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by
Herman Wouk
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May 28, 2012 - February 19, 2021
The Author to the Reader
Preface to the First Edition
PART ONE
Natalie
“Geben Sie gut Acht auf den Osten,”
The girl had been downright affectionate during the second Palio, which they had watched without Jastrow, and at one point in the evening—when they were well into a third bottle of Soave at dinner after the race—she had remarked that it was too bad he wasn’t a few years older, and a Jew. “My mother would take to you, Briny,” she had said. “My troubles would be over. You have good manners. You must have lovely parents. Leslie Slote is nothing but an ambitious, self-centered dog. I’m not even sure he loves me. He and I just fell in a hole.”
This author, to my mind, portrays the Germans under Hitler as they were: a remarkably tough and effective fighting nation, not a horde of stupid sadists or comic bunglers, as popular entertainment now tends to caricature them. For six years these people battled almost the whole world to a standstill, and they also committed unprecedented crimes.
In 1917 Lenin overthrew the Kerensky government and sued for a separate peace on the eastern front. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, dictated by the Germans over a year before the Treaty of Versailles, deprived Russia of a territory much larger than France and England combined, of almost sixty million inhabitants, and of almost all her heavy industry. It was far harsher than the Versailles Treaty.
Winston Churchill himself has called the Versailles settlement a “sad and complicated idiocy.”
Had the German forces jumped off from a line two hundred kilometers nearer Moscow, they would have engulfed the Russian capital, deposed Stalin, and won the campaign before the first flake of snow fell on the Smolensk road. England certainly would have made peace then, and we would have won the war.
There is no doubt that in September France could have sent millions of well-trained soldiers, with more armored divisions than the Wehrmacht had in Poland, crashing out of the Maginot fortresses, or via the northern plain through Belgium and Holland, into our paper-thin western formations, and rolled to Berlin. But the will was not there.
This day when Hitler’s war began was turning out the most delightful in Madeline Henry’s life.
“I’m told,” Roosevelt said, “that they type his speeches on a special machine with perfectly enormous letters, so he won’t have to wear glasses.” “I wouldn’t know about that, sir.” “Yes, I got that from a pretty reliable source. ‘Führer type,’ they call it.”
FORWARDED X BYRON HENRY SAFE WELL WARSAW X AWAITING EVACUATION ALL NEUTRALS NOW UNDER NEGOTIATION GERMAN GOVERNMENT X SLOTE
Put together at different times and places of different steel plates and machines, embodied in many forms under many names, a battleship was always one thing: the strongest kind of warship afloat. This meant a thousand ever-changing specifications of size, design, propulsion, armor, armament, interior communication, interior supply systems; a thousand rituals and disciplines binding the crew, from the captain to the youngest striker, into one dependable corporate will and intelligence. In this sense there had been battleships in the days of Phoenicia and Rome, and there would always be
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“But nobody ever stopped Hitler from building a merchant marine,” Warren promptly came back. “Piling up tanks, subs, and dive bombers instead was his idea. All aggressive weapons. Isn’t that his tough luck?”
Slote had a high regard for himself, his powers, and his future. Bad luck had now put him in a spot where all his broad political knowledge, all his gifts of analysis, humor, and foreign tongues were of little avail compared to the simple capacity to be brave. That, he lacked.
“Leslie Slote is a selfish bastard. He just doesn’t want to have me on his mind. One thing less to think about.”
Byron pushed away his plate. The awareness of horseflesh heavy in his stomach, the gluey taste of horse in his mouth, the remembered smell of fly-blown dead horses on the Jewish streets, blended in his consciousness as one thing—war.
It was hard to believe that these were the villains who had been pouring flying steel and fire on Warsaw, setting pregnant women aflame, blowing children’s legs and hands off, and making a general shambles of a handsome metropolis. They were just young men in soldier suits and stern helmets, standing around in the shady woods amid the pleasant noises of birds and grasshoppers.
“Well, Stockholm ahoy,” Natalie said. “I admit one thing. I’ve lost all curiosity about Berlin.”
Byron now pulled out the yellow envelope. The message, on a Wehrmacht official form, had these few English words: GLAD YOU’RE OKAY. COME STRAIGHT TO BERLIN. DAD.
He was her secret favorite. Rhoda had thought of the name Byron at her first glimpse of her baby in the hospital: a scrawny infant, blinking big blue eyes in a red triangular face; clearly a boy, even in the rolls of baby flesh. She thought the child had a manly romantic look. She had hoped he would be an author or an actor; she had even unclenched his tiny red fists to look for the “writer’s triangles” which, she had read somewhere, one could see at birth in a baby’s palm wrinkles.
Warren was a Henry: the plugger, the driver, the one who got things done, the A student, the one with his eye on flag rank and every step up toward it.
