The General's Women Read online

  The girls and their mother sat down at the table and began to eat. “The stew is good, Mum,” Kay said, although it wasn’t, quite. Still, these days, one said what needed to be said or heard, whether it was true or not.

  “Thank you,” Kul said, gracefully accepting Kay’s small lie. “Better for Evie’s dumplings.”

  Evie, always the realist, wrinkled her nose. “It might be even better if we hadn’t had mutton stew the last time we ate supper together.”

  They all chuckled at that. There was food in England—nobody was actually starving—but one had to wait forever in queues and there wasn’t much variety. Kay couldn’t remember when she had last laid eyes on a salmon fillet.

  Kul glanced at Kay. “What do you hear from Gordon?”

  The subject of her dissolving marriage was a tender one, and Kay hesitated. “I got a letter last week. He’s in India, with the Royal Artillery.” She dropped the little bombshell she had been holding. “He and Nancy Thomas—Dylan Thomas’s sister—are planning to get married.”

  “Dylan Thomas, the poet?” Evie was interested. “I didn’t know he had a sister!”

  “She’s in Egypt with the Auxiliary Territorial Service,” Kay said. “I met her at a party once. I think she and Gordon are meant for each other. They’re both social butterflies.”

  “Oh, you girls and your men.” Kul picked up her wineglass. “Still, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, I suppose. Let’s drink to Gordon’s happiness, if there’s such a thing left in this world.”

  Kay’s marriage to Gordon Summersby had been a dazzling three-year whirlwind of idle days, late nights, and weekend house parties: all the doomed gaiety of life before war put the lights out. But for Kay it had quickly become frivolous and empty, too fragile a thread to bind a marriage together, and she saw it now for what it had been: a silly, impetuous mistake. Thank heavens she and Gordon were agreed on that, and neither minded terribly when the war put paid to it.

  Gordon had gone first to Egypt and then to India, and a friend had recommended Kay to Worth’s in Hanover Square, where the sales manager took one look at her figure and face and hired her as a model. The job didn’t pay well, but it brought her back to her first love: fashion design and costume. She hung over the drawing tables and watched the dresses evolve from the first sketch through construction and the final fitting, often on herself. Since she had a “Worth’s” figure, she was encouraged to wear the gowns to parties, where they (and she) were much admired.

  But that world, too, was quickly doomed by the war. Hitler’s armies were marching across Europe, smashing city after city under the hobnailed heels of their jackboots. When England declared war and began to worry about a German invasion, Kay walked out of Worth’s and—with Evie, who had left her office job—joined the MTC. They were assigned to the ambulance service and reported every day to their command post, the old schoolhouse in Lambeth, near the docks on the south shore of the Thames.

  That was where Kay learned about waiting. Waiting with nothing to do all through the year-long “phony war”—what the papers called the Sitzkrieg—until the Luftwaffe arrived like angels of death in August of 1940 and the war became terrifyingly real. Blood and guts and horror and death were the almost hourly order of business during the Blitz, day after day of piloting her ambulance through the burning streets, a Charon ferrying the dead and dying across the Styx. After the Blitz ended, it was back to waiting again, mostly at the American Embassy, where British drivers, skilled in navigating through ruined streets and unmarked lanes and the blackout, were preferred to American military drivers, who were forever getting lost—and getting into accidents, because they tended to drive on the wrong side of the road.

  After supper and the washing up and a rubber of three-handed bridge, Kay reminded her mother that she had to pick up her Yank at nine the next morning, sharp, so she needed to be off. She and Evie said their goodnights and made their way to their flat through the cave-like darkness of the blackout, keeping to the sidewalk between the white stripe painted on the curb and the comforting brick walls of the buildings.

