The speaker said in clipped and concise English, "We welcome you again on this day that is dear to you." And the minds were on the red-necked politician, foaming with enthusiasm and bourbon whisky, screaming the eagle on a bunting-covered platform while his audience longed for the watermelon and potato salad to come.
The conductors of parties said, "We are going to the Tower of London. It is in a sense the cradle of English civilization"-the fat man"s race, the three-legged race, the squeals of women running with eggs in tablespoons, the smell of barbecuing meat on a deep pit.
The band played beautifully in Trafalgar Square a dignified and compelling march-and Coney Island, in its welter of squalling children, the smell of ice cream and peanuts and water-soaked cigar b.u.t.ts, the surf, one-third water and two-thirds people, fighting their way through the grapefruit rinds, the squeak and bellow of honky-tonk music.
Soldiers have paraded in London, men who marched like clothed machines, towering men, straight as their own rifles and their hands swinging-at home, the knights of this and that in wilted ostrich-plumed hats, in uniforms out of the moth-b.a.l.l.s again, knights who were butchers last evening, and clerks and tellers of the local bank, but knights now, out of step, shambling after their great banner, their tinsel swords at all angles over their shoulders, the knights of this and that.
The hospitable people of London have served flan and trifle, biscuits and tea, marmalade, gin and lime, scotch and water, and beer-hot dogs, with mustard drooling from the lower end and running up your sleeve. Hamburgers, with raw onions spilling out of the round buns. Popcorn dripping with b.u.t.ter. The sting of neat whisky and the barrels of beer set on trestles. Chocolate cakes and deviled eggs, but mostly hamburgers with onions, and which will have you have, piccalilli or dill or mayonnaise, or all of them?
The cool girls dance well and they are pleasant and friendly. They work hard in the war plants, and it"s a job to get a dress so neatly pressed. The lipstick is hard to get, and the perfume is the last in the bottle. Neat and pretty and friendly. At home the sticky kisses in the rumble seat and the swatting at mosquitoes on a hot, vine-covered porch. And in the joints the juke box howls and its ba.s.ses thump the air. When you say something the girl knows the proper answer. None of it means anything, but it all fits together. Everything fits together.
This is a time of homesickness, and Christmas will be worse. No grandeur, no luxury, no interest can cut it out. No show is as good as the double bill at the Odeon, no food is as good as the midnight sandwich at Joe"s, and no one in the world is as pretty as that blond Margie who works at the Poppy.
When they come home they"ll be a little tiresome about London for a long time. They will recall exotic adventures and strange foods. Piccadilly and the Savoy and the White Tower, the Normandie Bar and the place in Soho will drip from their conversation. They will compare notes enthusiastically with other soldiers who were here. The cool girls will grow to strange and romantic adventures. The lonesome little glow will be remembered as a Bacchic orgy. They will remember things they did not know that they saw-St. Paul"s against a lead-colored sky and the barrage balloons hanging over it. Waterloo Station, the sandbags piled high against the Wren churches, the excited siren and the sneak air raid.
But today, July 4, 1943, they wander about in a daze of homesickness, seeing nothing, hearing nothing but the faces and voices of their own people.
THE PEOPLE OF DOVER.
DOVER, July 6, 1943 July 6, 1943-Dover, with its castle on the hill and its little crooked streets, its big, ugly hotels and its secret and dangerous offensive power, is closest of all to the enemy. Dover is full of the memory of Wellington and of Napoleon, of the time when Napoleon came down to Calais and looked across the Channel at England and knew that only this little stretch of water interrupted his conquest of the world. And later the men of Dunkerque dragged their weary feet off the little ships and struggled through the streets of Dover.
Then Hitler came to the hill above Calais and looked across at the cliffs, and again only the little stretch of water stopped the conquest of the world. It is a very little piece of water. On the clear days you can see the hills about Calais, and with a gla.s.s you can see the clock tower of Calais. When the guns of Calais fire you can see the flash, while with the telescope you can see from the castle the guns themselves, and even tanks deploying on the beach.
Dover feels very close to the enemy. Three minutes in a fast airplane, three-quarters of an hour in a fast boat. Every day or so a plane comes whipping through and drops a bomb and takes a shot or so at the balloons that hang in the air above the town, and every few days Jerry trains his big guns on Dover and fires a few rounds of high explosive at the little old town. Then a building is. .h.i.t and collapses and sometimes a few people are killed. It is a wanton, useless thing, serving no military, naval, or morale business. It is almost as though the Germans fretted about the little stretch of water that defeated them.
