“Cliff, just don’t try to handle him. He does that fine.”
“You mean… it’s all right… I can have him?”
“For that job? Of course.”
“And you’ll… persuade him?”
“Yes.”
“Casey, if you knew what this means to me…”
“Save it, Cliff. I’m not doing it for you.”
Garnett gulped and recovered fast. There was no rancor in the reply but Dennis had withdrawn into his shell.
“You don’t understand. I’m thanking you for Ted, old man.”
“I’m not doing it for him entirely. Those B-29’s need Ted.”
“Don’t worry, Casey, we’ll make ’em sing. After the example you fellows have given us over here…”
Haley and Davis returned with the weather map and at first sight of them Dennis forgot everything else. He had spread the map on the table and was already scrutinizing it before he spoke again.
“Well…?”
“The mass is denser but that’s slowing it up, sir. It’s eighty-four miles behind expected drift now.”
“How much longer will that give us?”
“The Continent will be cavu all day, sir. But at present drift this will start closing the bases in by fifteen hundred.”
“How would that fit, Haley?”
“Lacks about twenty minutes, sir.”
Dennis nodded and walked a slow circle around the room, deep in thought. Garnett glanced at the map.
“Can’t you just start them that much earlier?”
Dennis did not answer. Haley coughed apologetically.
“It would mean forming in the dark… with that gas and bomb load. We have observed that sometimes early collisions have a demoralizing effect upon a whole mission, sir.”
Dennis came back to the table, still oblivious of Garnett.
“But even by sixteen hundred they could clearly see where the island is from, say, fifteen thousand?”
“Yes, sir,” said Davis. “It’ll stack up over the island like froth on a beer till it cools enough to move on. That’s the trouble.”
“Bring me the fourteen hundred map as soon as it’s done and anything special as it comes. Haley, wait a minute.”
Dennis waited until the door closed on Davis.
“Have every spare parachute in the Division repacked this afternoon. Tonight repack enough from the Groups till you can fill out with fresh packs tomorrow.”
Garnett saw Haley stiffen with the impact of the order but his discipline did not fail him. He replied with a steady “Yes, sir,” and left the room at once.
“Casey, what are you thinking of?”
“Paratroops do it.”
“But the planes…”
“They’re expendable, Cliff.”
“A whole division for one target?”
“All they’re made for is to hit the right targets.”
“But have you thought what they’ll say in Washington?”
“I’m thinking what they’ll say in Berlin. They count on weather like this.”
2
Brockhurst, entering just then, could not be sure whether he saw or only wished to see that Garnett was staring at Dennis with an awed respect. He decided that it was imagination. It was the essence of the whole ghastly tragedy that none of the little men whom the accidents of rank had placed around Dennis ever would understand him. In all fairness Brockhurst had to acknowledge that only yesterday he himself had thought Dennis a blundering butcher.
“General Garnett, General Kane asked me to ask you if you would come down to the hole at once.”
He watched Garnett spring for the door with the instinctive, unthinking obedience that was at once the strength and the ruin of the service. Dennis put on the formality with which he always shielded himself from strangers.
“Did General Kane want me?”
“No,” said Brockhurst, “nor me either. That’s the point.”
He had hoped to invite curiosity and through it a moment of intimacy for personal amends, but the next remark showed him what he should have known; Dennis did not rise to civilian innuendoes.
“Did he tell you to loaf in here?”
“General, I owe you a personal apology.”
“These are my working hours, Mr. Brockhurst.”
“You see, General Kane has double-crossed me….”
“Please take your grievance against my boss to him.”
“But that’s not what’s important. He’s double-crossing you.”
“You’re speaking of my superior, Mr. Brockhurst.”
“He’s ordering a recall signal on your mission.”
This did shake that stony impassivity. Dennis glanced at his watch and then at the map, but his lips remained locked.
“I know it’s too late to save losses,” said Brockhurst. “They’re probably fighting now. But it puts Kane on record. What happens now is your rap.”
“And my business,” said Dennis evenly.
“It’s the country’s business, if the country could know. He’s sacrificing the whole operation, taking the losses without getting the result… just from fear.”
“Commanders have to fear losses, Mr. Brockhurst.”
Momentarily Dennis had become more responsive than the correspondent had ever known him. But the armor of his uniform still seemed impenetrable.
“He isn’t afraid of losses and you know it. He isn’t afraid of Germany or Washington or even these goddamned Congressmen. There’s only one thing in the world Kane is afraid of now and that’s you.”
“Me?” At least the surprise was genuine.
“You. Because you’re doing what’s right and Kane has lived long enough to know that someone always pays a hell of a price for that.”
“The boys are paying that, Mr. Brockhurst.”
“Not all of it. Kane’s got you framed like a picture.”
Dennis spoke patiently, as if to a troublesome child.
“You don’t understand the army.”
“It’s only people in uniform. I understand people.”
“No, it isn’t. People only shout for soldiers after they’ve blundered themselves into danger they can’t cope with as people. Then they accept the uniform….”
“Nuts. Even military decisions have to be made on the opinions of men. When you know yours are right…”
“It’s your duty to persuade your superior as forcibly as you can, after that it’s your duty to execute his decision.”
