Winds of War (111 page)

Pug had seen the forbidding old military historian here and there at the conference. Two nights ago, at a wardroom party for the American visitors, some junior British officers had started what they called a “rag,” marching in dressed in kilts or colored towels, bizarre wigs, and not much else; skirling bagpipes, setting off firecrackers, and goose-stepping over chairs and tables. After a while Major-General Tillet had stood up unsmiling – Pug thought, to put a stop to the horseplay – and had broken into a long, wild jig on a table, as the bagpipers marched around him and the whole mess applauded. Now he was as stiff as ever.

Red secrecy warnings blazed on the steel door that Tillet opened. Dressed in a one-piece garment like a mechanic’s coveralls, stooped and heavy-eyed, Churchill pondered a map of the Russian front all across one bulkhead. Opposite hung a chart of the Atlantic. Young officers worked over dispatches at a table in the middle of the room, in air thick with tobacco smoke.

“There,” said the Prime Minister to Tillet and Pug Henry, gesturing at the map of the Soviet Union with his cigar, “
there
is an awful unfolding picture.”

The crimson line of the front east of Smolensk showed two fresh bulges toward Moscow. Churchill coughed, and glanced at Henry. “Your President warned Stalin. I warned him even more explicitly, basing myself on very exact intelligence. Surely no government ever had less excuse to be surprised. In an evil hour, the heroic, unfortunate Russian people were led by a pack of outwitted bungling scoundrels.” The Prime Minister turned and walked to the other bulkhead, with the tottering step Victor Henry had observed in his London office. At Argentia Churchill had appeared strong, ruddy, springy, and altogether ten years younger. Now his cheeks were ashy, with red patches.

“Hullo. Don’t we have a development here?”

Little black coffin-shaped markers dotted the wide blue spaces, and an officer was putting up several more, in a cluster close to the battleship’s projected course. Farther on stood large clusters of red pins, with a few blue pins.

“This new U-boat group was sighted by an American patrol plane at twilight, sir,” said the officer.

“Ah, yes. So Admiral Pound advised me. I suppose we are evading?”

“We have altered course to north, sir.”

“Convoy H-67 is almost home, I see.”

“We will be pulling those pins tonight, Mr. Prime Minister.”

“That will be happy news.” Churchill harshly coughed, puffing at his cigar, and said to Pug Henry, “Well. We may have some sport for you yet. It won’t be as lively as a bomber ride over Berlin. Eh? Did you enjoy that, Captain?”

“It was a rare privilege, Mr. Prime Minister.”

“Any time. Any time at all.”

“Too much honor, sir. Once was plenty.”

Churchill uttered a hoarse chuckle. “I daresay. What is the film tonight, General Tillet?”

“Prime Minister, I believe it is Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, in
Saps at Sea.”

“
Saps at Sea,
eh? Not inappropriate! The Surgeon-General has ordered me to remain in bed. He has also ordered me not to smoke. I shall attend
Saps at Sea
, and bring my cigars.”

Pug Henry’s enjoyment of
Saps at Sea
was shadowed by an awareness that at any moment the battle ship might run into a U-boat pack. Germany skippers were adept at sneaking past destroyer screens. But the film spun to the end uninterrupted. “A gay but inconsequent entertainment,” the Prime Minister remarked in a heavy, rheumy voice, as he plodded out.

Clement Attlee’s broadcast the next day packed the wardroom. Every officer not on watch, and all staff officers and war planners, gathered in the wardroom around one singularly ancient, crack-voiced radio. The battleship, plowing through a wild storm, rolled and pitched with slow long groans. For the American guest, it was a bad half hour. He saw perplexed looks, lengthening faces, and headshakes, as Attlee read off the “Atlantic Charter.” The high-flown language bespoke not a shred of increased American commitment. Abuse of Nazi tyranny, praise of “four freedoms,” dedication to a future of world peace and brotherhood, yes; more combat help for the British, flat zero. Some sentences about the free trade and independence for all peoples meant the end of the British Empire, if they meant anything.

Franklin Roosevelt was indeed a tough customer, thought Captain Henry, not especially surprised.

“Umph!” grunted Major-General Tillet in the silence after the radio was shut off. “I’d venture there was more to it than that. How about it Henry?”

All eyes turned on the American.

