The Winds of War

by Herman Wouk

  “The war is a struggle for foreign markets, all the same,” Bozey insisted serenely, back in his deep slouch. “How about cameras, just at random? Germany still exports cameras.”

  Warren said, “As I understand you, then, the Germans invaded Poland to sell Leicas.”

  “Making jokes about economic laws is easy, but irrelevant.” Bozey smiled.

  “I’m fairly serious,” Warren said. “Obviously Hitler’s reason for attacking Poland was conquest and loot, as in most wars.”

  “Hitler is a figurehead,” said Bozey comfortably. “Have you ever heard of Fritz Thyssen? He and the Krupps and a few other German capitalists put him in power. They could put someone else in tomorrow if they chose, by making a few telephone calls. Of course there’s no reason why they should, he’s a useful and obedient lackey in their struggle for foreign markets.”

  “What you’re saying is the straight Communist line, you know,” Janice said.

  “Oh, Bozey’s a Communist,” Madeline said, emerging from behind the screen with a wooden bowl of salad. “Dinner’s ready. Will you dress the salad, Bozey?”

  “Sure thing.” Bozey took the bowl to a rickety little side table, and made expert motions with oil, vinegar, and condiments.

  “I’m not sure I’ve ever met a Communist before,” Warren said, peering at the long brown man.

  “My gosh, you haven’t?” said Madeline. “Why, the radio business swarms with them.”

  “That’s a slight exaggeration,” Bozey said, rubbing garlic on the salad bowl, and filling the close, warm flat with the pungent aroma.

  “Oh, come on, Bozey. Who isn’t a Communist in our crowd?”

  “Well, Peter isn’t. I don’t think Myra is. Anyway, that’s just our gang.” He added to Warren, “It dates from the Spanish Civil War days. We put on all kinds of shows for the benefit of the Loyalists.” Bozey brought the salad bowl to the table, where the others were already seated. “Of course there’s just a few of us left now. A lot of the crowd dropped away after Stalin made the pact with Hitler. They had no fundamental convictions.”

  “Didn’t that pact bother you?” Warren said.

  “Bother me? Why? It was a wise move. The capitalist powers want to snuff out socialism in the Soviet Union. If they bleed themselves white beforehand, fighting each other, the final attack on socialism will be that much weaker. Stalin’s peace policy is very wise.”

  Warren said, “Suppose Hitler polishes off England and France in a one-front war, and then turns and smashes Russia? That may well happen. Stalin could have made a deal with the Allies, and all of them together would have had a far better chance of stopping the Nazis.”

  “But don’t you see, there’s no reason for a socialist country to take part in an imperialist struggle for foreign markets,” Bozey patiently explained to the benighted naval aviator. “Socialism doesn’t need foreign markets, since the worker gets all he creates.”

  “Bozey, will you bring the stew?” Madeline said.

  “Sure thing.”

  Janice Lacouture said, speaking louder as he went behind the screen, “But surely you know that a Russian worker gets less than a worker in any capitalist country.”

  “Of course. There are two reasons for that. Socialism triumphed first in a feudal country,” Bozey said, reappearing with the stew, “and had a big industrial gap to close. Also, because of the imperialist threat, socialism had to divert a lot of production to arms. When socialism triumphs everywhere, arms will become useless, and they’ll all be thrown in the sea.”

  “But even if that happens, which I doubt, it seems to me,” said Janice, “that when the state owns the means of production, the workers will get less than if capitalists own them. You know how inefficient and tyrannical government bureaucracies are.”

  “Yes,” interjected Madeline, “but as soon as socialism triumphs everywhere the state will wither away, because nobody will need a central government any more. Then the workers will get it all. Pass the wine around, Bozey.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Warren said to his sister, narrowing his eyes at her, “Do you believe that?”

  “Well, that’s how the argument goes,” Madeline said, giggling. “Wouldn’t Dad die if he knew I’d made friends with Communists? For heaven’s sake don’t write and tell him.”

  “Have no fear.” Warren turned to Bozey. “What about Finland?”

