Presidential Mission

by Upton Sinclair

  In the same dingy room were the three comrades to whom Lanny had told his life story: Jean Catroux, the Communist, who wished to be known as Zed; Soulay, the docker, tough and weatherbeaten; and the mysterious young woman who had first been Mlle. Richard and now was Mlle. Bléret. Zed was either the leader, or else the more talkative; he said: “Bonsoir, Camarade Zhone. Asseyez-vous, s’il vous plait.” Comrade Jones took a vacant chair, and the spokesman continued: “We have met the agent you sent to us, and everything is satisfactory. We don’t know whether you know this man, or wish to know about him.”

  Lanny’s reply was: “I do not know him, and I much prefer not to share any secret that is not necessary to my work. I only want to be sure you have got what you want.”

  “We have, and we thank you.”

  “I have already told Comrade Bruges, but I will repeat for your benefit, that there is to be an American invasion of the Mediterranean area before the end of the present year. There was a conference of the general staffs of Britain and America last month, and that was the decision. I have it upon the highest authority, and you may accept it as settled. The exact place and date are still to be determined, but your duties are the same in any case. You are asked to do everything in your power to make certain that the French Fleet does not fall into the hands of the Germans. That is the one absolutely vital thing that is within the field of your efforts.”

  “We have been told that, Comrade Jones, and we are doing our best and hope to do more.”

  “You should try to win the confidence of individual sailors and persuade them to organize so far as it can be done; you should also try to win officers; there are many who understand the principles of the Revolution, and are not under the Vichy spell. And not merely the sailors, but the arsenal workers, the dockers, the whole labor force of this port must be prepared to rise in a mass movement, to seize arms, and to make every building at the harbor a fortress to keep the Germans away from the ships.”

  “You are perhaps aware, Comrade Jones, that the Germans have compelled our commanders to reduce the fuel in the tanks, so that the ships cannot make their escape.”

  “I have been told that, and if that is the situation when the crisis comes, it will be necessary to sink the vessels. Men must be found with courage enough to open the seacocks, and then stand by and defend the ships while they sink. There have been such heroes in French history, I know, because my stepfather, the painter Marcel Detaze, was shot down in an observation balloon and had his face burned off; nevertheless, in the last desperate days of the second battle of the Marne, he took a gun and went into the fighting and gave his life.”

  “We know that story, comrade.” It was the woman speaking, and Lanny turned toward her. She had been gazing at him intently out of her fine brown eyes, something he had observed on the previous occasions when they had met. She was an extremely attractive young woman, so Lanny had thought at the beginning, and he still thought it: slender and graceful, with sensitive features and an ardent expression. He had been interested to make her acquaintance; but now the circumstances had changed and he was a bit afraid of her. All his life he had been made aware that ladies “fell for him” easily, and he knew the world well enough not to attribute it altogether to his personal charms. He hadn’t been more than six years old when Robbie had pointed out to him that he was the grandson of an American millionaire and might some day be the son of such a godlike being; the ladies would find that out, somehow or other, and for the rest of his days—young, middle-aged, or old—he would have to be aware of that special danger. Now, desiring no entanglements, he remarked:

  “Let me tell you, comrades, that a few years ago I was married to a German artist of talent, a Socialist who did not give way to the Nazis. She was seized by them and tortured to death, but she did not betray any of the secrets with which she had been entrusted. She used to quote to me the words of a German poem, supposed to be spoken by the Tirolese hero, Andreas Hofer: ‘Wir sind all des Todes eigen,’ that is to say, ‘Nous appartenons tous à la mort.’ Such is the spirit in which we have to work in these tragic days, men, women, and even children; we all belong to death. That is true of me, and also of my wife, for I have recently been married to an ardent comrade who would be here with me tonight, except that she is expecting a baby soon.”