Pug saw no virtue in equivocating. “No, sir, I’d guess that was it.”

“Your President has now pledged in a joint communiqué to destroy Nazi tyranny,” Tillet said. “Doesn’t that mean you’re coming in, one way or another?”

“It means lend-Lease,” Pug said.

Questions shot at him from all sides.

“You’re not going to stand with us against Japan?”

“Not now.”

“But isn’t the Pacific your fight, pure and simple?”

“The President won’t give a warning to Japan. He can’t, without Congress behind him.”

“What’s the matter with your Congress?”

“That’s a good question, but day before yesterday, it came within one vote of practically dissolving the United States Army.”

“Don’t the congressmen know what’s happening in the world?”

“They vote their political hunches to protect their political hides.”

“Then what’s the matter with your people?”

“Our people are about where yours were at the time of the Munich pact.”

That caused a silence.

Tillet said, “We’re paying the price.”

“We’ll have to pay the price.”

“We had Chamberlain then for a leader, sir,” said a fresh-faced lieutenant. “You have Roosevelt.”

“The American people don’t want to fight Hitler, gentlemen,” said Pug. “It’s that simple, and Roosevelt can’t help that. They don’t want to fight anybody. Life is pleasant. The war’s a ball game they can watch. You’re the home team, because you talk our language. Hence Lend-Lease, and this Atlantic Charter. Lend-Lease is no sweat, it just means more jobs and money for everybody.”

An unusually steep roll brought a crash of crockery in the galley. The crossfire stopped. Victor Henry went to his cabin. Before disembarking in Iceland, he did not talk much more to the British officers.

Chapter 48

The Atlantic Charter, like the elephant, resembled a tree, a snake, a wall, or a rope, depending on where the blind took hold of it.

Axis propaganda jeered at its gassy rhetoric about freedom, cited enslaved India and Malaya, noted the cowardice of the degenerate Americans in evading any combat commitment, and concluded that it was all a big empty bluff, tricked out with the usual pious Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy, to cover impotent hatred of the triumphant New World Order, which a thousand Atlantic Charters could no longer roll back.

In the United States, a howl went up that Roosevelt had secretly committed the country to go to war on England’s side. A cheer went up – not nearly so loud – for the most glorious document in man’s struggle toward the light since the Magna Carta.

British newspapers implied that much more than this fine charter had been wrought at Argentia Bay; but for the moment the rest had to be hushed up.

The Russians hailed the meeting of Roosevelt and Churchill on a battleship at sea as a triumph for all peace-loving peoples everywhere; hinting that, as was well known, a second front in Europe now was crucial, and the Atlantic Charter, failing to mention a plan for this, was somewhat disappointing.

No reaction was stronger or blinder than the one that swept the immured Jews in Minsk.

The Germans had confiscated their radios. The penalty for possessing one was death. A sixteen-year-old boy had heard the Russian broadcast imperfectly on a tiny receiving set rigged in his attic. He had joyously spread the story that Roosevelt had met Churchill, and that the United States was declaring war on Germany! The effect on the ghetto of this lie was so wonderful, so life-giving, that one may wonder whether falsehood may not sometimes be a necessary anodyne for souls in torment.

The spirit of the Minsk Jews had recently been shattered. They had resigned themselves, with the coming of the Germans, to be herded into a few square blocks, to be forced to register for work, to be arrested and maltreated, to endure hooligan raids and perhaps even shootings. This was a pogrom time. German pogroms could be expected to be very bad. But Jewry survived pogroms.

Then one night gray trucks had swarmed into the ghetto, and squads of Germans in unfamiliar dark uniforms had cleared out the dwellers along two main streets, house by house, loading the people into the vans - for resettlement, they announced. Some of the Germans were brutal, some polite, as they pushed and urged the people into the trucks. In other streets, behind barred doors, other Jews wondered and shivered. What had happened afterward according to reports brought by partisans who haunted the woods - was so hideous and unbelievable that the Minsk Jews were still trying numbly to come to grips with it. The gray vans had driven five miles away, to the woods outside a village. There in a moonlit ravine the Germans had ordered the people out of the trucks, had lined them up in groups, and had shot every last one - including the babies and the old people - and then had thrown them in a big hole already dug, and shovelled them over with sand.