There is a quality in the people of Dover that may well be the key to the coming German disaster. They are incorrigibly, incorruptibly unimpressed. The German, with his uniform and his pageantry and his threats and plans, does not impress these people at all. The Dover man has taken perhaps a little more pounding than most, not in great blitzes, but in every-day bombing and sh.e.l.ling, and still he is not impressed.
Jerry is like the weather to him. He complains about it and then promptly goes about what he was doing. Nothing in the world is as important as his garden and, in other days, his lobster pots. Weather and Jerry are alike in that they are inconvenient and sometimes make messes. Surveying a building wrecked by a big sh.e.l.l, he says, "Jerry was bad last night," as he would discuss a windstorm.
It goes like this-on the Calais hill there is a flash in the night. Immediately from Dover the sirens give the sh.e.l.ling warning. From the flash you must count approximately fifty-nine seconds before the explosion. The sh.e.l.l may land almost anywhere. There is a flat blast that rockets back from the cliffs, a cloud of debris rising into the air. People look at their watches. The next one will be in twenty minutes. And at exactly that time there is another flash from the French coast, and you count seconds again. This goes on sometimes all night. One hour after the last sh.e.l.l the all-clear sounds. This does not mean that it is over. Jerry sometimes lobs another one in, hoping to kill a few more people.
In the morning there are wrecked houses; the dead have been dug out. A little band of men are cleaning the debris out of the street so that traffic may go by. A policeman keeps the people from coming too close for fear a brick may fall. That house is probably wrecked and will be unlivable until the war is over, but the houses all about are hurt. The windows are all blown out, and there will be no gla.s.s until after the war, either. The people are already sticking paper over the broken windows. Plaster has fallen in the houses all about. A general house cleaning is in progress. Puffs of swept plaster come out the doors. Women are on their knees, with pails of water, washing the floors. The blast of a near sh.e.l.l cleans the chimneys, they say. The puff of the explosion blows the soot out of the chimney and into the rooms.
There is that to clean up, too. In a front yard a man is standing in his garden. A flying piece of scantling has broken off a rose bush. The bud, which was about to open, is wilting on the ground. The man leans down and picks up the bud. He feels it with his fingers and carries it to his nose and smells it. He lifts the scantling from the trunk and looks at it to see whether it may not send out new shoots, and then, standing up, he turns and looks at the French coast, where five hundred men and a great tube of steel and high explosive and charts and plans, mathematical formulae, uniforms, telephones, shouted orders, are out to break a man"s rose bush. A neighbor pa.s.ses in the street.
"The Boche was b.l.o.o.d.y bad last night," he says. "Broke the yellow one proper," he says. "And it was just coming on to bloom."
"Ah, well," the neighbor says, "let"s have a look at it." The two kneel down beside the bush. "She"s broke above the graft," the neighbor says, "she"s not split. Probably shoot out here." He points with a thick finger to a lump on the side of the bush. "Sometimes," he says, "sometimes, when they"ve had a shock, they come out prettier than ever."
Across the Channel, in back of the hill that you can see, they are cleaning the great barrel, studying charts, making reports, churning with Geopolitik.
MINESWEEPER.
LONDON, July 7, 1943 July 7, 1943-Day after day the minesweepers go out. Small boats that in peacetime fished for herring and cod. Now they fish for bigger game. They are equipped with strange, new fish lines. The crews are nearly all ex-fishermen and whalers and the officers are from the same tough breed. Theirs is an unromantic and unpublicized job that must be done and done very thoroughly. The danger lurks without flags and firing. Very few decorations are awarded to the minesweeping men.
They usually sail out of the harbor in a line, three boats to sweep and two to drop the buoyed flags, called dans, which mark the swept channel. Once on the ground to be swept, three of the boats deploy and travel abreast at exact and set distances from one another. The s.p.a.ce between them is the area that can be reached by their instruments. The little boats are searching for the two kinds of mines which are usually planted-the magnetic mines which explode when a ship with its self-created magnetic field sails over, and the other kind which is exploded by the vibration of a ship"s engines. The sweepers are equipped with instruments to explode either kind and to do it at a safe distance from themselves.
The three abreast move slowly over the area to be cleared of mines and behind them the dan ships follow at intervals, putting out the flags. At the end of their run they turn and come back, overlapping a little on the old course and the dan ships pick up the flags and set them on the outer course again.
