The War That Came Early: West and East Read online

  “Not like that,” Naumann said. “You ought to sew a yellow star on the front of your outfit.” He laughed raucously.

  “Oh, fuck off,” Stoss said without much rancor. “So I had the operation when I was a kid. So what? Goddamn sheenies aren’t the only ones who do, you know.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Naumann didn’t push it any more. Sergeant or not, he might have had a fight on his hands if he had. Teasing somebody about looking like a Jew was one thing. Acting as if you really thought he was one was something else again—something that went way over the line.

  Theo had known Adi was circumcised, too. You couldn’t very well not know something like that, not when the two of you were part of the same panzer crew. He wasn’t going to say anything about it, though. Sometimes—often—the best thing you could say was nothing. That was how it looked to him, anyhow. If Heinz thought otherwise … Well, Heinz was a sergeant. Sergeants got all kinds of funny ideas.

  The other thing was, Theo wouldn’t have wanted Adi Stoss pissed off at him. If Adi got mad, he was liable to go and rupture your spleen first, then feel bad about it afterwards. Theo wouldn’t have wanted to take him on. Heinz Naumann thought he was a tough guy. He’d made that plain. If he thought he was tougher than his driver, he needed to think again.

  They all started splashing one another and wrestling in the stream, skylarking like a bunch of schoolboys. Maybe by chance, maybe not, Adi held Naumann under water for a very long time. No, Theo wasn’t surprised the sergeant couldn’t break Stoss’ hold. His struggles were beginning to weaken when Adi finally let him go.

  “Jesus!” Naumann said, gulping in air till he went from a dusky red-purple back to pink. “You trying to drown me, asshole?”

  “Sorry, Sergeant.” Stoss sounded so sincere, he might have meant it. “I didn’t know you’d turned quite that color.”

  “I thought I’d have to grow fins,” Heinz said. “Save that shit for the Frenchies, huh?”

  “You bet.” Adi watched Naumann closely. Theo would have, too. If you beat somebody like that, he was liable to try to get his own back. But Heinz just walked out of the stream and started putting his uniform on again. Whatever he was going to do, he wouldn’t do it right away.

  With a shrug, Theo started for the bank, too. He didn’t want his crewmates squabbling. Taking a panzer into battle was hard enough when everybody got along. Another man might have tried to get them to make up. Theo was too withdrawn for that. He hoped they would be sensible enough to see the need without him. Adi seemed to have his head on pretty tight. Theo wasn’t so sure about Heinz. The sergeant didn’t just have his rank to worry about. He also owned a touchy sense of pride, more like a Frenchman or an Italian than your everyday German.

  But the quarrel evaporated as soon as they got back to the encampment. It reminded Theo of nothing so much as an ants’ nest stirred with a stick. People ran every which way. Theo watched two panzer crewmen bounce off each other, as if they were in a Chaplin film. Something had happened in the hour or so they’d spent in the stream.

  He didn’t need long to find out what. The company—well, never mind the company: the whole damned panzer division—was getting pulled out of the line. Where it was going, nobody seemed to know. Somewhere.

  “What the hell do they think they’re doing?” Heinz Naumann threw his hands in the air. “Are they going to break through without panzers? Not fucking likely!”

  “Hey, come on, Sergeant—it’s the General Staff,” Adi said. “Just like the last war. My father used to tell stories about how the guys in the fancy shoulder straps screwed up half of what the Landsers did. More than half.”

  “Yeah, my old man goes on the same way.” As soon as Stoss agreed with him, Heinz stopped being angry. That was good, anyhow. “But the Führer was supposed to clean up that kind of shit.”

  “What can you do?” Theo said. Both his crewmates looked at him in surprise. He didn’t put his oar in the water very often.

  What they could do was follow orders, and they did. Along with the rest of the company’s machines, their Panzer II clanked back to Clermont, the nearest German-held railhead. Adalbert Stoss drove it up onto a flatcar. They chained the panzer into place, then boarded a jammed passenger car. Theo hated being surrounded by so many other people. He would rather have made the train trip inside the Panzer II. Expecting your superiors to care about what you would rather do, though, was like waiting for the Second Coming. It might happen, but not any time soon.

