This Russian advance was going on all the time that Lanny was in Newcastle and New York. Wherever there was a radio he and Laurel would sit and listen. Morning and evening the newspapers printed maps showing how the great bulges were spreading all the way across the broad plains of Poland and up to the German border. The Germans had constructed immense defense areas and turned whole cities into fortresses, but the Russians by-passed most of these; they were so sure of their own strength and their enemy’s weakness that they no longer feared counteroffensives. They were going straight through this time, their destination Berlin. The only thing that troubled the American listeners was fear that the Allied armies might be too slow in getting started and might take too long to get across the Rhine. The Russians might take all Germany; and what if they refused to get out? Uneasiness was spreading, and Lanny heard more than one of his rich friends express the idea that maybe there might have been something in Hitler’s ideas after all. Wouldn’t it have been better to make a deal with him? Perhaps he couldn’t be trusted, but at least the armies would have been moving east instead of west!
7
Let Us Have Peace
I
For the assimilated Colonel Budd there came a War Department telegram, instructing him to board a plane at Mitchel Field, the Army airbase, two days later. He took the precaution to drive out there and check. He didn’t need any passports or other documents; all he had to do was to identify himself, which was not difficult. He packed his bags and took his little portable; they put no weight limit on one of his status, for who could know what important documents or other impedimenta he might be needing? He reported at the field on time and found an assemblage of passengers, Army and State Department people, both men and women—secretaries, translators, specialists in various subjects. Apparently not one of them knew where he was going or for how long, and there was a lot of speculating and talking in low tones.
They were to be transported in a passenger plane and would be made comfortable; no bucket-seat job, for they must be fit to go to work the moment they arrived. Lanny found himself seated next to a young lawyer from Cleveland, now with the State Department; he was Russian-born, and read Russian books all the way—which would have helped Lanny to a guess if he had needed a guess. He asked no questions, and neither did the other man; they talked for a while about the news which appeared on the bulletin board of the plane. It was the end of January, and the Russians had reached a place called Kleinitz on the Oder, a river that flows within fifty miles of Berlin. Amazing!
Air travel had been routine to Lanny for a long time now. He had a bundle of newspapers and magazines and passed the time agreeably. Bermuda wasn’t new to him, except for the extensions of the airport; the same was true of the Azores, of Casablanca, and of Naples, with Mount Vesuvius for a background. It was interesting to see how quickly the Americans had restored the facilities of that port; a job of the Army engineers, who boasted of having hairy ears and of breaking schedules in all the places where they were turned loose. From Naples the party was flown to Malta, an island reported to be the most-bombed spot on the face of the globe. It is some twenty miles long and half as wide, and if there was one of its stone houses undamaged Lanny Budd failed to see it.
Those unhappy days were over now, and the RAF airbase at Luqa was in perfect shape. It needed to be, for big planes were coming in every few minutes, bringing what one of the pilots described as “heavy loads of brass.” These were the six hundred people that F.D.R. had spoken of, and no doubt as many more British. A total of ninety four-motor aircraft—C-54S and British Yorks—were required for this job. The first person Lanny met was Baker, the President’s man, and after that he felt at home. He forbore to ask questions, but was told that his plane was to be flown to a town called Saki, on the southern coast of the Crimea. Nobody could go by ship, because the enemy had mined all the harbors of the Black Sea.
Franklin Roosevelt’s fourth inauguration had taken place in Washington, a brief and simple ceremony, and two days later he had been taken in his special train to Norfolk, the Army’s secret port of embarkation, and had boarded the heavy cruiser Quincy; a week later he was in the Strait of Gibraltar. Those on board had held their breath, wondering how many German subs would be waiting for them. The last time the President had come there, on his way to the Teheran Conference, Franco had turned all his searchlights on the battleship Iowa, to give what help he could to the subs. But this time he hadn’t done so, and the P.A. remarked, “He has found out how the war is going.”
II
The trip from Malta was rough, and some of the passengers were airsick. They passed over the Isles of Greece, which brought back memories to Lanny, who had sailed among them just thirty years ago as a guest aboard a yacht. A fellow guest had been Marcel Detaze, who was to become Lanny’s first stepfather. (If you went about in the fashionable world you might meet some lad who had had half a dozen stepfathers.) Lanny had had no cares, and the world had been wonderful; he had not dreamed that he was destined to live through the two most dreadful wars in history, or that when he passed over these islands again he would be two miles up in the air, on his way to do what he could to help prevent a third war that would dwarf the others if it came.
The Germans, after holding the Crimea for a couple of years, had wrecked everything before they left. The big planes had to be set down on what was called an airstrip, having but a single runway made by laying mats of steel. The first sight Lanny saw was snow-covered mountains, and then, on the field below, hundreds of women diligently shoveling freshly fallen snow from the runway. The plane circled until this job was completed, and then it came in to a bumpy landing. There were few houses left standing in Saki, and apparently most of the people lived in cellars and shacks built out of wreckage. You saw no young or middle-aged men, only the old, the children, and the women. Girls served as soldiers guarding the road to Yalta, releasing the men for the front now far away; the girls carried old-fashioned Springfield rifles, obtained by American lend-lease.
