Two Fronts twtce-5 Read online

  He also had the feeling they would need to. If they went hunting panzers in France, the gun pods would make their plane even less airworthy than it was without them. Maybe he could surprise enemy fighters with the 37mm guns. Any cannon that would do for a panzer would do for a Spitfire … if you could hit it. He’d knocked down a couple of enemy planes with the big guns. Again, he supposed he might stay lucky.

  Or he might not. And if he didn’t, his story wouldn’t have the kind of ending a cinema audience liked.

  “We fly west day after tomorrow,” Steinbrenner said. “Our new base will be in Belgium, not far from the French border. Groundcrew men will come by rail-we won’t mount you on the wings and drop you over the new airstrip.”

  He got another laugh, this one mostly from the men in the black coveralls. Hans-Ulrich envied his ease up there in front of everybody. The pilot wished he could match it himself. He knew he had a long way to go.

  When he and Albert Dieselhorst climbed into their Stuka for the journey into the wild, exotic, and almost forgotten West, Dieselhorst said, “Well, I won’t be sorry to get the hell out of Russia, and you can take that to the bank.”

  “Neither will I,” Hans-Ulrich agreed. The next German he met who admitted being sorry to leave Russia would be the first. But he couldn’t help adding, “The Reich isn’t leaving. We’ve still got a lot of men here on the ground.”

  “Some of them will head west, too,” Dieselhorst said. “If the froggies and the Tommies are serious, we sure don’t have enough troops there now to do more than annoy them.”

  “Two-front war,” Rudel said gloomily. “Damn the Englishmen! It’s their fault.”

  “It sure is.” Sergeant Dieselhorst chuckled, almost too low for Rudel to hear him. Hans-Ulrich didn’t swear very often. Maybe that meant he got more mileage out of the cussing he did use. Maybe it just meant he was a prig.

  Bf-109s flew top cover as the Stukas buzzed back toward Byelorussia. If the Ivans had somehow heard the squadron was pulling back, it would be just like them to try to ambush it. But the planes escaped without harm, and came down somewhere not far outside of Minsk.

  The Germans were putting their mark on occupied Byelorussia. White signs with black letters from an alphabet a man could read marked the airstrip and the roads around it. Opel trucks-gasoline tankers-rattled up to refuel the dive-bombers. Then the Stukas flew off again, their next stop not far from Bialystok.

  Hans-Ulrich thought about asking for a little leave to give Sofia a proper good-bye. If she weren’t a Mischling, he thought he would have done it. After all, the worst Colonel Steinbrenner could tell him was no. But in this time of trouble for Germany, he didn’t want even the tolerant colonel noting how attached he’d got to a half-Jew. Sometimes the best thing you could do was keep your big yap shut.

  Before the flight crews climbed back into their Ju-87s for the journey across the rest of Poland and back into the Vaterland, Sergeant Dieselhorst set a hand on Hans-Ulrich’s shoulder for a moment. “Every so often, life can be a real bastard, you know?” he said, rough sympathy in his voice.

  “Ja,” Hans-Ulrich replied, and not another word. Whether or not Colonel Steinbrenner knew how he felt, his rear gunner sure did. Well, Dieselhorst wouldn’t blab. Hans-Ulrich was sure of that.

  Their next stop was in Breslau, not far from where Hans-Ulrich had grown up. Signs at the airport were in German. Some smiling young women from a relief agency brought the Luftwaffe men sweets and something they called tea. What leaves or roots they’d brewed it from, Hans-Ulrich had no idea. It tasted like something halfway between licorice and cough medicine. But it was hot, and they were pleasant, and they had accents like his. He didn’t have to stop and puzzle out what they were saying, the way he’d so often needed to with Sofia.

  After a little while, though, he realized how much he missed her clever tartness. He had no trouble understanding these girls, no, but what difference did it make if they had nothing interesting to say? And, after her sharp, angular features, the German girls seemed doughy.

  When they went off to minister to another crew, he said as much to Dieselhorst. The older man’s smile was bittersweet. “Ah, sonny, you really did have it bad, didn’t you?” he said.

  “No.” Hans-Ulrich shook his head. “I had it good. I didn’t know how good I had it.”

