Umnak Island, 1 October 1944, letter 2 -- "I'm drained dry of news"

My darling…

John Hersey, whose writing I liked in “Into the Valley” but whose hyper-simplicity annoyed you, has pulled a Steinbeck stunt in “A Bell for Adano,” which I am reading now. Here it is:

Tomasino’s wife came in from the kitchen with a platter of torrone and saved the day. She must have weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. When she put the candy down she raised her two arms, turned to the Major and shouted: ‘My God! My God!’ She pronounced it as though it were spelled G-u-d, and all her fatness shook with laughing. Everyone else except Tomasino had to laugh at her. Giuseppe jumped to his feet and introduced the Major to Tomasino’s wife. Her name was Rosa.

I have almost finished the book – it is only a three hour stint to go through it and while it is very good, I think Hersey is a better reporter than a novelist. His extreme simplicity, effective as it seems to me to be in conveying information, tends a bit toward monotony in presenting a picture of ideas and the story of a way of life. 

Yesterday I finished reading Harold Lamb’s life of Genghis Khan. It is strange how the books I have picked up since coming to the Aleutians have all, in some way, been linked to each other. And with our past. I took out Genghis Kahn because I wanted to find out more about the early days in Siberia, having become interested in them through Langyel’s book and the story of the Czech Eskimo. I found out much of what I wanted, but also picked up background on the Columbus voyages (which I had read about last month) and, most interesting, the migrations of the early Slavs and Mongols into Turkey and the Danube delta.

Almost without realizing what I was reading I came to this paragraph about the Mongol drive in Hungary:

Meanwhile Bela (the Hungarian king) began to cross the Danube with his host—Magyars, Croats and Germans, with the French Templars who had been posted in Hungary. A hundred thousand in all. The Mongols retreated slowly before them at a hand pace. The invasion leaders, Batu, Subotai, Mangu—conquerer of Kiev—had left the army and were inspecting the site chosen for the battle. This was the plain of Mohi, hemmed in on four sides, by the river Sayo, by the vine-clad hills of Tokay, by dark woods and the great hills of Lomnitz.

…

Battle of Mohacs: The Europeans looked good, but they lost

The battle was stubborn and unbroken until near midday. Then Subotai finished his flank movement, and appeared behind Bela’s array. The Mongols charged in, broke the Hungarians. Like the Teutonic Knights at Liegnitz, the Templars died to a man on the field.

Reading it I thought first only of the parallels to the current war, of the radio which was even as I read announcing that the Russian army had broken over the Danube north and south of the Iron Gates. But then I thought of the plain of Mohi…”on the plain of Mohi” and remembered: 

 

Mohacs,  hot in the afternoon sun, the white buildings blank-eyed with grey shutters drawn, the long wait for officials to return our deposition on the kayak, the walk uptown after ice cream and the policeman’s objection to your sunsuit, the little store by the landing where I bought a poor knife for a nickel, the other faltbooters on their way to Turkey and the hard, hot paddle after them to steal a tow from the river barge, the little man who had the book he wanted me to translate for him, and the muddy landing at the Yugoslav customs, the bad moment while the Romur [all of Murray and Rosa’s succession of kayaks were named Romur] rocked crazily and the other canoes flipped, one by one. The camp on the shore. And the paddle on, alone, which ended in the thunderstorm and the dash for shelter in the little farmhouse and the strange, electric night on the porch floor with lightning lacing the river and the roomer shifting from foot to foot on the chair above us. 

There was a monument to that battle in Mohacs. I don’t remember it well—it seems to me it was an obelisk—but I remember looking at it and thinking how incongruous was the idea of war and such a pleasant, sleepy, do-nothing river town.

                                             

There is very little to write about, my sweet, except my reading. I stayed up late this morning, reading and listening to the football games from home and thinking about Seattle and football weather.

Our weather is footballish now, though much more like late November than early October. The wind comes strong and cold and gusty, and the sky is much overcast. There is less rain than I had expected, and our mountain, which a week ago was traced with snow and looked like a steel etching, is black again. Except that the wind is so strong that it makes walking very tiring, the weather is not disagreeable. 

Our four boys left today, and the hut is extremely quiet. Tim was asleep when the word came he was to be ready to take off in twenty minutes and--you won’t believe this—he complained bitterly about being rushed all the time he was dressing. And his final words as he staggered out of the hut carrying his barracks bag which has been packed for six days now was, “You’d think they’d give a guy a little notice.”