From there it was a two-hundred-mile drive along the coast to Yalta. The Russians had provided cars, but not enough for this great company; more were brought in by the Americans in cargo planes. Lanny and half a dozen of his party were driven by an American chauffeur through rolling country, lined with wrecked houses, wrecked cars, trucks and tanks, all the debris of battle as Lanny had seen it in the Rhone valley and in the Ardennes. Near Yalta it was mountain country, which might have been the French Riviera with its towns and villas; the road was like the Grande Corniche, the “great shelf” which runs high up above the Côte d’Azur, winding around the sides of one mountain after another, and looking down upon a boundless sea. This one was called the Black because it was so deep and dark.
Yalta had been a town, the summer playground of the tsars and their court. The Germans, before retiring, had reduced every building of the town to rubble, sparing only three palaces along the coast. The Livadia, assigned to the Americans, had been the residence of Tsar Nicholas II; it was an enormous place, which had been the headquarters of Marshal von Rundstedt, who had come so near to capturing Lanny in the Ardennes. The report was that Hitler had promised these palaces to three of his best generals, and so the historic buildings hadn’t been blown up or burned. All that Rundstedt’s men had done was to take the furniture and even the plumbing fixtures. The Russians had brought down trainloads of stuff and done their best to make fastidious Americans feel at home. Lanny was told that the medical corps had fumigated the palace; this because Churchill had radioed Roosevelt on the Quincy, reporting that it was swarming with typhus-bearing lice.
III
The building, immensely long, was of white stone and had two tall stories; at each end was a wide tower, twice as tall as the rest of the building. The front was indented to make wide porticoes, and above these were verandas and a sort of covered pavilion on the roof; the Tsar and his large family had come here for fresh air.
Lanny had been told how, just afte
r the revolution, all these Crimean palaces had been turned into rest homes for the workers, and thousands of them had swarmed here, eating on long trestle tables set out in the court, in the porticoes, and in the very splendid formal gardens. The war had ended all that, and now there was a new picnic party coming to the summer palace in midwinter. Tsar Nicholas II had ardently desired peace but hadn’t known how to get it or to keep it. Here came an American President, a British Prime Minister, and a Bolshevik Party Secretary become Marshal, to see if they could be any wiser and abler.
The United States Secret Service was on hand, Argus-eyed and all-foreseeing; they had politely told all the Russian servants that they were not needed, and the President’s Filipino mess-boys had moved in and were busy surveying the premises, unpacking their gear, and getting ready for the great show. Everything had been planned in advance, like a battle; everybody knew his post and his duties, and it was like an army deploying.
Baker had given Lanny the needed credentials, and anyhow, the Secret Service had known him for a long time and gave him the run of the place. The Irish-American head of this super-body, Mike Reilly, told him about some of the precautions taken for this trip. All along the Black Sea coast, where the planes had to fly, were Russian antiaircraft batteries, and the young soldiers manning these were apt to be “trigger-happy”; they wouldn’t know American planes and might take one for an enemy. Before he let the President fly that route, Mike had decreed that there must be an American Air Force man stationed with every battery. To that the Russian military commander had said “Impossible,” and Mike had replied, “Then no President.” The issue had been referred to Stalin, who, to the obvious bewilderment of the Russian officer, had assented at once. So now there was a noncom in every battery, armed with a pair of binoculars, and he called the turn on all the approaching planes. He had been taught one Russian word, “Stoy,” which means stop. All the Americans learned that word, for when a Russian sentry said “Stoy!” he meant it, and stoy you did.
IV
Having no duties the first afternoon, and being stiff from plane and car riding, Lanny went for a walk to inspect the ruins of Yalta. At once he made an interesting discovery—he was to have a shadow: a very tiny Russian man, presumably not big enough to carry a gun, and clad in very tight striped trousers which did not come down to the tops of his shoes. He walked when Lanny walked and stopped when Lanny stopped, and as soon as Lanny realized what this meant he turned back and joined him, greeted him politely and shook hands, to the man’s evident embarrassment. That wasn’t the orthodox way to treat a shadow.
But why not? “We are allies,” said Lanny, and when the man didn’t understand that, he said “Tovarish”—which did the business. Lanny had visited Leningrad, and on another yachting trip Odessa, and more recently Kuibyshev and Moscow, so he knew some words. When someone said “Tchai?” he could say “Da,” meaning that he would have some tea. When they said “Vodka,” he could say “Nyet, nyet”—and he knew he would have to say it many times during his sojourn in the Livadia Palace.
Knowing the war-torn lands, he had put chewing gum and chocolate into his bags, and now he offered a stick of gum to the odd little man, who accepted it gladly and put it into his mouth, paper, tinfoil, and all. So it was Lanny’s turn to cry “Stoy!” and he showed the man what to do. After that they were friends, and grinned every time they saw each other; but the shadow would never walk beside Lanny, always a few feet behind—that, no doubt, being the regulation.
