Presidential Mission

by Upton Sinclair

  This was what had happened. A handful of lads of the “Workshops of Youth,” ardent Royalists, had been told that it was their duty to rid French North Africa of the double-dyed traitor Admiral. No doubt they had been prompted by older persons, but they wouldn’t name them. They had drawn lots, and the first who had been drawn refused the task. Bonnier de la Chapelle had accepted, and had greeted the Admiral in the corridor of his office and put four bullets into his chest. In jail, a police officer had offered him his life if he would confess; this he had done, but no one had seen that confession, and it was possible that the officer had put it away to use for purposes of blackmail.

  The youth had been tried by a court-martial and taken out that night and shot. There were two stories of his end, and you might take your choice. One “insider” told Denis a pitiful tale of the terrified boy screaming and crying on the way to his execution; another declared that he had been assured that blank cartridges would be used, and had gone quietly, relying upon this promise. That is how it was in this vast gossip factory of Algiers; one person made up a tale, and a thousand others repeated it eagerly. What was certain was that Darlan and his assailant both were dead, and that the government was in the hands of an elderly general who held the same reactionary views as his old Marshal, but who despised politics and had only one real interest in life, which was to destroy the German Army.

  General Giraud would leave the administration to Lemaigre-Dubreuil, the vegetable-oil king, whose code name was “Robinson Crusoe,” and his man Rigault, whose code name was “Friday.” Rigault, once associated with the Cagoule, was Minister of the Interior, in charge of police work. No American could penetrate all these labyrinths of intrigue, but this much was certain; the boy’s mouth had been shut forever, and the Jewish doctor Aboulker and his son and several others who had been most active in aiding the Americans were shipped off to southern Algeria and put under what the French politely called résidence forcée. Lanny had to see that, and report it to Roosevelt, and then wait for something to happen.

  Robert Murphy at this time was a desperately tired man, and greatly worried; but it seemed to Lanny that this worry was because of the storm of criticism from home, and not from Murphy’s own doubts as to the wisdom of his course. It surely wasn’t his fault that the government of French North Africa had been in the hands of greedy politicians for a long time, and that the only men who had experience in administration were men of reactionary views. Nor was it his fault that they had elegant manners, and luxurious villas in which they knew how to entertain charmingly. It had been a Counselor’s job to make friends with them and get their help; now he was under social obligations to them, and how could he kick them out and put untried and unknown men in their places? How could he recommend such a course to his superiors in the State Department, who were divided into warring factions, or to the heads of the United States Army, who didn’t care a profane damn about Frenchmen and their political squabbles but were hell-bent on getting after the Germans?

  VII

  It was a trying time in Tunisia, and so many things were going wrong. The British and American forces were rushed eastward, and there weren’t enough of them; they had had to be supplied by narrow roads winding through mountain passes and over bridges not strong enough to carry tanks and artillery. It was the rainy season, and the landing fields were turned into bogs. The Germans, on the other hand, had excellent hard-surfaced airfields in Tunis and Bizerte, the great French naval base; also in Sicily and southern Italy, from which they could bomb incessantly. American boys were rushed into places from which they had to back out again. The Army was like a young and inexperienced boxer who comes dancing into the ring, full of assurance, and gets a bloody nose in the first minute. He is staggered, and realizes all of a sudden that a fight is not the same as a picnic.

  It was bitterly cold in those mountains, and the G.I.’s were lying in trenches and foxholes, half frozen and entirely forgotten, so it seemed to them. They were bombed incessantly, and where were their own planes? They had to hold on, while the engineers did their work; the roadbuilders and the bridge strengtheners, the bulldozers that extended airfields and the men who laid steel mats upon them. The S.O.S., the Services of Supply, had to load and transport the quarter of a million different kinds of articles which an American Army requires. Ships had to bring them, and port facilities had to be set up to handle them, and trucks had to carry them over the freshly repaired roads. Millions of men were working at these tasks, day and night, at home and all along the route—four thousand miles of water and one or two thousand miles of land, according to which of the various ports you were using. All that vast machinery had been set into motion by the decision that had been taken in London five months ago. A presidential agent, along with the rest of his countrymen, had to learn the painful lesson that waiting constitutes a larger part of war than any of its other ingredients.