  They rolled back through France, back through the Low Countries, and across Germany. Theo started to wonder if they would go all the way to Breslau.

  They didn’t. They went farther than that. The train stopped at the Polish border. Polish soldiers in uniforms of a dark, greenish khaki and domed helmets smoother in outline than the ones German foot soldiers wore waved to the men in the passenger cars. Some of the Germans waved back. Theo would have felt like an idiot, so he didn’t.

  After a delay of about an hour and a half, the train started moving again—into Poland. Adi whistled softly. “Well, now we know what’s up,” he said. “We’re going to give the Russians a kick in the slats.”

  Nobody tried to tell him he was wrong. No wonder the Poles were waving and smiling! Here were Germans, coming to do their fighting for them! Theo wouldn’t have wanted to be a Pole, forever stuck between bigger, meaner neighbors. Poland offered Germany a shield hundreds of kilometers wide against the Russians. If the Red Army started biting chunks out of that shield, didn’t the Reich have to show Stalin that wasn’t such a hot idea?

  Evidently. And showing it with a panzer division—or more than one, for all Theo knew—would make sure the Reds remembered the lesson. Of course, that could also buy the Reich a much bigger war than it had now. Again, Theo wondered whether the Führer and the General Staff knew what the hell they were up to. Whether they did or not, he couldn’t do anything about it but try to stay alive.

  Poland sure looked like perfect panzer country: low and flat and mostly open. Every so often, the train would roll through a village or town. Some of them were full of bearded Jews, many wearing side curls. Theo glanced over at Adi Stoss, who happened to be spreading sausage paste—pork sausage paste—from a tinfoil ration tube onto a chunk of black bread. Circumcised or not, he didn’t look like a Jew, and he didn’t eat like a Jew, either.

  Northeast to Bialystok—another town packed with them. Southeast to Grodno. Northeast again, through Lebeda to Lida. They detrained there. The grayish sky and chilly breeze said they’d come a long, long way from France. The distant thump of artillery said they hadn’t come very far at all.

  German and Polish officers shouted and waved at the panzer troops as they got their machines down off the flatcars. The Poles spoke German, but not a kind that made sense to Heinz or Adi. Theo had no trouble with it. Living in Breslau, he’d grown up around Poles doing their best in his language. Where he had to, he translated for his crewmates.

  They went into bivouac outside of Lida. Polish infantrymen stared at the panzers with fearful respect. “They’re glad we’re going up against the Russians and not them,” Adi remarked.

  Theo hadn’t thought of that, but it made sense as soon as he heard it. Sure as hell, the Poles were meat in a sandwich. Their best hope—their only hope—was that the slices of bread hated each other worse.

  Chapter 6

  “Hey, Sergeant!” Luc Harcourt called—quietly, so his voice wouldn’t carry to the German line not too far away.

  “Yeah?” Sergeant Demange said. “What d’you want?” He also kept his voice down, and didn’t show himself. You never could tell when a German sniper had a bead on your foxhole. The bastards in field-gray were good at that stuff, damn them.

  “What’s up with the Boches?” Luc said. “They’re laying barbed wire like it comes out of their asses.” He didn’t point toward the enemy, either.

  “I wish it did. That’d make ’em think twice whenever they sat down, by Christ,” Demange said
. “You want to know what’s going on, though? They’ve pulled a bunch of their tanks out, that’s what. Now the foot soldiers have to hold the ground by themselves. They’re digging in, the cons—digging like mad. In their boots, so would I.”

  Luc thought about it. Slowly, he nodded. He swigged pinard from his canteen. The rough red wine made the world seem easier to take. “How’d you find out? Where’d you hear it?” he asked. It sounded sensible, but in war that proved nothing, or maybe a little less.

  “I was bullshitting with a radio operator. He told me,” Demange answered. “Said we’d nicked some of their signals or something. And I haven’t seen a tank over there for a couple of days. Unless they’re trying to royally screw us, they really are moving their armor … somewhere. Where, I can’t tell you.”

  “Tanks can flatten wire,” Luc said. “Think we’ll send ours in, and the infantry behind them?”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it. Swear to God, Harcourt, the high command still doesn’t have its heart in the fight,” Demange said, disgust in his voice. “Oh, when the Nazis tried to jump all over us we fought back, but who wouldn’t? An offensive like that, though? In your dreams! In mine, too.”

