War and Remembrance (95 page)

At the enormous Canadian Air Force Base outside Montreal, Slote telephoned the Division of European Affairs, and the division chief told him to hurry along to the Montreal airport and catch the first plane to New York or Washington. While this was going on, Fenton passed the telephone booth. A tall pretty girl in a red fox coat was clinging to his arm, hips rolling with each step, devouring the pilot with lustrous green eyes. A casual wave with his smoking cigar at the booth, a man-to-man grin, and the ferry pilot passed from view. A short life and a merry one, thought Slote, with a flicker of rueful envy.

To his pleased surprise, Slote found that he did not mind the takeoff of the DC-
₃
, or the bumpy climb through heavy clouds. The airliner seemed so huge, the interior so luxurious, the seat so broad and soft, the stewardess so entrancing, that it was more like being on the
Queen Mary
than on something flying through the air. He cold not tell whether the bomber ride had cauterized, as it were, his fear of flying, or whether he just had no nerves left, and was on the verge of a total crack-up. Anyway, not to be frightened was delightful.

He had snatched a
Montreal Gazette
from the newsstand. Now he unfolded it, and a picture of Alistair Tudsbury and Pamela on the first page made him sit up. They stood beside a jeep, Tudsbury grinning in balloonlike army fatigues, Pamela looking pinched and bored in slacks and a shirt.

SUNSET ON KIDNEY RIDGE

By Alistair Tudsbury

By wireless from London. This dispatch, dated November 4,1942, the famous British correspondent’s last, was dictated shortly before he was killed by a landmine at El Alamein. Edited by his daughter and collaborator, Pamela Tudsbury, from an unfinished draft, it is reprinted by special permission of the London Observer.

The sun hangs huge and red above the far dust-streaked horizon. The desert cold is already falling on Kidney Ridge. This gray sandy elevation is deserted, except by the dead, and by two intelligence officers and myself. Even the flies have left. Earlier they were here in clouds, blackening the corpses.
They pester the living too, clustering at a man’s eyes and the moisture in the corners of his mouth, drinking his sweat. But of course they prefer the dead. When the sun climbs over the opposite horizon tomorrow, the flies will return to their feast.

Here not only did these German and British soldiers die, who litter the ground as far as the eye can see in the fading red light. Here at El Alamein the Afrika Korps died. The Korps was a legend, a dashing clean-cut enemy, a menace and at the same time a sort of glory; in Churchillian rhetoric, a gallant foe worthy of our steel. It is not yet known whether Rommel has made good his escape, or whether his straggle of routed supermen will be bagged by the Eighth Army. But the Afrika Korps is dead, crushed by British arms. We have won here, in the great Western Desert of Africa, a victory to stand with Crecy, Agincourt, Blenheim, and Waterloo.

Lines from Southey’s “Battle of Blenheim” are haunting me here on Kidney Ridge:

They say it was a shocking sight

After the field was won,

For many thousand bodies here

Lay rotting in the sun;

But things like that, you know, must be

After a famous victory.

The bodies, numerous as they are, strike the eye less than the blasted and burned-out tanks that dot this weirdly beautiful wasteland, these squat hulks with their long guns, casting elongated blue shadows on the pastel grays, browns, and pinks of the far-stretching sands. Here is the central incongruity of Kidney Ridge — the masses of smashed twentieth-century machinery tumbled about in these harsh flat sandy wilds, where one envisions warriors on camels, or horses, or perhaps the elephants of Hannibal.

How far they came to perish here, these soldiers and these machines! What bizarre train of events brought youngsters from the Rhineland and Prussia, from the Scottish Highlands and London, from Australia and New Zealand, to butt at each other to the death with flame-spitting machinery in faraway Africa, in a setting as dry and lonesome as the moon?

But that is the hallmark of this war. No other war has ever been like it. This war rings the world. Kidney Ridge is everywhere on our small globe. Men fight as far from home as they can’ be transported, with courage and endurance that makes one proud of the human race, in horrible contrivances that make one ashamed of the human race.

My jeep will take me back to Cairo shortly, and I will dictate a dispatch about what I see here. What I am looking at, right now as the sun touches the horizon, is this. Two intelligence officers, not fifty yards from me, are lifting the German driver out of a blasted tank, using meat hooks. He is black and charred. He has no head. He is a trunk with arms and legs. The smell is like gamy pork. The legs wear good boots, only a bit scorched.

I am very tired. A voice I don’t want to listen to tells me that this is England’s last land triumph; that our military history ends here with a victory to stand with the greatest, won largely with machines shipped ten thousand miles from American factories. Tommy Atkins will serve with pluck and valor wherever he fights hereafter, as always; but the conduct of the war is passing out of our hands.

We are outnumbered and outclassed. Modern war is a clangorous and dreary measuring of industrial plants. Germany’s industrial capacity passed ours in 1905. We hung on through the First World War by sheer grit. Today the two industrial giants of the earth are the United States and the Soviet Union. They more than outmatch Germany and Japan, now that they have shaken off their surprise setbacks and sprung to arms. Tocqueville’s vision is coming to pass in our time. They will divide the empire of the world.

