Two Fronts twtce-5 Read online

  “To the factory, is it?” Jezek responded. “Well, here’s hoping we stay away from industrial accidents.”

  “Here’s hoping. Ja-fucking-wohl.” That wasn’t exactly proper German, but Vaclav followed some improper German, too.

  He and the Pole tramped along together for a while. They told each other the usual lies about the drinking and screwing they’d done in Madrid. A jackhammer couldn’t have done all the pounding the Pole claimed. Vaclav pretended to believe him. Life was too short for some arguments.

  They waved when they separated, and wished each other luck. The Internationals’ trenches were north and east of the stretch the Czechs held. “Hey, look who’s back!” Vaclav’s countrymen shouted. One of them added, “You don’t look as rumpled as you ought to, dammit!”

  “Rumpled? I’ll tell you about rumpled, by Jesus!” Vaclav retold some of the stories he’d fed the Pole. His buddies ate them up. He’d already thought them through once, and they sounded a hell of a lot better in Czech than they had in German. He hoped he gave good value.

  Through all the stories, Lieutenant Benjamin Halevy listened with an ironically raised eyebrow. Everybody got promoted a grade on coming to Spain; that was why Vaclav was a sergeant now. Halevy had been a sergeant-a sergeant in the French Army. His parents were from Prague; he’d been born in Paris. Fluent in French and Czech (and several other languages), he’d served as liaison between French troops and the men who served the government-in-exile.

  And he’d accompanied the Czechs to Spain. Like any other Jew, he couldn’t stomach France’s alliance with the Third Reich. French authorities hadn’t much wanted him around, either. He could have gone back to civilian life with an honorable discharge. Instead, he’d kept on fighting Fascism.

  He was a good soldier, clever and brave. Vaclav hadn’t had much use for Jews till the war started. When it came to fighting the Nazis, though, they were in it to the end. A couple of Slovaks in Vaclav’s squad at the beginning of things ran out the first chance they got. They were probably in Father Tiso’s “independent” Slovakian army right now, fighting the Russians. Vaclav chuckled nastily. That’d serve the stupid shitheels right!

  “Where’s my toy?” he asked Halevy. He didn’t bother with a sir; neither of them took the promotions they’d got from the Spaniards too seriously. The extra pay, in cash and in promises, did come in handy, though.

  “Well, somebody saw an elephant out behind the Fascists’ lines. He went hunting with your piece, and we haven’t seen it or him since,” Halevy answered blandly.

  Vaclav snorted. “My ass! Is the beast still where I stashed it?”

  “You bet it is,” the Jew replied. “C’mon, man-get real. Who in his right mind would want the goddamn thing?”

  “Well, I do,” Vaclav said with such dignity as he could muster.

  “I said, ‘Who in his right mind?’ ” Halevy repeated patiently. Vaclav snorted again. Halevy led him to the bombproof where he’d left the antitank rifle before he went down to paint the town red (or, given its politics, redder). He’d taken it from a French soldier who was too dead to need it any more. It was a beast and a half: almost as long as a man was tall, and more than twice as heavy as an ordinary rifle. It fired rounds as thick as a thumb, and not much shorter.

  Even with a muzzle brake and a padded stock, it almost broke your shoulder every time you pulled the trigger. But those fat bullets would pierce at least twenty-five millimeters of hardened steel, which made it death on armored cars and powerful enough to trouble any tank they’d had in 1938 (more modern marks shrugged off any rifle bullets).

  It might not wreck a new tank. To the logical French, that made it obsolete and therefore useless. To Vaclav, it only meant he needed to use the monster for something else. The antitank rifle fired heavy rounds on a flat trajectory with a ridiculously high muzzle velocity. That made it a wonderful sniper’s rifle, especially after he fitted it with a telescopic sight. He could kill a man two kilometers away.

  He could, and he damn well had. General Franco hadn’t been so far off-he’d been out around 1,500 meters. Franco, by all accounts, had been a careful and logical man, more methodical than brilliant. No doubt he would have agreed with the French about the obvious uselessness of an outdated weapon. He would have, yes, till Vaclav plugged him. At the moment, he had no opinions about anything. And Vaclav planned on doing some more sniping tomorrow.

