The Winds of War

ellow ticket to her bosom. "Well! listen to Briny Henry being master of. The whole thing so is, darling, if anything does go wrong, I don't ever want to feel I dragged you into trouble." This was th

eaten up all the food. Byron pounced on a couple of seats vacated for a moment. Bottles of warm Polish beer stood in the center of the table, with an opener and some glasses, so they drank warm beer and paid the waiter who came swooping down. Then Byron found a telephone and talked the waiter into calling the embassy. Slote was shocked to hear his voice. He appeared at the airport within the hour, chewing nervously on his cold pipe, in a shiny blue Chevrolet that prompted stares. Out came not only the passports, with various entry documents badly printed in purple ink on crude paper, but their luggage too, mysteriously rescued from the Balkans. They piled into the embassy car and set off for the city. Natalie looked trim and pert after a last grooming in the ladies' loungee size

ight." 'I thought maybe a week," Natalie said. "Then Byron and I can fly or drive down to Cracow and visit Medzice, and then fly on back t'o Rome." "Great bloody Christ, what are you talking about? Medzice! just forget it, Natalie! 'y should I? Uncle Aaron said I should visit the family in Medzice. That's where we're all from. My gosh, this is flat country. Flat as a table." They were driving through fields of sweet-smelling ripe grain, interspersed with pastures where cows and horses grazed. Far, far ahead on the level plain, the buildings of Warsaw dimly rose. "Exactly, and that's Poland's curse. It's a soccer field, a hundred thousand square miles in size. Fine for invasions. Even the low mountains along the south have nice wide easy passes. Half a million German soldiers are in Czechoslovakia at this moment, poised at the Jablunka pass, forty miles from Medzice. Now do you understand?" Natalie made a face at

in Poland. He picked up the antique ivory-handled telephone, and with some haggling in German managed to get connected to Natalie's room. "Hello. Are you in the bathtub yet?" "Well, I'm glad you can't see me. What's up?, "I'm beat. You have dinner with Slote. I'm going to bed." 'Stop that rubbish. You're dining with us, Briny. You come and fetch me at nine, do you hear? Leslie has booked me into Paderewski's suite, or something. it's fantastic. I've got a fun-length mirror here, held up by two big brown wooden angels." This way," Slote said. 'Our table's ready." An orchestra in gold-frogged red coats was thumping old jazz tunes in the main dining room of the Bristol, which for size, silk hangings, white linen, gilt-and-crystal chandeliers, obsequiousness of waiters, fine dress of the thronging customers, and ineptness on the dance floor, might have been in any first-class hotel in Europe. Certainly there was no trace of a war scare. "Sorry I'm late. It's the Jews," Slote apologized when they sat down. "They're storming the embassy. We've all become visa officers, right on up to Biddle. Christ knows I don't blame them. If they can show a relative, a friend, a letter, anything, we process them. A New York telephone book, today in Warsaw, is worth a hundred zlo

efeat the Germans. After all, they defeated them brilliant, talking in x4lO1 Theseare strange people, Byron. They can be about politics and history, yet they don't give a damn that Germany is now an industrial giant, while Poland remains all farms and Jews and castles and mazurkas. Maybe they're right. Maybe the Polish fighting spirit will scatter the stupid unwilling cattle of Hitler. That's the talk. There are supposed to be two and a half million Poles in uniform, more men than Hitler's got. A highly questionable figure, but in this country, any statistics-"'Say, isn't that 'Stardust'?" Natalie put in. "It sounds a bit like 'Stardust." Dance with me." Byron thought Slote looked more like her uncle than her sweetheart, steering her clumsily around the floor. But Natalie's clinging attitude, closed eyes, and touching cheek weren't the ways of a niece. They exchanged a few laughing words, then Natalie said something that made Slote look serious and shake his head. They argued as they danced. "I'll find him without you," Natalie was saying as they came back to the table. "I didn't say I wouldn't help you find him. I said if you're going to talk to him about going to Medzice-" "Just forget it. Forget I mentioned it." Slote took two more shots Natalie glowered at the meat on her plate of vodka. To lighten the at

