The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [140]
STAMPER IS FINAL STORY, BLAZE OF GLORY, ALL THAT.
"Quick, shoot this off to them." Ben was grabbing for the notepad.
"You want me to break in on a priority message from Washington?"
"You heard me." He jotted the words big and bold and handed them to the reluctant clerk. Where is STAMPER, ANYWAY?
STAMPER STATIONED WITH NEW ACK-ACK UNIT AT HQ EUROPEAN THEATER. VITAL DRAMATIC STORY THERE.
Ben paused over that. Supreme headquarters where the invasion of Europe had been planned and carried out was in England. England meant London, and every correspondent from Ernie Pyle to Hemingway had a soft spot for London and the British, so dauntless under the bombing of the Luftwaffe in the first years of the war. He had learned to love the old city himself in his early stint of reporting there, and now the Luftwaffe bombers had been driven from the sky over Great Britain and even the rocket buzz bomb attacks were reported to have dropped off sharply. There was second allure in what Tepee Weepy was proposing; while he could not have put a name to her, Mnemosyne once more was gliding forth from the eternal grove with that double handful of tantalizing choice. If the Allied forces took Berlin by the end of the year, as everyone was saying could happen, London would be a fine place to write the one thing guaranteed to preserve Jake and Moxie and himself, the story that the war itself was dead. Ben cast his lot. I'M LISTENING.
AS WE WERE SAYING, the TPWP teletype implacably resumed. STAMPER A SHORT-TERMER NOW IN ACK-ACK DUTY. HE WILL BE MUSTERED OUT WITH COMMENDATIONS AND APPROPRIATE CEREMONY, OVER THERE, THEN BRING HIM HOME AS HERO. EISMAN TO BE HERO BY THEN TOO, LONGEST-SERVING ATC PILOT ON ALASKA RUN, ALSO WILL BE MUSTERED OUT. SATISFIED?
It was a better bargain than he'd thought he could get: Jake would not be going to Europe, would not be at risk from Nazi flak and concentration camp. With a sense of relief, he sent back: FEELING BETTER ALL THE TIME.
GLAD CURE IS TAKING HOLD. WIND UP AFFAIRS AT EAST BASE NEXT FEW WEEKS. EARLY DECEMBER YOU WILL PROCEED FORTHWITH TO—
At first he thought the clerk at the Tepee Weepy end had garbled together some wrong keys in typing the ultimate word. Then he still had to think for a moment where Antwerp was.
17
Belgium had been a main road in two world wars, Ben knew that much, every schoolkid knew that much. It was notoriously easy for the Kaiser's army in 1914 and the Führer's in 1940 to rumble into the supposedly neutral low country where the port of Antwerp faced out alluringly into the entire maritime world. Back to Napoleon and Wellington, back greatly farther than that in the centuries-long swash of war as European monarchies contended for that foothold on the North Sea, the Belgians' lot had been to prosper cautiously during intervals of peace and to suffer foreign occupation as soon as the cannons were fired. Now, glory be to the dazed and half-starved little country, the four-year Nazi grip on Belgium had been wrenched free by a surprise British offensive after the D-Day landings. "Surprise" scarcely said it; Field Marshal Montgomery's tanks thrust north out of Normandy with such astounding rapidity that German forces emptied out of Belgian cities in mad haste. In particular, they unwisely abandoned Antwerp without taking time to sabotage the strategic waterfront along the River Scheldt and its mouth into the North Sea. There it sat, the prize port with its nicely intact docks and locks and cranes, and the Allied high command lost no time in turning Antwerp's dockland into the supply conduit for the final push on into Germany. Which, Ben could see, meant defending Antwerp against air raids as the Germans might seek to make up for their error of hasty evacuation. Which, also as far as he could see, meant duty as usual for anti-aircraft batteries such as Moxie Stamper's. Keep your damn head down for a few weeks more, Mox, and we're home free.
Days were hectic, nights were forlorn, as he readied to leave for Europe. There was a last quick visit home for Thanksgiving,