The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat Read online

  But up toward the Barents Sea the U-30 went. It wasn’t summer yet, but daylight stretched and stretched in these latitudes. Lemp had heard about the white nights of St. Petersburg—Leningrad, these days. He was ten degrees of latitude north of St. Petersburg now. The sun set in the far, far northwest and soon rose again in the far, far northeast. While it ducked below the horizon, twilight never got dark enough to show any but the brightest stars.

  That meant the U-30’s crew had to stay alert around the clock. A rating might spot a troopship at any hour of the day or suppositious night. On the other hand, an English plane, or a Russian one, might come across the U-boat at any time.

  Or nothing might happen. No matter how long it stayed light, the ocean was vast. Troopships full of Tommies might slip past unseen. For all Lemp knew, there were no troopships full of Tommies. The Kriegsmarine brass had plenty of bright ideas that didn’t pan out.

  A whale spouted a couple of hundred meters to port. The great beast wasn’t that much smaller than the U-boat. Lemp watched it with awe from the conning tower. It paid the U-30 no heed. That suited Lemp fine. A collision with a whale would be like a truck hitting an elephant on the Autobahn—except the truck wouldn’t sink afterwards.

  He cruised his assigned area, awaiting new orders from Berlin—or even from Namsos. In due course, new orders came. Once decoded, they read, Continue current assignment. Lemp was anything but thrilled—as if his superiors cared. Continue he did.

  LUC HARCOURT HAD JUST got a fire going on the floor of a half-wrecked peasant hut when a private stuck his head through a hole in the wall and said, “Excuse me, Sergeant, but could I please talk to you for a little while?”

  Sighing, Luc asked, “What d’you want, Charles?” Whatever it was, it would be trouble. Whenever a private asked that question in that tone of voice, it had to be trouble. Maybe Charles’ father was desperately ill, and he wanted compassionate leave. Right now, of course. Maybe his girlfriend was two-timing him, and he needed a shoulder to cry on or permission to go back to France and whale the stuffing out of the loose, stupid bitch. Or maybe …

  “What are we doing here, Sergeant?” Charles couldn’t have been more than nineteen. His voice still cracked sometimes. He was trying to grow a mustache, but only looked as if he had dirt on his upper lip.

  After hacking the top off a ration tin with his bayonet, Luc heated monkey meat over the flames. “What do you mean, what are we doing here? Do I look like a priest, to answer a question like that?”

  He sounded even more like Sergeant—now Lieutenant—Demange than he realized. Almost everything he knew about soldiering, and about dealing with inferiors in the army, he’d learned from the veteran. Demange’s sarcasm had rubbed off on him, too.

  Charles flushed. “I don’t mean it like that, Sergeant. I mean, what are we doing here in Russia? The Englishmen packed it in. Why can’t we?”

  As far as Luc was concerned, that was a damn good question. He gave the only reply he could: “When Daladier wants us to quit, we will. Till then, you’d better fight. You think the Ivans won’t cut your dick off, you’d better think again.”

  “It isn’t fair,” Charles whined.

  “Since when is life fair?” Yes, Luc sounded like Demange.

  “You can joke all you want,” Charles said, which, since Luc was a sergeant, was true enough. “But we’re liable to get killed for no reason at all, and that isn’t funny.” His nostrils twitched as if he were an angry rabbit.

  As a matter of fact, he was wrong. Luc had seen both enemies and friends die in ways idiotically ridiculous enough to make him laugh like a jackass. Anyone who’d been up at the front for a while could say the same thing. Most of the laughter sprang from relief that you were still alive to giggle.

  But that wasn’t the point. The savory aroma—if you got hungry enough—of sizzling bully beef distracted Luc, but he answered, “I don’t know what you want me to do about it. If you think I’m going to cross over to the Russians’ lines, you’re even crazier than I give you credit for.”

  “They put out all those safe-conducts.” Charles displayed one. Sure as hell, it promised that the bearer would be treated well if he deserted.

  “It’s written in good French—better than the ones the Boches used to throw around,” Luc said. “But so what?”