m. There were some prosperous people, too, smooth-shaven men wearing bowlers and wellgroomed women looking much like the Warsaw Gentiles around the darted about at their street games, boys in caps Europeiski. Children and short trousers and girls in neat colored frocks, and their mothers gossiped as they watched them. 'I thought you said they were all storming the embassy," Byron remarked to Slote. "There are three hundred and fifty thousand of them, Byron. Maybe one in a hundred has foresight. That puts three or four thousand hammering at our doors. The rest believe what they want to believe, and vaguely hope for the best. The government keeps telling everybody there won't be a war." Natalie was looking around with an absent, pleased expression at the horse-drawn wagons and handcarts in the streets, and at an old trolley car clanking by. "My parents described all this to me when I was a child," she said. 'It seems not to have changed." People stopped and looked after the embassy car as it passed. Once Slote halted to ask directions. The Jews came clustering around, but gave only vague cautious answers in Polish. 'Let me try," Natalie said, and she began to talk Yiddish, causing an astonished outbreak oflaughter, followed by a burst of warm, friendly talk. A chubby boy in a ragged cap volunteered to run ahead of the car and show the way. They set off after him. "Well done," Slote said. "I can hack out Yiddish after a fashion, if I must," Natalie said. "Aaron's a master of it, though he never utters a Yiddish word." Natalie and Slote got out at a gray brick apartment building with tall narrow windows, an ornate iron door, and window boxes of blooming geraniums. It overlooked a small green park, where Jews congregated on the benches and around a gushing fountain in noisy numbers. Curious children ran from the park to ring Byron in the American car. Under their merry stares, as they freely discussed him and the machine, Byro

vations from there?" 'No. But Cracow's a hub. There are half a dozen ways to get out. We'll buy our tickets-plane or train or bus-as soon as we arrive there. Well? Byron! Have you fallen back asleep?" "I'm thinking." Byron was weighing the advantage of leaving Warsaw and Slote, against these harebrained travel arrangements. The war crisis seemed to be abating. The Poles in the nightclubs had acted gay and carefree, though Slote had remarked on the absence of foreigners, especially Germans. The streets were as calm as ever, and there were no visible preparations for war. Byron hadtaken to gauging the state of the crisis by the tone of Radio Warsaw. He now knew a few key words and phrases about the crisis, and much could sometimes be surmised from the shaky or relieved accents of the newscasters. In the United States, announcers in a time of crisis tended to use sonorous doom-filled voices, to thrill ffieir listeners. The Polish broadcasters, nearer the action, were less bent on being dramatic. In the past day or two they had not sounded quite so worried. He said, 'Have you heard any news?" "I just got BBC on shortwave. Same bulletins as last night. Henderson's talking to Hitler." "Natalie, this would be a damned wild excursion." 'y? I'll probably never have another chance to see where my parents were born. I'm here now. Leslie himself said last night that the worst seems to be over, that they've agreed to negotiate. Anyway, you don't have to come. I mean that. It'll be a bore for you, slogging around in the Polish countryside." "Well, I'll have breakfast with you." Byron packed fast. The more time he spent with Natalie Jastrow the more she puzzled him. Her relationship with Usl

ist, an officer in the temple, and all that. But our rabbi was such a boring dunce, Briny! And my father simply couldn't answer my questions. He's not an intellectual like Aaron, he's a businessman. When I was eleven I'd re ad more books than he had." "But he just allowed you to drop it?" Byron said. "Like that? My father wouldn't have, that's for sure." "Possibly military men are different," Natalie said with a skeptical smile. "Most fathers can't do much with daughters. Anyway, I was an only child, and very good, on the whole. I just wouldn't keep up flummery that made no sense to me. Well!" She set her knife and fork down. "Coffee and then on to Medzice. Correct?" "I'm with you." A rickety taxi, with thick surgical tape criscrossing the cracked yellow windows, brought them to the airport. The lone aircraft on the sunny field looked so rusty and patched that Byron thought it might be a wreck; but as they arrived, People came out on the grass and beganboarding it. "I don't know," Byron said as He paid the cab driver. "Do you suppose it will leave the ground? Maybe we should have this fellow wait." Natalie laughed and went to telephone Slote; but he was not in his apartment, nor at the embassy. The terminal was still crowded with Germans, though so few seemed left in Warsaw. Only Poles, and a few Jews, boarded the Cracow plane and took the awkward iron seats. The plane did leave the ground, with bumps and shudders that slightly parted the metal floor plates, affording a view underfoot of green fields and admitting a jet of warm air that billowed Natalie's skirt. She tucked it under her thighs and fell asleep. After a half hour or so the plane dived, slamming down to a stop near a barn in an open field, amid tall grass and wi