  Without waiting to observe the effect of this statement upon the mademoiselle, Lanny turned his eyes to the sturdy dockworker with the well-browned skin and leathery hands. “It would be well, Comrade Soulay, if a few of you enfants de la patrie could get hold of some sticks of dynamite and plant them under the vital machinery of the arsenal before the Germans arrive. It would be better yet if you would study some of the bridges and tunnels and wreck them to delay the enemy’s approach. This one thing you have to get clear, and don’t let anybody persuade you otherwise—the instant they get word that an American soldier has set foot upon French soil, whether here or in North Africa, the Panzers and the parachutists will set out for Toulon. So don’t let anything delay you; he ready to act the first night, because that may be the only night you have.”

  “Que vous avez raison!” said the horny-handed enfant.

  13

  The Yanks Are Coming

  I

  From Toulon to Marseille is another short train journey, and there the Pendleton Agence de Voyage had engaged passage for M. Budd on the same steamer which had carried him to Algiers the previous time. The great “midland sea” was still and the air was hot in mid-summer, and again Lanny spent the night on deck. Late the next afternoon there loomed up that shining white city on the steep hillslopes, and once more a bus took him on the boulevard which runs along the shore, ascending slowly, and then turns and comes back in the opposite direction, still ascending. The bus continued into the suburbs until it came to a high, level spot which had been made into a beautiful garden, and here was a hotel prepared to provide a collector of mosaics with every comfort, provided that he could pay the high price.

  The faithful Hajek had been notified and was on hand. He had been seeking new art treasures, and soon the visitor was immersed in those elaborate negotiations which he found amusing. They were the custom of the country, made him a great gentleman, and provided protection against espionage. Just as by going into a French café and ordering a cup of coffee or a glass of wine you had the right to sit and read all the newspapers in the place, so by bargaining over several fountains for ablutions and buying one of them Lanny could have the right to hold secret conferences with as many conspirators as he could find in Algiers.

  Capitaine Denis de Bruyne came to the hotel and they sat under an arbor, conversing in low tones. Lanny told about his meeting with Charlot, and it was sad. Denis was not so bitter against his brother as the brother was against him. Denis took the position that Charlot was a strayed lamb whom he yearned to bring back into the fold. But Lanny couldn’t hold out any hope; he had to report that Charlot had completely committed himself to the collaborateurs and could not be brought to hear reason. The older brother sat with his lips pressed together and the knuckles showing white in his clenched hands. “If only I could talk to him!” he lamented.

  Lanny replied: “It would only add to the bitterness between you. You will have to leave it to events to change his mind.”

  “What events will do is to get him shot!” exclaimed the brother.

  II

  Lanny gave an account of his visits to Washington and London, and of the decision taken by the Allied Combined Chiefs of Staff. Denis, a man of honor, could be trusted with the great secret. Lanny told him that it was certain to be North Africa, and hardly possible that Algiers should not be one of the first ports taken. It was to be an invasion in force, and the troops would come to stay.

  “It is most important for us to be sure of that,” said the younger man. “We shall be staking our lives upon it. Our friends have been terribly discouraged by Dieppe.”

  He was referring to an event which had just been reported, of course with
the high coloring the collaborationist press gave to all German successes. Some five thousand troops, mostly Canadians, had been thrown against Dieppe, and had managed to hold portions of the harbor for half a day. They had been forced to retire, and if you could believe the Algiers papers, they had lost several vessels of war, a great fleet of planes, and more than half the men who had taken part. The Germans had given them a bloody lesson and vindicated the claim that the Channel coast was invulnerable.

  Lanny said: “It was a commando raid, Denis; a big one, but still a raid. It had to be undertaken because the Canadians were so impatient. What I am talking about is an invasion, with force enough to take and hold all French North Africa. You know how the Americans came last time, and the job they did; they are coming again, and in far greater force. We are building an army of eight million men, and the decision has been taken to open up the Mediterranean, destroy Rommel’s army, and build air bases to put Italy out of the war. That is going to happen, and the Germans can no more stop it than they can stop tomorrow’s sunrise.”

