Tornado Pratt

by Paul Ableman

  “Listen, do you really know anything about Fascism?”

  I removed my arm.

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t mean books. I mean, have you been there? Have you seen what’s happening in Germany?”

  Even as she asked it, Horace, I realized that I’d treasured my ignorance. Sure, I’d read all the manifestos and booster books but I’d avoided any first-hand experience. Hell, I could have steamed across the ocean any time and explored my paradise. But I’d preferred to keep the legend pure. Now it turned out that Alexandra knew a lot about Hitler’s Germany. She had an uncle who was a German Jew, professor of classics at Yale, formerly of Heidelberg. It seemed he was in delicate health because some storm-troopers, liberating his library, had kicked him about some. They’d left him dying of a ruptured kidney and in pain from broken bones. And die he undoubtedly would have done if one of them, grim and embarrassed, hadn’t sneaked back and driven him to the hospital. On discharge some months later, he’d concluded that Germany, his beloved country, was fixed on his destruction and so he’d bribed his way out. Alexandra started off telling me about her Uncle Johan in an objective and dispassionate tone. But she was Greek and her passion rose. Oh, she knew a hell of a lot about Germany. Her husband had done a congressional report on the place. She herself had toured there the previous year. She had anti-Nazi German friends. She knew exactly what was going on and, although she had, with mysterious intuition, perceived that, in spite of appearances, I was not an authentic Nazi, as she talked of the horrors that had already been born there and the horrors that were gestating there, harsh fury began to infuse her voice, and she glared at me in reproach. In the end we had a shouting session and then she stormed out of the house. I was so mad I didn’t even go after her although I knew she’d have a hell of a job getting a cab at that time of night. Three years later, when I next met her, she told me she’d walked, no marched, four or five miles that night, tears of rage and pity pouring down her cheeks much of the time.

  She was a fine woman, Horace, the finest I ever knew but we never did lay pressed together. When we next met, it took some time to re-establish cordial relations and the truth is she’d just gone over the top. When I’d first known her, she’d been a mature tiger, powerful in mind, with lithe limbs and rippling muscles. Embracing her then would have been embracing a ripe continent. But now her nose stuck out. She’d got that mite skinnier and bonier and—I just didn’t fancy her any more. She asked me, straight out, one night when we were at her place and I’d kissed her goodnight.

  “You don’t want me any more?”

  “Hell, Alex—”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Okay, I—okay, I guess it’s true. I can’t figure it out myself. That first evening, I wanted you more than I’ve ever wanted a woman.”

  She looked at me for a long moment with a look that might have been contempt, amusement or anguish and then she shrugged:

  “You’ll call for me tomorrow? For the symposium?”

  And we never discussed it again, Horace. I liked being with Alex better than with anyone else in the world but all our future relations were governed by strict formality. She’d take my arm if we were out in public. I’d kiss her on the cheek when we parted. That was all the physical contact there was. Oh my God! I just saw it, Horace, those ghastly last months when, blue with emphysema, so lungless that raising a cup to her lips made her gasp for five minutes, she still tried to instruct and advise me. What happens, Horace, when we die? Do we empty ourselves into the huge vessel of the cosmos or just go out like a light? In which case, why switch us on in the first place? To suffer like Alex? Is there any point in light that just shows you a blank wall ahead? There must be more! Our flicker must be part of a great blaze too immense for human vision. Horace? Are you still there?

  Thanks, son. So—sure—I’ll get a move on. I—yum—hoo—so, son—that was about—in Washington—oh, sure, Alex made me ashamed and I saw the error of my politics and so I changed all that because—I began to see—Poland. Oh, and there was this general—General Paxou Aristopholis—sure, that’s cute. He was a Greek, too, like Alex only I met him with a Danish senator and—we just became kind of buddies. He said:

  “This is not going to be a European war, Tornado. This is going to be a world war.”

  I stated that most thinking Americans thought Europe should go fuck itself because America was a long way off and nobody could land an invasion fleet on our shores. I asked Paxou:

  “Can you see the American businessman jeopardizing his new prosperity by getting entangled in European squabbles?”

  And he replied: “No.”