Peasants who had dug the huge sandy hole had seen this horror with their own eyes; so the partisan report went. The Germans had rounded them up for the job, then had ordered them to go home, and not to linger or to talk about the excavation, on pain of being shot. A few had sneaked back through the trees, all the same, to see what the Germans were up to; and they had recounted to the partisans the massacre of the “Zhids” from the gray trucks.

To the Jews trapped in Minsk three hundred miles behind the German armies approaching Moscow this story was an unimaginable shock. The Germans were already shooting people for small offenses after swift crude trials. Bloated smelly bodies of such victims, and of captured partisans, hung in the public squares. Such things could be expected in wartime. But the sudden murder, evidently at random, of all the people who lived in two long streets - children, women, old people, everybody - exceeded their deepest fears of what even Germans could do. Either the story was a hysterical exaggeration, or if it were true - and the reports as they trickled in began to seem overwhelming - then the Germans were far worse than the most frightful rumors had ever pictured them.

Yet next day Minsk looked much the same, the sunflowers bloomed, the sun shone in a blue sky. Some buildings were ruined by bombs or fire, but most stood as before; German soldiers cruised the streets, already a common sight in their gray trucks and tanks marked with swastikas. The soldiers themselves looked entirely ordinary and human, lounging with their guns and squinting in the sunshine. Some even made jokes with passersby. Russians still walked everywhere, old neighbors of the Jews, and the same bells rang at the same hours. These streets were the scenes of the Jews’ lives, as familiar as faces at home. Only now all the houses in two streets stood quiet and empty.

Into this stunned moment, the news broke that Roosevelt and Churchill had met at sea and that America was entering the war. The word flew from house to house. People cried, laughed, caught up their children and danced them on their shoulders, kissed each other, and found wine or vodka to drink to President Roosevelt. One fact was graven in Europe’s memory: last time, the coming of the Americans had won the war. Happy arguments broke out. Would it take three months? Six months? However long it might take, there would be no more insane occurrences like the emptying of those two streets. The Germans would not dare now! The Germans were bad when they were on top, but how humble they could be when things turned around! They were all cowards. Now they would probably start being nice to the Jews, to avoid punishment by the Americans.

Berel Jastrow did not try to contradict the rumor, though he knew that it was untrue. At the bakery, he still kept his shortwave radio concealed. His papers allowed him to pass the ghetto boundaries, for the Germans needed bread and the Minsk bakers were fighting hundreds of miles away. At the underground meeting of Jewish leaders that night, in the boiler room of the hospital, Berel did report the accurate broadcast he had heard from Sweden. But he was a foreigner, and he was telling the committee what it did not want to hear. Somebody cut him short with the observation that he had probably been listening to the German-controlled Norwegian radio; and the excited planning continued for the armed uprising that would take place in Minsk, in cooperation with the partisans, as soon as the Americans landed in France.

A few days later Jastrow and his son, with the wife and baby, disappeared. They went silently in the night, asking nobody in the ghetto for permission or help, or for passwords to contact the partisans in the woods. The Jewish Board had some trouble with the Gestapo about the vanished Polish baker. But they pleaded that the Jastrows were refugees, for whom they couldn’t be responsible. The Germans had themselves issued Jastrow his special papers.

The three Polish Jews with their infant did not come back to Minsk. The ghetto people assumed they had been shot right away by the Wehrmacht forest patrols, as most Jews were who tried to slip from the town without partisan guidance. It was the German custom to throw fresh bodies from the forest into Jubilee Square, as a warning to the other Jews. But nobody saw, in these gruesome, stiff piles of dead unburied friends, the bodies of the Jastrows. That was the one reason for believing the Jastrows might still be alive somewhere.

* * *

In Rome the Germans were conducting themselves very well, at least within the purview of Natalie and her uncle. A certain arrogance toward the Italians had perhaps intensified with all the conquests, but that had always been the German demeanor. Ghastly rumors of Nazi treatment of Jews had been flying around Europe for years. To these were now added stories of the vilest atrocities against the captured hordes of Slav soldiers. Yet when Aaron Jastrow and his heavily pregnant niece dined in the hotel or some fine Roman restaurant, there would very likely be Germans at table on either side of them. Enough wine might spark a bit of Teutonic boisterousness; but to ascribe a capacity for mass murder to these well-dressed, carefully-mannered, good-looking people - so very much like Americans in some ways - passed all belief.