Herman Wouk - The Winds Of War

by The Winds Of War(Lit)

Goering said to Gianelli, "You are welcome to Karinhall, Luigi. I have tried to invite you more than once. But this time you have come a long way for a short interview."

  "May I say, Field Marshal," the banker answered in broken German, that I have seen millions of money made and lost in a conference lasting a few minutes, and that world peace is worth any effort, however unpromising."

  "I am in complete agreement with that." Goering motioned them to chairs placed near him.

  Ribbentrop, seizing the arms of his chair and closing his eyes, burst out in high rapid tones, in German, "This peculiar visitation is another studied insult by your President to the German head of state.

  Whoever heard of sending a private citizen as an emissary in such matters? Between civilized countries the diplomatic structure is used.

  Germany did not withdraw its ambassador in Washington by choice.

  The United States first made the hostile gesture. The United States has allowed within its borders a boycott of German products and a campaign of hate propaganda against the German people. The United States has revised its so-called 'eutrality Act in blatant favor of the aggressors in this conflict. Germany did not declare war on England and France. They declared war on Germany."

  The foreign minister stopped talking and sat with his eyes closed, the long-jawed haggard face immobile, some strands of the graying blond hair falling over his face. The California banker looked first at Goering, then at Victor Henry, clearly shaken. Goering poured himself more coffee.

  Concentrating with all his might, Victor Henry translated the foreign minister's tirade. Ribbentrop did not correct or interrupt him.

  Gianelli started to talk, but Ribbentrop burst out again: "What purpose can be served by this maladroit approach, other than a further deliberate provocation, one more expression of your President's highly dangerous contempt for the leader of a powerful nation of eighty million people?, With a trembling wave of his hand at Henry to indicate that he understood, Gianelli said, "May I respectfully reply that-" The bright blue eyes of Ribbentrop opened, closed again, and he said in still louder tones, 'The willingness of the Fuhrer to give you a beaning in these circumstances is a testimony to his desire for peace that history will so me day record. This is the sole value this peculiar interview possesses."

  Goering said to the banker in a milder, but no more friendly tone "What is your purpose here, Luigi?" "Field Marshal, I am an informal messenger of my President to your Fuhrer, and I have a single question to put to him, by my President's instructions. To ask it, and to answer it, should take very little time. But by God's grace it can lead to lasting historical results." Victor Henry put this into German.

  'What is the question?" Goering said.

  The banker's face was going yellow. "Field Marshal, by my President's order, the question is for the Fuhrer," he said hoarsely in German.

  "It is for the Fuhrer to answer," Goering said, "but obviously we are going to hear it anyway. What is the question?" He raised his voice, ri)ting his gaze on the banker.

  Gianelli turned away from Grins eyes, which were lazily hard, licked his lips, and said to Henry, "Captain, I beg you to confirm my instructions to the great field marshal."

  Victor Henry was rapidly calculating the situation, including the trace of physical danger which had shadowed his mind since passing through the outer fences of Karinhall. Goering, for all his gross jolly facade, was a tough and ugly brute. If this monstrously fat German, with the rouge-red face, thin scarlet lips, and small jewelled hands, wanted to harm them, diplomatic immunity was a frail shield here. But Pug judged that his talk was cat-and-mouse fooling to kill time. He translated the banker's answer under the straight stare of Goering, and added, 'I confirm that the instructions are to put the question directly to the Fuhrer, as Herr Gianelli already has done to his good friend Il Duce in Italy, where in my presence 11 Duce gave him a favorable response."

  'We know all that," Ribbentrop said. 'We know the question, too."

  Goering blinked at Henry and the tension broke. The banker brushed his fingers across his brow. The silence lasted for perhaps a minute.

  Adolf Hitler, pushing a lock of hair across his forehead, came into the room through a side door hung with a tiger skin.

  As quickly as the Americans, Goering and Ribbentrop rose, assuming very much the lackey look. Goering moved away from the comfortable settee to a chair, and Hitler took his place, gesturing to the others to sit.

  He did not shake hands. Seen at this close range the Fuhrer looked healthy and calm, though too fat and puffy-eyed. His dark hair was clipped to the bone at the sides like a common soldier's. Except for the famed mustache he had an ordinary face, the face of any small man of fifty or so wamng by on a German city street. Compared to this man of the people, the other two Nazis seemed bedizened grotesques.

  His gray coat with the single Iron Cross over his left breast contrasted remarkably with Ribbentrop's gold-braided dark blue uniform and the air marshal's extravaganza of colors, gems, and medals.

  Folding one hand over the other in his lap, he took in the Americans with a grave glance.

  "Luigi Gianelli, American banker. Captain Victor Henry, United States naval attache in Berlin," said Ribbentrop, in a sarcastic tone emphasizing the unimportance of the visitors. "Extraordinary informality emissaries, Mei F hr r, from the President of the United States.