  “See? You call them Boches, too! And now they’re on our side—I mean, we’re on theirs—even though we still hate them and even though we almost started shooting at them on account of what they did to those Jews.” Charles’ nostrils quivered some more. “Wouldn’t you rather fight against them than for them? Five gets you ten they’re still doing that horrible shit to Jews, only in places where we can’t catch ’em at it.”

  He was no Jew himself; Luc was sure of that. And Luc hadn’t thought he was a Red, either. As a matter of fact, Luc still didn’t think so. But the question was a lot harder to deal with when Charles put it that way. Slowly, Luc said, “The Russians aren’t nice people, either. Don’t forget that for a minute. So many Russians and Ukrainians and whatnot wouldn’t fall all over themselves to help the fucking Nazis if they liked Stalin. Right?”

  Most reluctantly, Charles nodded. “I guess so.”

  “Other thing to remember is, the Russians never signed the Geneva Convention. Even the Germans did that,” Luc went on. “So who gives a rat’s ass what that safe-conduct says? Once the Reds have you, they can do whatever they damn well please. Nobody’s gonna stop ’em. The Red Cross never gets a look inside their POW camps—if they bother keeping POWs alive long enough to put ’em in camps. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “You’re saying you like Hitler better than Stalin.” Charles might have been accusing him of picking his nose and eating the boogers.

  “No! No, God damn it to hell! I’m saying I can’t stand either one of those shitheads, and you can’t trust either one of them.” Luc paused to take the tin off the fire. The monkey meat was as ready as it ever would be. His stomach growled gratefully when he stuffed a mouthful into his chowlock. After a gulp an anaconda might have used to engulf a half-grown tapir, he resumed: “It’s like I told you before. I don’t set our foreign policy, and neither do you. We go where they tell us and we do what they tell us to do there. And if we don’t, our own side’ll make it rougher on us than the Nazis and Reds put together.”

  Artillery rumbled, not far enough away. Charles gestured in that direction, asking, “How?”

  “They can jail you. They can shoot you, too. And they can make life hell on earth for your kinfolk. If your brother keeps getting fired; if your son, when you have a son, ends up in a crappy school and blames you for it … They remember. It’s how they stay on top—remembering. And paying back.”

  His words made the youngster—three or four years younger than he was now—recoil in horror. “They wouldn’t do anything like that! They couldn’t get away with it!”

  “My ass they couldn’t.” Luc scooped more hot bully beef out of the tin.

  “You’re no help at all, dammit.” Charles stomped away from the hut in dudgeon as high as a corpse four days gone.

  Luc finished the tin of monkey meat. Then he hunted up Lieutenant Demange. He recounted the conversation with Charles, adding, “You’d better tighten up the sentries, sir. He’s liable not to be the only one who’ll try and go over to the other side.”

  “Yeah, chances are you’re right.” Demange shifted his Gitane to one side of his mouth and spat in disgust out of the other. “That stupid fucking Russian asswipe of a safe-conduct! Jesus God, the clowns like Charles are smart enough to see that their own government lies to them every chance it gets, so how come they aren’t smart enough to see all the other governments’re full of bullshit, too?”

  “Beats me.” It seemed as obvious as an axiom of geometry to Luc. Had he thought that way before the war broke out? He had trouble remembering. He didn’t believe he had—he hadn’t worried much about politics at all then. So what, though? Lies and incom
petence hadn’t come close to sinking France then. Things looked different these days.

  Charles didn’t try to desert. Luc dared hope he’d put the fear of God into him. A couple of nights later, though, two other poilus did slip away. Lieutenant Demange swore in furious disgust.

  Supplies came up in horse-drawn wagons. Both French and German trucks literally fell to bits when they had to deal with what were alleged to be Soviet roads. Horses didn’t break down, and wagons were easier to repair than motor vehicles. As long as Luc kept getting ammo and food, he didn’t care how.

  With the Germans on their left flank and Hungarians to their right, the French pushed forward. Fighting well was the best way to improve your chances of staying alive. Luc didn’t have anything in particular against the Russians, the way he’d had against the Wehrmacht men when they tried to overrun his country. He shot at them anyhow, to keep them from shooting at him.