to take all the blame on herself. "I think he's got a case of nerves," she said. "You don't suppose he's afraid of the Germans?" "Look, it was an unceremonious way to leave him." She said, with an odd little glance at Byron, "It wasn't all that um ceremonious. We were together till dawn, you know, talking. He ought to be tired of me."'What? I saw you Turn in at three." "Oh, yes, but then he rang me from the lobby, said he was too exhausted to sleep, or something, and I came down and we went out again." "I see. You must be really beat." "Strangely enough I feel wonderful. The nap on the plane, and now, all this sweet country air! Poland smells delicious. I never read that in a book." "Poland a foist-class country," Berel spoke up in English, stroking his beard. "Strong pipple. Hitler a big bluff. No war." Byron's stay in Medzice remained in his memory forever after as something like a trip to the moon. Though the usual church stood on the usual knoll, the villagers were almost all Jews. Medzice was a cluster of houses on crooked narrow dirt or cobbled streets, some log, some plastered, a few of brick, sloping down toward a flat green meadow and the winding river. About a mile beyond the town, a roofless great house in the style of a French chateau lay ruined on the river bank. The noble family was extinct, the house was a casualty of the World War, but the village survived. The Jastrows and their relatives seemed to comprise half of Medzice. They swarmed on Natalie and Byron and marched them joyously from home to home. The dark interiors were all much the same: tiny rooms, enormous stoves, heavy polished Victorian furniture, lace curtains, each house seething underfoot with children ranging from crawlers to adolescents. Wine, cake, tea, hard candies, vodka, and fish appeared on table after table. There was no polite way to refim. After a while Byron was physically uncomfortable, because there was never a toilet pause. In all the hours that this was going on, he never understood a word that anybody said. It seemed to him that all the Jews talked continuously and simultaneously. Natalie chattered away with these bearded men in dark blouses, breeches, and heavy boots, these unpainted work-worn women in plain dresses that reached their ankles. They all appeared enthralled by her. Outside each house a crowd gathered, joining the conversation through the windows. The visit of the two Americans was obviously one of the grandest events in Medzice since the war. what a world! No sidewalks, no shops, no movie houses, no garages, no cars, no bicycles, no streetlights, no hydrants, no billboards; not a sound, not a sight to connect the town with the twentieth century, except a string o

d by the injury, and still angry over her casual disclosure that she had been with Slote until dawn the day before. However, to have this girl leaning on him, in a sunlit orchard full of apple scent by a river, seemed to Byron almost all the pleasure he wanted in the world. just holding her like this was sweeter than any delight any other girl had ever given him. Whatever it was that made a girl desirable-the enigmatic look in the eyes, the soft curve of a cheek, the shape of a mouth,. the sudden charm of a smile, the swell of breasts and hips under a dress, the smoothness of skin-Natalie Jastrow for Byron was all composed of these lovely glints, all incandescent with them. That she stemmed from the strange Jews of Medzice, that she was, by all evidence, the mistress of a dour man ten years older than himself, that she was only a solid and human girl-indeed very heavy, leaning on him and limping-with a stubborn streak and some unattractive, almost coarse tomboy bravado: all these drawbacks just made her Natalie Jastrow, instead of the perfect girl he had been dreaming about since his twelfth year. The perfect girl had in fact been a blonde, and something of a sex fiend, like the dream girls of most boys. She was gone now, and this prickly Jewish brunette held her place. And here they were alone on a riverbank in south Poland, in golden sunshine, a mile from any house, amid apple trees laden with ripe fruit "This will be slow work, getting back," she said. "I can try to carry you."What, a horse like me? You'd rupture yourself. I'm fine if I keep my weight off it. It's just such a bore." 'I'm not bored," said Byron. They passed an old abandoned scow half full of water. "Let's use this," he said, tipping it to empty it out. Natalie appreciatively watched him heave up the scow unaided. "No oars," she said. "We can float downstream." He guided the scow with a long rough plank that lay in it, using the plank as a rudder and as a pole. The river was very sluggish, almost oily, calm and brown. Natalie sat on the bow edge of the scow, facing Byron, her shoes in the seeping water. She said as they floated past the cemetery, "That's where all my ancestors are, I guess. The ones that aren't buried in Palestine." -Or Egypt or Mesopotamia," Byron said. Natalie shuddered. "I don't know. It's a godforsaken place, Briny." 'Medzice?" "Poland. I'm glad grandma and grandpa got the hell out of here." He banked the scow near the village. She climbed out and walked slowly, not limping. There was no doctor here, she said, and she didn't want to generate a crisis around the injured American cousin. She would have her knee taped in Cracow tomorrow. None of the villagers noticed anything the matter with her. Byron tried to find out the war crisis news. There was one working radio in Medzice, and several broken-down ones. The priest had the working radio. The rabbi told Byron, in Yiddish tortured into a barely comprehensible kind of German, that the last broadcast from Warsaw had been encouraging: the prime minister of England had gone to his country home for the weekend, and the crisis seemed to be passing. "Henderson, Henderson," the rabbi said. "Henderson talked to Hitler." And he winked shrewdly, rubbing one hand over the other to pantomime a money deal The wedding made Byron wish over and over that he were a writer and