  Next among the ingredients is pain; and Lanny, who had never willfully caused pain to any living creature, saw the wounded men being brought in from the not-so-distant front, and renewed his hatred of the cruel and barbarous monster which has tormented the human race from the beginning of time. It had been Lanny’s fate to live through two world wars, although he had been too young for the first and too old for the second; but he had wanted the second war, helped bring it on, and carried the moral responsibility for it in his soul. He had to learn to think straight about it, and to be sure that he was doing everything in one man’s power to make certain that this war would be the last.

  Among the Pinks whom the grandson of Budd Gunmakers had cultivated in his youth and early manhood had been some outright pacifists; people who said that war was morally wrong, and that the way to end it was to have nothing to do with it. “Wars never settled anything,” so Lanny had heard them say a hundred times. But reading the history of his country, he thought that the Revolutionary War had settled, the question of American independence, and that the Civil War had settled the question of chattel slavery in America, and also of the right of a state to secede from the Union. What any war settled was a question of statesmanship after it; and Lanny, who had centered his hopes upon Woodrow Wilson and his League of Nations, was now living in the faith that Franklin D. Roosevelt would be able to reap where Woodrow Wilson had sown, and that this time there would be an international police force with real power to enforce international.

  VIII

  Lanny had a little fun with Robert Murphy when he met him. He said: “I understand that you are expecting some V.I.P.’s.” Murphy, of course, couldn’t be sure whether Lanny had been told or was only guessing. At last Lanny told him what instructions F.D.R. had given, and then the Counselor opened up. The Conference was to take place the second week in January, and was to be the most secret thing in the whole world. The President supposedly would be having a vacation in the South, and Churchill would just disappear from London. The meeting place was a suburb above Casablanca, known as Anfa, a group of fourteen luxurious villas centering on the Anfa Hotel. This great structure would be commandeered, and the district would be surrounded with a high fence of barbed wire. The Army would be in charge, but the Secret Service would have a hand, as it did wherever the President’s protection was concerned.

  Baker was already in Casablanca, and Lanny returned there. The faithful Hajek came, too, and the American art expert resumed the business of inspecting mosaics and fountains and listening to the talk in the souks. The town was as full of rumors as a vacuum tube is of electrons, and flying as fast. Stalin was coming, the King of England was coming, the Sultan of Morocco was invited—this dignitary lived in Rabat, the capital, and of course wanted to be more important than the French would let him be. Lanny found that his friend Jerry had heard all the rumors but didn’t know what to believe. He came to Lanny’s hotel room and said: “There’s something big going on here, and the enemy knows about it.”

  Lanny didn’t have to be urged to take an interest in that remark. “Why do you think that,
Jerry?”

  “Their agents are swarming over the border. You know, they come and go freely, because Spanish Morocco is supposed to be neutral. But of course it’s the same as Nazi territory.”

  Lanny was prepared to hear that it was an effort to murder somebody; but no, Jerry said it was a “peace offensive.” He went on: “You know that Juan March has a villa here in Casablanca, something très snob. I was introduced to his steward in a café, and it seems the old man himself is here. I gave the steward a line of talk about how this war is going to lay Europe at the mercy of the Bolsheviks, and so he opened up. I think he guessed that I’m an American agent and he wanted to know how it was possible for Murphy, a Catholic, to fail to realize that danger. How could our military men fail to see it? I said that when people get to fighting they get blinded with anger, and their minds close up. We talked on quite a high moral plane, you see.”

  “And then?”

  “Oh, he gave me all the bull, about Franco being anxious to mediate, and how Señor Juan was all hopped up about it, and making headway with American Army and Navy officers who were entertained at his home. They are making a sort of club of it.”