All the boats are armed against airplanes. The gunners stand at their posts and search the sky constantly, while the radio operator listens to the spotting instruments on the sh.o.r.e. They take no chances with the planes. When one comes near them they train their guns in that direction until they recognize her. And even the friendly planes do not fly too close. For these men have been bombed and fired on from the air so often that they will fire if there is any doubt at all. Sticking up out of the water are the masts of many ships sunk early in the war when the German planes ranged over the Channel almost with impunity. They do not do it any more.
The voice of the radio man comes up through the speaking tube to the little bridge. "Enemy aircraft in the vicinity," he says, and then a moment later, "Red alert." The gunners swing their guns and the crew stands by, all eyes on the sky. From the English coast the Typhoons boil out angrily, fast and deadly ships that fly close to the water. In the distance the enemy plane is a spot. It turns tail and runs for the French coast. The radio man calls, "All clear," and the crew relaxes.
On the little bridge the captain directs the laying down of the colored flags, while his second checks the distance between the boats. If the dan ship gets too close, a mine may explode under her. With instruments the distance is checked every few seconds. The little flotilla moves very slowly, for when it has pa.s.sed and marked the free channel the ships with supplies must be able to come through in safety.
Suddenly the dan ship is struck by a heavy blow, the sea about flattens out and shivers, and then a hundred yards ahead a tower of water and mud bursts into the air with a roar. It seems to hang in the air for a long time and when it falls back the dan ship is nearly over it.
There is a large, dirty place on the ocean, bottom mud and a black gluey substance, which comes from the explosive. The crew rush to the side of the ship and search the water anxiously. "No fish," they say. "What has happened to the fish? You"d think there would be one or two killed by the blast." They have set off one of the most terrible weapons in the world and they are worried about the fish.
The captain marks with great care on his chart the exact place where the mine was exploded. He takes several sights on the coast to get the position. Another mine roars up on the other side of the lane. The second in command takes up the blinker and signals, "Any fish?" and the answer comes back, "No fish."
The day is long and tedious, sweeping and turning and sweeping, and when the job is done it is only done until the night, for on this night the mine layers may creep over from the French coast and sow the field again with the nasty things, or a plane may fly low in the darkness and drop the mines on parachutes. The work of the sweepers is never finished.
It is late when they turn for home and it is dark when the little ships file into the harbor and tie up to the pier. Then the captain and his second relax. The strain goes out of their faces. No matter how long or uneventful the sweep, the danger is never gone. The gun crew clean and cover their guns and go to their quarters. The officers climb down to the tiny wardroom. They kick off their fleece-lined boots and settle back into their chairs. The captain picks up the work he has been doing for weeks. He is making a beautifully exact model of-a minesweeper.
COAST BATTERY.
SOMEWHERE IN ENGLAND, July 8, 1943 July 8, 1943-The guns hide in a field of grain and red poppies. You can see the cannon muzzles protruding and aiming at the sky. The battery is on the south coast, in sight of France. There was a time when the great flights of German bombers came over this undefended coast and carried their bomb loads to London and Canterbury. But the coast is not undefended now.
The spotters are all over the hills, the complicated and delicate listening posts which can hear a plane miles away, and the spotters are girls. When a strange ship is heard, its position is phoned to the plotters of position, and the plotters are girls, too. The sighters are girls. Only the gunners who load and turn the gun itself are men. It is an amazing inst.i.tution, the mixed battery, something unique in the history of armies.
The barracks are nearby, one for the girls and another for the men. The eating hall is common, the recreation room is common, and the work is common.
Twenty-four hours a day the crews are on duty. They can do what they want within a certain distance from the gun. The girls read and wash their clothing, sew and cook. The kitchen, a temporary affair, is built of kerosene tins filled with sand laid like bricks. The new kitchen is just now being built.
The countryside is quiet. The guns are silent. Suddenly the siren howls. Buildings that are hidden in camouflage belch people, young men and women. They pour out, running like mad. The siren has not been going for thirty seconds when the run is over, the gun is manned, the target spotted. In the control room under ground the instruments have found their target. A girl has fixed it. The numbers have been transmitted and the ugly barrels whirled. Above ground, in a concrete box, a girl speaks into a telephone. "Fire," she says quietly. The hillside rocks with the explosion of the battery. The field gra.s.s shakes and the red poppies shudder in the blast. New orders come up from below and the girl says, "Fire."
