War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk Page A

through narrow stifling hot streets, thronged with Asiatics of all ages and skin shades: some in native dress, some dressed Western style, some rich-looking and fat, some bony and naked but for rags. Sweet, spicy, and disgusting smells drifted turn by turn into the car windows. Brightly colored shop signs in strange alphabets lined the streets.
    When the car emerged on a boulevard, the scene metamorphosed: broad avenues, green palm-lined parks, signs in English, tall buildings; glimpses of a waterfront, and gusts of refreshing sea breeze; dark-faced, white-gloved Bobbies directing traffic; a British seaport city, burning in un-British heat, its pavements crowded with colored faces. At the big ramshackle Raffles Hotel Rule dropped their bags. A navy launch took them from a steel and concrete pier, roofed with high arches, out to a gaudily camouflaged battleship moored to a buoy. Helped by Rule, clutching her flimsy skirt, Pamela climbed the accommodation ladder. Behind her Tudsbury painfully grunted.
    “Oho!” she said as she set foot on deck. “The British! I wondered where they were.”
    “Everybody’s here that matters,” said Rule.
    Under a brown awning the laughing, chattering guests were standingaround drinking cocktails, or waiting in a reception line that stretched to the sunlit forecastle. The men wore white linen suits or bright-hued blazers, the women, flowery print dresses fluttering in the breeze. All the faces were white, unless the owner of the face carried a tray. Four long guns painted in garish patches like snakeskin projected beyond the awning.
    “Mr. Tudsbury?” said a young officer at the gangway. “The admiral’s compliments, sir. Please follow me.”
    They went to the head of the line. The admiral, a surprisingly small man with crusted gold shoulder marks on his white uniform, held out a small scrubbed hand. “Frightfully pleased. Very keen on your broadcasts.”
    He presented them to several stiff old men lined up beside him. Their sharply tailored tropical uniforms showed knobby gray-haired knees and elbows; their military titles were majestic, the highest brass in Singapore. The roar of airplanes interrupted the pleasantries; wave upon wave coming in low from seaward, scarcely clearing the
Prince of Wales’s
masts, then zooming over the waterfront. Distant guns boomed. Beyond the city, clouds of white smoke puffed up against the blue sky. Tudsbury shouted to the admiral, “Would those be our famous coastal guns?”
    “Just so. Heaviest calibre in the world. Jolly good marksmanship, my target-towing ships report. Approaching Singapore in anger from the sea
not
advisable!”
    “I’d like to visit those guns.”
    “It will be arranged.”
    All this was a series of yells through the racket of the air show. Tudsbury gestured upward. “And these planes?”
    A tall grayhead in RAF uniform, standing next to the admiral, flashed pride from filmy wrinkled eyes. “Vildebeest and Blenheim bombers leading the pack. The fighters are American Buffaloes. Can’t touch our Spitfires, but dashed good, better than what the Japs have got.”
    “How do you know that, sir?”
    “Oh, Jap planes have fallen in China, you know.” The gray eyebrows arched in cunning. “We have the book on them. Second-rate, rather.”
    Rule and Pamela stood at the rail amid a crowd of beaming British, watching the planes. He picked drinks off a tray passed by a Chinese boy. “God, Pam, your father does have a way with the brass. That’s Air Chief Marshal Brooke-Popham talking to him. Boss of the whole theatre, Commander-in-Chief, Far East. They’re chatting like old school chums.”
    “Well, everyone wants a good press.”
    “Yes, and they know he’s got the popular touch, don’t they? All acid and disenchanted in tone, yet in the end it comes out straight Rudyard Kipling, every time. For God and for Empire, eh, Pam?”
    “Anything wrong with that?”
    “Why, it’s pure gold. False as hell to the future, but why