Hitler's War Read online

  Instead of explaining how he knew, Saul said, “Maybe the British will send planes over tonight.”

  “How can you sound so cheerful about it?” Sarah asked him. “They’re liable to blow us up.” With Jews having to shelter in their homes, enemy bombers were more likely to blow them up than anybody else.

  Her brother only shrugged again. “They haven’t yet. And the more Nazis they send to the Devil, the better I’ll like it. If I had a gun…”

  “Saul,” Samuel Goldman said sharply. “That will be enough of that.”

  “Should I turn the other cheek?” Saul retorted. “I don’t see what for. I’m no Christian. They keep reminding me of that, in case I’m not smart enough to figure it out for myself.”

  “They’re no Christians, either,” Father said. “Pagans. Barbarians.” He looked disgusted. “And they’re proud of it, too.” A Roman noble talking about wandering Ostrogoths could have packed no more scorn into his voice.

  He would have silenced Sarah. Saul still felt like locking horns. “What about the German Christians?” he said. “Their preachers wear Nazi uniforms. Even the Catholics have swastikas in their churches. The students at their universities give the Nazi salute.” His right arm shot out.

  “They can call themselves whatever they want. The name is not the thing,” Father insisted. “Trying to make you believe it is—that’s only one more lie.”

  “Maybe so,” Saul said. “But we both tried to join the Wehrmacht anyway, didn’t we? And if they’d only let us, we’d be braying ‘Heil Hitler!’ like all the other donkeys in the Reich, wouldn’t we?”

  Samuel Goldman opened his mouth, then closed it again. At last, he said, “I have no answer for that, because we would. If they’d let us be Germans, Germans we would have been. Since they make us into something else…” He left the table sooner than he might have.

  No one else had much to say after that, either.

  British bombers didn’t visit Münster. They didn’t drop anything close by, either. Especially in nighttime quiet, the sound of bombs going off carried a long, long way.

  Saul went off to work early the next morning. Father looked lost, bewildered. He had nothing to do—nothing that would yield a Reichsmark, anyway. He started to fill his pipe, then thought better of it. The tobacco ration was miserably small. What he got smelled like burning overshoes, too.

  Sarah went out shopping with her mother. When she was small, she remembered, she’d really enjoyed that. When she was small, they could walk into any shop in Münster and buy whatever they wanted. Shopkeepers fawned on them, as they fawned on any other customers.

  Everything changed after the Nazis took over. Brownshirts stuck big signs—GERMANS! DON’T BUY FROM JEWS!—on the windows of Jewish-owned stores. And Jews were no longer welcome in shops run by Aryans. Some of the German shopkeepers seemed embarrassed about it. They did what they had to do to get along, no more. Others, though…Others gloated. Those were the scary ones.

  Only a handful of shops Jews could go into were left now. The war’d just made things worse—not only for Jews, but for everybody. And the British air raids added to the burden of fear. The people across the street—Aryans—never stopped complaining about how their favorite bakery was gone. “Like someone yanked a tooth. It’s not there any more,” Frau Breisach would grumble.

  She didn’t know when she was well off. Of course she doesn’t—she’s an Aryan, Sarah thought. The one bakery in Münster that Jews could still use was way over on the far side of town. It wasn’t open very often, and didn’t have much when it was. But when the choice lay between not much and nothing at all…you went over to the far side of town.

  They had a little wire basket with wheels. Sarah pulled it along behind her. It felt like nothing now. On the way back, it would be heavier. She hoped it would, anyhow. Sometimes the bakery didn’t open, or it was sold out, or…I won’t think about any of that, Sarah told herself fiercely.

  A gang of laborers was repairing a bomb crater in the middle of the street. And there was Saul, as deft with a shovel as Father was with Greek irregular verbs. He turned the Nazi slogan on its head: he drew joy through strength.

  The gang overseer was a wizened little man in his forties. The left sleeve of his shirt was pinned-up and empty. Maimed in the war, Sarah thought. Maimed in the last war, she amended. How many would get maimed in this one? Too many—that seemed sure.