The process is machine-like, exact. There is no waste movement and no nonsense. These girls seem to be natural soldiers. They are are soldiers, too. They resent above anything being treated like women when they are near the guns. Their work is hard and constant. Sometimes they are alerted to the guns thirty times in a day and a night. They may fire on a marauder ten times in that period. They have been bombed and strafed, and there is no record of any girl flinching. soldiers, too. They resent above anything being treated like women when they are near the guns. Their work is hard and constant. Sometimes they are alerted to the guns thirty times in a day and a night. They may fire on a marauder ten times in that period. They have been bombed and strafed, and there is no record of any girl flinching.
The commander is very proud of them. He is fiercely affectionate toward his battery. He says a little bitterly, "All right, why don"t you ask about the problem of morals? Everyone wants to know about that. I"ll tell you-there is no problem."
He tells about the customs that have come into being in this battery, a set of customs which grew automatically. The men and the women sing together, dance together, and, let any one of the women be insulted, and he has the whole battery on his neck. But when a girl walks out in the evening, it is not with one of the battery men, nor do the men take the girls to the movies. There have been no engagements and no marriages between members of the battery. Some instinct among the people themselves has told them trouble would result. These things are not a matter of orders but of custom.
The girls like this work and are proud of it. It is difficult to see how the housemaids will be able to go back to dusting furniture under querulous mistresses, how the farm girls will be able to go back to the tiny farms of Scotland and the Midlands. This is the great exciting time of their lives. They are very important, these girls. The defense of the country in their area is in their hands.
The manager of the local theater has set aside two rows of seats this evening for members of the battery who are off duty. The girls who are to go change from their trousers to neat khaki skirts and blouses. They spend a good deal of time making themselves pretty. They sit in the theater, leaning forward with excitement. The film is a little stinker called War Correspondent War Correspondent, made six thousand miles from any conflict, where people are not likely ever to see any.
It concerns an American war correspondent who through pure handsomeness, cleverness, bravery, and hok.u.m defeats every resource of the Third Reich. The Gestapo and the German Army are putty in his hands. It is a veritable Flynn of a picture.
And these girls who have been bombed and strafed, who have shot enemies out of the sky and then gone back to mending socks-are these girls scornful? Not in the least. They sit on the edges of their seats. When the stupid Gestapo men creep up to the hero they shriek to warn him. This is more real to them than this afternoon, when they fired on a Focke Wulf 190. The hero who emerges from a one-man Dunkerque, with combed hair and immaculate dress, is the true, the good, the beautiful.
This afternoon the girls were sweaty, dusty, and they smelled of cordite. That was their job-this is war. And when the film is done they walk back to their barracks, talking excitedly of the glories of Hollywood warfare. They go back to their routine job of defending the coast of England from attack, and as they walk home they sing, "You"d be sooo naice to come "ome to, You"d be so naice by a fire."
ALCOHOLIC GOAT.
LONDON, July 9, 1943 July 9, 1943-His name is Wing Commander William Goat, DSO, and he is old and honored, and, some say, in iniquity. But when he joined the RAF wing two years ago he was just able to totter about on long and k.n.o.bby legs. For a long time he was treated like any other recruit-kicked about, ignored, and at times cursed. But gradually his abilities began to be apparent. He is very good luck to have about. When he is near, his wing has good fortune and good hunting. Gradually his horns, along with his talents, developed, until now his rank and his decorations are painted on his horns in brilliant colors and he carries himself with a shambling strut.
He will eat nearly everything. No party nor any review is complete without him. At one party, being left alone for a few moments, it is reported that he ate two hundred sandwiches, three cakes, the arrangements for piano and flute of "Pomp and Circ.u.mstance," drank half a bowl of punch, and then walked jauntily among the dancers, belching slightly and regarding a certain lieutenant"s wife, who shall be nameless, with l.u.s.tful eye.
He has the slightly bilious look of the military of the higher brackets. Being an air-goat, he has rather unique habits. If you bring an oxygen bottle into view, he rushes to it and demands it. He puts his whole mouth over the outlet and then, as you turn the valve, he gently relaxes, grunting happily, and his sides fill out until he nearly bursts. Just before he bursts he lets go of the nozzle and collapses slowly, but the energy he takes from the oxygen makes him leap into the air and engage imaginary goats in h.o.r.n.y combat. He also loves the glycol cooling fluid which is used in the engines of the Typhoons. For hours he will stand under the barrels, licking the drips from the spouts.