That does it, my sweet. I’m drained dry of news and can’t even think of anything more to plagiarize. I’ll go back to working on my screwy short story which at present seems unfunny to me. I should finish it within a day. If you get a chance, go to one of the football games at the Stadium for me.  …

 M

The Honeymooners, July 9, 1939

Murray sent accounts of their honeymoon kayak trip down the Danube to the Tacoma News Tribune.
At this point, less than two months before Germany invaded Poland, the Morgans still couldn't believe there would be a war any time soon, and the Trib had not yet learned to spell Rosa's name.

I've been looking through William Shirer's Berlin Diary for a counterpoint to Murray and Rosa's impressions. He was older -- 35 -- probably wiser and certainly much better connected in Europe, having lived there since 1925. On a trip back to the U.S. in early July, he was frustrated by the lack of urgency among Americans about the situation in Europe:

July 3 -- The trouble is everyone here knows all the answers. They know there will be no war. I wish I knew it. But I think there will be war unless Germany backs down, and I'm not certain at all she will ... Congress here in a hopeless muddle. Dominated by the Ham Fishes, Borahs, Hiram Johnsons, who stand for no foreign policy at all, it insists on maintaining the embargo on arms as if it were immaterial to this Republic who wins a war between the western democracies and the Axis.

July 4 -- Hans Kaltenborn so sure there will be no war, he is sending his son off on his honeymoon to the Mediterranean, he tells me tonight.

Murray to Henry Victor Morgan, Bulgaria and Romania, 11 August 1939

Dear Dad:

It’s a long way back up the Danube to the little spot on the bank where I sat and watched the Bulgarian fishermen as I typed my last letter to you, but I'm going to try to make it up now. ...

...

The Bulgarians are the poorest and the unluckiest people in the Balkans. They have been particularly unsuccessful in war, and every time they attempt to get back some of their old territory they lose another slice from the ever-diminishing core that is left. The seeds of their territorial discontent carefully nurtured by Germany, the Bulgarians are now particularly strenuous in their demands that Dorbrudja be returned to them by Roumania who grabbed it at the close of the second Balkan War, which preceded by a year or two the World War. It is typical of the dilemma which Bulgaria finds herself in that her friend Germany is also her greatest potential enemy. The fact that all Bulgarians who consider the matter realize this does not make it any easier to decide what to do.

...

Before 1933 Germany bought about a quarter of Bulgaria's produce. Since 1935 she has taken more than half of it. The rub is this. Germany is in a position to ruin Bulgaria's economy simply by refusing for one year to buy Bulgarian goods. Because she has threatened to do this, Germany can dictate to Bulgaria's policy-forming officials. ... But the thinking about such things is done by city folk. Plodding ever in the background of the country are the farmers, dirt-poor tillers of poor dirt. All day they work in their tiny fields, many of them without the aid of draft animals, and the women often toil far into the night making baskets and pots and dishes for the markets of Sofia as well as dresses for themselves and suits for the men. These hardworking, poverty ridden men and women are Bulgaria. 

Twelve days ago we left the Romur lying beside the Roumanian navy at Girgiu, expecting to be back to see it in not more than five days. We still hope to get back to the river tomorrow, but one can never tell what will happen to plans in this country. We spent most of the morning we arrived in Girgiu trying to get registered with the police, and then we began to worry about where we could leave our boat while we took the two-hour rain ride to Bucharest. Eventually the Commander of the Roumanian Armed Forces on the Danube came up to say that we could moor the Romur by the side of a Roumanian warship, where the sailors would see that nothing happened to it. The warship turned out to be an overgrown tug with a few armored plates and a twenty-two with elephantiasis mounted forward, but the offer was more than willingly accepted.

Since no train left till late afternoon, the commander decided he ought to entertain us. I don't know whether he realized the humor of it, but he took us on a boat ride on the Danube. We went putting along in an outboard motorboat while all the soldiers along the shore saluted. It made us feel quite important. They don't salute the Romur, for some strange reason. We finally putt-putted up to a swimming beach and spent the afternoon drinking lemonades and trying to converse with the Commander in mongrel German-French.

...

Bucharest, though historically fairly old, is really a mushroom city. It has more than quadrupled in size since the World War, and for the most part it has done a good job architecturally of its expansion. The tall buildings are well laid out and there seems to be no real problem of congestion, even at rush hours. 

Murray and Rosa were taken under the wing of an Embassy undersecretary who took them out dinner and a nightclub, took them home for lunch the next day, and introduced them to several people in Bucharest.  

