The War That Came Early: West and East Read online

  “Tell me what to do,” Pete repeated.

  “You’ve done the first thing you needed to do: you’ve brought it to my attention. Now I’m going to have to talk to the judge advocate. He’ll tell me where the mines are, and how you can go about sweeping them.” Longstreet must have had a lot of sea duty, to think of mines in the water instead of mines buried under the ground. Well, he wasn’t old enough to have gone Over There in 1918.

  “When will you talk with him, sir? When will he figure out what needs doing?” Pete was all eagerness.

  It was his life, of course. It was only Ralph Longstreet’s job, and a small, annoying part of his job at that. “I see Herb every day, of course,” he answered. “I’ll fill him in on what’s troubling you, and after that it’s in his hands. He may have to talk with some other people, too.”

  Pete had thought—had hoped—this might be a matter of days. Now he saw all too plainly that it would be weeks or months if not the threatened year. His shoulders lost the iron brace they’d kept even while he sat in the hard wooden chair in front of Longstreet’s desk. “Well, thanks for starting things, anyway, sir.”

  “You did that,” the officer said. “And if you’re still as ready to go through with it by the time we’re all done as you are now, I’d say your chances with this girl will be a lot better than they are today.” He picked up the fountain pen. “Anything else on your mind as long as you’re here?”

  “Uh, no, sir.”

  “Okay. Dismissed.” Longstreet went back to work. Pete stood up, saluted, and left the captain’s office. He wondered if he’d done himself and Vera more harm than good.

  WILLI DERNEN DIDN’T KNOW where the hell he was. Somewhere in France—somewhere between where he had been and the border with the Low Countries. He couldn’t smell Paris, couldn’t taste victory, any more. All he smelled was trouble.

  He shivered under his summer-weight tunic. It was cold as a witch’s tit. If the winter was as bad as it gave signs of being, it’d freeze his balls off. His breath smoked. That was bad. An alert enemy soldier could spot the fog puffs rising into the chilly air and lie in wait to pot the poor bastard who was making them. But he didn’t know what he could do about it. Stop breathing? No, thanks!

  A gray-haired French peasant watching sheep in a meadow stared at him with no expression at all. Chances were the fellow’d gone through the mill in the last war. Would he sneak off to tell the poilus where the Germans were? He might.

  The froggies had been polite, even friendly, while the Wehrmacht had the bit between its teeth. And why not? They’d figured they would stay German a long time, the way they had after 1914. Now they were wondering. That would mean more trouble down the line, sure as hell it would.

  Something else moved. Willi’s scope-sighted rifle swung that way as if it had a life of its own. But it wasn’t a poilu. It was Corporal Baatz coming out of the bushes. Reluctantly, Willi lowered the rifle’s muzzle. Tempting as it was, he couldn’t go and plug Awful Arno. He didn’t suppose he could, anyhow. The unloved corporal was his lord and master again. He’d been reattached to his old unit within hours after Oberfeldwebel Puttkamer got his head blown off. He was still surprised they hadn’t made him turn in the fancy Mauser. Somebody’d slipped up there.

  Baatz saw him, too, and waved. He didn’t raise his hand too high. You never could tell what would draw a sniper’s eye. Willi wondered what had happened to the goddamn Czech with the antipanzer rifle. He was probably still busy nailing Germans. Puttkamer wasn’t around to quarrel with him any more, that was for sure.

  “Wie geht’s?” Awful Arno asked.

  Willi shrugged. “I’m still here. If I get hungry, I’ll shoot me a sheep.” He paused, considering. Hell with it, he thought, and went on, “War’s pretty goddamn fucked up, though, isn’t it?”

  He might have known Baatz wouldn’t admit what was as plain as the nose on his piggy face. “You can’t talk like that,” the noncom insisted.

  “Why the hell not?” Willi said. “It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “It’s disloyal, that’s what it is,” Baatz answered. “I knew the Gestapo guys knew what they were doing when they started sniffing around you and your asshole buddy Storch.”

  And they had, too. All the same, Willi said, “Oh, fuck off, man. If you can’t tell we screwed the pooch, you’re too dumb to go on living.”