He has the confidence of his men. Once when it was required that his wing change its base of operations quickly, he was left behind, for in those days it was not known how important he was. At the new base the men were nervous and Irritable, fearful and almost mutinous. Finally, when it was seen that they would not relax, a special plane had to be sent to pick up the wing commander and transport him to the new base. Once he arrived, everything settled down. The Typhoons had four kills within twenty-four hours. The nervous tension went out of the air, the food got better as the cook ceased brooding, and a number of stomach complaints disappeared immediately.
Wing Commander Goat lives in a small house behind the Operations Room. His name and honors are painted over the door. It is very good luck to go to him and stroke his sides and rub his horns before going out on operations. He does not go out on operations himself. There is not room in the Typhoons for him, but if it were possible to squeeze him in he would be taken, and then heaven knows what great action might not take place.
This goat has only truly bad habit. He loves beer, and furthermore is able to absorb it in such quant.i.ties that even the mild, nearly non-alcoholic English beer can make him tipsy. In spite of orders to the contrary he is able to seek out the evil companions who will give him beer. Once inebriated, he is p.r.o.ne to wander about sneering. He sneers at the American Army Air Force, he sneers at the Labor party, and once he sneered at Mr. Churchill. The sneer is probably inherent in the beer, since punch has quite a different effect on him.
In appearance this goat is not impressive. He has a shabby, pinkish fur and a cold, fishlike eye; his legs are not straight, in fact he is slightly knock-kneed. He carries his head high and his horns, painted in brilliant red and blue, more than offset any physical oddness. In every way, he is a military figure. He is magnificent on parade. Eventually he will be given a crypt in the Air Ministry and will die in good time of that military ailment, cirrhosis of the liver. He will be buried with full military honors.
But meanwhile Wing Commander William Goat, DSO, is the luck of his wing, and his loss would cause great unrest and even despondency.
STORIES OF THE BLITZ.
LONDON, July 10, 1943 July 10, 1943-People who try to tell you what the blitz was like in London start with fire and explosion and then almost invariably end up with some very tiny detail which crept in and set and became the symbol of the whole thing for them. Again and again this happens in conversations. It is as though the mind could not take in the terror and the noise of the bombs and the general horror and so fastened on something small and comprehensible and ordinary. Everyone who was in London during the blitz wants to describe it, wants to solidify, if only for himself, something of that terrible time.
"It"s the gla.s.s," says one man, "the sound in the morning of the broken gla.s.s being swept up, the vicious, flat tinkle. That is the thing I remember more than anything else, that constant sound of broken gla.s.s being swept up on the pavements. My dog broke a window the other day and my wife swept up the gla.s.s and a cold shiver went over me. It was a moment before I could trace the reason for it."
You are going to dine at a small restaurant. There is a ruin across the street from the place, a jagged, destroyed stone house. Your companion says, "On one of the nights I had an engagement to have dinner with a lady at this very place. She was to meet me here. I got here early and then a bomb hit that one." He points to the ruin. "I went out in the street. You could see plainly, the fires lighted the whole city. That front wall was spilled into the street. You could see the front of a cab sticking out from the pile of fallen stone. Thrown clear, right at my feet as I came out of the door, was one pale blue evening slipper. The toe of it was pointing right at me."
Another points up at a wall; the building is gone, but there are five fireplaces, one above another, straight up the wall. He points to the topmost fireplace, "This was a high-explosive bomb," he says. "This is on my way to work. You know, for six months there was a pair of long stockings hanging in front of that fireplace. They must have been pinned up. They hung there for months, just as they had been put up to dry."
"I was pa.s.sing Hyde Park," says a man, "when a big raid came over. I went down into the gutter. Always did that when you couldn"t get a shelter. I saw a great tree, one like those, jump into the air and fall on its side not so far from me-right there where that scoop is in the ground. And then a sparrow fell in the gutter right beside me. It was dead all right. Concussion kills birds easily. For some reason I picked it up and held it for a long time. There was no blood on it or anything like that. I took it home with me. Funny thing, I had to throw it right away."
One night, when the bombs screamed and blatted, a refugee who had been driven from place to place and tortured in all of them until he finally reached London, couldn"t stand it any more. He cut his throat and jumped out of a high window. A girl, who was driving an ambulance that night, says, "I remember how angry I was with him. I understand it a little now, but that night I was furious with him. There were so many who got it that night and they couldn"t help it. I shouted at him I hoped he would die, and he did.
"People save such strange things. One elderly man lost his whole house by fire. He saved an old rocking chair. He took it everywhere with him; wouldn"t leave it for a moment. His whole family was killed, but he hung on to that rocking chair. He wouldn"t sit in it. He sat on the ground beside it, but you couldn"t get it away from him."