  “He will have plenty of good food and liquor,” Lanny remarked.

  “It was the steward’s idea that I should help the Señor to make friends with some of the higher-ups. He assured me that the old man was generous with those who helped him to get his way. I was being offered a tip.”

  “Use a dignified word,” said Lanny with a smile. “It would be a retaining fee. If you don’t mind, let me try out the Señor. I know him rather well, and it happens that there is something urgent under way. Time is of the essence!”

  IX

  Lanny wrote a note on the stationery of the fashionable Hotel Transatlantique where he was staying, telling the ex-tobacco smuggler who had become the financial master of Spain that he had just returned from America and had information that might be of interest. In reply a note was brought by a liveried servant, inviting Lanny to lunch next day and saying that a car would call for him—a necessary favor in these times.

  Lanny was driven to a sumptuous estate and greeted with cordiality by Señor Juan, less than two years older than when Lanny had lunched with him last, but he looked ten years older. He was losing his hair, and the strange rubbery appearance of his complexion was more striking because it was full of wrinkles. Juan March was what the Spaniards call a Xueta, that is, a Jew who has been a Spaniard for so long that he is not a Jew but “a descendant of Jews.” Of course, one who was so rich, and whose money had made a humble army officer into a Caudillo and Generalissimo, such a man could have become an “honorary Aryan” if he had cared to; but apparently he thought it the greatest of honors to be plain Señor Juan, owner of several of the big business monopolies of his native land.

  He had not forgotten the son of Budd-Erling, and was fully informed as to the part this son’s father was playing in the war. Lanny had a special “line” reserved for Fascist industrialists—his father was distressed by having to see his planes used on the wrong side of the world’s great struggle, and had authorized his son to tell this to his old friends on the Continent. Lanny himself was in distress of mind over the prolongation of this blind conflict, in which the propertied classes of Europe were laying themselves at the mercy of the sans-culottes. Not even the most elegant luncheon, served by a liveried butler, could calm his soul; not even reclining in a well-padded chaise longue on a loggia looking out over the blue harbor of Casablanca, now crowded with gray-painted warships, transports, and freighters.

  This “line” pleased Señor Juan, and while he puffed a long dark Havana cigar, he disclosed what was in the mind of those who controlled Axis policy. The Señor didn’t know who was coming to the conference at Anfa, but thought it was the military leaders, gathering to decide what to do about the grave check they had sustained in Tunis. Also, he had been told that Robert Murphy would be present. Lanny said that he knew Murphy well, and the Señor agreed with his steward, that it was inconceivable to Catholics how any man of that faith could be supporting the policy of turning Europe over to the Bolsheviks.

  Yes, it was another “peace offensive.” Señor Juan wanted Lanny to drop the business of buying mosaics and fountains for ablutions, and begin a crusade to persuade the American leaders to work out a compromise with the Axis before it was too late. He had the complete Hitler line of talk: Der Führer would guarantee the integrity of the British Empire forever, and would let America have all South America and all the Japanese Empire. What he wanted was Russia, Central Europe, and the Balkans, so that he could wipe out Bolshevism there for good and all. As a special concession he would let Britain and America assist him in this and have a share in the spoils of these conquered provinces.

  This last was something new, a sign of how the Stalingrad collapse and the defeat of Rommel had frightened the Nazi leaders. Lanny didn’t say anything so impolite as that; he said it sounded to him like common sense, and he would transmit it to his father, and to Mr. Hearst and Mr. Henry Ford and other powerful friends of his. He said that he found it a very good sign that the American Army was showing its conservative tendencies in this province; there surely wasn’t any Bolshevism in General Patton, for example. And Señor Juan was pleased to agree; he had been delightfully impressed by the American officers who had been his guests, and was agreeably surprised to learn how many of them shared his outlook. They just hadn’t understood the Spanish situation; they had been fooled by the wrong labels which cunning enemies had put on El Caudillo and the Falange.