  The other replied: “I am ready to stake my life on my faith in you, Lanny; but you can understand how hard it is for a Frenchman to believe in success any more. For almost three years we have seen nothing but defeats, all over the world, and we have got the habit of despair.”

  “That is because you have to see the war through the enemy’s spectacles. We in the outside world see it differently. The siege of London has certainly not been a defeat for Britain, and the sieges of Leningrad and Moscow have not been defeats for the Soviet Union. I am told by friends at home who are close to sources of information that we destroyed something more than a third of Japan’s most highly trained flyers at the Battle of Midway, and we are destroying more every day in the struggle for the Solomons. Those things don’t show up in the daily reports, but they are bound to have an effect in the long run.”

  “All that seems far off to us, Lanny. Here in North Africa we contemplate the fact that Rommel is only seventy miles from Alexandria, and that reinforcements and supplies are being poured in by way of Tunis and the other ports so close to Italy. I have been told that in Cairo there is a trac, a panic. The well-to-do residents are packing their belongings into their cars and preparing to flee to Palestine or to wherever they can go.”

  “That may be, Denis; but it is not the well-to-do residents who fight battles, and it may be they are encouraged to take themselves away and relieve the food situation by that much. What you do not hear about are the convoys we have been sending around South Africa and up through the Suez Canal. We have a new tank called the General Sherman that is believed to be good, and we have a self-propelled antitank gun that the Desert Fox isn’t going to like a bit when he hears it go off. Don’t forget, too, we have an airplane route established across the middle of Africa, and we are sending all kinds and sizes of planes to Cairo. I have no idea when the British will feel, strong enough to attack, but I do know that they have been bringing up forces from all over the Middle East, and you can be sure that Rommel will have to do a lot more fighting before he gets to Alexandria, to say nothing of Suez.”

  III

  Lanny was taken again to the apartment of Professor Aboulker, and had another session with him and the two Royalists, D’Astier de la Vigerie and the Jesuit Father Cordier. Lanny did not reveal to these three that he was positive about the Allied decision; he contented himself with saying that he had checked upon and verified his previous information, which was that the big attack was to come by way of the Mediterranean and was to be this year. Since Algiers was the most important French city in North Africa, it was fair to assume that it would be included in the program. Lanny was told that a representative of Colonel Donovan’s organization had made contact with this group; the news pleased him greatly, for it meant that “Wild Bill” and his miscellaneous crowd were missing no openings. The Frenchmen professed to be satisfied with what they had got; the Americans were a wonderful people.

  When this group learned that Lanny had been in London, they wanted to know if he had visited General de Gaulle. The truth was that he had kept as far from the French Joan of Arc as possible, for he had got the impression both in London and New York that the headquarters of this movement was beset with spies, intriguers, and publicity seekers. But he couldn’t say this to Frenchmen in exile, who knew the General only by his radio eloquence. When they asked why President Roosevelt did not at once espouse this great leader’s cause and place him at the head of the expedition, Lanny answered tactfully that the President was doing his best to distinguish between the winning of the war, which was the American task, and the future of la patrie, which was a problem for Frenchmen, and in which Americans had to exercise care to avoid even seeming to interfere. France was an ally, and all Frenchmen would be friends, save only those who had chosen to be friends of the Nazis. This statement pleased the group, and Lanny could only hope that when the Army came it would have some advisers who understood this touchy people.

  Here in this apartment were five Frenchmen determined to work like all possessed for the occasion which the Americans oddly called “D-day.” Their movement was spreading rapidly, and the different groups were at one in their desire to make as much trouble as possible for the enemy. Lanny promised to let them know what was coming and when; but they must understand that the Germans had many submarines, to say nothing of dive-bombing planes, and these constituted greater menaces than anything likely to be encountered on shore. Therefore every effort must be made to deceive the enemy as to the destination of the great convoy, and the friends of the cause must not expect definite information until the vessels were immediately at hand.