  That set me thinking, Horace. I realized I’d been wrong about the Nazis, who were not the harbingers of the future but lice. I became alarmed when I realized that France depended for its security on an obsolete Maginot Line. What was the use of having underground barracks and railways and concrete bunkers, even fortified with gun pillboxes, when all the enemy had to do was bomb out a bit of the line and pour through, ignoring the rest? What good is a line? It has never been a sound military defence. The Chinese started it with the Great Wall of China which is very impressive as it snakes massively across valleys and hills but the same thing applies. Cross it at one point, as the Tartars did, and the line’s no good any more. Line thinking was always unsound but when you add aircraft and armour—I mean, shit!

  I spoke to various people about the non-viability of the Maginot Line but Americans were complacent and isolationist in those days. It wasn’t that they didn’t perceive the frailty of that line but that they didn’t care a fuck. They said:

  “So what?”

  I explained:

  “So the Germans’ll be in Paris a week after they attack.”

  “So let’s hope they lay off the whorehouses.”

  I got more facetious replies than any other kind. Then I learned the British were drilling with pitchforks because they didn’t have any rifles. The Nazi factories were pouring out tanks, planes, submarines, guns. And these were the finest armaments in the world at that time, a great iron fist with which to pound England. And big nostalgia enveloped me, Horace, for the fair island that had given me my bride and my friend. I saw the bombs ripping up English villages and imagined the gentle scholars and maidens stamped beneath jack-boots. So I began to agitate. I went to New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, St Louis and to Dallas, Texas where there was a lot of oil money. I got very little response but in every city I found a few awakened spirits. It would be inaccurate to say that I founded the Free World Society because it was really the idea of Mike Adler in Cincinnati. But he just had a duplicator and an attic. I took the name, the letterhead and Adler’s fervour and added to it some practical business organization. And it grew. By the time the dive bombers were screaming down on to Warsaw we had a hundred thousand members in a hundred cities and about a million bucks in the bank, half of which I had personally contributed, which is why I was broke again after the war and had to engage in dubious business enterprises.

  We had the popular base but not the power base. Roosevelt was on our side but hampered by being President. It’s not true that the guy at the top has the most power. Sometimes he has but sometimes he is just a symbol of the majority and if he sways a little out of line they crucify him. I went to Paxou and asked him to found a cell in Washington but he claimed he was impotent:

  “Because I’m a Greek. I have the brains, the guts, the knowledge. I’m the best damned infantry general in the American army and you know my job? I’m in charge of records. I can put five hundred filing cabinets into the field.”

  The last time I’d seen him he’d been operational so I asked him what had changed that.

  “They don’t like my name.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “They don’t want a Greek any more. They used to need me—to show how democratic the American army is. Hell, I knew I was a propaganda item but I also knew I was a good officer. Now—”


  It seemed some four-star general had hinted that if Paxou Americanized his name they might find a field command for him again. He replied, shit, his name was as American as anyone else’s and he wasn’t going to tangle with Nazis under some cosmetic name.

  So I had a tough job raising support in Washington. I was still working on it when Chamberlain reached the end of his elastic patience and declared war on Germany. Then I did something sentimental. I got on a train and went to Virginia. There I took a bus to Humberson Camp where I enlisted in the marines. Humberson Camp was where I’d done my boot training twenty-two years before and where I’d met Harvey. Again I lied about my age because they wouldn’t take anyone over thirty-five and Paxou fixed it with records in Washington. I used my real first name but changed my last one, for the duration, to Sark. I became Tornado Sark. Sark was the name of an island off the coast of Scotland, I think, where Nat and I had once loved and roamed. I ended up Colonel Sark. Only one guy suspected anything. That was in Japan where an old major who had once been a clerk in Chicago for Blane Products, a former subsidiary of mine, asked if I was anything to do with the Tornado Pratt who had run that outfit. I said: wish I had been. I acted amazed that anyone else could have had the same bizarre Christian name.

  PRATT ON THE MARCH

  I found Humberson Camp awe-inspiring. When I’d last seen it, a quarter of a century before, there’d been a parade ground surrounded by huts and nothing much else. Well, naturally, there’d also been stores and weapons stores, ranges, officers’ quarters and such like but basically the whole camp had been part of the landscape. The contours had been those of the Virginia hills. The forest had started just behind the chow-hall and there’d been blue grass growing between the huts. Now it had become a city of war that had conquered that part of America. The airfield alone reached practically to the horizon. The barracks were small sky-scrapers and the huge repair shops roared and clanged twenty-four hours a day. Machine-guns chattered on the ranges and tanks skimmed over the concrete aprons and bucked over the training grounds. And everywhere platoons of white-vested men wheeled and trotted.