  And, before long, the advancing French troops came upon a fresh grave in the woods with an Adrian helmet for a tombstone. They dug it up. In it lay one of the deserters. He hadn’t stopped a mistaken bullet. The Ivans had sported with him for a long time before they let him die. The French soldiers quickly buried him again.

  “Where’s your safe-conduct?” Luc asked Charles. “Feel like using it now?”

  “No, Sergeant,” the kid answered in a very small voice. As if on the training ground, Luc snapped, “What was that? I can’t hear you!”

  “No, Sergeant,” Charles said again, rather louder this time.

  “All right, then.” Luc let it go. He didn’t need to worry that Charles would skedaddle, not after the youngster saw what was left of that other damn fool. The Russians would have drawn more deserters had they treated people who went over to them well. But if they wanted to play the game the other way, they’d soon discover the French could, too.

  IVAN KUCHKOV PATTED the round drum that held his PPD’s ammunition with almost the same delight he would have used to pat a barmaid’s round backside. He never wanted to have anything to do with an infantry rifle again. You didn’t need to aim a PPD. You just pointed it and fired. If one bullet didn’t do for a Fascist, the next would, or the one after that.

  A Nazi with a Mauser could hit him from much farther away than he could hit the Fritz with his submachine gun. In the kind of fighting they were doing, in woods and villages and towns, that seldom mattered. You mostly didn’t see your enemy till he was right on top of you. Then you needed to kill him in a hurry. The PPD was made with just that in mind.

  His outfit kept falling back toward Smolensk. It infuriated him. He wanted to drive the Germans west, not to dance to their tune. The Red Army counterattacked whenever officers thought they saw a chance—or whenever orders came down from above. Sometimes the Russians gained a little ground. Even when they did, they rarely held it long.

  He wasn’t sure about the name of the village where they were fighting now. It might have been called Old Pigshit, a handle it would have kept for centuries. Or it might have been rechristened something like Leninsk after the glorious Soviet Revolution. Either way, it was a stench in the nostrils—and a lot like the miserable hole in the ground where Ivan had grown up.

  One way in which it differed from that particular hole in the ground was the broad expanse of grainfields and meadows to the north, south, and west. “Couldn’t be better country for panzers,” said Lieutenant Vasiliev. Ivan was convinced the political officer fucked pigs, but even a pigfucker got it right every once in a while.

  About half the villagers had been rash enough to stick around instead of hightailing it to the east. Maybe they thought the Red Army would push the Nazis back, in which case they were optimists. Or maybe they thought things would get better once the Nazis took over, in which case they were really optimists.

  Any which way, the politruk took charge of them. He set them digging deep, wide ditches across their fields and meadows, not so much to stop tanks as to channel their movements toward antitank guns.

  A peasant with a gray mustache had the nerve to complain: “How the devil can we farm after we tear up the land like this?”

  Lieutenant Vasiliev drew his Tokarev automatic from the leather holster on his belt. He held it up to the peasant’s head and pulled the trigger. The report was harsh, flat, undramatic. The peasant fell over. He kicked a few times and lay still. Blood puddled under him. A wrinkled woman in a headscarf shrieked.

  “Any other questions?” the politruk asked pleasantly, reholstering the pistol. Vast silence, but for the woman’s sobs. The politruk nodded. “All right, then. Get back to work.”

  And they did—all of them, including the babushka who’d just lost her husband. Sometimes life could be very simple.

  Some of the soldiers dug alongside them. Others turned the village into a strongpoint. Field fortification was a Russian art. Maskirovka—camouflage—was another. Making buildings into places that were much stronger than they looked combined the two.

  They got less done than Ivan wished they would have. German artillery started probing early in the afternoon. Not even the politruk’s pistol could keep the muzhiks working after that. They ran for the trees, more afraid of the big shells bursting—and with reason. Artillery was the great butcher. Everything else was an afterthought beside it.

  The soldiers stolidly labored on. Every so often, they flattened out in the antitank ditches when incoming shells sounded close. After the shelling moved on for a while, they stood up again, brushed themselves off, and went back to digging. A few shells hit in the ditches. A man or two walking around above ground got wounded by fragments.