  Awful Arno turned red. “Watch your big mouth, before you open it so wide you fall in and disappear. You keep going on like that, I’ll report you—so help me God I will.”

  “Go ahead,” Willi said wearily. “Maybe you’ll get me yanked out of the line. If you do, I’ll be better off than you are.”

  That only made Baatz madder. “You don’t know what the devil you’re talking about. Wait till they chuck you into Dachau. You’ll wish you only had machine guns to worry about.”

  The blackshirts had said the same thing. Willi wasn’t about to take it from Awful Arno. “Give me a break. If telling the truth is disloyal, then I guess I am. Jesus Christ, the war is screwed up. Even a blind man can see it. Even you should be able to.”

  “You’re not just talking about the war,” Baatz said. “You’re talking about how we’re fighting it. And if you say that’s gone wrong, you’re saying the Führer’s leadership isn’t everything it ought to be.”

  “Yeah? And so? He’s the Führer. He’s not God, for crying out loud. When he takes a crap, angels don’t fall out of his asshole,” Willi said.

  Awful Arno’s eyes widened. He looked like an uncommonly sheltered child hearing about the facts of life for the first time. “He’s the Führer,” he said, on a note as different from Willi as could be.

  “Ja, ja, and the Grofaz, too,” Willi said: the cynical contraction of the German for greatest military leader of all time. “But if he’s so goddamn great, how come we’re retreating? How come Paris is way the hell over there?” He pointed west.

  Before Baatz could answer, a mortar bomb burst a hundred meters behind them. They both threw themselves flat. More bombs came down, some of them closer. Fragments whined and snarled overhead. Willi looked around without raising his head. Sure as hell, that Frenchman had bailed out. And a couple of sheep were down and kicking. Spit filled his mouth. Mutton chops!

  Arno Baatz shielded his face with his arm, as if that would do any good. “So Dachau is worse than this, is it?” Willi said.

  The corporal nodded without raising his head. “You’d better believe it is. And everybody who doubts the Führer will end up in a place like that.” Conviction filled his voice.

  “Scheisse,” Willi said. “If he messed up the war—and he damn well did—somebody needs to doubt him, don’t you think? I hope to God I’m not the only one, or Germany’s even more screwed up than I figured.”

  “He’s the Führer. If we live through this, Dernen, I will report you.”

  “Go ahead,” Willi said, wondering if he would have to make sure Awful Arno damn well didn’t live through it. He would if he had to, but he didn’t want to. Killing someone on his own side in cold blood wasn’t what he’d signed up for. He went on, “I’ll call you a motherfucking liar and say you always had it in for me—and that’s the truth, too. You think the officers don’t know what kind of asshole you are, Baatz? Yeah, report me. It’s your word against mine. I bet they believe me, not you, and you end up in the concentration camp.”

  “You don’t get it, do you?” Baatz sounded almost pitying. “This is security we’re talking about. Of course they’ll believe me.”

  “They’d believe somebody with a working brain, maybe, but not a fuckup like you,” Willi retorted. “Like I said, they know better. Go ahead, report me, cuntface. You’ll find out.” Maybe he was right, maybe he was wrong. Maybe nobody’d take any chances, and they’d both wind up in Dachau. If they did, he was willing to bet he’d last longer than Awful Arno.

  And maybe they wouldn’t live through this, and it would all be moot. Willi lifted his head a few centimeters. Som
ething that wasn’t a sheep moved atop the next little swell of ground to the west. Willi brought his rifle to his shoulder and snapped a shot at it. It disappeared down the back side of the hillock.

  “What was that?” Baatz asked.

  “Well, it might have been a hippo escaped from the zoo. Or it might have been a Frenchman.” Willi chambered a fresh round. “Odds were it was a Frenchy. So if you want to live long enough to rat on me, get your empty ostrich head out of the sand and start acting like a soldier.” He’d never had the chance to tell off a noncom like this. It was fun. It might almost be worth getting shot. Almost. If Baatz got shot, too.…

  Two French soldiers came over that hillock. They were more cautious than the first fellow had been—they knew there were Landsers on this side, which he hadn’t. Willi fired at one of them. Then he rolled away from Baatz and into the bushes. Once the shooting started, you wanted as much cover as you could find.