  The winter before, the Wehrmacht hadn’t had proper clothes for fighting in Russia. The German greatcoat served tolerably well in Western Europe. Russian winds bit right through it. Willi Dernen had acquired-a polite way to say had stolen-a sheepskin jacket in a peasant village. German boots also sucked. The hobnails in their soles took cold right up to your feet, and they also fit too closely to be padded. Willi’d taken a pair of valenki-oversized felt boots-off a Russian corpse. He’d done much better after that.

  Things were different this time around. German soldiers got cold-weather gear as good as anyone else’s. Even the Ivans stole Wehrmacht-issue felt-and-leather boots when they could get them. Willi was relieved. Shivering and risking frostbite were bad enough. Having even your Polish allies laugh at you-or, sadder yet, pity you-because you were shivering and frostbitten was worse.

  Willi came from Breslau. Just about everybody in the division was drawn from the Wehrkreis-the recruiting district-centered on that town. Poland bordered it on the east. Plenty of Poles lived in the district, and in Breslau. Like most Germans, Willi looked down his nose at them. Watching them look down their noses at him and his countrymen here was flat-out embarrassing.

  The Wehrmacht first came east to help the Poles drive Stalin’s hordes out of their country. The Germans had done that. Now they were in Russia up to their armpits, the boundary between Poland and the USSR hundreds of kilometers behind them, Moscow still hundreds of kilometers ahead.

  Where, in all this Russian immensity, did victory lie? Anywhere? If it lay anywhere close by, Willi couldn’t see it. He didn’t think any of the other Landsers in his outfit could, either. He’d quit worrying about it. All he cared about were staying alive and coming home in one piece.

  He peered out from the edge of some woods across the snow-covered fields to the east. His new winter coat was white on one side, Feldgrau on the other. He’d slapped whitewash on his Stahlhelm. With snow dappling the pines and birches that sheltered his section, any watching Red Army man wouldn’t be able to see him from very far away.

  Which proved less than he wished it would have. For all he knew, a Russian in a snowsuit was lying in that field not fifty meters away. The Germans didn’t call their enemies Indians by accident. For one thing, Indians were red men. For another, Indians were supposed to be masters of concealment. They were supposed to be, and the Ivans damn well were.

  If a Russian was lying in the field, he wouldn’t give himself away by moving. He could lie there all day without doing that. He could lie there all day without freezing to death, too. German troops often wondered whether Russians were half animal. If they were, it was the wrong half, as far as Willi was concerned.

  Boots crunched in the snow behind him. He turned his head. Nothing to get excited about: just one of his buddies. “Anything going on?” Adam Pfaff asked.

  “Well, I don’t see anything,” Willi answered.

  “Mpf,” the other Obergefreiter said. Willi couldn’t have put it better himself. Pfaff went on, “Maybe that means something, and maybe it doesn’t.”

  “I was just thinking the same thing before you came up,” Willi said. “If you want to look around for yourself, be my guest. I won’t get pissed off if you spot Ivans I missed. I’ll thank you kindly, on account of you’ll be saving my ass, too.”

  “Sure, I’ll look. I don’t think I’m likely to spot anything you didn’t, but even when it comes to cabbage two heads are better than one.” Cradling his Mauser, Pfaff moved up alongside Willi. The woodwork on the rifle was painted a gray not far from Feldgrau. He’d carried that Mauser s
ince he joined the regiment as a replacement. Arno Baatz, the Unteroffizier who’d led this squad, tried to tell him to make the piece ordinary again. The company commander had said it was all right, though. That didn’t make Pfaff and Baatz get along any better.

  Then again, Awful Arno didn’t get along with anybody. He and Willi had had run-ins aplenty. Right this minute, Baatz was recovering from an arm wound, and the squad belonged to Willi. He didn’t care what Pfaff did with his rifle, as long as it fired when he pulled the trigger.

  Willi’s own weapon was a sniper’s Mauser, with a telescopic sight and a special downturned bolt rather like an English Lee-Enfield’s because the scope got in the way of an ordinary one. Awful Arno also hadn’t liked him to carry that piece.

  After scanning the landscape to the east, Pfaff said, “Looks a hell of a lot like Russia, y’know?”

  “Wunderbar. And here I was expecting Hawaii,” Willi said sourly. “Russia? I could do that well myself. Hell, I did do that well myself.”