  Scouts fell back toward Old Pigshit or whatever it was, skirmishing as they came. “Stupid Germans aren’t far behind us,” one of them said as he jumped into a trench close to Ivan. Nemtsi, the Russian word for Germans, meant tongue-tied ones or mumblers; it went well with the notion of stupidity. The scout lit a papiros.

  “Let me have one of those fuckers, will you?” Ivan said. The scout glanced his way, saw he was a sergeant, and gave him a smoke. Kuchkov had expected no less. After a couple of drags, he asked, “Have they got tanks along?”

  “I saw some,” the scout answered. He carried a PPD, too. A Red Army soldier was more inclined to believe in firepower than in God.

  “They would, the clapped-out cunts,” Ivan muttered. One of the scout’s eyebrows twitched. All soldiers swore, but Ivan was in a class by himself. He found another question: “Are their peckers up?”

  “Why not? They’re advancing,” the scout said bleakly.

  Ivan glanced over his shoulder. Maybe a company of KV-1s would clank forward and save the day like the warriors who whipped the Teutonic Knights in Alexander Nevsky. Now there was a flick for you! And maybe green monkeys will fly out of my ass, too, Ivan thought, mocking himself. Life wasn’t like a movie. Tanks didn’t show up from nowhere just because you needed them like anything. And wasn’t that a goddamn shame?

  German soldiers appeared in the distance. Field-gray blended in about as well as khaki, but the Nazis’ black helmets stood out on the horizon. The Germans had tanks along: three Czech machines, either captured or newly built in conquered factories. They were better than Panzer Is and IIs, not so good as IIIs: about like any Soviet tanks this side of the KV-1.

  Cautiously, the tanks with the white-edged black crosses on them advanced. Foot soldiers loped between them. A Soviet mortar started thumping. Earth fountained up as the bombs hit. The Nazi infantrymen dove for cover. One of them was blasted off his feet. Ivan didn’t think he’d get up again.

  A tank crew thought about crossing a ditch, but the obstruction proved too wide and too deep. The machine came straight toward the village, then, as the defenders had planned. A hidden antitank gun opened up on it. The gunners needed several shots before they scored a hit, but the tank stopped and began to burn when they did.

  That told the other enemy tanks where the gun was, though. They shelled it into silence, then rolled forward with g
reater confidence. Another antitank gun knocked one of them out in nothing flat. The last tank scuttled back out of range.

  Red Army men with rifles fired at their German counterparts. A machine gun in a tavern opened up on the Fritzes, too. The Germans hit the dirt and started digging foxholes. They were veteran troops. They weren’t about to make things easy for their foes.

  “Well, we’ve stopped ’em,” the scout said. Neither he nor Ivan had fired a shot. The Fascists hadn’t drawn close enough to turn their submachine guns deadly.

  “For now, yeah. Right here, yeah,” Ivan said. The Red Army could usually stop the Germans right here, and for now. Then, somehow, they’d break through a little later somewhere else, and stopping them right here for now wouldn’t matter any more. You’d have to retreat, or else they’d close the ring behind you and grind you to pieces at their leisure.

  Lieutenant Obolensky and the politruk wanted to make the Germans fight a regular battle for Old Pigshit. Unfortunately, the officers in charge of the advancing Nazis had too much sense to bang their heads into a stone wall. They were like water; they slid around obstructions. Before long, their 105s started pounding the Red Army men who held the woods a few kilometers south of the village. Ivan could follow the fighting to the south by ear. The Russians in the woods gave way. The Germans pushed through. That meant Old Pigshit would start flying the swastika pretty soon.

  Maybe the place would have held if troops from here had helped the handful of Russians in those woods. Maybe not, but maybe. No one thought to weaken the strongpoint, though. And so, instead of weakening it, the company had to abandon it.

  They retreated in good order. They’d be ready to fight again somewhere else before long. The Soviet Union was vast. It could afford to trade space for time. But you couldn’t win a war with endless retreats … could you?