  Dieselhorst patted him on the back. “That’s what I said.” Hans-Ulrich only frowned.

  They flew across the Reich. As they got farther west, they flew over towns the RAF had bombed. The devastation in the Vaterland shocked Rudel. He’d visited the same kind of devastation on Czechoslovakia, the Low Countries, France, and Russia, but that wasn’t the same, not to him it wasn’t. Those were foreign countries, enemy lands. They weren’t Germany.

  The squadron’s new home in Belgium was outside of Philippeville, a small town south of Charleroi, which had been the scene of a thunderous battle in the last war’s opening round. The people spoke French. The black-on-white signs in German seemed almost as alien here as they had in the Soviet Union.

  No smiling, friendly girls greeted the Luftwaffe men. The snouts of 88mm flak guns pointed skyward to shoot at enemy raiders. Barbed wire held saboteurs at bay-people hoped.

  Surveying the scene, Dieselhorst said, “Are you sure we left Russia?”

  “Pretty sure,” Hans-Ulrich answered. “If we get shot down on this front, odds are they won’t stab us with pitchforks or start carving on us. We’re back in the land of the Geneva Convention.”

  “Boy, sir, you sure know how to ease my mind,” Sergeant Dieselhorst observed, and Rudel found himself with no reply to that.

  There were times when Sarah wondered whether she’d ever been married at all. Officially, her last name was Bruck now, not Goldman, but how often did you need to worry about your last name, or even remember you had one? She was living with her parents again, in her old room, almost as if the months with Isidor had never been.

  Almost. Her clothes had gone to the Brucks’ flat above their bakery-and had gone up in flames when the bombs hit the place. She was left with no more than she’d had on her back the night of the RAF raid. Even Aryans in the Reich got scanty clothing rations; those for Jews were smaller still. Replacing what she’d lost would take, well, forever, or twenty minutes longer.

  Mother shared what she had. But that was already shabby, and would only get shabbier faster from being worn by two people rather than one. Then, out of the blue, the rabbi who’d intoned prayers at Isidor’s small, sorry funeral showed up with a bundle.

  “Not much,” he said, “and I know not stylish for a pretty young girl, but with luck better than nothing.”

  The dresses and blouses must have come from little old Jewish women who’d died in Munster. Some of them hadn’t been stylish since the days when the Kaiser still ruled Germany. Not everything looked as if it even came close to fitting.

  None of which mattered a pfennig’s worth to Sarah. What she couldn’t alter, her mother could. “Thank you so much!” she exclaimed, moved almost to tears. She’d never had much to do with the synagogue. Like her parents, she’d been secular, assimilated … and much good it did her once the Nazis started screaming about how the Jews-any Jews at all-were their misfortune.

  “We try,” the rabbi answered. “We don’t always do as well as we wish we could, but we try.”

  “Thank you,” Sarah said again. “Thank you for thinking of me.” Even if I never thought of you went unsaid but, no doubt, not uncomprehended.

  No, not uncomprehended. “We are all in the same boat,” the rabbi said. “It may be the Titanic, but we are all in it together whatever it is. Alevai one day it will come to a safe harbor.”

  “Alevai omayn!” Sarah agreed. The rabbi touched the brim of his hat and said his good-byes. His black suit was shiny in the seat and down the sleeves; his trousers showed a deftly mended rip. The six-pointed yellow star labeled Jude on his left lapel was noticeably newer and fresher than the coat it defaced.
r />   Sarah and her mother sorted the clothes. “Well, we’ve got some work in front of us before you’ll want to go out in any of this,” Hanna Goldman said, as diplomatically as she could.

  “Oh, sure.” Sarah nodded. “But it’s cloth!” She might have been one of the Children of Israel, talking about manna from heaven. She was one of the Children of Israel, she felt she was talking about manna, and the Third Reich was a desert beside which wandering through Sinai would have seemed a holiday by comparison.

  She and her mother were still excited when her father came back from his shift on the labor gang. Benjamin Goldman’s mouth twisted when he saw the clothes. “Very nice,” he managed at last.

  “I know they’re old,” Sarah said. “We can do things with them, though. We really can, honest.”

  “She’s right,” Mother agreed.