Rosa in her Romanian embroidered blouse

 ...Later in the day we went to the National Bureau of Tourism to look up a fellow named Dico Maxim. D.D. Dimancescu had given us an introduction to him, but for some reason we had expected Maxim to turn out to be a pompous puffy-pants. Instead Dico was an athletic young fellow of 27, a sportsman, aviator, journalist who looked like a cross between Gary Cooper and Noel Coward. Dico, who soon become "Dick," invited us to spend the rest of the afternoon at his yacht club, and also broke the pleasant news that Dimancescu was in town for a few days. 

Dico spoke pretty good English, and we asked him about it. Not long ago, he told us, a young American girl from Boston was in Bucharest and she offered to teach him the language. In two months of intensive instruction he became almost letter perfect. He also became divorced.

Clare Boothe Luce, 1937, photo by Carl Van Vechten

... In the evening Dimancescu drove up with a couple of other Americans who had flown into town, including Clare Booth, the author of "The Women," one of the most successful plays in recent years in America. I sat next to her at dinner ... [where she entertained him with racist stories about a "buck negro" and a "big strapping Jew" who became the main character in her play "A Margin for Error."]

It was nearly one when the dinner was over, and it must have been after five when Dico drove us up to the Ambassador Hotel. I went to bed and stayed there for three days, running a fever ... We called a doctor the second day and he decided I had infected bowels and he gave me some pills, but I really think it was sleep I needed. Anyway I got plenty of it, and now I feel strong as an ox again.

There is another kid from the University of Washington in town here. He had found a little Hungarian pension just down the street a couple of blocks were we could both live and eat three meals a day for a combined total of eighty cents.

A different September 11: 1939, Bucharest, Romania -- "You had better get out of here"

Murray and Rosa got married March 5, 1939 and left for Europe on a freighter that same day. He was 23, she was 20. Their plan was to buy a kayak, learn how to paddle it, and take it down the Danube to the Black Sea. They almost made it. This letter to Murray's childhood best friend Frank Sadler describes the end of the river trip.

Dear Frank,

The Roumanians have persuaded us to discontinue our paddle to the Black Sea, but they had to toss Rosa and me in jail yesterday to put the clincher on their argument.

For the last week Rosa and I had been debating whether we should call off the paddle, fold up our boat, and start at once for home. The last 400 kilometers of the Danube are very slow and abound with mosquitoes, but we didn’t even figure that in our decision to quit. Slow water and biters wouldn’t be enough to cause us to stop when we are so near to our real destination. Our new worries rose from the war.

A few days ago I asked a Roumanian official what he thought of our going down the river now that the war had started.

I don't know who the woman in the middle is.

“The Bulgarian border patrol would probably shoot you,” he replied.

Not exactly encouraged, I asked one of our friends at the American Legation what he thought.

“Listen,” he said, “The Roumanians are nice people, but the boys they have watching over the river are young and excitable. They’re just as likely to shoot first and ask any questions that come to their minds later. Besides it isn’t going to be long before all hell breaks loose in this section and you had better get out of here while there are still some frontiers open.”

That made a lot of sense to us, but we still wanted to paddle that last 400 kilometers. When we took the train for Giurgiu yesterday, Rosa and I still hadn’t reached a definite decision. We were going to see how we felt when we saw the boat. Our passport was at the Ministry of Propaganda getting stamped with the official exit visa and our arrangements for tickets home are nearly complete, so we thought we might be able to spare five days and dash down the river to Vilkov, the Black Sea port.

When we had landed at Giurgiu we had not counted on the cheapness of living in Roumania or the many attractions of Bucharest and its hinterland. We had told the commandant of the port that we would be back in three or four days, and he had given us permission to leave our faltboat beside his flagship—an armed tug which was used for river patrol duty. That was five weeks ago.

The train from Bucharest goes only as far as the city of Giurgiu. The port, which is government property, lies about three miles away. Rosa and I hired a droshky and told the driver to take us to the commandant’s office. We got as far as the bridge which crosses a small tributary of the Danube, just below the quays of the port, when our troubles started.

One of the soldiers on guard at the bridge wanted to see our passports. I told him in English, French, German, and pig-Latin that our passport was in Bucharest at the office of the Ministry of Propaganda being stamped with an exit visa. He was both polite and firm. We must go back to police headquarters in the city. He came with us.

At police headquarters we were allowed to cool our heels in an anteroom for about half an hour before being ushered into a tiny office and the presence of an official in a worn khaki uniform which would have looked better with a little washing. So would the official. We were told he could speak French, but someone had been fooling him—or maybe we were wrong. Anyway, it didn’t sound like French to us.

Murray's father and Rosa's mother were back in Tacoma, waiting for news.

 

 

 

Our inability to understand him must have looked suspicious to the little functionary. He glared for awhile, began to shout, and finally, when I thought that he would burst or pop an eye out of its socket, he jumped up and left the room.