  Maimed or not, he carried a swagger stick in his right hand. He also had a foul mouth, and didn’t care if women heard him use it. “Work harder, you lazy prick!” he yelled, and lightly swatted a laborer on the behind.

  “Ja, ja,” the fellow muttered, and went on working the same way he had before.

  That didn’t make the overseer any happier. “And you, too, you fucking kike!” he bellowed. When he hit Saul in the back with the swagger stick, it was no tap. The whack echoed like a gunshot. Sarah thought it would have knocked her over.

  It barely staggered her big brother. Saul Goldman responded with what had to be instinct, as he might have on the soccer pitch. He’d been hit. He had a weapon in his hands. He used it. The flat of the shovel blade crashed into the side of the overseer’s head.

  The man went down as if he’d stopped an artillery shell. His skull was all caved in and bloody. Sarah and her mother let out identical shrieks of horror—anyone could see that the overseer would never get up again.

  Saul stared at the man he’d killed. He stared at his mother and his sister—all that in maybe a second and a half. Then he threw down the gore-spattered shovel. It clattered on the cobbles. He turned and ran as if a million demons were at his heels.

  “After him!” one of the other laborers shouted. Chasing a Jew was more fun than fixing a bomb crater any day of the week. The gang pounded after Saul, some of them still brandishing their spades.

  Sarah and her mother looked at each other, each mirroring the other’s anguish. As if on cue, they both burst into tears.

  A FRENCH PRIVATE FIRST CLASS wore a little brown hash mark on his sleeve to distinguish him from an ordinary private. Luc Harcourt was less than delighted when the indestructible Sergeant Demange told him he’d been promoted. “I’d’ve had more fun getting the clap,” he said.

  Demange’s Gitane twitched as he chuckled. “Think of it as congratulations for living this long,” he said.

  Luc did. Suddenly, being a private first class looked a lot better. He said so, adding, “After all the shit I’ve gone through to get this, I’ll be a general by the time the war finally ends.”

  “France is in trouble, yes. I hope to Christ France isn’t in that much trouble,” Demange said.

  “Kiss my ass,” Luc said. The sergeant only laughed. Luc had earned the right to swear at him. He did remember that he had to pick his spots with care.

  “Anyway, sew that stupid thing on,” Sergeant Demange told him. “You could be leading a squad at five minutes’ notice. Hell, a couple of lucky German shell bursts and you could be leading a platoon.”

  He wasn’t kidding. Luc had seen how fast casualties could chew a unit to pieces. He and Demange were two of not very many men who’d been with the company since before the German blow fell on the Low Countries. The rest were replacements, or replacements of replacements, or sometimes.…

  Luc didn’t want to command a squad, much less a platoon. All he wanted to do was hunker down tight, live through the war, and get on with his life. Not that anyone from Sergeant Demange on up cared what he wanted, of course.

  “See? I told you France was in trouble,” the veteran underofficer said. “And you will be, too, if you don’t get cracking.”

  “Right.” Luc knew better than to argue. Somewhere in his pack he had a little housewife with needle and thread. He dug it out and sewed on the hash mark. He would never put a seamstress out of business. He’d sewn up a couple of rips in his uniform. His stitches were large and dark and ugly, like the ones that held together the pieces of the Frankenstein monster in the A
merican film.

  French 75s threw shells at the Germans on the other side of the Aisne. Luc’s company was dug in a couple of kilometers west of Soissons. The town had taken a beating in the Franco-Prussian War and again in the Great War. Now it was catching hell one more time. Luc had come through it on the way to this position. Bombs and shells had wrecked the cathedral; bits of thirteenth-century stained glass lay shattered in the streets. A priest stood by the ruins with tears running down his face. Luc had no tears left for people, let alone things.

  Machine guns started stuttering up by the river. French or German? Luc wondered, cocking his head to one side to hear better. Both, he thought. That wasn’t so good.

  Sergeant Demange must have decided the same thing. “Are those shitheads trying to force a crossing?” he growled. “They’d better not get over, that’s all I’ve got to say.”

  “Let’s move!” Luc grabbed his rifle. He liked the idea of Germans on the south bank of the Aisne no better than Demange.