  “Oh, I believe you.” Believe her or not, Father sounded uncommonly bleak. “But those people shame me. We paid them no attention for so long, but they remember us. How can I not be ashamed?”

  “The rabbi said we were all in the Titanic together,” Sarah said. The rabbi, actually, had said it better than that. He’d said it in a way Father might have, but Sarah couldn’t quite remember how. She had the gist, though: “How can we not help each other at a time like this?”

  Her father’s mouth turned down on one side once more. “I never had the least trouble ignoring the frum.” He used the Yiddish word for observant as if it were from a foreign tongue. For an assimilated German Jew, it was. “I’m embarrassed, dammit. If we could find charity anywhere else …”

  “Beggars can’t be choosers,” Mother said, her voice sharper than usual. “And we are beggars right now, whether it embarrasses you or not.”

  Samuel Goldman sighed. “I wish I could tell you you’re wrong. Instead, I have to tell you you’re right, and you have no idea how much more that hurts.” In spite of everything, he still kept his touchy pride.

  For a couple of days, playing with the old clothes and trying to turn them into something wearable kept Sarah too busy to worry about what she kept: a boatload of tsuris. Isidor had no brothers or sister. Sarah and Isidor’s uncle were the family heirs.

  In a civilized society, it would have been a serious, even a solemn, business. In the Reich, it carried more than a few elements of farce. For one thing, quite a bit of her late husband’s family property had gone up in fire and smoke. For another, Munster’s Nazi hierarchy seemed bound and determined to steal what was left in the Brucks’ bank account.

  Scowling at yet another threateningly official letter, Sarah put down her pinking shears for a moment. “The gonifs! It’s so unfair!” she burst out.

  “And this surprises you because …?” Hanna Goldman had lived with Samuel for a lot of years now. She could do an excellent contralto impression of him. The voice might be too high, but the sardonic tone was perfect.

  It teased a snort out of Sarah, but she quickly soured again. “They have everything!” she said. “Everything! And they want to take away some nothing that’s supposed to belong to a couple of Jews.” As far as she was concerned, Isidor’s uncle would have been welcome to whatever the Brucks had. She’d been part of the family only a little while. An inheritance like that would have made her hands feel slimy with blood if she were trying to take it from him.

  But the Nazi hooligans were another story. Why had the Brucks died, anyhow? Because Hitler started his stupid war, that was why. If he hadn’t tried to rob the Czechs and Slovaks of whatever small store of happiness they possessed, her in-laws and husband would still be baking bread today.

  And she couldn’t even scream Why didn’t the RAF bomb the stupid Fuhrer instead? Her mother would understand. Understand, nothing-her mother would agree with her. She still didn’t know for sure whether the house was bugged, though. The whole family would head straight for Dachau if the SS heard something like that from her.

  Hitler had started the war, and the Nazis were intent on making-on stealing-a profit from it. What could one Jew do against a Juggernaut’s car? Try not to get crushed under the enormous wheels: that was all she could see. Long odds against managing even so little.

  In lieu of her scream, she said, “Something needs to happen. Something good, I mean. We’ve had too much of the other stuff.”

  “I know,” Mother said. “But what can you do?”

  “Nothing.” Sarah let even more bitterness out. “Nothing is all they’ll let you do. They’re going to take away whatever the Brucks had, and they’re going to find some stupid reason to pretend it’s legal.”

  She imagined herself writing an indignant letter to the Fuhrer. She imagined her clever words persuading him that his henchmen were overstepping. She imagined him being so impressed, he decided he’d been foolish to hate Jews all these years.

  Then she imagined the attendants at the asylum strapping her into a straitjacket so she couldn’t hurt herself or anyone else. Hitler wouldn’t listen to her. Hitler never listened to anybody. That was part, and not such a small part, of what made him Hitler. No, he didn’t listen to anybody. He made everyone else listen to him instead. And if you didn’t, if you wouldn’t … Well, that was what places like Dachau were for.

  They were going to steal the Brucks’ estate, or confiscate it, or whatever other label they’d slap on it to make it seem good to them. She wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. Except hate them. And she was already awfully good at that.