The sun going down on Kidney Ridge is setting on the British Empire, on which — so we learned to say as schoolboys — the sun never set. Our Empire was born in the skill of our explorers, the martial prowess of our yeomanry, the innovative genius of our scientists and engineers. We stole a march on the world that lasted two hundred years. Lulled by the long peaceful protection of the great fleet we built, we thought it would last forever. We dozed.

Here on Kidney Ridge we have erased the disgrace of our somnolence. If history is but the clash of arms, we now begin to leave the stage in honor. But if it is the march of the human spirit toward world freedom, we will never leave the stage. British ideas, British institutions, British scientific method, will lead the way in other lands, in other guises. English will become the planetary tongue, that is now certain. We have been the Greece of the new age.

But, you object, the theme of the new age is socialism. I am not so sure of that. Even so, Karl Marx, the scruffy Mohammed of this spreading economic Islam, built his strident dogmas on the theories of British economists. He created his apocalyptic visions in the hospitality of the British Museum. He read British books, lived on British bounty, wrote in British freedom, collaborated with Englishmen, and lies in a London grave. People forget all that.

The sun has set. It will get dark and cold quickly now. The intelligence officers are beckoning me to their lorry. The first stars spring forth in the indigo sky. I take a last look around at the dead of El Alamein and mutter a prayer for all these poor devils, German and British, who turn and turn about sang “Lili Marlene” in the cafes of Tobruk, hugging the same sleazy girls. Now they lie here together, their young appetites cold, their homesick songs stilled.

“Why, ‘twas a very wicked thing!”

Said little Wilhelmine.

“Nay, nay my little girl!” quoth he
—

Pamela Tudsbury writes: “The telephone rang just at that moment, as my father was declaiming the verse with his usual relish. It was the summons to the interview with General Montgomery. He left at once. A lorry
brought back his body next morning. As a World War I reserve officer, he was buried with honors in the British Military Cemetery outside Alexandria.

The
London Observer
asked me to complete the article. I have tried. I have his handwritten notes for three more paragraphs. But I cannot do it. I can, however, complete Southey’s verse for him. So ends my father’s career of war reporting
—

“It was a famous victory.”

The airplane was humming above the weather now, the sky was bright blue, the sunlight blinding on the white cloud cover. Slote slumped sadly in his chair. He had come a long way from Bern, he was thinking, not only in miles but in perception. In the hothouse of the Swiss capital, under the comfortable glass of neutrality, his obsession about the Jews had sprouted like some forced plant. Now he was coming back to realities.

How could one arouse American public opinion? How get past the horselaugh of “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” the acid cynicism of Fenton? Above all, how overcome the competition of Kidney Ridge? Tudsbury’s piece was touching and evocative, describing a great slaughter; but there was no Kidney Ridge for the Jews of Europe. They were unarmed. It was no fight. Most of them did not even comprehend that a massacre was going on. Sheep going to the slaughter were uncomfortable to contemplate. One turned one’s eyes elsewhere. One had an exciting world drama to watch, a contest for the highest stakes, in which the home team was at last pulling ahead. Treblinka had small chance against Kidney Ridge.

I
N
September 1941, Victor Henry had left a country at peace, but with isolationists and interventionists in a screechy squabble, the production of munitions a trickle, despite all the “arsenal of democracy” rhetoric; the military services shuddering over Congress’s renewal of the draft by one vote; a land without rationing, with business booming from defense spending, with lights blazing at night from coast to coast, with the usual cataracts of automobiles on the highways and the city streets.

Now as he returned, San Francisco from the air spelled War; shadowy lampless bridges under a full moon, pale ribbons of deserted highways, dimmed-out residential hills, black tall downtown buildings. In the dark quiet streets and in the glare of the hotel lobby the swarms of uniforms astounded him. Hitler’s Berlin had looked no more martial.

Newspapers and magazines that he read next day on the eastbound flight mirrored the change. In the advertisements, all was bellicose patriotism. Where heroic-looking riveters, miners, or soldiers and their sweethearts were not featured in the ads, a toothy Jap hyena, or a snake with a Hitler mustache, or a bloated scowling Mussolini-like pig took comic beatings. The news columns and year-end summaries surged with buoyant confidence that at Stalingrad and in North Africa the tide of the war had turned. The Pacific was getting short treatment. Sketchy references to Midway and Guadalcanal, perhaps through the fault of the closemouthed Navy, miserably missed the scope of these battles. As for the sinking of the
Northampton,
Pug saw that if released the story would have been ignored. This calamity in his life, this loss of a great ship of war, would have been a dark flyspeck on a golden picture of optimism.

And it was all mighty sudden! Island-hopping across the Pacific in recent days, he had been reading in airplanes and waiting rooms scuffed periodicals of the past months. With one voice they had bemoaned the dilatory Allied war effort, the deep German advances into the Caucasus, the pro-Axis unrest in India, South America, and the Arab lands, and Japan’s march across Burma and the Southwest Pacific. Now with one voice the same journals were hailing the inevitable downfall of Adolf Hitler and his partners in crime. This civilian change of mood struck Pug as frivolous. If the strategic
turn was at hand, the main carnage in the field was yet’to come. Americans had only begun to die. To military families, if not to military columnists, this was no small thing. He had called Rhoda from San Francisco, and she had told him that there was no news of Byron. In wartime, no news, especially about a son in submarines, was not necessarily good news.