  As they hurried up toward the riverbank, they gathered as many other soldiers as they could. Damned if that hash mark on Luc’s sleeve didn’t make ordinary privates follow him without arguing or asking a lot of questions. I could get used to this, he thought.

  There was smoke on the river: not the ordinary war smoke of burning houses and vehicles, but a thick chemical haze the Germans used to mask what they were doing on the other side. Out of the smoke came black rubber boats paddled by field-gray soldiers in coal-scuttle helmets. Sure as the devil, the Boches were trying to get over.

  French machine guns stammered out death again. A German dropped his paddle and slumped down in his raft. Then another one got hit, and another. The raft slewed sideways. It was probably leaking, too. German machine guns across the Aisne shot back, trying to silence the French fire. They put out more rounds per minute than the ones the French used, but they couldn’t knock them out of action.

  Luc flopped down behind some bushes and started shooting at the Germans in their rafts. It wasn’t fair—they couldn’t shoot back. That bothered him till a couple of machine-gun bullets cracked past maybe half a meter above his head. They cured any chivalrous notions he might have had.

  Two or three rubber rafts actually made it to the south bank of the Aisne. The unhurt Germans in them jumped up and tried to set up some kind of bridgehead. With all that French firepower concentrated on them, they never had a chance. Inside of a few minutes, they were all dead or wounded.

  “Assholes’ll have to do better than that,” Sergeant Demange said, a fresh cigarette in his mouth and a fresh clip on his rifle.

  “What else have they got behind that smoke?” Luc asked.

  “We’ll know in a few minutes,” Demange answered, sending up smoke signals of his own. “Looks like it’s blowing away.” He and Luc and the rest of the French defenders waited. Then he said one thing more: “Fuck me.”

  The Germans had lined up a couple of dozen tanks—Panzer IIs and captured Czech machines—on the north bank of the Aisne. Their cannon all pointed toward the French positions across the river from them. To Luc’s frightened eyes, it seemed as if every single one of those cannon pointed straight at him.

  Every single one of them seemed to open up at the same time, too, pouring shells and more machine-gun bullets down on the French defenders. Luc hugged the ground. His rifle was useless against those steel monsters. The machine gunners fired back at the German armor. He watched tracers fly across the Aisne and ricochets harmlessly spark off the tanks’ armored carapaces.

  One by one, the French machine guns fell silent. Luc didn’t think the gunners were lying low, waiting to massacre the next wave of German rubber boats. He thought they were dead. Those cannon weren’t all pointing at him after all. They were pointing at the guns that could do the German assault troops the most harm.

  That second wave of boats splashed into the river even while the cannonading went on. The Boches hadn’t silenced everything on the south bank: here and there, riflemen and even a machine gun or two opened up on the soldiers who paddled like men possessed.

  But now the French didn’t have enough firepower to keep the rubber boats from beaching on the near bank. Luc raised up a little to shoot at the men leaping out of the boats. As soon as he did, a machine gun from one of the tanks on the far bank started banging away at him. He had to flatten out again if he wanted to stay alive.

  Some of the German assault troops carried submachine guns with big drum magazines. French doctrine scorned submachine guns. They fired pistol ammunition, and they were worthless out past a couple of hundred meters. Inside that range, though, they were uncommonly murderous. They threw around a hell of a lot of lead. Even if they didn’t get you, they made you stay down so you couldn’t shoot back.

  And the damned Boches had brought along real machine guns, too. Hearing that malevolent crackle at such close range made Luc’s asshole pucker. He had to bear down tight on his bladder to keep from wetting himself.

  “Back!” Sergeant Demange’s raspy voice penetrated the din. “We’ve got to get out of here, form a line somewhere else!”

  “How?” Luc asked, which seemed to him the very best of good questions.

  Even through the rattle of the German machine guns, he heard the underofficer laugh. “Carefully, sonny, carefully, unless you aim to get your dick shot off.”

  Even thinking of that made Luc want to clutch at himself. He crawled away from the riverbank, doing his best to keep the bushes between himself and the Boches. Only a few random bullets came his way. The Germans didn’t seem to know he was there: news good enough to make an atheist thank God.

