open the north Burma corridor, into which they had pushed the British, a futile waste of lives and resources. In the long run, it would not matter much who won at Imphal. The Japanese, slowly weakening under the American Pacific assault, now lacked the punch to drive far into India. The Chinese under Chiang Kai-shek would not fight worth a damn; Chiang’s concern was holding off the Chinese communists in the north. In any case, Gandhi’s unruly nationalist movement would shove the British out of India, once the war was over. The
handwriting was on the wall; so Burne-Wilke thought. Still, events had swirled into this vortex, and a man had to fight.

As usual, talking to the combatants on the spot proved worth it. Burne-Wilke gathered his pilots in the large bamboo canteen at Imphal, and asked for complaints, observations, and ideas. Out of the crowd of hundreds of young men came plenty of response, especially complaints.

“Air Marshal, we’ll take the red ants and the black spiders, the heat rashes and the dysentery,” spoke up one Cockney voice from the rear, “the short rations, the itches and the sweat, the cobras, and the rest of this jolly show. All we ask in return, sir, is enough petrol to fly a combat air patrol from dawn to dusk. Sir, is that askin’ so bleedin’ much?” This brought growls and applause, but Burne-Wilke had to say that Air Transport could not bring in that much fuel.

An idea surfaced, as the meeting went on, which the fliers had been discussing among themselves. The Japanese raiders came and went over the Imphal plain through two passes in the mountains. The notion was to scramble not after the raiders, but directly into patrol positions in the passes. Returning Jap pilots would either face the superior Spitfires in these narrow traps, or they would crash from engine failure or lack of fuel, trying to evade over the mountains. Burne-Wilke seized on the idea, and ordered it put into effect. He promised alleviation of other shortages, if not of fuel, and he flew off to cheers. On this return flight, he disappeared in a thunderstorm.

Pamela endured a bad week before word came from Imphal that some villagers had brought him in alive. It was during this week that Pug’s letter arrived from New Delhi, in a batch of delayed personal mail. She was busier than usual, working for the deputy tactical commander. The disappearance of Burne-Wilke was preying on her mind. As his fiancée, she was the focus of all the concern and sympathy on the base. These pages typed on stationery of the Jeffersonville Plaza Motor Hotel seemed to come from another world. For Pamela, everyday reality was now Comilla, this hot mildewy Bengali town two hundred miles east of Calcutta, its walls stained and rotting from monsoons, its foliage almost as green and rank as the jungle, its main distinction a thick sprinkling of monuments to British officials murdered by Bengali terrorists, its army headquarters aswarm with Asian faces.

Jeffersonville, Indiana!
What did it look like? What sort of people were there? The name was so like Victor Henry himself — square, American, obscure, unprepossessing, yet with the noble hint of “Jefferson” in it. Pug’s marriage proposal, with its sober financial statement and brief clumsy words of love, both amused and dizzied Pamela. It was endearing, but she could not cope with it at this bad time, so she did not write an answer. When she thought about the letter, in the ensuing turbulence of Burne-Wilke’s return, it seemed less and less real to her. At bottom, she could not believe that
Rhoda Henry would bring off this latest maneuver. And it was all happening so far, far away!

After a few days in the Imphal hospital, Burne-Wilke was flown to Comilla. His collarbone was broken, both ankles were fractured, and he was running a high fever. Worst of all, at least to look at, were his suppurating sores from leeches. He ruefully told Pamela that he had done this to himself, tearing the leeches off his body and leaving the heads under his skin. He knew better, but he had regained consciousness in a swamp with his uniform almost torn off, and black fat leeches clustering on him. In dazed horror he had begun plucking at them, before remembering the rule to let them drink their fill and drop off. The plane had spun in, he said, but he had managed to level off at the tree tops for a stalling crash. Coming to, he had hacked through the jungle to a riverbed, and stumbled along it for two days until the villagers came on him.

“I was rather lucky, actually,” he said to Pamela. He lay in a hospital bed, swathed in bandages, his wanly smiling face puffed and hideously discolored by the leech sores. “One’s told the Nagas are headhunters. They could have helped themselves to my head, and nobody would have been the wiser. They were dashed kind. Frankly, my dear, I don’t care if I never see another tree.”

She was at his bedside for hours every day. He was very low, and movingly dependent on her for affection and encouragement. They had been close before in a quiet way but they now seemed really married. Pamela finally and rather despairingly wrote to Pug on her plane trip from New Delhi to London. After two weeks in hospital, Burne-Wilke was being sent back, very much against his will, for further treatment. She recounted what had happened to explain her delay in replying, and went on,

Now, Pug, about your proposal. I put my arms around your neck and bless you. I find it very hard to go on, but the fact is that it mustn’t be. Duncan’s sick as a dog. I can’t jilt him. I don’t want to. I’m terribly fond of him, I admire him, and I love him. He’s a superb man. I’ve never pretended to him — or to you — that I feel for him the strange love that has bound us. But I’m about ready to give up passion as a bad job. I’ve not had much luck with it!

He’s never pretended, either. At the outset, when he proposed, I asked, “But why do you want me, Duncan?” With that shy subtle smile he answered, “Because you’ll do.”