  The banker cleared his throat, attempted an expression of gratitude for the interview in German, made a flustered apology, and shifted to English. The Fuhrer, his gaze steady on the banker while Henry translated, kept shifting in his chair and crossing and uncrossing his ankles. With the same prologue on world peace that he had addressed to Mussolini, Gianelli put to the Fuhrer the question about Sumner Welles. As it came out in English, a contemptuous smile appeared on Ribbentrop's face. Upon Henry's translation Hitler and Goering looked at each other, the Fuhrer impassive, Goering hoisting his shoulders, waving his thick-gemmed hands, and shaking his head, as though to say, "That's really it. Unbelievable!"

  Hitler meditated. The glance of his sunken, pallid blue eyes was straight ahead and far away. A bitter little smile moved his mustache and his mouth. He began to speak in quiet, very clear, Bavarianaccented German, 'Your esteemed President, Herr GianeEi, seems to feel a remarkable sense of responsibility for the whole present course of world history. It is all the more remarkable in that only the United States, among the great powers, failed to join the League of Nations, and in that your Congress and your people have repeatecey indicated that they want no foreign entanglements.

  "In my speech of April twenty-ninth, mainly addressed to your President, I acknowledged that your country has more than twice the population of our little land, more than fifteen times the living space, and infinitely more mineral resources. Perhaps therefore your President feels that he must approach me from time to time with stern fatherly admonitions.

  But of course I am giving my life for the renascence of my people, and I cannot help seeing everything from that limited point of view."

  Victor Henry did his best to translate, his heart pounding, his mouth dry.

  Hitler now began reminiscing garrulously about the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. He spoke at length and seemed to be enjoying himself, slowly waving his hands and using relaxed tones.

  The justifications were familiar stuff. He grew briefly loud and acid only over the British guarantee to Poland, which, he said, had encouraged a cruel reactionary regime to engage in atrocious measures against its German minority, in the illusion that it had become safe to do so. That was how the war had started. Since then England and France had over and over spurned his offers of a peace settlement and disarmament. What more could he do, as a responsible head of state, than arm his country to defend itself against these two great military empires, who between them controlled three-fifths of the habitable surface of the earth and almost half its population?

  German political aims were simple, open, moderate, and uncha
nging, he went on. Five centuries before Columbus discovered America, there had been a German empire at the heart of Europe, its boundaries roughly fixed by geography and the reproductive vigor of the people. War had come over and over to this European heartland through the attempts of many powers to fragment the German folk. These attempts had often had temporary success. But the German nation, with its strong instinct for survival and growth, had time and again rallied and thrown off foreign encirclements and yokes. In this part of his talk Hitler made references to Bismarck, Napoleon, Frederick the Great, the War of the Spanish Succession, and the Thirty Years' War, which were beyond Victor Henry. He translated them word for word as best he could.

  The Versailles Treaty, said the Fuhrer, had simply been the latest of these foreign efforts to mutilate the German heartland.

  Because it had been historically unsound and unjust it was now dead.

  The Rhineland was German. So was Austria. So was the Sudeteniand. So were Danzig and the Corridor. The manufactured monstrosity of Czechoslovakia, thrust like a spear into Germany's vitals, had now become once again the traditional Bohemian protectorate of the Reich.

  This restoration of normal Germany was now complete. He had done it almost without bloodshed.

  But for the absurd British guarantee, it would have all been finished in peace; the question of Danzig and the Corridor had been practically settled in July. Even now nothing substantial stood in the way of lasting peace. The other side simply had to recognize this restored normality in central Europe, and return to Germany her colonial territories. For the Reich, like other great modern states, had a natural right to the raw materials of the underdeveloped continents.

  Victor Henry was deeply struck by Hitler's steady manner, by his apparent moral conviction, by his identification of himself with the German nation-'. and so I restored the Rhineland to the-e Reich and so I brought back Austria to its historical origins... and so I normalized the Bohemian plateau..."-and by his broad visions of history. The ranting demagogue of the Party rallies was obviously nothing but a public image, such as the Germans, in Hitler's estimate, wanted. He radiated the personal force that Captain Henry had seen in only two or three admirals.

  As for the journalistic picture-the carpet-chewing hysterical Charlie Chaplin politician-Pug now felt that it was a distortion of small things which had led the world into disaster.

  'I share the President's desire for peace ' Hitler was saying. He was starting to gesture now as in his speeches, lough less broadly.

  His eyes had brightened astonishingly; Henry thought it must be an illusion, but they seemed eerily to glow. 'I hunger and yearn for peace. I was a simple soldier in the front lines for four years, while he, as a rich and wellborn man, had the privilege of serving as an Assistant Secretary of the Navy in a Washington office. I know war. I was born to create, not to destroy, and who can say how many years of life are left to me to fulfill my tasks of construction? But the British and French leaders call for the destruction of 'Hitm"-he brought out the foreign tenn with contemptfilled sarcasm-'as their price for peace. I can almost understand their hatred for me. I have made Germany strong again, and that did not suit them.

  But this hate, if persisted in, will doom Europe, because I and the German people cannot be separated. We are one. This is a simple truth, though I fear the English will need a test of fire to prove it.

  I believe Germany has the strength to emerge victorious. If not, we will all go down together, and historical Europe as we know it will cease to exist."