  The Russian invasion of the tiny northern country was then about a week old, and already looking like a disaster.

  “Okay. What about it?”

  “Well, you know Russia claims that Finland attacked her, the way Hitler claimed Poland attacked Germany. Do you believe that?”

  “It’s ridiculous to think that Poland attacked Germany,” Bozey said calmly, “but it’s highly likely that Finland attacked the Soviet Union. It was probably a provocation engineered by others to embroil socialism in the imperialist war.”

  “The Soviet Union is fifty times as big as Finland,” Janice Lacouture said.

  “I’m not saying the Finns did something wise,” said Bozey. “They were egged on into making a bad mistake. Anyway, Finland just used to be a duchy of Czarist Russia. It’s not an invasion exactly, it’s a rectification.”

  “Oh, come on, Bozey,” Madeline said. “Stalin’s simply making hay while the sun shines, slamming his way in there to improve his strategic position against Germany.”

  “Of course,” Warren said, “and that’s a damned prudent move in his situation, whatever the morality of it may be.”

  Bozey smiled cunningly, his eyes starting from his head. “Well, it’s quite true he wasn’t born yesterday. The imperialists all lift up their hands in holy horror when a socialist government does something realistic. They think that’s their exclusive privilege.”

  “Why do you suppose the invasion’s flopping on its face?” Warren said.

  “Oh, do you believe the capitalist newspapers?” said Bozey, with a broad wink.

  “You think the Russians are really winning?”

  “Why, all this nonsense about the Finnish ski troops in white uniforms makes me ill,” Bozey said. “Don’t you suppose the Russians have skis and white uniforms too? But catch the New York Times saying so.”

  “This is a lovely stew,” Janice said.

  “I used too many cloves,” Madeline said. “Don’t bite into one.”

  Warren and Janice left right after dinner to go to the theatre. He was on a seventy-two-hour pass from Pensacola, and Janice had come up from Washington to meet him; dinner with Madeline had been a last-minute arrangement by long-distance telephone. When they left, Madeline was cutting out her dress and Bozey was washing the dishes.

  “What do I do now?” Warren said, out in the street. The theatre was only a few blocks away. It was snowing and cabs were unobtainable, so they walked. “Get myself a shotgun?”

  “What for? To put Bozey out of his misery?”

  “To get him to marry her, was my idea.”

  Janice laughed, and hugged his arm. “There’s nothing doing between those two, honey.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “Not a chance. That’s quite a gal, your little sister.”

  “Jesus Christ, yes. The Red Flame of Manhattan. That’s a hell of a note. And I wrote my folks I was going to visit her. Now what do I say?”

  “You just write your parents that everything’s peachy with her. Because it is.”

  They walked with heads bent, the snow whirling on the wind into their faces.

  “Why are you so quiet?” said Janice. “Don’t worry about your sister. Really, you don’t have to.”

  “I’m thinking how this war’s blown our family apart. I mean, we used to scatter here and there,” Warren said. “We’re a service family and we’re used to that, but it’s different now. I don’t feel there’s a base any more. And we’re all changing. I don’t know if we’ll ever pull back together again.”

  “Sooner or later all families change a
nd scatter,” said Janice La-couture, “and out of the pieces new families start up. That’s how it goes, and a very lovely arrangement it is, too.” She put her face to his for a moment, and snowflakes fell on the two warm cheeks.

  “The imperialist struggle for foreign markets,” said Warren. “Jehosephat! I hope she’s rid of that one by the time Dad gets back. Otherwise he’ll lay waste to Radio City.”

  19

  “BYRON!”

  Dr. Jastrow gasped out the name and stared. He sat as usual on the terrace, the blue blanket over his legs, the gray shawl around his shoulders, the writing board and yellow pad on his lap. A cold breeze blowing across the valley from Siena fluttered Jastrow’s pages. In the translucent air the red-walled town, with its black-and-white striped cathedral atop the vineyard-checkered hills, looked hauntingly like the medieval Siena in old frescoes.

  “Hello, A.J.”