Two reporters sat out the blitz in the Savoy Hotel, playing chess and fortifying themselves. When the bombs came near they went under the table. "One or the other of us always reached up and cheated a little," the reporter says.
Hundreds of stories, and all of them end with a little incident, a little simple thing that stays in your mind.
"I remember the eyes of people going to work in the morning," a man says. "There was a quality of tiredness in those eyes I haven"t forgotten. It was beyond a tiredness you can imagine-a desperate kind of weariness that never expected to be rested. The eyes of the people seemed to be deep, deep in their heads, and their voices seemed to come from a long distance. And I remember during a raid seeing a blind man standing on the curb, tapping with his stick and waiting for someone to take him across through the traffic. There wasn"t any traffic, and the air was full of fire, but he stood there and tapped until someone came along and took him to a shelter."
In all of the little stories it is the ordinary, the commonplace thing or incident against the background of the bombing that leaves the indelible picture.
"An old woman was selling little miserable sprays of sweet lavender. The city was rocking under the bombs and the light of burning buildings made it like day. The air was just one big fat blasting roar. And in one little hole in the roar her voice got in-a squeaky voice. "Lavender!" she said. "Buy Lavender for luck." "
The bombing itself grows vague and dreamlike. The little pictures remain as sharp as they were when they were new.
LILLI MARLENE.
LONDON, July 12, 1943 July 12, 1943-This is the story of a song. Its name is "Lilli Marlene" and it was written in Germany in 1938 by Norbert Schultze and Hans Leit. In due course they tried to publish it and it was rejected by about two dozen publishers. Finally it was taken up by a singer, Lala Anderson, a Swedish girl, who used it for her signature song. Lala Anderson has a husky voice and is what you might call the Hildegarde type.
"Lilli Marlene" is a very simple song. The first verse of it goes: "Underneath the lanterns, by the barracks square, I used to meet Marlene and she was young and fair." The song was as simple as that. It went on to tell about Marlene, who first liked stripes and then shoulder bars. Marlene met more and more people until, finally, she met a brigadier, which was what she wanted all along. We have a song with much the same amused cynicism.
Eventually Lala made a record of the song and even it was not very popular. But one night the German station in Belgrade, which sent out programs to Rommel"s Afrika Korps, found that, due to a little bombing, it did not have many records left, but among a few uninjured disks was the song "Lilli Marlene." It was put on the air to Africa and by the next morning it was being hummed by the Afrika Korps and letters were going in demanding that it be played again.
The story of its popularity in Africa got back to Berlin, and Madame Goering, who used to be an opera singer, sang the song of the inconstant "Lilli Marlene" to a very select group of n.a.z.is, if there is such a thing. Instantly the song was popular and it was played constantly over the German radio until Goering himself grew a little sick of it, and it is said that, since inconstancy is a subject which is not pleasant to certain high n.a.z.i ears, it was suggested that the song be quietly a.s.sa.s.sinated. But meanwhile "Lilli Marlene" had got out of hand. Lala Anderson was by now known as the "Soldiers" Sweetheart." She was a pin-up girl. Her husky voice ground out of portable phonographs in the desert.
So far, "Lilli" had been solely a German problem, but now the British Eighth Army began to take prisoners and among the spoils they got "Lilli Marlene." And the song swept through the Eighth Army. Australians hummed it and fastened new words to it. The powers hesitated, considering whether it was a good idea to let a German song about a girl who did not have all the sterling virtues become the favorite song of the British Army, for by now the thing had crept into the First Army and the Americans were beginning to experiment with close harmony and were putting an off-beat into it. It wouldn"t have done the powers a bit of good if they had decided against the song.
It was out of hand. The Eighth Army was doing all right in the field and it was decided to consider "Lilli Marlene" a prisoner of war, which would have happened anyway, no matter what the powers thought about it. Now "Lilli" is getting deeply into the American Forces in Africa. The Office of War Information took up the problem and decided to keep the melody, but to turn new words against the Germans. Whether this will work or not remains to be seen. "Lilli Marlene" is international. It is to be suspected that she will emerge beside the barrack walls-young and fair and incorruptly inconsistent.