  He paused, his face tightened and changed, and the pitch of his voice all at once began to rise. 'How can they be so blind to realities? I achieved air parity in 1937 Since then I have never stopped building planes, planes, planes, U-boats, U-boats, U-boats!' He was screaming now, clenching his fists and waving his stiff outstretched arms. "I have piled bombs, bombs, bombs, tanks, tanks, tanks, to the sky! It has been a wasteful, staggering burden on my people, but what other language have great states ever understood? It is out of a sense of strength that I have offered peace. I have been rejected and scorned, and as the price of peace they have asked for my head. The German people only laugh at such pathetic nonsense!' On the shouted litany of "planes... bombs... U-boats' he swept both fists down again and again to strike the floor, bending far over so that the famous black lock of hair tumbled in his face, giving him his more usual newsreel look of the street agitator; and the red face and screeching tones had indeed something of the carpet chewer, after all.

  Suddenly, dramatically, as at a podium, he dropped into qtdet controlled tones. "Let the test of fire come. I have done my utmost, and my conscience is clear before the bar of history." Hitler fell silent, then stood with an air of dismissal, his eyes burning and distance his mouth a down-curved line.

  "Mein Fuhrer," Goering said, lumbering to his feet, his boots creaking, after this wonderfully clear presentation of the realities you offer no objection to this visit of Herr Sumner Welles, I take it, if the President persists." Hitler hesitated, appeared perplexed, and gave an impatient shrug.

  "I have no wish to return discourtesy for discourtesy, and petty treatment for petty treatment. I would do anything for peace. But until the British will to destroy me is itself destroyed, the only road to peace is through German victory. Anything else is irrelevant. I will continue to hope with all my heart for a last-minute signal of sanity from the other side, before the holocaust explodes." In a worked-up manner, with no gesture of farewell, he strode out through the carved double door. Victor Henry glanced at his wristwatch.

  The Fuhrer had spent an hour and ten minutes with them, and so far as Henry knew, President Roosevelt's question remained unanswered.

  He could see on Gianelli's pale, baffled face the same impression.

  Goering and Ribbentrop looked at each other. The fat man said, "President Roosevelt has his reply. The Fuhrer sees no hope in the Welles mission, but in his unending quest for a just peace he will not reject it."

  "That was not my understanding," said Ribbentrop in a quick, strained voice. "He called the mission irrelevant. "If you want to press the Fuhrer for clarification," Goering said satirically to him, gesturing at the double doors, 'go ahead. I understood him very well, and I think I know him." He turned again to the banker, and his voice moderated. 'In informing your President of this meeting, tell him that I said the Fuhrer will not refuse to receive Welles, but he sees no hope in it-and neither do I-unless the British and the French drop their war aim of removing the Fuhrer. That is no more possible than it is to move Mont Blanc. If they persist in it, the result will be a frightful hattie in the West, ending in a total German victory after the death of millions."

  "That will be the result in any case," said Ribbentrop, "and the die will be cast before Mr. Sumner Welles can arrange his papers and pack his belongings." miring took each of the two Americans by an elbow and said with a total change to geniality that brought to Victor Henry's mind the waiter at Wannsee, "Well, I hope you are not leaving so soon?

  We will have dancing a little later, and a bite of supper, and then some fine entertainers from Prague, artistic dancers." He mlled his eyes in jocose suggestiveness.

  "Your Excellency is Marvelously hospitable," Gianelli replied.

  "But a plane is waiting in Berlin to take me to Lisbon and connect with the Clipper."

  "Then I must let you go, but only if you promise to come to Karinhall again. I will walk out with you."

  Ribbentrop stood with his back to them, looking at the fire. When the banker besitandy spoke a word of farewell, he grunted and hitched a shoulder. Arm in arm with Goering, the Americans walked down the corridors of Karinhall. The air minister smelled of some strong bath oil. His hand lightly tapped Victor Henry's forearm. "Well, Captain Henry, you have been to Swinemonde and seen our U-boat setup. What is your opinion of our U-boat program?"

  "Your industrial standards are as high as any in the world, Your Excellency- And with officers like Grohke and Prien you're
in good shape.

  The U-boats are already making quite a record in the Atlantic."

  "It's only the beginning," Goering said. 'll-boats are coming off the ways now like sausages. I doubt that all of them will yen see action. The air will decide this war fast. I hope your attach for air, Colonel Powell, has been reporting the Luftwaffe's strength accurately to your president.

  We have been very open with Powell, on my orders."

  "Indeed he has made reports. He's very impressed." Goering looked pleased. "We have learned a lot from America. Curtis in particular has brilliant designers. Your Navy's dive-bombing was carefully studied by us and the Stuka was the result." He turned to the banker and speaking in slow, simple German, asked him questions about South American mining companies. They were walking through an empty ballroom with huge crystal-and-gilt chandeliers, and their clicking steps on the parquet floor echoed hollowly. The banker replied in easy German, which he had not displayed under pressure, and they talked finance all the way to the front doors. Guests walking in the halls stared at the sight of Goering between the two Americans.

  The banker's man-of-the-world smile reappeared and color returned to his face.