  For the first month I was very depressed. I was convinced that enlisting had been quixotic. I couldn’t even orientate myself. The first Sunday I tried to locate my old barracks, or its site, and the places where Harvey and I had talked. But nothing was the same, not the roads, the buildings, anything. I felt superannuated, like the old camp that had gone. I felt that the obliteration of that camp was a symbol of the obliteration of my life. Nat was gone and Harvey was gone. All my works had perished. I had nothing to do with this mechanical army. Also I found it hard to keep up. I’d thought! was fit but at the end of the first week I was an aching hulk. Then it got worse. The guys started to pick on me. Sure I was different. I was older. I never talked about my background and they couldn’t figure me out. But the worst thing was on my first day I made an enemy and he turned out to be the natural leader of the pack: a red-haired brute from Oregon, six foot four with a face like a cliff and a punch that could knock bricks out of a wall. He was dumb as a hog and mean as a rattlesnake and he was the one I crossed.

  The first incident was in the showers. We were sluicing down after a day of quick-marching about the dusty parade ground and I was revelling in it. The guys were shouting and horsing around and suddenly there was a crack and loud yelp. The red oaf had flicked a recruit with his towel. The guy, rubbing his buttock, protested:

  “Hey, cut that out!”

  The aggressor turned to a lackey, whom he was obviously familiar with, and asked:

  “You know what he’s talking about, Mick?”

  “Hell no, Peko.”

  Then the two of them had a little towel flicking duel, only I noticed that Peko was playing for real and the other guy, although he laughed a lot in a sycophantic way, made sure he didn’t land any flicks. Then Peko tried it on with a few of the other guys and got half-hearted, cowed protests. Thent he flicked at me and I said:

  “Don’t start on me.”

  “Hey, dandy!” shouted Peko. “Come on, dandy!”

  And he danced about, very light for his size, flicking at me. When I got a chance, I grabbed his towel and, with a jerk, tugged it from his hand. He slouched towards me, grinning, with outstretched hand:

  “Aw, come on, dandy. That’s my towel, dandy.”

  But I gathered it into a ball and lobbed it on to the wash-basins. A quiver in Peko’s grin indicated reproach but he merely purred:

  “Okay, dandy, exchange is no robbery.”

  And he darted up his hand and snatched my towel off the partition just as the master-sergeant stomped in:

  “What the hell’s keeping you bunch? Jesperson, put that towel back!”

  He’d inferred what was going on from our postures. Peko Jesperson shrugged and replaced the towel. And that was the whole incident.

  For a while nothing else happened. There was endless horseplay in the barracks and I felt caged up with a bunch of idiots but I was left pretty much alone. Then, about a week later, I dozed off on my bunk after lunch, as a lot of us did, to grab twenty minutes rest before the sergeant bellowed for us. Suddenly, I was conscious of a feeling on my face as if spiders were running across it. I opened my eyes and, against the brilliant sunlight streaming through the windows, saw a dark bulk looming over me. Immediately I jerked my head to one side to escape a hand that was near it and then twisted off the bed and stood up. A ring of guys was standing around and they had faint sneers on their faces. Jesperson was the one whose hand I had dodged and I tackled him:

  “What the hell’s going on?”

  He answered with mocking tenderness:

  “Take it easy, dandy. I was just wiping away your tears—like your ma would have done.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You was sobbing your little heart out, dandy.”

  A few of the others nodded and I realized that he’d spoken the truth. In any case, I suddenly felt a rush of anguish. I couldn’t recall the dream but a huge shadow rose out of it and darkened my heart. I may have gulped or sobbed. I sat down on the bed. Peko said:

  “Gee, guys, dandy’s had a bad dream.”

  One of the more decent men urged:

  “Why don’t you skip it, Peko?”

  “I just feel sorry for him.”

  He reached down and, almost effortlessly, lifted the end of the bed and pumped it up and down. He said:

  “Come an, fellows, we’ll rock him to sleep again.”

  I bounced up and down ludicrously for a few seconds before lurching off the bed. I tried to feel anger but I just felt misery. I stood, staring at Peko in what I hoped would seem an attitude of menace. But he just shrugged and said:

  “Okay, dandy, have it your own way.”

  And he turned and swaggered over to his own bed. And the gang dispersed. But it scared me, Horace. I knew the incident had demonstrated my vulnerability and I figured there was worse to come. I was right.