  “Always glad to be of service.” His buddy sketched a salute.

  “You think we can advance across those fields?” Willi asked.

  “Sure-as long as there aren’t any Russians in the woods on the far side,” Pfaff said. “But if they’ve got a couple of machine guns set up amongst the trees there, they’ll screw us to the wall if we try it.”

  “Yeah, that’s about how it looks to me, too. Not a pfennig’s worth of cover along the way.” Willi sighed out a young fogbank. “Leutnant Freigau, he kinda wants us to go forward, though.”

  The junior lieutenant commanded the company now for the same reason a senior private led the squad: the guy who should have had the slot was getting over a wound. Adam Pfaff sighed, too. “If he’s so hot to go charging ahead like that, let him come here and scout it out. Christ, even ordinary riflemen’d give us a hard time. Like you said, they’d be shooting from cover, and we don’t have any.”

  “Go tell him to come up and check for himself,” Willi said. “If he sends us out anyway …” He shrugged. He would have made the effort, anyhow.

  “I’ll do it. Can’t hurt. Maybe he’ll have a rush of brains to the head.” Pfaff’s tone said that was likely to be too much to hope for. Even so, he bobbed his head at Willi and went back to the west.

  Willi had time to duck behind a pine and smoke a cigarette before Pfaff came back with Rudi Freigau. The Leutnant was only a couple of years older than the two Obergefreiters. He wore a neat mustache that was blond almost to the point of invisibility. Instead of a rifle, he carried a Schmeisser. He greeted Willi with, “Pfaff says you’re not too happy about moving up from here.”

  “See for yourself, sir,” Willi replied. “If they’re waiting for us in that next bunch of trees, we’re sticking our heads in the sausage machine.”

  Lieutenant Freigau did look. He was as careful as Willi and Adam Pfaff had been. He’d seen his share of tight spots before; he didn’t want to make things easy for a Russian sharpshooter. After eyeing the bare field and the woods on the far side, he said, “Everything looks quiet.”

  “Well, sure, sir. It would if they’re trying to see whether we’re dumb enough to go out there, too.” As soon as he spoke, Willi realized he might have put that more tactfully.

  “Or if they aren’t there at all. Which is my judgment of the situation, Dernen.” Freigau sounded irked. Willi supposed he would have, too, if he were an officer who’d just got the glove from somebody hardly even a noncom.

  The lieutenant started across the snowy field. Yes, he wore winter white, but that didn’t come close to making him invisible. Willi and Adam Pfaff exchanged stricken looks. “Sir, don’t you want to come back? You’ve made your point,” Willi called after him.

  Freigau shook his head. “No need,” he answered. “I’m not going to run away from shadows and ghosts and unicorns and other imaginary things. And every advance we make brings us that much closer to-”

  A Russian machine gun barked to life. Willi and Adam Pfaff both flattened out. The gunner might not be aiming at them, but they were still close to his line of fire. Lieutenant Freigau went down, too, but not because he meant to. He writhed feebly and made horrible choking noises. He’d been hit at least twice: once in the belly and once in the neck. Blood darkened his snowsuit and pooled and steamed in the drift where he lay. After a couple of minutes, he quit gurgling and lay still.

  “Well, you were right,” Pfaff said to Willi.

  “Ja. And a whole fat lot of good that does the lieutenant.” Willi didn’t even point toward Freigau’s body, for fear of drawing the machine gunner’s notice.

  “Other thing is,” Pfaff went on, “you’ll be commanding the company pretty soon, the way the people above you keep stopping stuff.”

  “If I end up commanding the company, we’re all in deep shit,” Willi said. Adam Pfaff didn’t try to tell him he was wrong. After all, what were friends for?

  The Nationalists were spewing out the usual lies through their loudspeakers: “Come across to our lines and we’ll fill you full of mutton stew! Lovely mutton stew! We eat it every day! We’ll fill you so full, you won’t walk any more-you’ll waddle instead! Lovely mutton stew!”

  Sometimes it was mutton stew. Sometimes it was chicken stew instead. The Nationalists’ announcer sounded as smooth to Chaim Weinberg as any radio pitchman flogging Lucky Strikes back in the States.