  Kay had never quite gotten used to the utter dark of the wartime streets. This one was lit only by the glowing tips of cigarettes, evidence that a few other people were out and about, their voices and footsteps surreal in the silent night. The only vehicles on the street were a few official cars and trams and lorries, their headlamps pointed downward and masked so that only cat’s-eye slits of light shone through—a dangerous situation, since it was easy to step off the curb in front of a car that lunged at you like a panther out of the blackness. There were other dangers, too. She had read just that morning of a man who got out of an unlit train at what he thought was his station and fell eighty feet over a viaduct rail. Accidents happened in the dark.

  And it was mostly in the dark that the Luftwaffe came. One of the last bombs of the Blitz had fallen just a block from their building. Kay still remembered the screaming whoosh and the terrifying, rocking crash, like a massive earthquake. Every window in their flat had shattered. She had never ceased to be grateful for the current hiatus in the Blitz, but she didn’t trust it. Now that the Americans were in the were in the war and bombing the bloody hell out of Hamburg and Rostock and Essen, the Germans were supposed to be too busy to bomb London, but you never knew, did you? The planes could come back any night, groaning with their lethal cargo. The sirens would wail like banshees and she and Evie would grab their pillows and blankets and run through the dark to the shelter a block away, where they would huddle together and try to sleep until the all-clear sounded.

  As they climbed the stairs to their flat, Evie said, “This two-star you’ve got—I suppose he’s yours for the duration? You can’t trade him to one of the other girls?”

  “I don’t see how.” Kay turned the key in the lock. “He’s badly outranked, so nobody else will want him. I’m afraid it’s going to be a long, dull week.”

  “Well, look at it this way,” Evie said practically. “Somebody at the bottom of the heap can’t be important enough to go very far. He’ll probably just have you shuttle him back and forth from Claridge’s to the embassy, and that’ll be that. Boring, but not very difficult.”

  They were both wrong.

  CHAPTER TWO:

  The General

  London

  May 27–June 2, 1942

  The two-star nobody with the German name had been sent to England by President Franklin Roosevelt and Army Chief of Staff George Marshall. Ike was there to take a hard look at what the Americans and the Brits were doing to prepare for joint action against the Germans. The news from London had been bleak, and he had been worried enough about the situation before he left Washington. When he came downstairs for breakfast at Claridge’s on Thursday morning, he was even more worried. The day before, he’d had long talks with both the American ambassador and General James Chaney, the commander of the U.S. Army Forces in the British Isles. He didn’t like what he’d heard.

  The British had been at war since September 1939, while America-First sentiments had kept the United States out of the increasingly desperate European conflict. But the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was followed just four days later by Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States. American citizens had been galvanized by FDR’s “Day of Infamy” speech and a newly fired hatred of Hitler and his “Nazi monsters.” Since then, the General and other U.S. military planners had been trying to respond to Japan’s fierce aggression in the Far East, at the same time trying to develop an Allied challenge to the Germans that would relieve the pressure on the sagging Soviet army—the “second front” that Stalin wanted. It was a damned complicated business that required everybody’s cooperation, and it didn’t look like that was going to be easy to get.

  It didn’t look like he was going to get any hot coffee, either, and Ike put down his cup with a scowl. Claridge’s was supposed to be the best goddamned hotel in London, and if lukewarm coffee was the best they could
do, it didn’t bode well. Clark was upstairs on the phone, so he attacked his bacon and eggs alone, glad for the chance to have some private thinking time.

  He had plenty to think about, mostly the difficulties involved in getting everybody to agree on an overall command structure and a common set of assumptions—much easier said than done. The schedule was heavy and tight, with one meeting after another, scattered over the whole goddamned country. Today, he had to get to Montgomery’s field exercise in Kent, back to London to the War Office to meet with General Sir Alan Brooke, and over to Grosvenor Square for another meeting with Chaney and his team. Then down to Dover, back to the War Office again to talk to Mountbatten, and over to Number Ten Downing Street for a late conference with the Prime Minister. There wasn’t much time between meetings in far-flung places. He’d better be able to count on that driver, who hadn’t impressed him yesterday.

