The War That Came Early: West and East Read online

  “I don’t think they’ve got it,” a third flyer said. “We’ve been in France since last year, and here it is, just about autumn come round again. You can only scrounge so much. After that, there’s nothing left to scrounge.”

  “There’d be plenty if we’d got into Paris the way we thought we would,” someone else said. Rudel couldn’t see who it was; the farmhouse was twistier than a fighter pilot’s mind. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the French family who’d lived in it before fleeing in the early days of the war had unrolled balls of thread of different colors to guide them as they navigated from one room to another. What was left of the upstairs seemed even worse.

  A long silence followed the flyer’s remark. Anything that touched on politics was dangerous these days. Yes, the squadron was a band of brothers. But brothers could turn on one another, too—look what happened to Joseph. Some people feared that the Gestapo got word of any even possibly disloyal remarks. Others—Hans-Ulrich among them—hoped the security service did. He didn’t want to inform on anyone else himself, but he also didn’t want to fly alongside people whose hearts weren’t in the fight.

  “We’ll get there yet,” he said.

  “Sure we will,” said another voice he couldn’t easily match with a face. “But when, and what will it cost? Will we get to Moscow first?”

  Someone else whistled softly. Hans-Ulrich knew the two-front war wasn’t popular with his comrades. Maybe it was even less popular than he’d thought. Again, no one seemed to care to take that particular bull by the horns. At last, the pilot sitting next to Rudel said, “I’d rather have the Poles on our side than against us.”

  “They aren’t on our side.” To Hans-Ulrich’s dismay, that was Colonel Steinbrenner. The squadron commander went on, “Right this minute, Stalin scares them worse than the Führer does. There’s a difference. You’d better believe there is, my friends.”

  “Jawohl, Herr Oberst,” Rudel said. “But it makes an army of a million men march against the Bolsheviks side by side with us. We ought to get the French and the English to do the same thing—a crusade to rid the world of something that never should have been born.”

  A different kind of silence descended on the farmhouse: one rather like the aftermath of a thousand-kilogram bomb. At last, the fellow next to Hans-Ulrich said, “You’ve always been an optimist, haven’t you?”

  “When it comes to Germany, of course I have,” he answered proudly.

  “We’re all optimists about the Vaterland.” Colonel Steinbrenner spoke as if challenging anyone there to argue with him. When nobody did, he continued, “But there is also a difference between optimism and blind optimism.”

  “Are you saying that’s what I show, sir?” Rudel asked.

  “No, no. You’re a good German patriot,” Steinbrenner replied. Rudel would have thought hard about reporting him had he said anything else. After all, he’d been brought in here to replace an officer in whom the fires of zeal didn’t burn bright enough—or so the Gestapo had concluded, at any rate.

  More high-octane liquor made the rounds. Several separate conversations started in place of the general one. That was safer: nobody could hear everything at once. Lickerish laughter said some of the flyers were talking about women—a topic more dangerous than politics, but in different ways. Hans-Ulrich might be a teetotaler, but he didn’t stay away from the French girls. His father wouldn’t have approved, but he didn’t worry about that. When he was with a girl, he didn’t worry about anything. More precious than rubies, the Bible said, and, as usual, it knew what it was talking about. The Biblical context might be different from the one Hans-Ulrich had in mind, but he didn’t worry about that, either.

  “If we didn’t fuck up this stupid goddamn war—”

  Rudel heard the words through all the other chatter, as one might hear a radio station through waves of static and competing signals. His ears pricked up. Treason would do that. You could say some things in some ways, but there were limits. This shot right past them.

  He thought so, anyhow. He wondered how Sergeant Dieselhorst would feel about it. Dieselhorst was an older man and a veteran noncom. Both factors generated a broader view of mankind’s foibles than a young officer who was also a minister’s son was likely to have. Rudel suspected as much, but only in a vague way. He would not have been himself were he mentally equipped to grasp the full difference between how he thought and how Albert Dieselhorst did.