  He wouldn’t have talked to Luc that way before the fighting started. He would have told him to fuck off. Luc knew it. He was proud of himself for earning Demange’s confidence, and more than a little revolted at being proud. Again, nothing in war made sense.

  “So what do we do now? Wait for the Americans, the way we did in 1918?” Luc inquired with a certain amount of malice aforethought.

  “Screw the Americans!” Yes, that was steam coming out of the sergeant’s ears. “Cocksuckers were way late the last time. I don’t think they’re coming at all now.”

  “Here’s hoping you’re wrong,” Luc said.

  “Sure—here’s hoping,” Demange answered. “But don’t hold your breath. Oh, and one more thing … Suppose we do send the tanks through the Boches’ wire. How far do you think they’ll get? How many mines have the fucking Feldgraus planted under there?”

  That was another good question. As many as they could was the answer that occurred to Luc. Doubting the Germans’ competence didn’t pay. Luc knew he made a decent soldier now not least because the enemy was such a good teacher. If you lived, you learned.

  Supper turned out to be something the cooks might have learned from the enemy: a stew of potatoes and cabbage and sausage that tasted like a mixture of stale bread and horsemeat. The only thing that suggested it hadn’t come from a German field kitchen was a heavy dose of onions and garlic. Before the shooting started, Luc would have sneered at it. These days, he knew better. Anything that left him with a full belly and didn’t give him the runs afterwards was not to be despised.

  After supper, a private named Denis Boucher said, “Talk to you, Corporal, please?” He was a little round-faced fellow, maybe a year younger than Luc: a new conscript, just out of training, and in the line for the first time.

  “What’s up?” Luc asked.

  Boucher looked at him the way he’d looked at Sergeant Demange when he was still a new fish. Luc still sometimes looked at Demange that way. To have somebody turn that kind of gaze on him … To the rookie, all noncoms were deities: some grander and more thunderous than others, no doubt, but all deities just the same.

  “Well, Corporal … Can we talk someplace where nobody can hear us?” The kid fidgeted in what looked like acute embarrassment.

  “Come on. Out with it. If we go off somewhere, people will wonder. If you talk to me right here, they’ll think you’re asking about cleaning your rifle or something,” Luc said.

  “You’re so smart!” Boucher blurted. Luc didn’t think he was trying to butter him up. That kind of thing hadn’t occurred to him before. I could get used to being the guy who knows stuff, Luc thought. Then the little fellow in the unfaded khaki uniform went on, “It’s about my girl. I’m afraid she’s fooling around on me while I’m away. What can I do?”

  Not even the guy who knew stuff had an automatic good answer for that one. Cautiously, Luc asked, “Why do you think she’s messing around?” Some guys worried themselves sick over nothing.

  And some guys didn’t. “Marie’s always been a flirt,” Boucher said. “And we kind of had a fight before I had to go into the army.”

  That didn’t sound so good. Luc spread his hands. “Don’t know what to tell you except this: if she is messing around on you, she wasn’t worth having to begin with.”

  “Easy for you to say! I love her!” Denis Boucher seemed as hot and bothered as a little round-faced guy could get.

  “Well, if she’s there for you when you get home, everything’s great. And if she’s not, you’ve got the rest of your life to pick up the pieces and find somebody else,” Luc said. Sergeant Demange would have told the kid to shut the fuck up and soldier, which was also good advice. Luc wasn’t so hardened. He also didn’t point out that Denis was liable not to get home, or to come back so torn up that neither Marie nor anyone else in skirts was likely to want anything to do with him. No matter how true that was, it wasn’t helpful.

  True it was. The Germans might not have any tanks in the neighborhood of Beauvais any more, but they’d left behind plenty of artillery. It started working over the French lines in the middle of the night. It had them ranged to the centimeter, or so it seemed to Luc as he cowered in his hole. Nothing you could do about artillery fire but pray it didn’t chop you up.

  The barrage stopped as abruptly as it started. Wounded poilus shrieked. You could follow them by their screams as aid men took them to the rear. Luc grasped his rifle and stared wildly into the night, waiting for the fuckers with the coal-scuttle helmets to sweep down on the French trenches. Machine guns spat strip after strip of ammunition at the German lines to make the Boches think twice.