tler 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. The stake they were gambling for was, in Shakespeare's expressive phrase, nothing less than "the great globe itself." What was going on in their minds seems to me of Importance. That is why I have translated Roon. His version of events, while professional and well informed, can scarcely be taken at face value. He was a German through and through. On the whole I have let General von Roon describe the war in his own way. I could not, however, translate certain passages without challenging them; hence my occasional comments. Roon starts on his first page, for instance, exactly as Adolf Hitler started all his speeches: by denouncing the Versailles Treaty injustice imposed an honorable and trusting GermanybythecruelAllies.Hedoes(as) not(an) mentionthehistoricalc(on) atch to that. German writers seldom do. 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 a year before the Treaty of Versailles,deprivedRussiaofaterritorymuchlargerthanFran(over) ce and England combined, of almost sixty million inhabitants, and of almost all her heavy industry. it was far harsher than the Versailles Treaty. I used to bring up this little fact during my Berlin service, whenever Versailles was mentioned. My German friends were invariably puzzled by the comparison. They thought it made no sense at all. The Treaty of Versailles had of the Germans, hcippened to them; Brest-Litovsk had happened to the other fellow. In this reaction they were sincere. I cannot explain this national quirk but it should never be forgotten in reading World Empire Lost. Ookton, Virginia 27 May, 1966Victor Henry (IT Z1.6-C The Responsibility for Hitler In writing this book, I have only one aim: to defend the honor of the German soldier. To trace the rise of Adolf Hitler, our leader in World War II, is not necessary here. No story of the twentieth century is better known. When the victorious Allies in 1919 created the crazy Treaty of Versailles, they also created Hitler. Germany in 1918, relying on the Fourteen Points of the American President Wilson, honorably laid down arms. The Allies treated the Fourteen Points as a scrap of paper, and wrote a treaty that partitioned Germany and made an economic and political madhouse of Europe. In thus outwitting the nllve American President and butchering up the map, the British and French politicians probably imagined they would paralyze the German notion forever. The cynical policy boomeranged. Winston Churchill himself has called the Versailles settlement a "sad and complicated idiocy." The oppression of Versailles built up in the vigorous German people a volcanic resentment; it burst forth, and Adolf Hitler rode to power on the crest of the eruption. The Nazi Party, a strange alliance of radicals and conservatives, of wealthy men and down-and-outers, was united only on the ideal of a resurgent Germany, and unfortunately on the old middle-European political slogan of discontentanti-Semitism. A riffraff of vulgar agitators, philosophic idealists, fanatics, opportunists, bullies, and adventurers, some of them extremely able and energetic, swept into power with Hitler. We of the General Staff for the most part watched these turbid political events with distaste and foreboding. Our loyalty was to the state, however it was governed, but we feared a wave of weakening social change. it is fair to say that Hitler surprised us. Swiftly, without bloodshe