  Awful Arno fired at the poilus, too. He was a decent combat soldier; even Willi, who’d despised him for a year now, would have admitted as much. He headed for something that might be cover, too. Off to the left, a German MG-34 started sawing away. A small smile crossed Willi’s face. He loved machine guns—his own side’s machine guns, anyhow. They were the best guarantee a poor ordinary ground pounder had that he’d go on pounding ground a while longer.

  The MG-34 didn’t just knock over enemy soldiers. It made them concentrate on it, so they forgot all about Willi and Baatz. He got a clean shot at a fellow crawling along in a khaki greatcoat. The fancy Mauser thumped his shoulder. The poilu doubled up. Sorry, buddy, Willi thought, but you would have done the same thing to me.

  They held the French in place till the late afternoon. By then, Willi had a well-positioned, well-protected foxhole—but no sheep carcass to keep him company, dammit. Even so, he was ready to stay a while, but a runner came up to order the line back half a kilometer. The Germans withdrew under cover of darkness.

  Willi and Arno Baatz almost tripped over each other. They exchanged glares. “Grofaz,” Willi said again, defiantly. If the Führer was so fucking smart, how come they were going backwards? Pretty soon, even Awful Arno would start wondering about things like that. Wouldn’t he?

  Chapter 23

  Sailors threw lines from the U-30 to the men waiting on the pier. The other ratings caught the ropes and made the U-boat fast. “All engines stop,” Julius Lemp called through the speaking tube.

  “All engines stopped,” the reply came back, and the diesels’ throb died into silence.

  Lemp sighed. Especially since the Schnorkel had come to let the diesels run almost all the time, that throb had soaked into his bones. Doing without it felt strange, unnatural, wrong. He sighed again. “Wilhelmshaven,” he said to no one in particular. “Home port.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Gerhart Beilharz declared.

  “Well, sure it does,” Lemp said. “You won’t have to wear your iron pot all the time.”

  “No, and I’ll probably clonk myself a couple of times when I don’t have it on,” the tall engineering officer answered. “Too goddamn many doorways aren’t made for people my size, and sometimes I forget to duck.”

  “That is a bad habit for a U-boat officer,” Lemp said with mock severity.

  “I’ll try to unlearn it.” Beilharz stretched. The space right under the conning toward was the only one in the boat where he could do that without clouting somebody. “Be good to get my feet on dry land again, even if it’ll feel like it’s rolling under me for a little while.”

  “They’ll probably pin an Iron Cross First Class on you for the snort,” Lemp told him. “It did us some good, no two ways about it.”

  “I’m glad you think so, Skipper. I know you had your doubts when the technicians installed it.”

  That was putting things mildly. Lemp didn’t feel like rehashing it, though. All he said was, “We’ve earned some time ashore.”

  As the sailors trooped off the U-boat, a commander nodded to Lemp and said, “Admiral Dönitz’s compliments, and he would like to speak with you at your convenience. If you would care to come with me …”

  At your convenience plainly meant right this minute. And if Lemp didn’t care to go with the commander, he damn well would anyway. Two unsmiling sailors with rifles and helmets behind the officer made that obvious. “I am at the admiral’s service, of course,” Lemp replied, which meant just what it said.

  Dönitz sat behind a broad desk piled high with papers. He had a broad face that tapered to a narrow, pointed chin. But for a thin beak of a nose, his features were rather flat.

  “Well, how do you like the Schnorkel?” he asked without preamble.

  “Sir, it’s more useful than I thought it would be,” Lemp answered. “It’s given less trouble than I expected from an experimental gadget, too. And Beilharz does a fine job of keeping it healthy. He’s a good officer.”

  “He didn’t fracture his skull inside the boat?” Dönitz inquired with a smile. Lemp blinked. Did the admiral keep every junior lieutenant in his mental card file? Maybe he did, by God.

  “A couple of flesh wounds. Nothing worse,” Lemp said after a beat.

  “That’s good. And it’s good you sank a Royal Navy destroyer. We’re going to win the Scandinavian campaign, even if England and France haven’t quite figured that out yet,” the admiral in charge of U-boats said.

