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

  He didn’t make fighting for Stalin sound like a good choice—only like a better choice than starting from scratch. Chuckling, Luc said, “Maybe I ought to shoot you now, then, to keep you from making trouble later on.”

  “It could be that you should.” The Russian wasn’t joking. “I see that, because you are French, some shreds of civilization still cling to you. The Nazis would not talk like that. They would just start shooting and burning. It has happened here in the Soviet Union many times already. No doubt it will happen many more.”

  Luc wanted to tell him that was all a pack of lies: nothing but garbage served up by the propaganda cooks in Moscow. He wanted to, yes, but the words stuck in his throat. After all, the Germans had invaded his country twice since 1914. They weren’t gentle occupiers either time. From all he’d heard, they were more brutal now than they had been a generation earlier. Why would he expect them to be gentle here in the East, then?

  Uneasily, he said, “International law gives them the right to be hard on francs-tireurs.” If you picked up a rifle without being a soldier, any army in the world that caught you would give you a blindfold and—if you were lucky—a cigarette and then fill you full of holes.

  Of course, the Germans took hostages if francs-tireurs troubled them. They murdered them by dozens or scores to remind the people they were fighting not to get frisky. Here in the East, they probably executed hostages by the hundreds. Would such frightfulness intimidate the Russians or only make them hate harder?

  Looking into the doctor-turned-peasant’s pale eyes, Luc didn’t like the answer he thought he saw. “Keep your nose clean, or you’ll be sorry,” he said, his voice rougher than he’d intended.

  “Oh, but of course, Monsieur,” the Russian said, his tone so transparently false that Luc wondered whether he should plug him right there.

  A Nazi would have. The Ivan understood as much. So did Luc. It was the biggest part of what stayed his hand. He didn’t have his men camp inside the village, as he’d intended when they approached it. Instead, he led them on for another kilometer. They were grumbling by the time he finally let them stop.

  He didn’t feel like listening to them. “Put a sock in it, you clowns,” he said. “We go to sleep in one of those houses, we’ll wake up with our throats cut.”

  “We’ll freeze here in the middle of nowhere,” one of the poilus retorted. “Is that so much better?”

  “We won’t freeze. We’ll just be cold. There’s a difference,” Luc said. He knew what the men would be saying about him—that he wouldn’t feel it because his heart was already cold. He’d said the same kind of thing about his sergeant back in the days before he wore any hash marks on his sleeve.

  Sergeant Demange was Second Lieutenant Demange now. A veteran noncom from the last war, Demange didn’t want to be an officer. But the know-it-alls above him kept getting shot, and he finally won a promotion whether he liked it or not. The way he chain-smoked Gitanes said he didn’t. Or maybe not—he’d smoked like a chimney as a sergeant, too.

  Luc told him about the French-speaking Russian back in the village. “You should have scragged the asshole,” said Demange, who had very little use for his fellow man. “It would’ve given the rest of the shitheads back there something to stew on.”

  “The Gestapo would be proud of you, sir.” More than two years of serving Demange had earned Luc the right to speak his mind.

  Up to a point. “Fuck you,” Demange answered evenly. “Fuck the Ivans, too. You want to make sure they don’t cause trouble, you’ve got to boot ’em in the balls. Oh, yeah—and fuck the Gestapo. Fuck ’em up the ass, except the ones who like it that way.”

  “Merde alors!” Admiration filled Luc’s voice. “You hate everybody, don’t you?”

  “Close enough,” Demange said. “With most of the bastards you run into, it just saves time.” He was looking at—looking through—Luc right then.

  If that wasn’t a hint, Luc had never run into one. “Don’t worry, sir. Everybody loves you, too,” he said. Sketching a salute, he went back to his squad. Behind him, the reluctant officer chuckled.

  In the middle of the night, the Russians dropped a swarm of mortar bombs on the village … and on the poilus who’d paused there for the night. Several soldiers got hurt. Luc’s squad was far enough from the buildings that nothing came down on them.