“Even when you know he’s shirking the decision?”
“You don’t know it. He may be acting on information you don’t have. This whole bombardment program may be only a diversion or holding attack in the higher strategy. I’m paid to serve General Kane; others are paid to judge him.”
“You have faith they’re better at the top?”
“We keep chaplains for questions of faith, Mr. Brockhurst.”
“You keep everything; you’ve got it all taped, haven’t you? Your own chaplains, judge advocates, food, pay, promotion, decoration and unlimited free coffins… you’ve made a separate world out of it with everything a man…”
“Everything but freedom”—Dennis smiled wryly now—“but I’ve read, in your press, that we’re fighting for that.”
“And your personal part in this…”
“Is very simple. Life without freedom is. I am responsible for making this command inflict maximum injury on the enemy, within orders.”
“And when the orders are deliberately ambiguous?”
“Your superior may be receiving the same kind.”
Brockhurst nodded wearily. “Okay, General, you get a hundred on the rules. But don’t ask me to think you believe in them against everything in reason…”
“That’s what war is, Mr. Brockhurst. If we win, reason may get another chance.”
The teleprinter in the next room burst into frenzied clattering now and its first accents claimed Dennis with instant reversion to the harsh reality
of the mission. Brockhurst watched him disappear through the door.
Brockhurst realized, as he knew Dennis had, that Kane’s recall signal to the mission marked a turning point. Up to then the senior commander had, at least negatively, countenanced Dennis’s course of action. Now he had made mechanical preparation for an adroit jettison. It was plain premeditated dissociation from the risk he had permitted Dennis to take.
Yet Brockhurst knew now that the foreseeable fate of Dennis was only a fragment, a shadow of the larger catastrophe he was witnessing. Dennis himself was safely beyond pity. Brockhurst’s brief glimpse inside the uniform had shown him a man who could carry himself, as he carried his convictions, inviolable through momentary changes of fortune.
The darker tragedy hid behind the form of Dennis, behind the army itself. The army was only the projected form of a deeper malignance. It had been created as a shield against a more highly developed tyranny than its own; it would survive by a superior ferocity.
It was futile to pity Dennis, to hate Kane, to rage at his own helplessness in the face of the army’s bestial stupidity and human venality; they were all manifestations of what had made them. It was not the weaknesses, the faults, the mistakes of armies; it was their existence that proclaimed the tragedy of mankind.
Chapter 13
As General Kane’s party returned from the hold Malcolm paused on the threshold of the door, pointing like a bird dog while a beaming, beatific grin overspread his heavy face.
“Drinkin’ whiskey fum Gawd’s own country!”
He hurried to the bar which Evans had improvised on the map table and raised a bottle for critical inspection.
“General Kane, I declah youah a min’ readeh. Wheah in the worl’ did you get this oveh heah?”
Kane hesitated but Evans did not. “It was a present to General Dennis from an admirer, sir.”
Brockhurst noticed the whiskey for the first time now. A rueful grin spread over his face.
“Yes, Sergeant, it is,” he said.
The others thronged forward to it eagerly. Kane made the most of the prevailing satisfaction to report to Dennis what he had done, covering his evident sense of unease with formality.
“General, as you know I pride myself on never interfering with normal operations. But today’s diversions were so obviously unsuccessful that I felt it my duty to signal Colonel Martin discretion to abandon his primary objective for a target of opportunity under fighter cover if he chose.”
“Did you get a reply, sir?” asked Dennis evenly.
“Not yet. He’s probably preserving radio silence.”
Prescott appeared now with a glass for Kane. Over by the bar Brockhurst was watching with amusement the completion of a cycle. For intent as they were upon the whiskey, the Congressmen had not allowed it to eclipse their own horizons. Discovering Evans no longer in mute attendance upon Kane, they had turned to the earnest courtship of the potential voter in the Sergeant’s bemedaled blouse.
“…an’ may I ask which of ouah great states has the honoh of producin’ a man whose country has rewahded him with medals like them?” inquired Malcolm.
“You can but I’d rather not say,” said Evans.
“Not say! You mean you ain’t proud of youah home state?”
“I wasn’t till I saw what some of the others put out.”
“I declah! Gennel, youah Sahgen’s not only a hero; he’s a wit. Come on, tell us wheah you fum, son.”
“If I did you’d quit sucking around for my next vote.”
Dennis looked at his watch.
“General Kane, we’ve had relays from General Endicott and General Salmond. Both report their targets successfully attacked.”
“Gentlemen,” said Kane hastily, “we have had very gratifying strike reports from the other missions. To two very successful attacks.”
He raised his glass and the others joined him heartily. Malcolm handed his back to Evans with careful instructions for refilling it before he turned on Dennis.
“You don’t drink to youah colleagues’ success, General?”
“I’m waiting to drink to the whole operation. Did you enjoy the hole, gentlemen?”
“I was fascinated but I was bewildered, too,” said Field.
“It was impressive but too much for the layman,” said Stone.
“They wasn’t nothin’ to it but them girls at the tables movin’ little pieces of cahdboahd an’ them damn shoht-circuit spahks on the screen an’ the whole place coldeh than Chris’mas.”