  Maybe they’d already thought twice. They didn’t come out of their foxholes and trenches. After a while, swearing and yawning, Luc curled up like a tired old dog and tried to sleep. No sooner had he closed his eyes, or so it seemed, than the artillery started up again.

  It went on like that for the next several days: random shelling at all hours of the night and day. It wasn’t anything like the usual methodical pattern of German fire. Maybe the regular German artillery commander had gone off with the tanks and left his halfwitted nephew in charge. If so, Junior was a damn pest.

  And Denis Boucher went missing one morning. Luc glumly reported that to Sergeant Demange. “Maybe a German 105 blew him to kingdom come,” he said. “But maybe he scooted off to see what was going on with his precious Marie.”

  “Well, if he did, he’s not our worry any more,” Demange said. “Let the military police get all hot and bothered about him. And if he does make it back to the mangy bitch, I hope she gives him the clap.” The milk of human kindness ran thin and curdled in Demange’s veins.

  In Luc’s, too, at the moment. He yawned till his jaw cracked like a knuckle. “I hope the Boches’ artillery lets up during the day. I’ve got to grab some sleep.”

  “You get tired enough, you can sleep through a barrage. I did it myself, back in ’18,” Demange said.

  “I believe you. I aim to try,” Luc said. Maybe the generals should have sent armor surging forward to drive the invader from la belle France. Luc couldn’t get excited about that, not right now. He went back to his hole and snuggled down in it. By now he was so used to sleeping on the ground, he’d decided mattresses were overrated. Exhaustion clouted him over the head with a padded blackjack. An hour and a half later, the German artillery started up again. Luc never knew it.

  AS HE ALWAYS DID while he was atop the U-30’s conning tower, Julius Lemp scanned. The sun was going down, far in the northwest. At this latitude and this season, it would rise again in the northeast in a very few hours. It wouldn’t stay dark long, and it wouldn’t get very dark; the sun wouldn’t sink far enough below the horizon for that.

  This stretch of North Atlantic between Iceland and Norw
ay should have been deadly dangerous for a surfaced U-boat, then. And it would have been, had any Royal Navy ships been close enough to spot the U-30. The submarine lay almost two hundred kilometers north of the Faeroe Islands. The English had to figure no one in his right mind would care to visit this lonely stretch of sea.

  Lemp thought the English had a point. You could die of boredom before you saw a freighter plowing across these waters. Even if you did, it would be flying a Danish or Swedish or Norwegian flag: a neutral, and so not a legitimate target. Lemp had already sunk one neutral. What Admiral Dönitz would do to him if he sank another did not bear thinking about.

  Resolutely, then, Lemp didn’t think about it. Or he tried not to. The thought kept making him notice it, like a chunk of gristle wedged between two back teeth. He longed for transcendental floss to make it go away.

  The ratings up there with him were also peering through binoculars. As a wave crest pushed the U-30 up a meter or two, one of them stiffened and pointed. “Smoke, Skipper!” he exclaimed.

  “Where away?” Lemp asked, but he was already looking north, following the man’s index finger. He needed to wait for another wave to lift the U-boat before he spied the plume himself. It was in the right quarter, but … He frowned. Diesels were supposed to make less smoke than turbines. That he’d seen this ship’s exhaust before the masts came up over the horizon wasn’t a good sign.

  “Is it ours, or does it belong to the limeys?” asked the man who’d first noted the smudge in the sky.

  “It had better be ours,” Lemp answered. By the time they got close enough to be sure it wasn’t, a Royal Navy ship would be pounding them to pieces. He waited for the ship itself to come into sight, then spoke to the bosun, who stood behind the signal lamp: “Give ’em the recognition signal, Matti.”

  “Aye aye.” Matti Altmark clacked the louvers. Three Morse letters flashed out across the water.

  A moment later, three came back. Lemp breathed a sigh of relief. That smoked, too—even heading into June, it was cold up here. You didn’t want to fall into the sea. You’d last only minutes if you did. “Alles gut,” Lemp said, noticing the sailors staring anxiously at him. They didn’t know what the answer was supposed to be. Lemp did. “That’s the Admiral Scheer, all right.”