  He didn’t enjoy being the only sober man in the middle of a drunken bash. Who in his right mind would? But this was nothing he hadn’t been through before. They’d think him a wet blanket if he stayed. They’d think him an even worse wet blanket if he got up and walked out. They’d think he thought he was better than they were. He did, too, but he’d learned that showing it only made things worse.

  Somebody not far away was going on about the vastness of Russia, and about how a war against a country like that could have no sure ending. Sober or not, Hans-Ulrich got angry. “Once we smash the Reds, we’ll run the country for ourselves,” he said. “Russia is our Lebensraum. England and France have colonies all over the world. We’ll get ours the way the Americans did, by grabbing the lands right next door.”

  “Yes, but the Americans only had to worry about Red Indians. We’ve got Red Ivans, and they’re tougher beasts.” The other flyer chuckled in not quite sober amusement at his wordplay.

  Ignoring it, Hans-Ulrich said, “We can beat them. We will beat them. Or do you think the Führer’s wrong?”

  The other fellow’s mouth twisted. He couldn’t say yes to a blunt question like that, and he plainly didn’t want to say no. What he did say was, “We all hope the Führer’s not wrong.”

  That was probably safe. Rudel would have had to push to make something out of it. He didn’t want to push. He wanted his comrades to like him. The easiest way to do that would have been to act like them. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. Showing he was brave and skillful in combat was the next best thing. The others didn’t despise him any more, anyhow.

  Progress. He could throw it away in a flash if he got too strident about politics or about the way he thought the war ought to be going. He said, “Wherever we run into the enemy, we’ll whip him, that’s all.”

  “That’s what the Kaiser’s General Staff told him, too,” the other flyer remarked.

  “We beat the enemy,” Hans-Ulrich said. “It was the traitors inside Germany who made us lose.” He’d been two years old when the last war ended. He was parroting Mein Kampf, not speaking from experience.

  The other flyer was probably younger than he was. “That’s not what my old man says,” he replied. “He was a lieutenant on the Western Front the last year and a half of the war. They had swarms of panzers by the end of 1918, and most of ours were retreads we captured from the Tommies. He says we got whupped.”

  “What’s he doing now?” Rudel asked.

  “He’s a lieutenant colonel in Poland. Why?”

  “Never mind.” If the complainer was fighting, Rudel couldn’t call him a defeatist. Not out loud, he couldn’t. What he thought … he kept to himself. Little by little, he was learning.

  CHAIM WEINBERG’S SPANISH was still lousy. It would never be great. But it was a hell of a lot better than it had been, especially when he talked about the class struggle or dialectical materialism.

  He hadn’t liked the political agitators who indoctrinated the Internationals so they would fight more ferociously. If they needed that kind of indoctrination, they wouldn’t have come to Spain to begin with. Or it looked that way to him. The leaders of the International Brigades, and the Soviet officers and apparatchiks who stood beside them, held a different opinion. Theirs was the one that counted.

  Indoctrinating prisoners with the ideals of the Republic—and of the USSR—was different. Chaim told himself it was, at any rate. The hapless campesinos the Nationalists had dragooned into their army needed to understand that everything they’d believed in before they were taken prisone
r was a big, steaming pile of mierda.

  “They exploited you,” he told the tough, skinny, ragged men who came to the edge of the barbed wire to listen to him. He didn’t fool himself into thinking he was all that fascinating. Time hung heavy for the POWs. Anything out of the ordinary seemed uncommonly interesting. “They were shameless, the way they exploited you.” Sinverguenza—he loved the Spanish word for shameless.

  One of the captured Nationalists raised a hand. Chaim pointed to him. “Excuse me, Señor,” the fellow said apologetically, “but what does this word ‘exploited’ mean?”

  Chaim blinked. He’d known these peasants were ignorant, but this took the cake. They literally had to learn a whole new language before they could understand what he was talking about. Before he answered the prisoner, he asked a question of his own: “How many others don’t know what ‘exploited’ means?”

  Two or three other grimy hands went up. After some hesitation, a couple of more followed them. How many other Nationalists were holding back? Some, unless he missed his guess.