  That didn’t sound so good to the conspirators, and M. d’Astier remarked: “If our Chantiers de la Jeunesse take the key points of Algiers and then your troops don’t come ashore, hundreds of French lads and all their leaders will be shot.”

  Lanny replied: “I will explain the situation to Washington, and no doubt Mr. Murphy will do it also. A code must be arranged, and you must know exactly what steps to take at every stage of the landing.”

  IV

  The visitor inspected several fountains and made himself conspicuous as an art expert, telling about his achievement in starting a new fad among the American rich. This would have the effect of increasing the prices of what he hoped to buy, but under the circumstances he didn’t mind that; his client, Mr. Vernon, would be making a contribution toward saving the lives of American soldiers. In the salons of the Algerian nabobs, in their town houses and their magnificent estates at the foot of the mountain range, Lanny discoursed upon the fact that they had treasures of art which they failed to appreciate; he rallied them because they were content with butchers’ calendars for paintings, while the wealthy of New York were sending an agent to North Africa to snatch ancient Moroccan masterpieces from under their noses.

  In one of these soirees he ran into the vegetable-oil king, and that gentleman, professing friendship, was hurt because M. Budd hadn’t looked him up. Lanny went to lunch again at the Golf Club, and let himself be pumped dry concerning what was going on in New York and Washington, London and Madrid, Vichy and Cannes. He didn’t mind it, for he told only what could do no harm, and he charged a good price for the service. M. Lemaigre-Dubreuil was a fountainhead of information about the leading personalities of Algeria, both French and German, to say nothing of American. He was a man to encourage, for he had great power and was ready and eager to make a deal for his own safety.

  The son of Budd-Erling was the sort of person he could understand, and he asked anxiously what would be the policy of the American Army and administration to French capital in these colonial lands. He had heard so much about “That Man,” and his dangerous prejudices against all “economic royalists.” Lanny explained that F.D.R. was doing what he could to cut the ground from under the Communists by persuading the super-rich to part with some of their excessive gains. His New Deal was a milder set of measures than the British Tories ha
d introduced two or three decades ago. This statement comforted the representative of the “two hundred families,” now preparing to seek shelter under the Stars and Stripes.

  Members of the haute bourgeoisie of Algiers were making money fast. They had found secret ways to undermine the Nazi system, by bribing individual officials of the Reichswehr, the Partei, or the various commissions which were looking out for German interests. “Some day the war will be over,” a French high bourgeois would say to a Nazi big or little wig, “and then you will have nothing but your salary. Wouldn’t it be the part of common sense to lay a little by?” This would enable the Frenchman to get hold of a block of stock in some bank or industry that was being acquired by the Germans, and then to transfer the shares to a newly organized holding concern in Switzerland or Sweden, Spain or the Argentine.

  They whispered about these stratagems among themselves, and when they had come to know the son of Budd-Erling well enough they let him hear the whispers. They even offered to let him in on some of the good things, going fifty-fifty, of course. Lanny would smile amiably and say that whenever he had any money to spare he put it into his father’s business; and he offered to let them in on that without any commission whatever. Some took him seriously and asked questions about Budd-Erling stocks; they had the most exaggerated ideas about the earnings of airplane shares, and equally exaggerated fears as to what would happen to such shares when the fighting stopped!

  Lanny listened attentively and learned new things about both France and Germany. There were more tricks than you could shake a stick at, or even a whole bundle of sticks tied together with a cord and with an ax in the middle of them. Such had been the symbol carried before the ancient Roman lictors, proclaiming to the world their authority to flog backs and to chop off heads. The fasces, the bundle was called, and Mussolini and his gang had taken it over and used its name and its threat. Now II Duce’s sticks were falling apart, and if you could believe the big-business émigrés of North Africa, the Führer was struggling in vain against the same forces of disintegration. Every American knows the phrase, “Business is business,” and every Frenchman knows “Les affaires sont les affaires.” The Germans had their version: “Geschäft ist Geschäft”!