There is nothing you can do about a song like this except to let it go. War songs need not be about the war at all. Indeed, they rarely are. In the last war, "Madelon" and "Tipperary" had nothing to do with war. The great Australian song of this war, "Waltzing Matilda," concerns itself with sheep-stealing. It is to be expected that some groups in America will attack "Lilli," first, on the ground that she is an enemy alien, and, second, because she is no better than she should be. Such attacks will have little effect. "Lilli" is immortal. Her simple desire to meet a brigadier is hardly a German copyright. Politics may be dominated and nationalized, but songs have a way of leaping boundaries.
And it would be amusing if, after all the fuss and heiling, all the marching and indoctrination, the only contribution to the world by the n.a.z.is was "Lilli Marlene."
WAR TALK.
LONDON, July 13, 1943 July 13, 1943-It is interesting to see that the nearer one comes to a war zone the less one hears of grand strategy. There is more discussion of tactics and the over-all picture in the Stork Club on a Sat.u.r.day night than in the whole European theater of operations. This may be, to a certain extent, because of a lack of generals to give the strategists a social foundation. For that matter, there are more generals in the Carlton Hotel in Washington at lunch time than in all the rest of the world.
This narrowing point of view may be geographical. Papers in England are not avidly seized, and as one gets down to the coast where some action is going on all the time, the discussion of the war dwindles until it almost disappears. It is further interesting how completely civilian ferocity disappears from the soldier or the sailor close to action or in action.
In the concrete wardroom over the berths of the motor torpedo boats the young men gather to drink beer. They are very young men, but there is an age in their faces that comes of having put their lives out at stake too often. The dice have rolled right for some of these young men so far, but a seven has turned up for too many of their friends for them to take the game or their luck for granted. The little boats are not heavily armed for defense, but they carry terrible blows in their torpedo tubes. They are the only lightweights in the world that can deliver a heavyweight punch. For their own safety they have only their speed and the cleverness of their crews.
Tonight they are going out on what the men call a Thing. A Thing is something bigger than a Scramble, but slightly less large than The Thing. A Thing is likely to be an attack on a German convoy, slipping secretly in the night through the Channel, but heavily armed and heavily guarded and, moreover, hugging the coast so that they are under the sh.o.r.e guns most of the time. And against them these tiny ships are going to dodge in under the sh.e.l.lfire, twist and turn in the paths of the tracers, and, finally, shoot their torpedoes into the largest ship they can find and then race for home.
In the wardroom the men speak with a kind of intense gaiety. You never hear the enemy discussed. By unstated agreement or because there has just been too much war they do not discuss war. The enemy is Jerry, or the Boche, and his name is spoken as something disembodied and vague. Jerry is a problem in navigation, a job, a danger, but not much more personalized than any other big and dangerous job. The men suffer from strain. It has been so long applied that they are probably not even conscious of it. It isn"t fear, but it is something you can feel, a bubble that grows bigger and bigger in your mid-section. It puffs up against your lungs so that your breathing becomes short. Sitting around is bad. You have a tendency to think that everything is very funny. This is the time to bring out the frowsy story that wouldn"t do so well at any other time. It will get a roar of laughter now.
There is a little bar in the wardroom where a Wren serves the flat beer that no one likes. The beer isn"t good, but everyone has a gla.s.s of it, and it is hard to swallow, because so much of you is taken up with the big bubble.
On the wall there is a clock and the hands creep slowly, much too slowly, toward the operation time. The waiting is the terrible part. The weather reports come in, There is wind, but perhaps not enough to cancel the Thing. Dozens of the little ships are going out. It is an Allied operation. There are Dutch boats, and Polish boats, and English. The Poles are great fighters. This is their kind of work. When the little ships attacked the Scharnhorst Scharnhorst, slipping through the Channel, it is said that a Polish sailor was down on the prow of his torpedo boat, calmly firing at the great steel battleship with a rifle. The Dutch have a calm, cold courage, and the British pretend, as usual, it is some kind of a garden party they are going to.
At ten minutes to the time the men start to get into their suits, complicated coats and trousers of oilskin that tie closely around the ankles. A towel is wrapped around the neck and the coat b.u.t.toned in tight about it. The little ships are wet. The green water comes over the bow constantly and there isn"t much cover. In action the men will presumably wear helmets on their heads, but this is only a presumption. Now they stand about, padded and wadded, their arms a little out from their sides, held out by the thick clothing. The leader of this group is a young man of great age. He is twenty-two and he came from a destroyer to the little MTBs. The big hand of the clock creeps on to the time of departure. The commander says, almost casually, and just as it is on the minute, "All ready?"