Byron roared with laughter. “What? Dad, the military targets of the Germans include anything that moves, from a pig on up. I was a military target. There I was, above the ground and alive. I saw a thousand houses blown apart out in the countryside, far behind the front. The Luftwaffe is just practicing on them, getting ready for France and England.”
By contrast, they offered photographic proof of happy captured Polish soldiers eating, drinking, and doing folk dances; pictures of Jews being fed at soup kitchens, waving at the cameras and smiling; and many photographs of German guns and trucks rolling past farmhouses and through untouched towns, with jovial Polish peasants cheering them. Byron’s tale cast an interesting light on all this.
Byron laughed, pointing to the fly-specked curling cardboard sign in the window: THIS RESTAURANT DOES NOT SERVE JEWS. “Are there any left in Berlin to serve?” “Well, you don’t see them around much,” Pug said. “They’re not allowed in the theatres and so forth. I guess they’re lying pretty low.”
“I want you to write it up. I’d like to forward your account to the Office of Naval Intelligence.”
“He does? That’s fine. Has he got any word on Natalie?” “Just that she’s gone to Stockholm. You’ll start on that report tonight?”
Under his arm Byron carried a new copy of Mein Kampf in English. Next day when Pug left the house Byron was up and dressed, lounging on the back porch in slacks and a sweater, drinking coffee and reading Mein Kampf. At seven in the evening the father found Byron in the same place, in the same chair, drinking a highball. He was well into the thick tome, which lay open on his lap.
Byron shook his head. “Really amazing,” and turned the page.
WRITE THAT GODDAMN REPORT.
“Slote, you can’t tell me the Germans aren’t strange.”
“Well, that’s why I’ve been reading this book, to try to figure them out. It’s their leader’s book. Now, it turns out this is the writing of an absolute nut. The Jews are secretly running the world, he says. That’s his whole message. They’re the capitalists, but they’re the Bolsheviks too, and they’re conspiring to destroy the German people, who by rights should really be running the world. Well, he’s going to become dictator, see, wipe out the Jews, crush France, and carve off half of Bolshevist Russia for more German living space. Have I got it right so far?”
“Okay. Now, all these nice Berliners like this guy. Right? They voted for him. They follow him. They salute him. They cheer him. Don’t they? How is that? Isn’t that very strange? How come he’s their leader? Haven’t they read this book? How come they didn’t put him in a padded cell? Don’t they have insane asylums? And who do they put in there, if not this guy?”
“Well, you won’t learn much from Mein Kampf. That’s just froth on top of the kettle.”
“Will you let me know,” Byron said, “if you get word before you leave Berlin about where Natalie went?”
DURING Victor Henry’s absence in the States, his wife had tangled herself in a romance; something she had not done in his much longer absences through almost twenty-five years.
Being an ex-beauty, and remaining pretty, she had always drawn and enjoyed the attention of men, so she had not lacked opportunities for affairs. But she had been as faithful to Pug Henry as he had been to her. She liked to go to church, her hymn-singing and prayers were heartfelt, she believed in God, she thought Jesus Christ was her Savior—if she had never gone deeply into the matter—and she was convinced in her soul that a married woman ought to be true and good. In the old Navy-wife pastime of ripping apart ladies who had not been true and good, she wielded well-honed claws.
Dr. Palmer Kirby was a shy, serious, ugly man in his middle-fifties. After the dinner party for him, discussing the guests with Sally Forrest, Rhoda had dismissed him as “one of these ghastly BRAINS.”
Rhoda was most attractive, in fact, when she made the least effort to be. She was the kind of woman who can dazzle a man at first acquaintance by piling everything into the shop window: none of it forced or faked, but in sum nearly all she has to offer.
Palmer Kirby was hit hard by this maximum first impact.
Keeping Palmer Kirby waiting while she fussed over herself was a delicious little nostalgic folly, a lovely childish self-indulgence, like eating a banana split. It almost made Rhoda feel nineteen again.
So it happened that when the telephone rang in the Henrys’ home at two in the morning—the long-distance call from New York, via the U.S.S. Marblehead in Lisbon—there was nobody to answer. Rhoda was sipping champagne, watching a hefty blonde German girl fling her naked breasts about in blue smoky gloom, and glancing every now and then at Dr. Palmer Kirby’s long solemn face in thick-rimmed glasses, as he smoked a long pipe and observed the hard-working sweaty dancer with faint distaste. Rhoda was aroused and deliciously shocked. She had never before seen a nude dancing woman, except in
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In her own vocabulary, she never “did anything.” When Pug returned, the adventure stopped.
“Attention! In the next few minutes you will hear a report of the highest importance to the fatherland.”
“There’ll be no armistice,” said Pug.
“Sondermeldung!” (Special bulletin!) At this announcement, an immediate total stillness blanketed the restaurant, except for a clink here and there.
“From Supreme Headquarters of the Führer. Warsaw has fallen.”
Victor Henry’s skin prickled as he looked around, and he felt at this moment that the Germans under Adolf Hitler would take some beating.