  “Dear me, Byron! I declare I’ll be a week recovering from the start you’ve given me! We were talking about you only at breakfast. We were both absolutely certain you’d be in the States by now.”

  “She’s here?”

  “Of course. She’s up in the library.”

  “Sir, will you excuse me?”

  “Yes, go ahead, let me collect myself—oh, and Byron, tell Maria I’d like some strong tea right away.”

  Byron took the center hall steps three at a time and walked into the library. She stood at the desk in a gray sweater, a black skirt, pale and wide-eyed. “It is, by God! It is you. Nobody else galumphs up those stairs like that.”

  “It’s me.”

  “Why the devil did you come back?”

  “I have to make a living.”

  “You’re an imbecile. Why didn’t you let us know you were coming?”

  “Well, I thought I’d better just come.”

  She approached him, stretched out a hand uncertainly, and put it to his face. The long fingers felt dry and cold. “Anyway, you look rested. You seem to have put on some weight.” She backed off awkwardly and abruptly. “I owe you an apology. I was feeling beastly that day in Königsberg, and if I was rude to you I’m sorry.” She walked away from him and sank into her desk chair. “Well, we can use you here, but surprises like this are never pleasant. Don’t you know that yet?” As though he had returned from an errand in town, she resumed clattering at the typewriter.

  That was all his welcome. Jastrow put him back to work, and within a few days the old routines were restored. It was as though the Polish experience had never occurred, as though neither of them had left the hilltop. The traces of the war in these quiet hills were few. Only sporadic shortages of gasoline created any difficulty. The Milan and Florence newspapers that reached them played down the war. Even on the BBC broadcasts there was little combat news. The Russian attack on Finland seemed as remote as a Chinese earthquake.

  Because the buses had become unreliable, Dr. Jastrow gave Byron a lodging on the third floor of the villa: a cramped little maid’s room with cracking plaster walls, and a stained ceiling that leaked in hard rains. Natalie lived directly below Byron in a second-floor bedroom looking out on Siena. Her peculiar manner to him persisted. At mealtimes, and generally in Jastrow’s presence, she was distantly cordial. In the library she was almost uncivil, working away in long silences, and giving terse cool answers to questions. Byron had a modest opinion of himself and his attractions, and he took his treatment as probably his due, though he missed the comradeship of their days in Poland and wondered why she never talked about them. He thought he had probably annoyed her by following her here. He was with her again, and that was why he had come; so, for all the brusque treatment, he was as content as a dog reunited with an irritable master.

  When Byron arrived in Siena, the Constantine book was on the shelf for the moment, in favor of an expanded magazine article, “The Last Palio.” In describing the race, Jastrow had evoked a gloom-filled image of Europe plunging again toward war. A piece startling in its foresight, it had arrived on the editor’s desk on the first of September, the day of the invasion. The magazine printed it, and Jastrow’s publisher cabled him a frantic request to work it up into a short book, preferably containing a note of optimism (however slight) on the outcome of the war. The cable mentioned a large advance against royalties. This was the task in hand.

  In this brief book, Jastrow was striking an Olympian, farseeing, forgiving note. The Germans would probably be beaten to the ground again, he wrote; and even if they gained the rule of the earth, they would in the end be tamed and subdued by their subject peoples, as their ancestors, the Goths and Vandals, had been tamed to turn Christian. Fanatic or barbaric despotism had only its hour. It was a recurring human fever fated to cool and pass. Reason and freedom were what all human history eternally moved toward.

  The Germans were the bad children of Europe, Jastrow argued: egotistic, willful, romantic, always poised to break up faltering patterns of order. Arminius had set the ax to the Pax Romana; Martin Luther had broken the back of the universal Church; now Hitler was challenging Europe’s unsteady regime of liberal capitalism, based on an obsolete patchwork structure of nations.

