A Future Arrived (36 page)

Winston Churchill could not say it any better.

Neville Chamberlain, the man who more than any other handed Czechoslovakia to the German Reich, thus ensuring Poland's indefensibility against German attack, stuns the House of Commons and the world by proclaiming that Great Britain will come to Poland's aid in case of such an attack. He even persuades a reluctant France to join him in a bilateral agreement.

“I've 'eard that one before,”
says the man on the street. More words on paper. More exchanging of ceremonial pens.

“All very well,”
says Major General Fenton Wood-Lacy,
“but I'd like to know what we're supposed to go to war with.”

He is saying this to Martin Rilke as they watch an exercise of the general's armored division on Salisbury Plain. The light tanks with their two-man crews and single machine gun look eminently stoppable. Bren gun carriers dash back and forth with the zeal of terriers.
“Oh, they look dashing enough—and they'll do the job if we can persuade Jerry not to shoot at the little darlings.”

The Mark II tanks, the Matildas, look more impressive, but there are so few of them—and so many teething problems. The treads break down after a hundred miles, and the radio, in those that have one, is erratic.

“I'm not overly impressed,”
says Martin.
“Thank God you have a navy.”

Home defense is of more importance to the prime minister—the need for the right little, tight little island. Antiaircraft guns ring the cities. Sluggish barrage balloons, which provide so many jokes for the music-hall comics, float serenely over London. The projected number of RAF fighter squadrons has been greatly increased—to the annoyance of the air marshals who firmly believe that only bombers win wars. Women work extra shifts stitching fabric to the frames of Hawker Hurricanes. The all-metal-skinned Spitfires crawl with agonizing slowness along the production lines. Young men to fly these planes are being trained through the university air squadrons, the Auxiliary, and the Volunteer Reserve.

The euphoria of Munich is not even a remembered dream. In the offices of Calthorpe & Crofts, Arnold Calthorpe sees the orders for pacifist books dwindle to nothing. His vision of universal peace shattered, his business on the brink of ruin, he publishes a novel sent to him by a middle-aged spinster in Yorkshire. It's an absurd tale of wanton women and lusty men in eighteenth-century England. The pure escapism of it strikes a chord in a nervous, if committed race, and the book shatters all records for sales in the history of the British publishing industry.

The French troops sit in the Maginot line and gaze toward the Rhine. The Paris press dub it the “Shield of France.” The men in the line call it
le trou
—the hole. They wait deep underground in air-conditioned comfort. Well fed, lying naked under sun lamps once a day. They are bored, indifferent.
Je m'en fous
is the current saying—to hell with it. None of them want war. The cold shadow of Verdun touches them all.

“There is something disturbing about the Maginot line,”
says Martin in a broadcast from London to the United States in August:

DAILY POST EXCLUSIVE

A. E. THAXTON WITH POLISH AIR FORCE

The young Polish fliers are dashing and superb pilots, but their planes are slow and obsolete. The Polish army is dashing as well, especially the cavalry, the huge squadrons of horse soldiers wheeling and thundering across the plains, pennons fluttering from the lance tips.

All roads reach an end somewhere. This road begins in the palace of Versailles in 1919 where frock-coated diplomats squabbled over the war spoils like so many shysters over an accident case. It ends in the harbor of the Free City of Danzig in the early morning hours of September 1, 1939. The old German battleship
Schleswig-Holstein
, which had last fired in anger during the battle of Jutland in 1916, trains its eleven-inch guns on a Polish army barracks and the firing switches are pulled. The thunder rolls across the dark water, past the sleeping city, and on and on over the fir forests and the Polish earth. The frontier with Germany throbs and shimmers with the flashes of a thousand guns and a new road begins, hammered out by the iron tread of the tanks.

I
T IS QUIET
in London. Sunday, the third of September. A balmy, sunny day. The cabinet has been meeting most of the night, and at nine o'clock in the morning instructs the British ambassador in Berlin to give the Germans two further hours in which to decide whether they will withdraw their troops from Poland or face war with Great Britain and France. The ultimatum is scorned. At eleven fifteen the prime minister broadcasts to the nation. There is no cheering in the streets as there was in 1914. Neither is there panic and despair—despite the inadvertent sounding of the air-raid sirens. A quiet, almost relieved acceptance of reality.

In the evening, the king speaks to his subjects over the radio in his painful way, struggling not to stammer. No one yet knows what iron grit and courage fills every pore of this shy, spare man. “…
We can only do the right as we see the right and reverently commit the rest to God
.”

And so be it.

T
HE
N
ORWEGIAN FREIGHTER
Hjelmeland
, battered and salt rimed after a stormy crossing of the North Sea, docked in London with a cargo of dried herring, lumber, and canned sardines. Among the twenty-three passengers were nine Polish and Czech fighter pilots who had managed to make their way to Norway, and Albert Thaxton.

Albert pointed up the Thames. “The Tower of London.”

The Poles nodded solemnly. “Where they cut off the heads?” one of them asked.

“Once. A long time ago.”

A whip-thin Czech tried out his English. “The RAF is please …?”

“Anywhere,” he said in German. “Just tell the immigration officers who you are and what you are.”

He couldn't leave it at that. They looked lost, bewildered. He showed his papers to an elderly man in uniform.

