Free The Golden Age by Gore Vidal Page B

perilous voyage home.
    Caroline was now going through her in-box. The world may be afire, but social Washington never stopped its formal round as people arranged themselves each day in different houses to scheme, to pass on information, to advance who knew what astonishing causes. There was a telegram from Tim. He was in New York, cutting his film. He had decided “War or Peace?” was too portentous a title. What should he call it?
    “Where are the Italians in all this?” Harold asked the question that everyone was now asking. Mussolini had not gone, as expected, to the aid of his Berlin ally.
    “Don’t they always stay out until they know who is going to win? They are very sensible that way.” Caroline tried to recall exactly what it was that Italy had done in the Great War to get onto the winning side.
    “That’s what the British say about us.”
    “John Foster is endlessly tactless.”
    “That’s why they made him a diplomat. Did you hear what Lord Lothian told the press yesterday?”
    Caroline quite liked the unmistakably attractive if eccentric ambassador. “He said what they all say. England needs ships, planes, bullets but not men, which of course England does, particularly now.”
    Harold shook his head. “No. He said that at the press conference, the official one. Later, he held a second press conference which he began with ‘Well, boys, Britain’s broke. It’s your dollars we want.’ ”
    Blaise had shown Caroline a secret report from the American Treasury to the effect that Britain had lost one-fourth of its wealth and so could not even pay the interest on old loans from the United States; presently, England would default. If that were to happen …
    Blaise entered the room. “Chamberlain’s out. The King has sent for Winston.”
    Harold left the room.
    “Not Halifax?” Ever since the recent British military fiasco in Norway, Prime Minister Chamberlain’s days had been numbered. Caroline thought that he should have gone after the Munich meeting where he had failed to “appease” Hitler, with his brisk businesslike sellout of Czechoslovakia. As Chamberlain left the Munich Conference, wielding his umbrella like a shepherd’s crook for the cameras, Hitler was said to have said, “If that old fool ever comes back here, I’m going to kick him down the stairs and jump up and down on his stomach in front of the Pathé news camera.” From the beginning of Hitler’s career, Caroline had noted with professional eye what a remarkable screen actor he was; certainly, for a professional rabble-rouser he had a surprising range of effects, including such delicate rhetorical instruments asirony and even not-so-bad jokes. Unfortunately, the West had not taken him seriously until too late. Only Blum had seen the coming danger, but the French were not a people who took well to being told anything that they did not already know. Caroline had watched the Bastille Day parade of 1939 from a friend’s Paris flat, and though it was made colorful by Moroccan and Senegalese troops, there were no latest-model tanks, only cavalrymen with curved sabers, guarding the open car in which the Premier, Daladier, glumly rode, unaware that in less than a year’s time Hitler himself would be able to drive through the streets of Paris. Caroline wished that she had had a premonition of things to come. But she had not been able to imagine the unimaginable. Besides, as of May 10, 1940, Paris was not yet occupied. A miracle could still light up the skies.
    “The government has left Paris.” Blaise was reading her mind. “No, I don’t know where your friend Blum is. We can’t even find the Premier. Last we heard from our man in Paris he was sticking close to the fleeing government, which means we’ve lost him, too, for the moment.” Blaise crossed to the map. Found a dot to the northwest of Paris, “Rennes? Is that where they are? The Associated Press is helpless. Hopeless.”
    Caroline then tried to ring