  He flopped down again behind the crest of a small swell of ground that shielded him from the enemy. Sergeant Demange lay a few meters away, still puffing on a cigarette butt. “What do we do?” Luc said. “How do we throw them back into the river?”

  “If we can bring a lot of tanks forward in a hurry, that might turn the trick.” Demange stubbed out the cigarette in the dirt. “But what are the odds, eh?”

  Luc mournfully considered them. “Not good,” he said. “The Germans always have plenty of tanks where they need them the most. How come we can’t do the same thing?”

  “Because their High Command doesn’t fight with its head up its ass,” Demange answered. He rose up to shoot at somebody heading up-slope toward them. A wild scream said he’d hit what he aimed at, too. Chambering a new round, he went on, “They know it’s the twentieth century, damn them. How come we don’t have any dive-bombers plastering the shit out of them right now?”

  Having cowered under more Stukas than he cared to remember, Luc said, “I don’t know, and I wish I did. How come we don’t?”

  “If we were fighting the Kaiser’s army, we’d wallop the snot out of it,” Demange replied. “It’s the curse of winning—you get ready to do the same damn thing over again. The Germans lost, so they figured they’d better try something new. Now we’re on the receiving end.”

  “Lucky us,” Luc said in hollow tones. Ever so cautiously, he too peered back the way he’d come. The lines on that dark helmet moving through dead grass were unmistakable. He fired. The Boche scrambled for cover. Luc fired again. The German went down with a howl. He wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t dangerous any more, either. That would do.

  “Good job,” Demange said. “But we won’t stop them all by ourselves. I wonder if anybody will, this side of Paris.”

  PEKING IN SUMMER WAS HOT and dusty. During the winter, it was colder than a witch’s tit. How cold was that? Marines who’d been in Chicago said it was that cold. Pete McGill could compare it to his native New York City. He’d known some cold weather there, but Peking bottomed out worse.

  And Peking would have felt cold even if it were in the nineties. As long as the Marines stayed close to the American legation, they were okay. But if they strayed very far into the city, Japanese soldiers were much too likely to whale the crap out of them.

  Like any other Marine, McGill
was convinced he was a better fighting man than some little, scrawny, buck-toothed, bowlegged Jap. He was convinced he could take two or three Japs, come to that. But when the odds got steeper still, even John Henry the Steel-Driving Man would have found himself in deep water.

  The odds did get steeper, too. Peking was crawling with Japs these days. Some of them kept order in the city. The Japanese way to keep order was to shoot first and not ask questions later. Since Nationalist and Communist guerrillas and freelance bandits all afflicted Peking and the surrounding area, that Wild Wild East style had its points.

  But even more Japanese soldiers were getting leave in Peking and then climbing onto trains and heading out of town. Pete would have liked it if the bastards never came back, but that was bound to be too much to hope for. They weren’t going back to Japan—at least, they weren’t heading southeast toward Tangku or Tsingtao, the ports from which they sailed for home.

  No, most of them were going northeast on some of the new lines their people had built: up into Manchukuo. That made McGill gloat. “I wouldn’t have believed it,” he said one day in the NCOs’ club, “but the sorry sons of bitches are heading somewhere colder’n this.”

  “Serves ‘em right, sure as hell,” another corporal agreed.

  Pete emptied his glass. “Hey, Danny!” he called. “Bring me another beer, chop-chop!”

  “Right, boss,” the Chinese bartender said. The beer came from Tsingtao. It was pretty damn good. The Germans had run the place before the Great War, and they’d built a brewery there. Hitler was a bastard, yeah, but the squareheads knew what was what with beer. The brewery was under new management these days, of course, but some of the old magic remained.

  When the beer came, Pete tipped Danny a nickel. To a Chinaman, a nickel was a big deal. Danny bowed almost double. He folded one palm over the other fist, which was what the Chinese did instead of saluting.

  A sergeant named Larry Koenig came and sat down with Pete. He ordered a beer, too. Danny brought it over to him. Koenig lit a cigarette and offered Pete the pack—he was a good guy. “Thanks,” McGill said. He took one and leaned close for a light.