Free The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] by David L. Robbins

Winston and his cigars. Big ostentatious ones, which the Prime Minister has trouble closing his lips over. He talks without taking them out, making his scratchy, constant voice even more strident. Roosevelt likes Winston Churchill, admires his flights of Victorian rhetoric. He’s sorry he has to make one of the most extraordinary men of history, leader of one of the world’s great and courageous nations, look so small.
     
    The President spreads both hands over his legs, squeezes powerful fingers over the deadened thighs. He looks at Harry’s wraith wrists swinging while the man walks away, the flesh pasty on the back of his friend’s neck. Harry, who’s been trying to die for years now.
     
    Roosevelt thinks about the spell that came over him an hour ago in front of Maloney. Exhaustion. Confusion. Goddammit.
     
    Roosevelt swallows a bilious tang, a fear. He lights his cigarette to chase the taste. After one puff he snuffs the cigarette.
     
    Harry and me, Winston and Joe. America. England. This whole planet of men and nations. Our peace will be costly. But it’s coming. We’ll all birth it together.
     
    He sits back and lowers his eyelids. One thing about the White House, it does not disappear when you close your eyes. He feels the Oval Office nudge him, history like Iago in his ear whispers, “Open your eyes, Franklin.”
     
    He complies. The old dead presidents of the room tell him.
     
    They speak with dozens of voices.
     
    Don’t ever be sorry. For anything you do as President.
     
    We know what we’re talking about, son.
     
    History is not made by men who are sorry.
     
    ~ * ~
     
    ----
     
     
    January 11, 1945, 1330 hours
    SHAEF headquarters
    Reims, France
     
     
    if you take the face of every man, woman, and child of kansas and you blend them all together, you will get the face of General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
     
    Bandy has snapped a hundred photos of the General for Life. In every one, Bandy captures the chin of a stolid farm lad, the eyes of a veteran plainsman, the soft cheeks and skin of the dairymaid, the crinkles of a girl, the doll hair of a tyke. Somehow, when Bandy releases the shutter, Ike never has his eyes closed, his mouth askew, or his hat cockeyed. He is composed when he’s angry, balanced when hurried, firm when sweet. He is the erect American everyman from Abilene.
     
    Bandy stands near the door and waits. He’s in a large octagonal room that used to be a banquet hall in this former technical school for boys. The crystal chandelier dangling overhead must weigh a ton. War maps festoon every inch of wall and table. Wax pencil arrows in black, red, blue, and green crosshatch them all, a crazy quilt of troops and machines on the move, eyeing each other across Europe, antagonistic colors.
     
    Female staffers operate banks of telephone connections, plugging and unplugging. Young men in crisp olive drab uniforms stride left and right shuttling sheaves of paper to someplace or another, where Bandy supposes they drop one and pick up a replacement. Other bright young men lean over the maps, drawing, erasing, measuring life and death in crayon. Every sound in the big room and the other rooms down the hall makes the same amount of noise, no one endeavor in here stands out. SHAEF, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, hums. Bandy watches Eisenhower in the center of it all, chain-smoking Camels. The General points, pats young men on backs, talks into phones, ponders over spread-out charts, all the while emitting smoke.
     
    Bandy left home three days after New Year’s. Life magazine sent a car up from Memphis to ferry him to an air base for a flight to Norfolk, where he boarded a Navy supply ship to London, then a quick flight to Paris, a car to Reims. The trip took six days. He wrote no letters to Victoria on the voyage, they didn’t part the best of friends. She’ll be all right, Bandy thinks. She always has been. This time is no different.
     
    She doesn’t understand, is