Warburg in Rome Read Online Free

waves of men hurling themselves against fire-spewing bunkers. Fortress Europe stormed at last, the great drama unfolding since dawn today.
    During the fuel stop at an outcropping of rock in the Azores only hours ago, Warburg and the dozen others had clustered around the shortwave at Base Ops—a thrown-together canvas shanty on the edge of the steel-mats airstrip that stretched pretty much across the entire island. “The President, the President!” a gas jockey had yelled at concert pitch, and sure enough. Men huddled and hushed. Once the radio static cleared, the unmistakable patrician vowels floated in upon the crackling air, America’s most familiar voice, with its most reassuring cadence. “Last night,” FDR began, “when I spoke with you about the fall of Rome . . .”
    The fall of Rome had been everything to those particular listeners, until then the essence of their concentration, anticipation, dread, and hope. Now they were being told that Rome was mere prelude, an overture to the music that mattered. “. . . I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our Allies were crossing the Channel in another and greater operation.” Greater than Mark Clark’s liberation of the Eternal City, the first Axis capital to fall to the Allies? When Fifth Army tanks had rolled onto the tarmac of Ciampino Airport, Warburg’s plane had taken off from Fort Dix field, the wheels-up he and presumably everyone else on board had awaited for weeks. In the Azores, they had still been two thousand miles shy of Rome, yet—so the President implied—the pages of history were turning already. The real operation was far to the north. Bloody Italy had always been a feint.
    “It has come to pass with success thus far. And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer.” Ahem s and shuffling, even in the radio shack. Hats came off. The President’s tone slipped into a chute of the properly lugubrious. “Almighty God: our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor . . .” Warburg’s gaze went involuntarily to the next man, a bald sergeant whose freshly bared head was bowed, his eyes closed, lips moving. To Warburg, the President’s pieties rolled on in packages, hardly registering.
    But then a phrase leapt out of the sanctimony as Roosevelt said, “Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies . . .” Arrogancies? Was that a word? Racial arrogancies? Warburg squeezed closer to hear what this could be, but Roosevelt had slid smoothly into the slot of his most solemn petition. “Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.”
    Arrogancies. Racial arrogancies. These hours later, the phrase was still hovering in Warburg’s mind. Wrapped in a blanket against the freezing altitude, he now sat on the narrow metal bench that ran along one wall of the stripped-down fuselage. The C-54 Skymaster, once reconfigured for cargo, was carrying passengers again, but apparently as ballast, the men distributed so as to keep the craft in balance. No matter who they were—brass, civilian VIPs, seat-of-government functionaries—the cargo was what mattered. In addition to the twelve or fifteen figures harnessed, like Warburg, on the twin benches, the plane held pallets of sacks and boxes stacked to the ceiling, running fore to aft and stamped USA QM. Cartons of C rations, evaporated milk, flour—thirty thousand pounds of Quartermaster supply, a first gesture of relief for starving Rome. The plane’s windows were blacked out, with the only light coming from three yellow-hued naked bulbs hung at intervals and filling the cramped space with eerie shadows that, early on, had made Warburg think of Plato’s cave.
    The starboard passengers were entirely cut off by the wall of cargo from those on the larboard bench. On Warburg’s left, a man had been steadily hunched over a book, as if there were light enough to read.