  He didn’t point that out to the men he led. If he had, they would have figured he was blowing his own horn. If they figured it out for themselves, though, they’d see what a clever fellow he really was. Back in his days as a sergeant, Demange would have played it the same way. Luc had learned more from him than he would ever admit, even—maybe especially—to himself.

  THE HACKED-UP BOARDS the Landsers fed into the fire came from a house a Russian shell had knocked flat. The gobbets of meat they toasted over the flames came from a horse that had hauled a 105mm howitzer till another shell broke its leg. Willi Dernen had shot it to put it out of its misery. He’d long since lost track of how many enemy soldiers he’d killed or wounded, but he couldn’t stand to see or listen to an animal suffer.

  He took a bite. The meat was half charred, half raw. It was also gluey and gamy. It was horsemeat, in other words. It wasn’t the first time he’d had it, and he was sure it wouldn’t be the last. He turned to his fellow Gefreiter—senior private—and said, “I’ve probably eaten enough horse to let them enter me in next year’s Berlin steeplechase.”

  Adam Pfaff shook his head. “Not fucking likely, Willi. I’ve eaten plenty of pussy, but nobody’s gonna put me in a goddamn cat show.” While Willi was still digesting that, so to speak, his buddy added, “Besides, have you taken a look at yourself lately? You’re no three-year-old, believe me, and no thoroughbred, either.”

  “Oh, yeah? And you are?” Willi said. They grinned at each other. Like the rest of the men in their section—like the rest of the German Frontschweine in Russia—they were scrawny and filthy and badly shaven. A crawly itch under Willi’s whitewashed Stahlhelm said he was lousy again, too. One of these days, he’d get deloused. And he’d stay clean till the next time he went through a Russian village. Say, half an hour after he left the delousing station. Then he’d have company once more.

  “Who’s got some tobacco he can spare?” Corporal Arno Baatz asked.

  Willi had a nice little sack of makhorka—Russian tobacco, cheap and nasty but strong—in a trouser pocket. He would have bet Adam Pfaff had a similar stash. Adam knew what was what about keeping himself supplied. Neither Gefreiter said a word. Willi had had to put up with Awful Arno since the war started. Adam was much newer to the regiment, but he’d rapidly learned the Unteroffizier made a piss-poor substitute for a human being.

  “Here you go, Corporal.” A private named Sigi Herzog gave Baatz a cigarette. Willi had already pegged him for a suckup. One more suspicion confirmed.

  “Good.” Awful Arno didn’t bother thanking Sigi. He took such tribute as no less than his due. Another reason to despise him, as far as Willi was concerned: one more to add to a long list. Were Baatz a gutless wonder, everything would have been perfect—and the company would have had a perfectly good excuse for shipping him back behind the lines where he could annoy people without risking lives. But he actually made a decent combat soldier. It was everything else about him that Willi—and anyone else who got stuck serving under him—couldn’t stand.

  He lit the cigarette and sucked in smoke. His plump cheeks hollowed. How any German on the Eastern Front stayed plump was beyond Willi, but Awful Arno managed. He shaved more often than most Landsers bothered to, but he was still plenty whiskery right this minute.

  After blowing out a stream of smoke and fog, he let loose with a blast of hot air, straight from the Propaganda Ministry: “As soon as the weather gets even a little better, we’ll roll up the Ivans like a pair of socks.”

  That he believed—and, worse, parroted—such bullshit was also on the list of reasons why he’d got his nickname. Willi rolled his eyes. Adam Pfa
ff rounded on Sigi. “What did you put in that smoke you gave him, man? Has to be better than tobacco, that’s for sure. If you’ve got more, give me some, too.”

  Baatz sent him an unfriendly look: about the only kind the corporal kept in stock. “So what are you saying, Pfaff? Are you saying we won’t roll up the Reds?” he asked. “That sounds like defeatism to me.”

  Defeatism could get you tangled up with the SS, the last thing anybody in his right mind wanted. Pfaff shook his head. “Don’t talk more like a jackass than you can help, Corporal. Anybody who’s seen me in action knows I’m no defeatist. Is that so or isn’t it?”

  “If you make other soldiers not want to fight their hardest, that’s defeatism, too,” Baatz said stubbornly. “And you’d better remember I’m not too big a jackass to know it.”