  Eisenhower sat back in his chair and looked around. The dining room was palatial, its eighteen-foot ceilings, crystal chandeliers, and ornately carved columns far too sumptuous for his simple taste. In fact, it was still pretty hard for him to believe that he was actually here. His wasn’t the first name that would naturally come to mind—on either side of the Atlantic—to deal with the British military establishment. He was just a country boy from Abilene, Kansas, a staff officer who had never commanded men at war, unless you counted that disgusting sortie that MacArthur had ordered ten years before against the Bonus Army veterans.

  In fact, Eisenhower’s life as a peacetime soldier had, in his own estimation, been as dull as a slow game of bridge. He’d been an uninspired student at West Point, distracted by the booty he got from playing poker with cadets who had family money in their pockets. Worse, he had suffered a knee injury that ended his football career midway through his first year. He had missed the Great War by a matter of months. After that, he’d been assigned to coach football teams, dispatched to Panama to keep an eye on the canal, sent to Europe to write a tourist guide to the battlefields, assigned to Washington to serve as MacArthur’s aide, and posted to the Philippines to create and train a Filipino army with little equipment and less support. He’d had the good luck to be mentored by the smartest men in the interwar army—Conner, Pershing, MacArthur, and now Marshall. But his most satisfying duty as a real soldier had been commanding troops in the Louisiana war games the summer of 1941. For that, he had earned his first star, just three months before Pearl Harbor.

  The second star had come—unexpectedly—three months after, when George Marshall handed him the damn-near impossible job of figuring out how to cobble together an Allied fighting force of Yanks, Brits, Canadians, and Free French and develop plans of action for both the European and the Pacific theaters. But two stars didn’t count for much, not over here, where he was outranked by every goddamned man he was scheduled to meet with.

  Clark pulled out a chair across the table from him and sat down. “Got the schedule reorganized. Dover tomorrow morning. Saturday afternoon open—by that time, we’re going to need a break.” To the waiter, he said, “What he’s got,” nodding at Eisenhower’s plate.

  Eisenhower held up his cup. “And see if you can find us some hot coffee.”

  Clark put his elbows on the table. “Pretty fucking discouraging,” he muttered. “That meeting with Ambassador Winant yesterday. Chaney’s been sitting on his hands and the Brits think we’re wet behind the ears. Looks like trouble ahead for the poor SOB who’ll be running this show.”

  “You said it,” Eisenhower replied emphatically. When he got back to Washington, he intended to recommend Joe McNarney to replace Chaney, and Clark for command of the first corps to be sent to England. Chaney and most of his men would be sent home—on a slow boat with no escort, if Eisenhower were writing the orders.

  The American ambassador had laid out the difficulties. The big brass in Churchill’s war cabinet were opposed to Sledgehammer, the American plan to land troops on the coast of France, and to its alternative, an operation in Norway—both designed to draw the Germans into a western front and relieve the pressure on the Soviets. Instead, the Brits were pushing for a landing in North Africa, followed by a drive up through Italy, a stab, as Churchill put it, “into the soft underbelly of Europe.” Eisenhower was there in part to promote Sledgehammer and in part to measure the resistance to it.

  Right now, though, it looked like Chaney and his Observer Group were here for a picnic. Eisenhower, for whom the war had already become an around-the-clock assignment, had been irritated to see that the two dozen members of Chaney’s group wore civvies, worked a leisurely eight-hour day, and had forgotten everything they’d ever known about military discipline. No, irritated wasn’t the right word. He’d been mad as hell, and it had cost a tremendous effort to conceal his anger at Chaney for encouraging the disgraceful sloppiness. It wasn’t his command, and he wasn’t in charge here, so Eisenhower was biting his tongue. But he would make it clear to Marshall that the nest of U.S. lounge lizards had to be swept out before the British Chiefs of Staff would believe that America meant business.