 

Another long wait, and then we were led into the office of the local big shot. I don’t know his position, but he was either chief of police or representative  of the federal  government for the district. He spoke both French and German and we had no trouble making him understand us.

I explained that we had a boat down by the river, that we wanted to take it away, and that our passport was in Bucharest. I suggested that he telephone either the Ministry of Propaganda in Bucharest or the Commandant of the River Police at the port. Either could identify us, I pointed out. He replied that he regretted that we had been subject to delay, but that we would be allowed to go as soon as he had made the necessary

The kids are all right.

telephone calls. It was all smiles and thanks as we bowed ourselves out. A matter of minutes, we thought. 

The guard led us back to another section of the building and put us in a little room with two narrow benches down the side and a heavy desk nailed to the floor in one corner. The window was barred. There were several Roumanians sitting on the benches, but none of them paid any attention to us. We sat down to wait. An hour later we were still waiting. 

I began to feel restless and irritated. I opened the door and walked down the hall toward the big shot’s office to see if I could stir him into action. I was intercepted by my friend in the khaki uniform and steered back to my little room, where Rosa and I waited for another half hour. Then she went foraying through the building, but the guard led her right back. We were both beginning to get sore. Another hour and no news. It was late and our plans for the day were completely disrupted. Mad clear through I started down the hall again.

My khaki uniformed pal met me about ten steps from the door of our room, grabbed my arm and started to pull me back. I didn’t feel like being led, and he annoyed me anyway. I yanked my arm free. He grabbed at it again.

“Just a minute,” I growled at him. “You’re pushing around an American citizen, and you’re going to get your nose smeared all over your dirty face in about another ten seconds.”

He didn’t understand the words, of course, but the tone must have given him a pretty good idea of what I was driving at. He flared right back at me, shouted Roumanian some more, pointed back to the cell.

All at once it clicked. I hadn’t realized before that we were really prisoners. 

“OK,” I said, deciding that I had better take it easy. “I’ll go back, but you telephone Bucharest.” I repeated Bucharest about five times and made the motions of telephoning. He looked as stupid as ever. Then I turned around and started back to the cell. Evidently feeling that he had me on the run, the dirty-faced dope made a lunge for my arm.

That was one too many. I let him have it with my elbow in his stomach and he grunted. By the time he straightened up I was in the doorway and facing him. He took a couple of steps toward me, so I cocked my right and started jiggling my left around a la Freddie Steele. He moved one step closer and I was all set to let him have a right when I saw a soldier coming down the passage. Roumanian bayonets are 18 inches long, so I decided to sit down. My pal slammed the door.

About an hour later he came back and looked in. I was foxy this time. Instead of making any passes at him, I whipped out my pen and notebook, walked over to him, and bending quite close looked at the numbers on his uniform collar. Then I wrote the figure down in the notebook.

It worked. He decided maybe I was someone important. With a dazed look in his eyes he clicked the door shut and we could hear him hurrying down the hall. In a minute or two he returned to show us back into the big shot’s room. I decided to follow through on the act. I raved and ranted in English for about ten minutes, and finally subsided into German and French to tell the braided boy behind the desk just what I thought of officials in general, him in particular, and nincompoops as a class. I larded my talk with enough references to America and President Roosevelt to make him think that he must have at least the vice-president in his office.

It was only half effective. I think I convinced him that he had made a mistake, but I didn’t make him believe that he should make an exception. He had to check up some more. The commandant of the port, he said, had been transferred. The Harbormaster had no record of us. He hadn’t phoned Bucharest. We would have to spend the night in the jail and then we would be released after he had phoned Bucharest in the morning.

At that, I went into my song and dance again. We were not spending a night in jail. I called upon the Greek Gods, the Supreme Court, the Constitution and the Marines. I screamed and yelled and beat my chest like Tarzan calling his apes. Finally he gave up.

“You may stay at the hotel,” he said. “You may phone Bucharest yourselves tonight and see if you can get one of your friends to identify you.”

With that I subsided. It was too late to fold up the kayak, so we might as well stay. We were given a guard to go to the hotel with us. On the way we passed a telephone station and put through a call to our best friend in the propaganda department. This official at once asked to speak to our guard. We took great delight in watching him reel under a tremendous verbal attack at long range. By the time that conversation was over, we were persons of importance in Giurgiu. We weren’t even guarded at the hotel room, and this morning we were escorted to the river where we found the Romur intact.

Our troubles had decided us that we’d never get to the Black Sea in the five days we have to spare, so we folded up the kayak and came back to Bucharest. We expect to start home on the fifteenth.

As ever,

Murray