  Pfaff didn’t back down. “Nobody here’s gonna run home to Mutti on account of anything I come out with. And we all know we’d better fight hard, or else the Russians’ll cut off our cocks and shove ’em in our mouths.”

  “Do they really do that shit?” asked a kid who’d come up to the front only a few days earlier. His uniform wasn’t so patched and faded as the ones the other Landsers wore. But for that, there wasn’t much to choose between him and the rest.

  “They sure do,” Pfaff replied. Awful Arno nodded—they agreed on that much, anyhow.

  Willi nodded, too. He’d seen it for himself, however much he wished he hadn’t. “You don’t want to let the Ivans take you prisoner,” he said. “Save a last round for yourself. Maybe the guys they do that to are already dead, but you don’t want to find out for yourself, do you?”

  “So what do we do with the Russians we capture?” the new fish asked.

  The veterans squatting by the fire eyed one another. Nobody said anything for a little while. At last, Willi answered, “Well, sometimes we send ’em back to a camp like good little boys, the way we would have in the West.” We would have most of the time in the West, anyway, he thought. The French and English weren’t perfect about sticking to the Geneva Convention, either. Aloud, he went on, “Sometimes, though …” He shrugged. “It’s a rough old war. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

  “If we catch commissars or Jews, we do for them right away,” Awful Arno said. “Pigdogs like that don’t deserve to live.”

  Not every commissar or Jewish Red Army man died right away. The Wehrmacht kept some alive for questioning. The ones who did live for a while probably wound up envying their comrades who perished on the spot. German interrogators weren’t likely to be gentler than their Soviet opposite numbers.

  The kid chewed on that for a few seconds. Then he asked, “If we treat them rough, doesn’t that give them an excuse to do the same to us?”

  Arno Baatz laughed at him. “You want to spout the Golden Rule, sonny, you should put on a chaplain’s frock coat before you start.”

  He waited for the other men who’d been through the mill to laugh with him. Sigi Herzog did, but he was the only one. Awful Arno scowled at the others. Willi stonily stared back at him. The kid had a point of sorts.

  But only of sorts. “Look, when this fight is over, either we’ll be left standing or the damn Russians will,” Willi said. “You fight a war like that, and who has room to be a gentleman?”

  “Isn’t that what the Geneva Convention’s for?” the new fish asked. “To keep things clean on both sides, I mean?”

  Awful Arno laughed some more—a mean, nasty laugh. “Didn’t they tell you anything before they shipped your sorry ass up here? Yeah, that’s what the Geneva Convention’s all about. When we fought the Tommies and the frogs, we played by the rules, and so did they. But you know what? The fucking Bolsheviks never signed the fucking Convention!”

  “Oh,” the kid said in a small voice. And that was about the size of it. There were no formal rules in the fight between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. They could go at it however they pleased. They could, and they did. The kid made one more try: “If we told Stalin we’d follow the Convention whether we have to or not, wouldn’t he almost have to do the same?”

  Baatz laughed one more time. However little Willi wanted to, he found himself laughing along. It was either laugh or weep, and laughing hurt—a little—less. “Stalin doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to do,” Awful Arno said. “What he wants to do now is kill all the Germans he can.”

  He was right about that. Of course, Hitler didn’t have to do anything he didn’t want to, either, and what he wanted to do was kill carload lots of Russians. Which left the soldiers in Feldgrau or khaki stuck in the middle between them in one hell of a rough spot.

  Like I didn’t know that already, Willi thought. His bayonet got most of its use as a belt knife. He hacked off another hunk of horsemeat with it. Then he skewered the meat and held it over the fire. At least his belly would be full, anyhow.

  CHAIM WEINBERG LIKED having the Czech holdouts around. They might not be Marxist-Leninists the way he and most of the Internationals were, but they were good, solid men. The American Jew had nothing against Spaniards. He wouldn’t have come to Spain to fight for the Republic if he had.