  Breakfast over, Eisenhower looked at his watch, saw that it was 9:25, and pushed back his chair. “That driver better be out there,” he growled. He wasn’t used to women in uniform—the President had just last week signed the bill that created the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. The British drivers, he understood, were volunteers, which was commendable. But while Summersby was certainly decorative enough, she had been out to lunch yesterday when she should have been waiting for him in front of the embassy. He wasn’t expecting much today.

  But when he went outside, the Packard was parked at the curb and Summersby snapped to attention and opened the car door smartly. And although her salute left something to be desired, he learned over the next several days that she was unfailingly punctual and an exceptional driver, for which he was grateful. She knew where she was going and how to get there on time, which in itself was remarkable, since the Home Office, worried about the very real possibility of a German invasion, had long ago ordered the removal of every street sign and highway marker. She was fearless in the nightly blackouts and the notorious London fogs, navigating in conditions that Eisenhower wouldn’t have ridden a horse in. London had grown up in the Middle Ages before city planning was on anybody’s horizon, and the streets were a labyrinthine maze. He had heard that cabbies had to study for a couple of years before they could pass the license test—the Knowledge, it was called. Summersby seemed to have the Knowledge tucked into that pretty little head of hers. What’s more, she was impeccably uniformed and gloved, with her auburn hair neatly brushed back under her garrison cap, something that counted with Eisenhower, who tended to judge a soldier’s military discipline by the condition of his uniform.

  He was especially struck by something that happened after a frustrating session with Bernard Montgomery, a jaunty little prick with a swagger stick who dressed him down for lighting a cigarette during his briefing. As he got back in the car with Clark, he could feel the veins in his temples throbbing. He fired off a barrage of blazing curses that smoked the air.

  But when he looked up, he saw that Summersby was watching him in the rearview mirror—with a kind of comradely amusement, as if the two of them were sharing a private joke. He had the idea that she knew something about Montgomery and asked her, later, what it was. She told him that Monty was said to complain that the British Army was staffed by too many chaps who were too fat to be fit and smoked too much to be healthy. He liked to rattle off one of Kipling’s quatrains in support of his view:

  Nations have passed away and left no traces

  And History gives the naked cause of it,

  One single, simple reason in all cases:

  They fell because their peoples were not fit.

  Her recitation didn’t endear Monty to Eisenhower, but as he lit another cigarette, he was glad to better understand the man.

  In fact, as one day followed another in a grueling parade of stuffy officials, airless, wi
ndowless offices, and a frustrating lack of cooperation, Eisenhower grew to appreciate Miss Summersby’s observant understanding of the British—who were not her countrymen, she was quick to point out.

  “Irish,” she said, in answer to his question. “Near Skibbereen, in County Cork.” He could hear the attractive burr in her throaty voice. But she had lived and worked in England for some fifteen years. She had an insider’s knowledge and an outsider’s perspective at the same time, with the advantages of both.

  The day she drove him and Clark to inspect the coastal defenses at Dover was a case in point. When he asked, she said that the London-Dover highway was part of the area known as Bomb Alley, and pointed out some of the hundreds of ruined buildings.

  “It earned the name during the Blitz,” she said, and Eisenhower caught her glance in the mirror. “When the German Heinkels and Junkers had the RAF on their tails and were in a hurry to get home, they dumped their bombs along this road.”

  Suddenly curious, Eisenhower leaned forward. “And you? What were you doing during the Blitz?”

  She slowed for a cyclist in the lane ahead of them, a tow-headed boy with a basket of garden vegetables lashed on the back of his rusty bicycle. Over her shoulder, she replied, “I was an ambulance driver in the East End, down by the docks. My sister Evie, too. We drove makeshift vehicles—Ford V-8s with the rear end chopped down so there was room for four stretchers and a rider. Twenty-four hours on, twenty-four off. Bombs every night, fire and ruined buildings and dead people everywhere.” She picked up speed again. “Bad time, the Blitz,” she added in a matter-of-fact voice. “My mum was a bomb spotter. Still is, since we never know when the bombs will be back.”