  No one hit me but once or twice they fucked about with my kit or my bedclothes, and there was a lot of verbal kidding and threats. Perhaps the worst of it was, there was another rookie who also got the treatment, a scholarly and pious boy. If anything, they hazed him worse than me. I wanted to stick up for him but I was scared and I didn’t like that. It was hard for me to accept. I’d always been the boss, the toughest guy present, the one the others looked to for approval. And now I was the quarry of a pack led by a mindless red wolf. And I couldn’t think of a damned thing to do about it. I had more brains than Peko but I doubted if I could lick him and even if I did, that rabble would rally to him again.

  I got near to chickening out. Like I could have gone to the Colonel, told him the truth about myself, including my real age, and slipped ignominiously out of the army. But I decided I’d try one last thing. I volunteered for tank instruction. The gimmick was: I’d be put in a different section and be able to make a fresh start. And it worked.

  I was good with tanks right from the kick-off an
d my confidence began to come back. I learned the manual practically by heart until I knew every nut and bolt in the vehicle. But my particular speciality was judging terrain. In those days, the chief danger to armour was not enemy action but landscape. Swamps, rocks, hills, streams—lots of things could stop a tank. You see a little forest ahead—can you crash through or are you going to get a stump through your tread? I could glance at the country and mentally see a road for my tank. I could take a hillside steeper than anyone else because I could feel the old monster’s stability. They gave us a point-to-point test over a two hour course. I was home ten minutes before the next steel hulk came pounding in.

  That night I was laying on my bunk after lights out, mentally bucking round the course again and feeling proud as punch and suddenly I saw my future. I was going to be the best damned soldier in the world. The old Tornado had blown himself out—right, a new one, a martial one, was going to conquer the empire of arms. I didn’t see myself as a budding Caesar or Alexander. I wanted to soldier and play a part, as big a part as all my sinew and intelligence could embrace, in toppling the new, brutal Caesars of Europe. I was good with tanks. Well, I was going to be better with small arms. I was going to master artillery, learn to fly, something of navigation, tactics and strategy, logistics—I was going to get the boss of this trade. I was a buck private, a rooky, and it never occurred to me to aim higher. It wasn’t rank I aspired to but proficiency.

  Horace, I worked harder for the next two years at soldiering than I ever had as a tycoon. My passion increased. I wasn’t satisfied with getting three bulls on the range. It had to be five. It didn’t gratify me when I had the fastest time in camp at stripping and reassembling a machine-gun. I had to be able to do it blindfolded. To train myself to the highest pitch of physical perfection, I gave up two things that were important to me: cigarettes and women. For a month I was strung up over cigarettes, feeling my brain dispersing with need for tobacco, but I sucked mints and worked out in the gym and in the end I licked it. Never smoked again until Japan surrendered when I accepted a Havana and since then I’ve only smoked cigars. Could use one now, Horace. Could you spare a Corona or get one sent up to my room? I need a cigar, Horace, to complement this martini and this girl—lup—girl is—girl was the other thing, Horace, that I gave up. No more girls for the duration. Except I didn’t quite make that one, Horace. I want you to know I didn’t give up girls because I had primitive ideas about squandering my vigour. Hell, no. I knew then as I know now that fucking is the finest thing for health and the best exercise any guy can take. But you see, Horace, the chase was distracting. I was determined I wouldn’t be distracted from my martial training and so I gave up women—or I practically gave them up, Horace. All except one. Funny this is, I can’t remember where I had that one. It could have been in the mountains because we did a mountaineering course in the Rockies. Maybe one afternoon I heaved myself on to a ledge and there was a maiden, curled up like a cougar, who took Tornado into her arms. But that doesn’t seem too probable, Horace, because how would that girl have got up there on the ledge when we had to use ropes to make it? It could have been on the sea-shore because we did disembarkation practice on the beach. You think I could have come plunging in full kit out of a landing craft and stumbled over a naked, sandy girl who pulled me down on to her? If that had happened the other guys would have made lewd comments and it would have ended up unpleasant for everyone. One time, after I’d only gone solo a couple of times, I bumped down with a coughing engine into a corn field. You suppose there was a corn maiden there, with corn-yellow hair and sky-blue eyes? I just can’t fix the exact occasion, Horace, but I know that once, as I became a warrior, a lipsoft damsel welcomed me into the moist palace of her belly.