  Spaniards—Spaniards on both sides, dammit—were extravagantly brave. They put up with shortages and fuckups with good humor he could only admire, because he sure couldn’t imitate it. But they were flighty. They were temperamental. They could be cruel for the fun of it (he’d never got used to bullfighting). And they liked to talk. Jesus H. Christ, did they ever!

  It wasn’t as if he didn’t enjoy the sound of his own voice. He did. He argued and converted and preached the Red faith with as much zeal as any friar taking on the latest jungle tribe who knew not the word of God. But when it came to passion, Chaim had to admit the Spaniards had him beat.

  He’d fallen hard for La Martellita, a Party organizer in battered Madrid. He would have said (hell, he did say, to anyone who would listen) he’d fallen in love with her. The emotion involved, though, sprang from an organ south of his heart. She was tiny. She was stacked. She was gorgeous, in the blue-black-haired, high-cheekboned, flashing-eyed Spanish way. She had what he couldn’t help thinking of as a blowjob mouth. And the way she painted it said she knew as much, too.

  She wouldn’t look at him for the longest time. It wasn’t that he was no movie star himself, even if he was no movie star himself. He was not too tall, kind of dumpy, and looked as Jewish as he was. But what really bothered her was that he wasn’t ideologically pure enough. He had the American gift, or curse, of thinking for himself, not blindly swallowing the latest twist in the Party line out of Moscow.

  He got into her bed by the oldest, most time-tested method in the world: he waited till she got smashed, went back to her place with her, and had his fun while she was too loaded to care—almost too loaded to notice. She was anything but delighted to discover him next to her the next morning, and her lethal hangover had only a little to do with it. But he’d tended to the hangover and sweet-talked her till she let him back in bed fully conscious; he owned the memory forever.

  Then she found out she was pregnant.

  She could have got rid of it easily enough. The Republic had probably the most progressive social policies in the world. But she didn’t want to. Maybe a strict Catholic upbringing still lurked in the unexamined basement of her soul. No, she wanted her little surprise to carry a proper surname.

  And so Chaim found himself a married man. He felt like Brer Rabbit in the briar patch. La Martellita—her revolutionary name meant The Little Hammer, and suited her all too well—promised she’d divorce him after the baby was born. Divorce was even easier here than abortion. And, unlike abortion, it didn’t trouble her tender conscience.

  In the meantime … It could have been a white marriage, like one between a fairy and a dyke wearing masks for the sake of the world’s good opinion. La Martellita, though, was as thorough in marriage as she was in everything else. And she had discovered that Chaim wasn’t half bad in the sack. It surprised her, as i
t had quite a few other women before her.

  “I may not be pretty, but by God I can screw,” he said, not without pride.

  “You may be able to screw, but by God you’re not pretty,” La Martellita answered, not without truth.

  Despite such devastating candor from his more-or-less beloved, he went back into Madrid from the front as often as he could. And he returned to the front less and less worried that she hoped he would stop something up there so she could give the baby a name as a respectable widow and not have to go on worrying about the messy details that went into marriage.

  Little by little, the Republicans were driving the Nationalists back from the northwestern edge of Madrid. There’d been months of bitter fighting over the corpse of the university. Now those battered buildings lay several kilometers behind the line. Pretty soon, most of Madrid would be out of artillery range for Marshal Sanjurjo’s thugs.

  Mike Carroll had served in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion for as long as Chaim had. Mike was tall and fair and lean and handsome. Chaim should have hated him on sight. Instead, they’d been buddies since the moment they met. Like so many buddies, they sassed each other all the time.

  “You’re the only Abe Lincoln who doesn’t want us to advance any more,” Mike said one chilly morning, a certain gleam in his eye.

  “My ass!” Chaim retorted. “The fuck that supposed to mean?”

  “Means the farther the front goes from the city, the tougher the time you have getting back there and getting your end wet,” Carroll answered.

  Chaim suggested that one way he could achieve such an objective was by having his comrade-in-arms perform an unnatural act on him. Said comrade-in-arms made reference to his mother, and also to the possibly relevant body parts of a ewe. Chaim surmised that the ewe might be diseased due to earlier intimate acquaintance with said comrade-in-arms. If they both hadn’t been laughing their heads off, they would have tried to murder each other.