  The “Palio” of Europe, wrote Jastrow, the contest of hot little nationalisms in a tiny crowded cockpit of a continent, a larger Siena with the sea for three walls and Asia for a fourth, was worn out. As Siena had only one water company and one power company, one telephone system and one mayor, instead of seventeen of these in the seventeen make-believe sovereignties called Goose, Caterpillar, Giraffe, and so forth, so Europe was ripe for the same commonsense unification. Hitler, a bad-boy genius, had perceived this. He was going about the breakup of the old order cruelly, wrongly, with Teutonic fury, but what mattered was that he was essentially correct. The Second World War was the last Palio. Europe would emerge less colorful but more of a rational and solid structure, whichever side won the idiotic and gory horse race. Perhaps this painful but healthy process would become global, and the whole earth would be unified at last. As for Hitler, the villain of the melodrama, he would either be hunted down and bloodily destroyed like Macbeth, or he would have his triumph and then he would fall or die. The stars would remain, so would the earth, so would the human quest for freedom, understanding, and love among brothers.

  As he typed repeated drafts of these ideas, Byron wondered whether Jastrow would have written such a tolerant and hopeful book had he spent September under bombardment in Warsaw, instead of in his villa overlooking Siena. He thought “The Last Palio” was a lot of high-flown irrelevant gab. But he didn’t say so.

  Letters were coming to Natalie from Leslie Slote, one or two a week. She seemed less excited over them than she had been in the spring, when she would rush off to her bedroom to read them, and return looking sometimes radiant, sometimes tearful. Now she casually skimmed the single-space typed pages at her desk, then shoved them in a drawer. One rainy day she was reading such a letter when Byron, typing away at the Palio book, heard her say, “Good God!”

  He looked up. “Something the matter?”

  “No, no,” she said, very red in the face, waving an agitated hand and flipping over a page. “Sorry. It’s nothing at all.”

  Byron resumed work, struggling with one of Jastrow’s bad sentences. The professor wrote in a spiky hurried hand, often leaving out letters or words. He seldom closed his s’s and o’s. It was anybody’s guess what words some of these strings of blue spikes represented. Natalie could puzzle them out, but Byron disliked her pained condescending way of doing it.

  “Well!” Natalie sat back in her chair with a thump, staring at the letter. “Briny—”

  “Yes?”

  She hesitated, chewing her full lower lip. “Oh, hell, I can’t help it. I’ve got to tell someone, and you’re handy. Guess what I hold here in my hot little hand?” She rustled the pages.

  “I see what you’re holding.”

  “You only think you do.” She laughed in a wicked way. “I’m going to tell you. It’s a proposal
of marriage from a gentleman named Leslie Manson Slote, Rhodes Scholar, rising diplomat, and elusive bachelor. And what do you think of that, Byron Henry?”

  “Congratulations,” Byron said.

  The buzzer on Natalie’s desk rang. “Oh, lord. Briny, please go and see what A.J. wants. I’m in a fog.” She tossed the letter on the desk and thrust long white hands in her hair.

  Dr. Jastrow sat blanketed in the downstairs study on the chaise longue by the fire, his usual place in rainy weather. Facing him in an armchair, a fat pale Italian official, in a green and yellow uniform and black half-boots, was drinking coffee. Byron had never seen the man or the uniform before.

  “Oh, Byron, ask Natalie for my resident status file, will you? She knows where it is.” Jastrow turned to the official. “Will you want to see their papers too?”

  “Not today, professore. Only yours.”

  Natalie looked up with an embarrassed grin from rereading the letter. “Oh, hi. What’s doing?”

  Byron told her. Her face sobering, she took a key from her purse and unlocked a small steel file by the desk. “Here.” She gave him a manila folder tied with red tape. “Does it look like trouble? Shall I come down?”

  “Better wait till you’re asked.”

  As he descended the stairs he heard laughter from the study, and rapid jovial talk. “Oh, thank you, Byron,” Jastrow said, breaking into English as he entered, “just leave it here on the table.” He resumed his anecdote in Italian about the donkey that had gotten into the grounds the previous week, laid waste to a vegetable patch, and chewed up a whole chapter of manuscript. The official’s belted belly shook with laughter.

  In the library Natalie was typing again. The Slote letter was out of sight.

  “There doesn’t seem to be much of a problem,” Byron said.

  “That’s good,” she said placidly.