“Thaxton, eh?” the man said. “Welcome back. I read your stuff in the
Post
. Bloody good it was too.”

“Thanks.” He pointed off. “That group there. Poles and a couple of Czechs. Pilots. Shot down a dozen Jerry planes between them. They hate the Nazis more than you'll ever know. Look after them will you? They want to join up.”

“Don't worry about that, son. Two Polish
destroyers
came upriver last month. It's like the ruddy Foreign Legion in old London now.”

He had lost all of his luggage when the Stukas had found the train twenty miles from Posen, howling down out of the dawn sky and dropping their bombs with such uncanny accuracy on the tracks ahead that the Polish officers had been shocked. A second wave of dive bombers had come for the train as soon as it stopped, plummeting steeply with their sirens shrieking. Gaunt birds of hell. He had spent the rest of his time in Poland in the clothes he had been wearing and with the money he had in his wallet—and a hundred-pound-note rolled tightly and sewn into a seam of his coat. The hundred pounds had paid for passage on a fishing boat from Gdynia to Sweden for him and six air force pilots. The British embassy in Stockholm had looked after him from there on and he now looked, riding in a taxi to Fleet Street, like a prosperous businessman.

“Take off a few days,” Jacob said. “Write your adventures. Stirring,
Boy's Weekly
prose. Then get down to the War Office and see a Colonel Maitland. I'm having you accredited to the BEF. Maitland will brief you on all the dos and don'ts of the job. And by the way, I increased your salary while you were away.”

“I'm sure I'll find a lot of ways to spend it in the trenches.”

Wartime London. Not much changed, he was thinking as he left the
Post
building and taxied on to Soho. A few buildings along the Strand with their fronts sandbagged. Windows crisscrossed with tape. The ubiquitous barrage balloons floating limply in the dull gray sky. A great many men and women in uniform. Otherwise no different from busy afternoons past. He thought of Warsaw burning under the bombs.

He sensed her presence the moment he reached the top of the stairs. Her perfumed bath powder. Her silk robe tossed across the foot of the bed. A teacup and saucer, a plate and glass in the draining rack in the kitchen sink. Food in the fridge. Her clothing in the closet.

“Well,” he murmured. “Curious are the ways.”

He got out of the heavy wool suit and into his work clothes of slacks and rumpled pullover. He had started typing the article Jacob wanted when he heard her close the front door and come up the stairs. He tilted back in his chair and waited for her. She came into the room, looking very lovely in a sweater and skirt, a Burberry over one shoulder like a cloak. There was a heavy briefcase in her hand which she tossed onto the couch with her coat.

“You're wearing your hair longer,” he said.

“It gave me something to do—watching it grow.”

“Are you surprised to see me back?”

She shook her head, gazing at him. “Jacob's been keeping me informed. He called me at work and I left early.”

“He didn't say a word to me—about you.”

“I made him promise.”

“Are you back with Calthorpe?”

“No. I managed to snag a job with the Ministry of Information. The we-would-never-lie-to-you gang, we call it.” She walked up to him and cradled his face between her hands. “God, I'm glad you're back.”

“My feelings about you, Jenny.”

Bending, she kissed him lightly on the lips. “Sun's over the yardarm and we're well stocked with gin.”

“
We
are?”

“Yes.
Our
home, Thax.”

It was getting dark in the room and she started toward the windows to draw the blackout curtains. He stood up before she could do so and took her into his arms. “I'll be going away again. Covering the BEF in France.”

“I knew you would be.”

“I have no idea how long I'll be gone.”

“Millions of men are saying that, darling. We'll have to make the most of the time we have and not waste a second of it.”

“It seems so wrong to ask you to marry me now, Jenny.”

She draped her arms around his neck and pressed her body tightly against him. “Oh, Thax, it would be so terribly wrong if you didn't.”

And the darkness fell over London, over the dim streets and the blacked-out houses. And far above the city a balloon rose trailing its snapped cable—higher and higher, its silver skin catching the last rays of the sun, glowing a dull orange until it faded from sight in the winter sky.

1940

The seven Colorado flying boats floated serenely at their moorings on the placid waters of San Diego Bay. They were painted a light blue-gray and bore the roundels of the Royal Air Force on fuselage and wings. The sight of airplanes with foreign markings had once caused people to stop and gawk, but the novelty was long past. England and France had been at war with Germany for nearly six months and San Diego had become one of the arsenals of the allies.

Colin Mackendric Ross drove his mother's canary-yellow Packard convertible through the main gate of the Ross-Patterson Aircraft Company. The long corrugated-iron buildings of the old plant were silent and deserted—there was no Sunday shift—but a score of construction workers swarmed over the new buildings where the Colorado 2Bs, an amphibious version of the long-range patrol bomber, would soon be built.

“Wow,” he exclaimed to his mother, “they're sure putting that baby up in a hurry.”

Alexandra said nothing in reply. Her eyes were on the line of planes in the Channel. It was a morning in early February, clear and dry with little wind. A few clouds drifting in from the sea. Perfect flying weather. Within an hour those planes would be thundering across the bay toward North Island, white spray feathering up behind them. Then they would rise like gulls, make a long, slow turn, and head southeast toward Pensacola. Then on to Londonderry in Northern Ireland via Bermuda and the Azores. Planes destined for the war. And her eldest son going with them.