  “Bueno,” he said. “If you don’t know, ask. How can you understand if you don’t ask? When the priests and the landlords exploit you, they take advantage of you. You do the hard work. They have the money and the fancy houses and the fine clothes and the pretty girls who like those things. They take your crops, and they make most of the money from them. ¿Es verdad, o no?”

  The POWs slowly nodded. That was how things worked in Spain—how they had worked before the Republic, and how they still worked where Marshal Sanjurjo and his lackeys governed. Joaquin Delgadillo raised his hand. Chaim nodded to him. He had a proprietary interest in Joaquin.

  “What you say is true, Señor.” Delgadillo had learned to slow down a little to give Chaim a better chance to stay with him. “But how can things be different? How can anyone do anything about it?”

  “Land reform,” Chaim answered at once. “There are no landlords in the Republic.” There were no live landlords in the Republic, not any more. “Peasants own their lands. Sometimes they form collectives, but no one makes them do that.” Plenty of Republican enthusiasts wanted to impose collective farms, as Stalin had in the USSR. Oddly, Soviet officials discouraged it. They didn’t want to scare the middle classes in the cities and towns.

  “But what about the holy padres?” another prisoner asked. “Haven’t terrible things happened to them?”

  “They sided with the reactionaries, or most of them did. They wanted to go on living well without working,” Chaim said. “Progressive priests follow the Republic.” There were some. There weren’t very many. He didn’t go into detail. His job here was to persuade, after all.

  “The priests say God is on Marshal Sanjurjo’s side. They say the Republic is the Devil’s spawn,” the prisoner said.

  “¿Y así?” Chaim asked. And so? “What do you think they will say? No one says God fights for his enemies, but Satan is with him. No one would be that stupid. But do you believe everything the padres tell you?”

  “They’re holy men,” the Spaniard said doubtfully. He wasn’t used to questioning assumptions. He probably hadn’t imagined assumptions could be questioned till he started listening to Chaim. Exploited, indoctrinated … Was it any wonder that, when the people of Spain found out they could overthrow the system that had been giving it to them in the neck for so long, they often threw out the baby with the bath water?

  “How do you know they’re so holy?” Chaim asked. “Are they poor? Do they share what they have with people who are even poorer? Or do they suck up to the landlords and piss on the poor?”

  “Some of them are good men,” the captured Nationalist answered. “Perfection is for the Lord.” He crossed himself.

  As long as their grandfathers had put up with it before them, a lot of Spaniards would put up with anything. They would be proud of putting up with it, in fact, because their grandfathers had before them. Well, Eastern European Jews had put up with pogroms for generation after generation, too. Chaim’s grandfather had—and, no doubt, his grandfather before him. But Chaim’s father had got the hell out of there and hightailed it for the States. And here stood Chaim in a bomb-scarred park in Madrid, not screwing around with the Talmud but preaching the doctrine of Marx and Lenin and Stalin.

  “Some are good, eh?” he said.

  “Sí, Señor,” the prisoner replied with dignity. People here had immense dignity—often more than they knew what to do with.

  “Okay,” Chaim said, and then, remembering which language he was supposed to be speaking, “Bueno.” He tried a different approach: “Isn’t it true that most of the priests you call good favor the Republic?”

  That made the prisoner stop and think. It made all the prisoners listening to him stop and think, in fact. They argued among themselves in low voices. One man threw his hands in the air and walked away in disgust when the argument didn’t seem to be going the way he wanted. The rest patiently went on hashing it out. They had plenty of time, and they weren’t going anywhere.

  Chaim squatted on his heels and smoked a cigarette. He wasn’t going anywhere, either, not right away. He owned more patience than he’d had before coming to Spain, too. If army life, and army life in the land of mañana at that, wouldn’t help you acquire some, nothing would.

  He’d given the little cigarette butt to Joaquin and lit another smoke—and got almost all the way through that one—before the POWs came to some sort of consensus. The fellow who’d called priests holy men came up to the edge of the wire. “It could be, Señor, that you have reason,” he said gravely. “Many of these men, the ones who did most for the poor, did favor the Republic. Some got into trouble for it. Some ran away to keep from getting into trouble.”