  Summer in Egypt. Alistair Walsh swore at himself for volunteering for … this. He’d been swearing at himself ever since the Germans pulled Musso’s fat out of the fire at Tobruk. Now the question was whether Fritz would spread his fire all the way to Alexandria and beyond to the Suez Canal.

  Fritz, damn him, had a dashing panzer general, and the dashing panzer general had the bit between his teeth. Walsh had seen photos of him. He didn’t look like anything special: kind of pudgy, more like a Bavarian tavernkeeper than a fifth-generation Junker trying out the General Staff’s latest bit of trickery.

  But, no matter what Walther Model looked like, he knew his trade as well as any starchy Prussian with a poker up his arse. German tanks kept driving deep into the desert and coming back into view anywhere the hard-pressed English commanders didn’t expect them.

  No one would have accused the English officers defending Egypt of much in the way of dash. They weren’t the Donkeys who’d led the King’s Army during the last war-Walsh didn’t suppose they were, anyhow-but they weren’t a great deal better.

  Every time Model drove deep into the desert like a dolphin after tunny in the sea and then came up for air in their rear, it took them by surprise. Every time they got taken by surprise, they retreated. They’d be back in Alexandria pretty soon. And wouldn’t that make a pretty kettle of tunny, by God?

  Of course, General Model wouldn’t be able to go around them and flank them out of Alexandria, the way he had so often farther west. Alistair Walsh didn’t suppose he would, anyhow. Wouldn’t the Nile get in the way? You couldn’t cross that on little rubber rafts the way the Wehrmacht had paddled over so many smaller streams in France.

  Could you?

  That Walsh had to wonder didn’t speak well for his confidence in his country’s officer corps. If I were in charge … he thought, but then, If I were in charge, what? The officers weren’t doing any too well, true. But it wasn’t as if he had any better ideas himself.

  He didn’t even have the better ’ole Bruce Bairnsfather’s Tommies had sheltered in during the last dust-up. He rode in the back of a lorry whose engine hacked and wheezed with too much inhaled sand. All the lorries were alleged to have desert-strength air filters. So were all the tanks. Lorries and tanks nevertheless went down for the count with depressing regularity.

  The soldiers jammed in there with him shared cigarettes and food. One of them squeezed liver paste from a tinfoil tube onto a cracker. As far as Walsh was concerned, that paste was the best ration in anybody’s army. Pointing at the tube,
he said, “Took that off a dead Fritz, did you, Algie?”

  “No, Sergeant. Off a prisoner,” Algie answered. He was half Walsh’s age, and red and peeling from sunburn. Gingery whiskers sprouted on his cheeks and chin and upper lip. He hadn’t found a chance to shave any time lately, and wouldn’t have cared to any which way: the sun would have left his skin as tender and sensitive as a baby’s. He stuffed the cracker into his mouth. With it still full, he added, “Not half bad.”

  “That’s a tasty one, all right,” Walsh agreed.

  He didn’t sound wistful or expectant. He made a point of not sounding that way. He was nonetheless a staff sergeant: perhaps not God Incarnate to a private soldier, but certainly no lower than His vicegerent on earth. Algie held out the tube to him. “Want some for yourself?”

  “Obliged,” Walsh said, and he meant it. He’d have to find some way to pay back the youngster before too long. In the meantime … In the meantime, he’d eat. You grabbed food and sleep whenever you could. You never could tell how long you’d have to do without them.

  As far as Walsh was concerned, the only ration that even came close to the German liver paste was tinned steak-and-kidney pie. It wasn’t as good, but it was plenty good enough-and you didn’t have to kill or capture somebody to get your hands on it. As long as he had the real prize, he’d enjoy it. He tried to remember not to make too much of a pig of himself as he squeezed the tube onto a cracker of his own.

  His belly growled when food first hit it, then grew quiet and contented. He pulled out a packet of Navy Cuts, lit one, and passed the packet first to Algie. One fag wasn’t enough to give for a squeeze from that tube, but it made a start.

  The lorry rumbled along. The road, such as it was, was bad. Along with the wheezy rumble, the lorry gave forth with an irregular series of thuds and bangs. And so Walsh and his comrades didn’t hear the German fighters till the 109s were right on top of their column.