  Mike Carroll didn’t take it so kindly. “I’m sick of that lying bullshit,” the other Abe Lincoln growled. “I wish putting a bullet through his loudspeaker would make him shut up.”

  “As long as you know it’s bullshit, it doesn’t wear on you so much. And as long as you’ve got enough to eat yourself,” Chaim added. “When times were tough, a big old bowl of stew sounded mighty fine.”

  “The Nationalists knew it was bullshit. They’d cross over to our lines, hoping we’d feed them,” Mike said.

  “Talk about optimists!” Chaim exclaimed.

  “Yeah, well, sometimes they’d be skinnier than we were-and that wasn’t easy.”

  “I remember. Those days on the Ebro … Everybody was hungry all the goddamn time. Hell, even I was on the way to being scrawny back then.” Chaim was short and thickset; an unkind man would have called him squat. He looked and talked like the New York Jew he was. In Madrid, he’d got himself a different kind of handle: el narigon loco-the crazy kike. In bar brawls, he’d sail into guys half again his size. He’d flatten them, too, because there were times when he didn’t give a rat’s ass whether he lived or died and because he brought his front-line meanness with him when he went on leave.

  Mike Carroll, by contrast, could have come off an SS recruiting poster. You’d lose teeth if you were stupid enough to tell him so, though. He was as good a Communist as Chaim or any other Abe Lincoln. He was probably a better Communist than Chaim, as a matter of fact. Chaim had a habit of asking pointed questions. Mike-Mike believed.

  “Delicious mutton stew!” the Fascist announcer called again.

  “What did you do to the sheep before you threw it in the pot?” Chaim yelled back. His Spanish was far from smooth, but he could make himself understood.

  These days, Spaniards filled out the Abe Lincolns’ ranks, and those of the rest of the International Brigades. They understood Chaim fine. Laughing, they started shouting “Sheep-fuckers!” toward the Nationalist trenches.

  That pissed off Marshal Sanjurjo’s heroes. It would have pissed Chaim off, too, and he didn’t have the touchy Spanish sense of machismo. The Nationalists’ machine guns started raking the Republican trenches. “Now look what you went and did,” Mike said reproachfully as the Internationals returned fire.

  “It’s a war,” Chaim explained. It wasn’t the first firefight jeers at enemy propaganda had touched off, and chances were it wouldn’t be the last.

  But he stopped taking it lightly when the Fascists opened up with mortars and artillery. They were more than just pissed off, and they were taking it out on the Republicans. H
e dove into a bombproof dug into the front wall of the trench, hoping no shell would burst on top of it and bury him alive.

  Then somebody banged on a big shell casing with an iron bar. “They’re coming! The bastards are coming!” The shout rang out in English and Spanish.

  Chaim scrambled out of the bombproof and took his place on a firing step. Sure as hell, the troops who followed Sanjurjo were rushing across no-man’s-land. It wasn’t like the doomed English plodding forward at the Somme. These fellows knew better. They stayed low. They kept in loose order. Every chance they got, they jumped into shell holes. Some of them fired while others scrambled forward.

  That helped, but only so much. Many of them fell scrambling forward. Some lay still once they went down. Others writhed and thrashed and screamed. The noises ripped from the throats of wounded men sounded very much alike regardless of which side they fought on or which country they came from. Suffering was a more universal language than Esperanto ever would be.

  One of his own cartridge cases bounced off Chaim’s boot. He loaded and fired and loaded and fired, now and then ducking automatically when an enemy round cracked past his head. Sanjurjo’s men got through the barbed wire with alarming ease. Had they sent out cutting parties the night before? If they had, this attack had been laid on all along; it wasn’t mounted on the spur of the moment.

  I can worry about that later-if I’m still around to worry about it, Chaim thought as he slapped a fresh magazine into his rifle. He started to fumble for his bayonet. Unless he was going trench-raiding himself, he used it for a knife and a tin-opener, not a weapon. But this might turn out to be one of the rare times he was glad to have it.

  Then a Republican machine gun opened up on the Fascists. A moment later, so did another one. Now despair filled the shrieks from Sanjurjo’s men. They’d braved rifle fire. Nobody, though, could hope to cross open ground in the face of the industrialized murder machine guns personified. Concentrated essence of infantry, someone had called them during the last war. That still seemed a plenty good label.