  Lanny mentioned the French administration in North Africa, and the Señor admitted that he had been agreeably surprised by this, too. He knew Lemaigre and what he stood for; also, he had a high opinion of Marcel Peyrouton, who was coming. Lanny hadn’t heard about that, and March was pleased to tell him that this one-time Minister of the Interior in the Pétain cabinet was flying from the Argentine, where he had been the Vichy Ambassador. Prior to Darlan’s death he had declared his support of the Admiral, and now he was invited to become Governor-General of Algiers. Lanny was staggered by this news, for he had met Peyrouton in Vichy and knew him to be one of the most determined anti-democrats in the Pétain outfit.

  What he said was: “A capable administrator, and we can all feel safe in his hands.” He added: “What my father says, Señor Juan, is that the people who ought to put through a peace deal are the German industrialists; they and the Comité des Forges ought to reach an understanding and work out the details of a settlement over the heads of the politicians. Hitler’s greatest blunder has been his unwillingness to heed the advice of these men. Now he must see that he is nowhere near to winning this war, and he should let the men of affairs take control.”

  The tobacco king replied: “That is exactly what is going on. It has to be very secret, because the Germans who are taking the initiative are incurring extremely grave risks. But our French associates, who have represented the Comité from the earliest days, know how to get word to their German friends and gain and hold their confidence. I don’t mind telling you, Señor Budd, that I myself have been in communication with some of the masters of the steel and coal interests of Germany, and that in my opinion the only thing that stands in the way of European peace at present is the stubbornness of Churchill and Roosevelt.”

  Lanny promised that he would see what could be done about that!

  19

  Old Men for Counsel

  I

  The last time the Prime Minister and the President had met, six months previously, had been the darkest period of the whole war. Then it had seemed likely that the Germans would take Cairo, and that the German armies far to the north would take Stalingrad and cut Russia into halves. But now had come the sunrise, and all the clouds were aglow with promise. The Germans had exhausted themselves in the ruins of that mile-long tractor plant, and their armies of some three hundred thousand men were surrounded and being chopped to pieces. As for Rommel, the Desert Fo
x, he had about run his legs off. Something like twelve hundred miles his armies had fled, westward along the Mediterranean shore. By now he was out of the desert and almost to Tripoli, the pride of Mussolini’s African Empire. The British meant to keep him moving, all the way to Tunis, and there to bottle him up, along with General von Arnim’s Tunis army of a hundred thousand men. That was the first of the problems these warmakers had to solve.

  A flight of Navy seaplanes set the presidential party down in the crowded harbor of Casablanca. Another flight brought the Churchill party, and the military and naval staffs. An interesting development at the very outset—the Nazi radios, beamed all over the world, began reporting that the British Prime Minister was at the White House in Washington for the third time. They kept this up for two weeks without let-up, pointing out how the once-proud Empire had now become the lackey of Yankee imperialism. The Americans in the listening post in the Hotel Anfa chuckled and felt very clever; they wondered if somebody had translated Casablanca into White House, and if this had caused the error. While it continued, no German bombers would appear over the Anfa Hotel, and statesmen and generals inside their barbed-wire enclosure might study their maps and carry on their discussions in security.

  Lanny told Baker that he had something important for the Chief, and on the second night of the Conference the P.A. was taken to the enclosure up on the hill of Anfa. He was amused to notice that the heavy barbed wire was decorated with festoons of tin cans, the idea being that if any strand was cut it would make a clatter and give the alarm. Silent Moors stood in long lines to stare at this spectacle and wonder what would be the next fantastic thing these white magicians from overseas would be up to. They had all seen the movies in days before the war, and knew that America was a land fabulous beyond anything in their own Arabian Nights: a land where plain workingmen lived in palaces, where motorcars were as thick as fleas in Morocco, and where custard pies were made to be thrown into people’s faces.