My dear, I really don’t quite believe your letter. Don’t be angry with me. I just know that Rhoda hasn’t landed her new fellow yet. Until he’s marched her into a church, she won’t have done. There’s many a slip! The unattainable other man’s wife, and the prospective spouse, may look very different to a confirmed bachelor threatened with the altar.

You will always take Rhoda back, and actually I feel you should. It’s impossible to blame you. I can’t give you a Warren (I
wouldn’t
mind the church
upbringing, you dear thing, but — oh well) and whatever ties us, it’s nothing like that thick rope of memories between you and Rhoda.

I look back at these hastily scrawled paragraphs and find it hard to believe my blurring eyes.

I love you, you know that, and I always will. I’ve never known anyone like you. Don’t stop loving me. The whole thing was just fated not to be; bad timing, bad luck, interfering commitments. But it was beautiful. Let’s be great friends when this damned war ends. If Rhoda does get her man, find some American beauty who will make you happy. They abound in your country, oh my sweet, like daisies in a June meadow. You have just never looked around. Now you can. But don’t ever forget

Your poor loving

Pamela

(from Aaron Jastrow’s manuscript)

APRIL
22, 1944.

I am waiting for Natalie to return from a clandestine Zionist meeting; waiting and worrying on a cool spring night, with pleasant scents drifting into the apartment from window boxes of geraniums, placed on our sills only yesterday by Beautification workers. I think she is stumbling into acute danger. Though it may cause a scene for which I haven’t the strength, I intend to have it out with her when she returns.

How long is it since I wrote a diary entry? I’m not sure. The last sheets are hidden away, long since. The Beautification has more or less overwhelmed me, both at the library and in the council. Also, Berel’s stunning appearance after my
Iliad
lecture was a very difficult thing to write about, so I put it off, put it off, and let the whole diary slide. Now I will try to fill it in. I’ve prepared tomorrow’s Talmud section, and this is the best way left to kill time. I won’t sleep till she shows up.

Berel gave me the start of my life that night, coming out of the gloom. What an eerie encounter! I had not seen him for close to fifty years. Alas, the transformations of time; the red-cheeked plump boy has become a hard-looking elderly man with bushy gray hair, a big outthrust jaw, heavy frowning eyebrows, and deep lines scored on a clean-shaven face. There’s a ghostly familiarity in the smile, and that is all. Shabbily dressed, with a yellow star for camouflage on his torn sheepskin jacket, be looked more Polish then Jewish, if there is anything to these notions of racial physiognomies; a formidable suspicious old Silesian peasant. He was nervous and wary in the extreme. While he walked with us he kept looking around and behind. He had a mission to perform in the ghetto, he said, and would leave before dawn; no explanation of when and how he had come, or how he would go.

He walked to our apartment with us, and there without ado he offered to get Louis out of Theresienstadt! Natalie paled at the very thought. But a new transport had just been ordered, she was in a shaken mood, and she was willing to listen. Berel’s idea was to place the child with a Czech farm family, as some Prague Jews managed to do with their tots before being hauled off to
Theresienstadt. It has worked well; the parents hear news of the children from time to time, and even receive smuggled letters from the older ones. To get Louis out, he would be hospitalized on some fraudulent diagnosis, for which Berel says he has the necessary connections in the Health Department. A death certificate would be provided to satisfy the Central Secretariat index, and there might be a faked burial or cremation. The child would be removed from the hospital in secret and spirited to Prague. There Berel would receive him and take him to the farm, visit him regularly, and send news about him to Natalie. The war might go on another year or more; but whatever happened, Berel would watch over him.

Natalie’s face grew longer and grimmer as Berel talked. Why, she asked, was this necessary? Louis was adaptable and thriving. Seeing his mother every day was the best thing for him. Berel did not argue about any of that, but he urged that, all in all, the best thing was to let Louis go. Sickness, malnutrition, transport, and German cruelty were ever-present dangers here, worse than the temporary risk of getting him out. Natalie gave no ground. I am abstracting here a low-toned Yiddish conversation that took more than an hour, before Berel dropped it and said he had business with me. She went off to bed. We talked Polish, which she doesn’t understand.

Now my pencil halts. How to write down what he told me?

I will not try to recapitulate his journeyings and ordeals. Imagination numbs, belief fails. Berel has passed through all seven circles of the inferno that Germany has made of eastern Europe. The very worst rumors about the Jewish fate are not only true, but very pale and gentle intimations of the truth. With his own hands my cousin has disinterred from mass graves and burned thousands of murdered men, women, and children. Such graves dot all of eastern Europe near cities where Jews once lived. A million and a half buried corpses, is his conservative guess.

In certain camps, including the one outside our old yeshiva town of Oswiecim, huge poison gas cellars exist for killing thousands of people at a time. A crowd to fill a great opera house, crammed into an enormous basement and asphyxiated all at once! Arriving fresh off sealed trains from all over Europe, they are murdered then and there. Great crematoriums burn up the bodies. Tall chimneys dominate the camp landscape, vomiting flames, greasy smoke, and human scraps and ash twenty-four hours a day, when an “action” is on. Berel was not recounting rumors. He worked in a construction gang that built such a crematorium.