She smiled as she lit a cigarette. Feeling good for Herb, feeling good about him, was good. She needed that; she could feel herself needing it. They still weren’t where she wished they would be.
Blowing a stream of smoke up at the ceiling, she wondered if they’d ever get there again. No way to know. There might be a scab over the wound in their trust, but the wound remained. One of these days, it might heal up and turn into a scar. She kept hoping it would.
She smoked the cigarette down to a very short butt, then stubbed it out in the brass baseball-glove ashtray that Herb liked. Then she turned on the radio. The dials lighted up right away. She knew she would have to wait for the tubes inside the big wooden cabinet to warm up before sound came out.
When it did, she changed the station as fast as she could turn the dial. That fast, bouncy jazz might be fine for jitterbugging soldiers on leave, and for the girls they’d sling over their shoulders or between their legs. Peggy wanted something with a real tune to it, though, not that pounding backbeat powered by bass fiddle and drums.
What she wanted was one thing. What she could find was liable to be a different kettle of crabs. A comic with a raspy voice and a Brooklyn accent-he seemed to want you to think he was Jimmy Durante’s cousin-made stupid jokes about how crowded trains were these days.
Trains were crowded. With gas rationing so tight, you couldn’t drive to Grandpa’s if the old man lived two states away. You had to take the train. And soldiers and sailors on leave or on official business had priority for seats. Okay, you could crack jokes about that. But comparing yourself to the cheese in a sandwich was just, well, cheesy. That was a joke Peggy made for herself, and it was a lot funnier than the ones Mr. would-be Durante was coming out with.
She didn’t waste more than a minute listening to him. On the next station she found, an earnest woman was explaining how to can vegetables. “Your victory garden will turn into a defeat unless you get the greatest possible use from it,” she declared.
That was bound to be true, but it wasn’t interesting, at least not to Peggy. She found some classical music. Stations were cautious about putting Wagner and other Nazi favorites on the air. If Germany and the USA did go to war, they’d probably disappear from broadcasts. But this was Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. Yes, Mussolini was on Hitler’s side and Vivaldi was Italian, but he’d been dead so long it hardly mattered any more.
The Vivaldi was pleasant; as with Bach, you could listen very closely and admire how everything worked and how it all fit together-or you could just listen. Peggy just listened for a while. Then she decided she’d rather hear something else, so she looked for another station.
She found a detergent drama. Mama had just found out her daughter was falling for a guy with black-market connections. Music that had nothing to do with Vivaldi swelled dramatically as Mama tried to figure out whether to turn him in or to start rolling in lamb chops and other goodies she couldn’t hope to get honestly.
Peggy was sure Mama would rat on Rocky. That was the Right Thing to Do, so it was what people in soap operas did. Everything would come out fine in the end anyway, but that was how things worked in soap operas, too. A real Mama probably would have run out and got some mint jelly to go with the lamb chops, but people in Radioland didn’t do stuff like that.
She didn’t care enough to keep listening. Another twist of the dial captured a quiz show. Herb liked those. He was good at them, too-often better than the contestants. The capital of South Dakota? The King of Prussia during the Seven Years’ War? The American League batting champion in 1921? He’d come out with the answer before a contestant could ring a bell. And he’d be right, too. Herb knew all kinds of weird things. That probably made him better as a government examiner.
Peggy also knew a lot of weird things. The difference between her and Herb was that she didn’t passionately care about the capital of South Dakota, while he did. She supposed it was the same kind of difference as the one between people who played cards for the fun of it and the ones who wanted to serve up their opponents on a platter with an apple in their mouth. She nodded to herself. She played a decent game of bridge, and she enjoyed it. Herb fought for every point as if he were crawling under barbed wire to make a trench raid on the Hun.
So she could take quiz shows or leave them alone. She soon left this one alone. She finally found some news. The Navy said its submarines had sunk a Japanese destroyer and two freighters. That sounded good, but not good enough. She didn’t think the war in the Pacific could have been much more mishandled if she were running it herself.
Then the newsman said, “The RAF used American-built Flying Fortresses to conduct daylight raids against German manufacturing centers. The bombers, also known as B-17s, performed well and inflicted heavy damage. They have also been used by our Army Air Force to strike Japanese-held Pacific islands.”
Hitler had made Spain a proving ground for his planes and tanks. Now the Fuhrer was on the receiving end as FDR did the same thing. What went around came around. Peggy would have bet dollars to doughnuts that old Adolf thought it was better to give than to receive.
Chapter 22
A couple of miles behind Alistair Walsh, the English artillery had lined up as many guns as the artillerists could get their hands on, all of them hub to hub. They’d piled up as many shells for them as they could, too. And now they were shooting them at the Fritzes in western Belgium.
They’d started two days earlier, and they showed no signs of stopping. The staff sergeant hadn’t been at the Battle of the Somme; he hadn’t been old enough to join the Army in 1916. The bombardment before the Tommies went over the top must have been a lot like this, though.
The Battle of the Somme, of course, had been a bloody disaster, in both the slang and the literal senses of the word. A week’s worth of shelling hadn’t been enough to knock out German cannon and, more important, German machine guns. Something like 50,000 got killed trying to advance the first day of the attack, and the numbers didn’t shrink much in the days that followed. And all they acquired were a very few square miles of muck and corpses pulverized as thoroughly as modern science knew how.
He hoped-Christ, he prayed, and he wasn’t a man in the habit of praying-things would go better this time when the order to advance came. The tank was supposed to have consigned trench warfare and days-long bombardments to the same dustbin of history that held cavalry charges and infantry squares and catapults. Tanks made warfare mobile again. So all the big brains insisted, anyhow.
Then the Germans brought their Tigers into Belgium. Tigers smashed English tanks and French chars as if their armor were tinfoil. Not a single Allied fighting vehicle had a gun that could punch through a Tiger’s frontal plates.
Tigers were slow. They weren’t very maneuverable. They were so wide and heavy, they strained bridges and sometimes even broke them. Going forward, they left a lot to be desired. But God help you if you were in a Crusader or a Matilda and you had to try to shift them.
God hadn’t helped enough. Thanks to the Tigers and their own good soldiering and general stubbornness, the Germans had kept England and France from taking back most of Belgium.
Thus the reversion to the last war’s tactics. If we kill them all and smash the whole countryside to rubble, the thinking seemed to be, we’ll be able to walk through them and then get on with the war.