All the young men stride heavily out of the door, down the steps to the hidden pens where the little stinging fish lie. There is a roar as engine after engine starts. Now the bubble bursts in your stomach and you can breathe again. Everything is all right. It"s a good night, misty and with little visibility. The boats back, one by one, from their berths and fall into line. A tiny blinker signals from the leader, the great motors thunder, the boats leap forward, and the white wake Vs out. The green water comes in over the bow. The crew huddles down, braced against the wind and the sea-no one has mentioned the war.
THE COTTAGE THAT WASN"T THERE.
LONDON, July 14, 1943 July 14, 1943-The sergeant lay in the gra.s.s and pulled gra.s.s and a bit off the tender stems and chewed them. It was Sunday, and a number of people were lying about, sailors and soldiers and even a few civilians. Across the path a line of people were fishing in the Serpentine, sitting on rented chairs, fishing in water that was stirred with the oars of boats and kicking swans. Each fisherman had his little audience.
The sergeant said, "This is a crazy country. Look at that, there hasn"t been a fish caught there all day, and they go right on with it. Maybe they"re not after fish. It"s a crazy country, and it"s getting me nuts, too." He spat out a little chewed wad of green gra.s.s stems. "I"ve got something bothering me," he said. "It"s a ghost story. I don"t believe it happened, and I know it happened. Only I don"t believe in ghosts. I"ve been thinking about it, sniffling around it, and I can"t make any sense out of it.
"You see," he said, "I"m at a little station up in the country. Not a very big outfit. There is a village about a mile from camp, and in the evening we walk in and get a couple of gla.s.ses of beer and try to figure out this darts game."
Far up the line of fishermen a man caught a fish about the size of a sardine and caused so much excitement that he was surrounded by people in a moment. The sergeant chuckled. "I used to work salmon in the Columbia River," he said, and let it go at that. "Well, anyway," he said, "it came on toward dark, and I"ve got some paper work to do, so I figured I"d walk back to camp. The other fellows weren"t ready to go yet. They"re kidding the barmaid, telling her they know movie stars. So I started out alone.
"I"ve been over that little road at least a hundred times. I know every foot of it, I guess. It"s a narrow, little road, with hedges on both sides, so you can"t see into the fields. The road is kind of cut down, like a trench. It"s not a very dark night, at least there is some starlight, and you can see big clouds, like it was going to rain." He stopped and seemed to be considering whether he should go on at all. He was looking across the Serpentine at the little pavilion where they rent boats, where the line of people wait all day for their turn to rent a boat.
The sergeant made up his mind suddenly. "About halfway back there was a light out onto the road. There was a little cottage, kind of, with the hedge coming up to it on both sides. There is a garden in front, a fence and then this big square window with little panes. Well, the light is coming out of that window. I looked right through and could see the room. It was kind of pleasant. There was a lamp on the table, and a fire in a small fireplace. It was kind of pleasant. It wasn"t a very bright light, but you could see pretty well. There"s a white cat asleep on the seat of a chair, and sitting beside the table under the lamp is a woman about fifty, I should say, and she is sewing on something. I stood there. Peeping-Tommed for a couple of minutes. It was peaceful and cozy-looking and nice.
In a minute I walked on. There was something bother-big me in the back of my mind. And then I thought, "Sure that"s what it is, no blackout curtains." I hadn"t seen a light coming out of the window at night for ten months-that"s how long I"ve been over. I was going to go back and tell that woman to pull her blackout curtains in case some country cop came along. She"d get a stiff fine. I turned around and looked back. I couldn"t see the cottage, but I could see the light shining out in the road. Well then, I thought, "What the h.e.l.l, maybe no cop will come by." It looked so nice, the room and the fire that you could look in on. You get awful tired of the blackout."
The sergeant picked up a little twig, dug at a gra.s.s root with it. "I walked along, but there was something that kept ticking away in my head, something I couldn"t get hold of. It began to sprinkle a little bit of rain, but not enough to hurt anything. I thought about the work I had to do, but I couldn"t get away from the feeling that there was something wrong with something."
He dug out his gra.s.s root, and it came up with a little lump of soil in it. He shook the dirt out of it. "I was just about to turn into the camp when it plumped into my mind. Now, this is what it is. And I"ve been thinking about it, and I can"t figure it out. There isn"t any cottage there, just four stone walls all black with fire. Early in the blitz some Jerry dropped a fire bomb on that cottage."
His fingers were restless. They were trying to plant the gra.s.s roots again in the hole they had come out of. "You see what worries me about the whole thing is this," he said. "I just don"t believe stuff like that."