  “I’m glad to hear it, sir. I know we’ve hurt the Royal Navy badly.”

  “Yes, mostly with U-boats and land-based aircraft, though the big ships did get that one carrier,” Dönitz said. “They’ve hurt our surface forces, too, and we have less to spare than they do. But we dominate the waters in the eastern North Sea, and that’s the point.” His telephone rang. “Excuse me.” He picked it up. “Dönitz here.”

  Someone gabbled excitedly in his ear. Lemp was astonished to see his jaw drop. Dönitz was for the most part an imperturbable man. Not today.

  “What?” he barked. “Are you sure? … What is the situation in Berlin? … Are you sure of that? … Well, you’d better be. Call me the minute you have more information.” He slammed the handset into its cradle.

  “What’s up, sir?” Lemp asked. “Anything I need to know about?”

  Dönitz took a deep breath. He’s going to tell me to get lost, Lemp thought. What the devil was going on? But the admiral didn’t do that—not quite. “Maybe you and your men should stick close to barracks for the next couple of days,” he said.

  “Sir, we just got in after a cruise,” Lemp protested. “The boys deserve the chance to blow off some steam. It’s not as if—” He broke off.

  “As if you’d sunk the Athenia again?” Dönitz finished for him. Lemp gave back a miserable nod. That was what had been in his mind, all right. Admiral Dönitz went on, “No, this isn’t your fault. But they should do it anyhow, for their own safety. Things may get … ugly.” He seemed to pick the word with malice aforethought.

  “Can you tell me what’s going on?” Lemp asked.

  “Only that it’s political,” Dönitz replied. “Listen to the radio. You’ll probably piece things together—as well as anyone can right now. Oh, and don’t be surprised if you find the barracks under guard.”

  That raised more questions than it answered. Lemp chose the one that looked most important: “Political, sir? What do you mean, political?”

  “What I said.” Dönitz seemed to lose patience with him all at once. “You are dismissed.” Lemp saluted and got out. He hadn’t closed the door before the admiral grabbed for the telephone again.

  The commander was waiting in Dönitz’s anteroom. “What’s up?” he asked when he got a look at Lemp’s face.

  “Ask your boss … sir,” Lemp said. The commander looked impatient. As best he could, Lemp recounted what had gone on after the phone rang.

  “Der Herr Jesus!” the other officer said after he’d finished. “Something’s gone into the shitter, all right. You’d better do what the admiral suggested. Th
ings are liable to get nasty in a hurry.”

  If he didn’t know what was going on, he had his suspicions. “What do you mean?” Lemp inquired.

  “Just sit tight. I hope I’m wrong,” the commander said, which only frustrated Lemp more. Instead of giving him any answers he could actually use, the other officer hurried into Dönitz’s sanctum.

  “Why don’t you do what Commander Tannenwald says, sir?” one of the armed ratings said. Now Lemp had a name to go with the face. The fellow with the Stahlhelm and the Mauser should have had no business giving him orders. His muscle, and his friend’s, and their weapons, were very persuasive. The two of them escorted Lemp back to his crew.

  A few minutes after he got to the barracks, rifle shots and a short burst from a machine gun rang out not nearly far enough away. “What the hell is going on?” Peter demanded. No one answered. No one could—no one else knew, either. The helmsman turned on the radio in the barracks hall. Syrupy music poured out of it. That was no help.

  When the tune ended, the announcer said, “Remain obedient to duly constituted authority.” Then he played another record.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Lemp asked. He got no more answer than Peter had.

  More gunfire came from the edge of the naval base. The lights outside the barracks hall suddenly went out. One of the guards stuck in his head and said, “The watchword is ‘Heil Hitler!’ Remember it.” He shut the door before anybody could ask him any questions. Lemp wasn’t sure what to ask anyway. And if people were running around with guns, the wrong question was liable to have a permanent answer.

  Lieutenant Beilharz took him aside and spoke in a low voice: “Skipper, I think some kind of coup is going on. What do we do?”

  The same unwelcome thought had crossed Lemp’s mind. “What can we do? Go back to the U-30 and start shooting things up with the deck gun? We don’t even know which side is which. Best thing is to sit tight and wait to see what happens. Or have you got a better idea?”