Malcolm shivered and took more whiskey in a long gulp. Brockhurst saw both Dennis and Kane look at their watches now. Even through his modest share of his own whiskey he could feel tension tightening in the room. He saw Dennis start visibly as the teleprinter suddenly began to clatter again in the Ops room, but Stone had pinned the Brigadier down with earnest questioning.
“But we did understand, correctly, that the main purpose of these other attacks was diversionary?”
“They were very important naval objectives,” said Kane quickly. “Of course we did hope to split the enemy fighters.”
“And you considered that hope had failed, General?”
Kane hesitated perceptibly. “You can’t be certain. But the screen is reasonably accurate at that range and the technicians identified no fighters. What do you think, General?”
“The other strike signals would have mentioned any significant scale of fighting, sir.”
“So you had to assume, in fact, that the main enemy forces are free to strike our central attack?”
“We had to assume it to begin with, sir,” said Dennis. “The diversions were only a hope—the best we could do, but still a hope.”
“Well,” persisted Stone, “if the main force had already gone so far…”
“You mean been sent so far,” said Malcolm. He had brought his glass over to join the argument now and his voice had taken on truculence with the whiskey. “An’ it had been sent by Gennel Dennis when he knew his own self that his divehsions probably wouldn’t succeed. Am I not correct, General?”
“You are.”
Haley appeared in the doorway with teleprint paper in his hand.
“Liaison message from an R.A.F. recce plane, sir.”
“Read it.”
Haley lifted the paper and read aloud, his flat unemotional accents falling like stones into the silence.
“‘Twelve hundred thirty-nine sighted large formation of USAAF Boeings approx ten forty east fifty forty north altitude twenty-two thousand heading ninety-eight…”
“Ninety-eight!” exclaimed Kane. “He’s still going into Germany!”
Haley waited but no one spoke. He resumed: “‘unescorted under heavy attack formations good over.’ That’s all, sir.”
He executed a sharp about-face and closed the door behind him, muffling a little the teleprinter, which had begun to clatter again. The men looked at each other blankly, heavily. Dennis lifted an eye from his wrist watch for a long look at the map. It was Malcolm who broke the silence. The liquor was dissolving the thin restraint over his natural volatility; he sounded nearly hysterical.
“…unescohted an’ undeh heavy attack. Gennel Kane, I’m wahnin’ you if you eveh let Gennel Dennis…”
“Aaathur, you better shut up,” said Stone.
“I agree,” said Field. “If they think it necessary…!”
“Necessary! To slaughteh American youth foh one pigheaded Brigadieh…”
He was walking toward Dennis again. Evans quietly stepped to the side of the table, his foot itching hopefully again when, unconsciously, they all froze with the cessation of sound from the teleprinter, the quick rasp of tearing paper, and then the approaching beat of Haley’s feet. Entering, he looked uncertainly at Dennis.
“Message for you, sir.”
“From Ted?”
“Not exactly, sir. Could you step out here?”
Dennis started for the door but Malcolm blocked him.
“No you don’t, neitheh.
You don’t play no back room games on me. Weah heah representin’ the whole people an’ I’m goin’ to heah the whole story…”
“Colonel, read the message aloud,” barked Kane hastily.
Haley stepped through the door and read as unemotionally as before.
“‘Relay on administrative cable from message center London for Colonel Edward Martin in clear new copilot made first successful landing four-fourteen this morning everything fine Helen.’ There is no ‘over’ sir, but they sometimes omit it on administrative messages,” said Haley apologetically.
Brockhurst saw the strain in Dennis’s face break into the first elation he had ever seen there.
“Jesus! Ted’s got a son.” He strode over to Garnett and extended a hand, his smile widening. “Congratulations, uncle!”
The Congressmen reacted to the news with a unanimous and purposeful convergence upon the bar. Prescott brought Kane another drink and even Haley unbent for comment.
“I imagine the Colonel and Mrs. Martin will be pleased.”
“Gentlemen,” said Kane. “Colonel Martin’s son.”
The others raised their glasses. Dennis spoke quietly to Haley.
“Get a copy ready to relay to Ted in the clear, Haley.”
“It’s being done, sir.”
“But don’t send it till we hear.”
“No, sir.”
“Till you hear what?” demanded Malcolm.
“His strike flash. It’s due very soon now.”
“You tellin’ me this cunnel out theah leadin’ the attack been bohn a daddy an’ you ain’t even goin’ to tell him…”
“He needs his mind on his work now.”
“Gennel Kane, this the mos’ inhuman thing…”
But to Evans’s continuing disappointment Kane himself now appeared to be disgusted with the Congressman; his answer was short.
“General Dennis is right. Colonel Martin must have gone ahead, on his own judgment, of course. How long do you make it now, General?”
“Seven if we’re right on the wind, sir.”
Kane nodded and summoned a conciliatory smile for the Congressmen.
“Fortunately, gentlemen, war also has its pleasant duties. We have just time for one of them now. General Dennis, will you ask for your adjutant and Captain Jenks?”
Command Decision Page 18