  “And what does this mean, do you think?” Chaim inquired.

  Instead of yielding as he’d hoped, the Nationalist prisoner only shrugged a slow shrug. “¿Quién sabe, Señor?” he said. “Who can be sure what anything means? Very often, life is not so simple.”

  In spite of himself, Chaim started to laugh. Only in Spain would a prisoner answer a political question with philosophy. “Muy bien,” the American from the International Brigades said. “What does this mean, then? Italy and Germany can’t help Marshal Sanjurjo any more. England and France can help the Republic. Who is likely to do better now?”

  “¿Quién sabe?” the Nationalist repeated. “We were winning before. You are doing better at this moment. But who can say anything about mañana?” Several long, strongly carved faces showed somber agreement.

  The response only made Chaim laugh harder. The prisoners gave him fishy stares, wondering if he was mocking them. He wasn’t, or not for that. “This is Spain, the land of mañana. I was just thinking about that. If you can’t talk about it here, where can you, Señor?”

  They had to talk that over, too, before they decided how to feel about it. It was almost as if they had their own little soviet here. Chaim didn’t tell them that; it would have scandalized them. Slowly, one at a time, they started to smile. “We did not think men from the Republic could joke,” one of them said.

  “Who says I was joking?” Chaim answered, deadpan. The POWs thought he was joking again, and their smiles got broader. He knew damn well he wasn’t. He grinned back at them all the same.

  THE BROWN BEAR in the cage stared out at Sarah Goldman and Isidor Bruck through the bars. He looked plump and happy. People in Germany might have to shell out ration coupons for everything they ate, but the zoo animals remained well fed. Germans were uncommonly kind to animals. Everyone said so.

  When Sarah remarked on that, Isidor looked around. No Aryans stood close enough to overhear him if he kept his voice down, so he did: “They think Jews are animals, so why don’t they treat us better?”

  Sarah stared at him in something not far from amazement. She would have expected a crack like that from her father, not from somebody her own age. But she didn’t need long to figure out why the baker’s son would come out with it. If being a Jew in
National Socialist Germany didn’t bring out gallows humor in people, what the devil would?

  Isidor took a chunk of war bread out of his jacket pocket. He tossed it into the bear’s cage. The animal ambled over to it. Sarah wondered if he’d turn up his nose at it—he probably got better himself. Animals were harder to fool than people. But he ate the treat and ran his blood-pink tongue across his nose.

  A guard bustled up. He wore an impressive, military-looking uniform. “Do not feed the animals! It is forbidden!” he said importantly. Then he saw the yellow stars on their clothes. He rolled his eyes (Aryan gray, not brown and therefore of questionable breed). “You should be in cages yourselves! Obey, or things will go even worse for you!” Sarah was afraid he would grab the billy club on his belt, but he turned on his heel and stomped off.

  “If we were in cages, do you suppose anyone would feed us?” she asked bitterly.

  “Some people would—if they came by when nobody could see them do it, and if they were sure the guard was somewhere else,” Isidor said.

  “Yes, that sounds about right.” Sarah remembered the Germans who’d sympathized with her after she had to start wearing the star. She also remembered that no one had told the Nazis they shouldn’t make Jews wear stars to begin with. “They wouldn’t keep us out of cages, though. Not a chance.”

  “You bet!” Isidor looked around. “I wish we could do something to the people who’re putting the screws to us. All I ever wanted to be was a German, and look what I’ve got.” He brushed his hand across the yellow star.

  Samuel Goldman could also have said that. Could? Her father had, many times. Sarah didn’t find it surprising: she’d said the same kind of thing herself, too. She almost told Isidor about her brother. But no. What he didn’t know, he couldn’t blurt out. Saul’s life rode on secrecy.

  And Saul’s fate rode on the tracks of a panzer. He was bound to have Aryan crewmates. He was also bound to be fighting as hard as he could to help the Nazis win their war. How perverse was that? As perverse as anything Sarah had ever imagined.