Lanny didn’t want to do any harm to anybody; he just wanted to look at the old folks and the children, see them smile at the rich Amerikansi, and find out how they were getting along in a land which their enemies had so cruelly wrecked. There had been time for planting since the enemies had been driven out, so the people had food, and the climate here was mild enough so that they could work all the year round. They would survive, and presumably some of the men would come back from the war. This was no new story to the Crimea. They had lived through it all a generation ago, and again less than a century ago, when the British had been the enemy. Not far away was that “mouth of hell” into which “the six hundred” had ridden.
Lanny looked into several peasant huts, and invariably was greeted with broad smiles. Strange and rather alarming smiles they were, for many of the old people had lost their teeth and had dental plates of which they were proud. They were made of steel and shone like polished silver plate in the sunlight. He made another discovery, of great interest to him: on the wall of every hut hung a small radio set, and at first he didn’t know what it was, for it had no dials. Then he realized that this was a totalitarian set; it could get only the wave lengths assigned to the official Russian stations. Lanny could guess that these people wouldn’t know there was any other kind of set or any other wave length in the world. Lanny recalled the story of Caliph Omar in the Alexandrian library: “Burn all the books but the Koran, for their value is in that.”
V
Roosevelt had a new plane, built especially for his travels, and this was his first trip in it. The Air force men dubbed it “The Sacred Cow,” and before long the symbol was painted on the nose. Also he had an armored car with bullet-proof glass, which was brought by plane and in which he made the drive from Saki to Yalta. This wasn’t new; it had belonged to Chicago gangster Al Capone. The Treasury Department had got the car when it succeeded in sending Capone to jail for understating his income taxes due.
The President was put up in one of the Tsar’s numerous bedrooms; War Mobilization Director Jimmy Byrnes slept in the Tsarina’s room, and that was certainly an odd adventure for a country boy from South Carolina. The royal lady’s boudoir was occupied by the very stiff and proper Admiral King, Commander of the Fleet. There was only one bathroom in this entire palace, and queues formed up; only the VGDIPs got showers.
Churchill and his outfit were installed in the Alupka Palace, about twelve miles away from the Livadia. He showed up at the conference wearing a round fur hat, Russian style, which he had had made in Canada; he had learned a few phrases of Russian to say to Stalin, but Stalin, alas, wasn’t able to understand them. The Red Marshal came by train and was established in the palace which had belonged to Prince Yussupoff, the slayer of Rasputin. He brought a large staff, headed by Molotov, his Foreign Commissar. For the Americans, among themselves, the pair were “Uncle Joe” and “Auntie Mol.”
The first day of the conference was Sunday, the 4th of February. Stalin and Molotov came to call on Roosevelt, bringing their interpreter. Half an hour later the first formal meeting began in the Grand Ballroom of the Livadia Palace. There was an immense round table in the center, and around it sat about thirty men: the heads of the three governments, their secretaries of state, and their chief military officers, army, navy and air force. They spent nearly three hours in discussion and then adjourned for dinner, with Roosevelt as host; there was consommé, sturgeon with tomatoes, beef and macaroni, plus the fixings. It was not an elegant menu, but the diners presumably made it palatable with vodka and five kinds of wine.
VI
The son of Budd-Erling wasn’t invited to this banquet, and he rather wondered why he had been brought to this secret state affair. Had F.D.R. acted on an impulse of friendliness, and would he now forget about it in the rush of affairs? Lanny stayed in his room, which he shared with three of the lesser officials; he was resolved not to force himself upon anybody, and studied diligently a little Russian phrase book he had bought in New York. In the middle of the morning he was summoned to Harry Hopkins, who said that the Boss wanted Lanny to give Harry what help he could, pending the time the Boss would have some leisure. Nothing could have given Lanny more pleasure, for he knew no better company than this harness-maker’s son from Iowa, keen-witted and at the same time warmhearted, grimly determined for the cause of the world’s downtrodden, and loyal to the great man who was trying to lift them up.
Helping Harry consisted of sitting by the bed while the tired man lay and chain-smoked
cigarettes and talked about the events of the day. He was an extremely sociable person, and perhaps talking aided his mind to work; he respected Lanny’s opinion and wanted to hear his reaction to this and that. Lanny was careful never to force his ideas upon these overworked official persons; he listened until they had propounded a problem, and then, if he had any answer, he gave it once. He too was impatient of bores and took pains not to be one. As a result people invited him to stay longer and to come again.
Harry the Hop told how in Malta our military men had had a tough argument with the British, who had a different plan for the advance upon Germany; it had become so hot that Marshall, Chief of Staff, had advised Eisenhower to say that he would resign if the British plan were followed. Our Navy people were demanding more forces against Japan; but F.D.R. settled that one, sticking right to the program he had laid down at the beginning—Germany must be beaten first. Our main problem was to get the Russians’ promise to help us drive the Japanese out of China. When would they undertake that job, and what price would they charge for it? This, alas, was not an altruistic world. They would want the Kurile Islands, and probably Dairen and Port Arthur, and they might want Manchuria, which would hurt. Chinese cities and provinces weren’t ours to give away; but they weren’t China’s either; was it our business to pour out American blood to save China’s possessions and lay them in China’s lap? All we could do was to try to persuade Stalin not to keep too much.