The War That Came Early: West and East Page 6

  Being on the receiving end of the lesson was an honor Willi could have done without. He nervously looked back over his shoulder. Where were the German panzers to stop this onslaught? They’d always been thin on the ground in this part of the front. The generals had concentrated them on the other wing. It almost worked, too … but almost was a word that got a lot of soldiers killed.

  One of the French panzers started spraying machine-gun fire toward the German line. Idiotically, a couple of German MG-34s fired back. Their bullets spanged harmlessly from the panzers’ thick iron hide. And, as soon as they showed themselves, other enemy panzers gave them cannon fire till they fell silent. It didn’t take long.

  Then flame spurted from the first French machine. It stopped short. Hatches flew open. The driver, radioman, and commander bailed out. One of them, his coveralls on fire, dove into a shell hole. The other two got shot before they could find cover. Willi didn’t know for sure whether one of his bullets found the panzer crewmen. If not, though, it wasn’t for lack of effort.

  The German antitank gun knocked out another enemy machine a moment later. Then the surviving French panzers shelled it into silence. On they came, poilus loping along among and behind them. After snapping off a couple of more shots, Willi ducked for cover. He knew what was coming. And it came: a burst of machine-gun bullets cracked past less than a meter above his head.

  Then he heard one of the sweetest noises ever. There were German panzers around here after all. One of them fired at the French machines. Clang! That was a hit. Willi thought it came from a 37mm gun, too. He really hadn’t known there were any Panzer IIIs in the neighborhood.

  Fire from the French panzers paused. They had to traverse their turrets to bear on the new threat. And their commander was also the loader and gunner. They couldn’t shoot fast no matter how much they wanted to. The German Panzer I and II suffered from the same problem. Not the III. Commander, loader, and gunner all fit within its angular turret.

  Because of that edge, the Panzer III knocked out two more French vehicles in quick succession. Its hull machine gun sprayed death at the advancing foot soldiers and made them sprawl for cover. But then the froggies started shooting back, damn them. Some of their panzers mounted 47mm cannon. The III was armored better than the I and II, but Willi didn’t know of a panzer in the world that could stop 47mm AP rounds. The German machine showed smoke, and then flame. Willi hoped some of the crewmen got out.

  A few Panzer Is and IIs still tried conclusions with the French armor. Willi could see how that would play out, even if it took a while. He didn’t like the ending on the movie that ran in his mind. He didn’t like retreating, either, but … He just hoped he could do it without getting shot in the back.

  Then Corporal Baatz yelled, “Fall back through Etrepois!” That was the tiny village behind the stretch of line the section was holding. Willi had heard the Frenchies who lived there pronounce the name. Awful Arno made a horrible hash of it.

  German artillery came to life then, pounding the ground in front of the line. That would make the poilus take cover if anything did. Trying not to think about short rounds, Willi scrambled out of his hole. He ran hunched-over and zigzagged. Maybe it did a little good, maybe not.

  He dove into a crater a 155 round must have dug. A moment later, another Landser joined him. “Boy, this is fun,” Wolfgang Storch panted. “Fun like getting all your teeth pulled out.”

  They’d gone through basic together. They still argued about who hated Awful Arno worse. Wolfgang was more apt to speak his mind than Willi, who usually had a sunnier disposition. But there wasn’t anything to be sunny about, not right now there wasn’t. “Fun. Yeah. Sure.” Those were all the words Dernen had in him.

  Storch fired a couple of rounds from his Mauser. “That’ll make ’em keep their heads down,” he said in some satisfaction. “C’mon. You ready to do some more moving?”

  “I guess.” Willi hoped he’d find reinforcements rushing up through Etrepois. He didn’t. The village was only a few houses and a tavern marking a crossroads. Frenchwomen with impassive faces watched the Germans retreat. A few weeks earlier, their own men had been the ones giving ground.

  The Wehrmacht was on the move then. Willi’d had his pecker up. Now … Now he was discovering what the Frenchies had known ever since December, when the German blow fell in the west. If you had the choice between advancing and retreating, advancing was better.

  Now there was a profound bit of philosophy! Shaking his head, Willi left Etrepois behind him.

  AFTER SO LONG on the Ebro front, Madrid was a different world for Chaim Weinberg. It was different for everybody in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, for everybody in all the International Brigades.

  That didn’t make the embattled capital of Spain (though the Republican government had been operating out of Barcelona for quite a while now) an improvement over the trenches in the far northeast. Looking at the devastation all around him, Chaim said, “They had to destroy this place in order to save it, didn’t they?”

  Mike Carroll only grunted. The hand-rolled cigarette in the corner of his mouth twitched. “Fascists destroyed this fuckin’ place to destroy it,” he answered. “That’s what Marshal Sanjurjo’s assholes do.”

  He talked slow, like a foul-mouthed Gary Cooper. He looked a little like him, too: he was tall and fair and lean and rugged. Chaim, short and squat and dark, fit in fine in Spain. People stared at Mike, wondering if he was a German. Better to be thought a Gary Cooper lookalike. No one in Republican Spain loved Germans.

  Grimacing, Chaim shook his head. That wasn’t true. No one in Republican Spain admitted to loving Germans. That wasn’t the same as the other. Just as Republicans had to lie low in land Sanjurjo’s Nationalists held, so the jackals of Hitlerism needed to smile and pretend wherever the Republic still ruled. One side’s firing squads or the other’s took care of fools who slipped. As far as Chaim was concerned, the Nationalists massacred, while the Republic dealt out stern justice. That somebody on the other side might see things differently bothered him not a peseta’s worth.

  Somebody on the other side wouldn’t have seen what the Fascists had done to Madrid. Spanish bombers—and those of their Italian and German allies—had been working the city over for two and a half years. Buildings looked as skeletal and battered as a bare-branched forest at the tag end of a hard winter. Spring would clothe the forest in green. Spring was here in Madrid, but this town still smelled like death. It would be a long time recovering, if it ever did.

  Well, that was what the International Brigades were here for. They were the best fighters the Republic had. Chaim would tell people so, at any excuse or none. Few Spaniards seemed to want to argue with him. They knew they had no military skill to speak of. That shamed a lot of them. Maybe it should have made them proud instead—didn’t it argue they were more civilized than most?

  Many Internationals, including some of the Abe Lincolns, had fought in the last war. Chaim and Mike were both too young for that. But, like the rest of the Marxist-Leninists and fellow travelers who’d come to Spain to battle Fascism, they were motivated. They hadn’t stood on the sidelines when reaction went on the march here. They’d come to do something about it.

  “Funny, y’know,” Chaim said, looking away from a skinny dog snapping at something disgusting in the gutter. “They were set to take us out of the line six months ago, when the big war fired up.” He jerked a thumb toward the northeast toward the rest of Europe, the world beyond the Pyrenees.

  “Yeah, well …” Mike paused to blow a smoke ring. He owned all kinds of casual, offhand talents like that. “Bastards back there finally figured out we knew what we were doing down here.”

  “Better believe it!” Weinberg had his full measure of the New York City Jew’s passionate devotion to causes. How could you not be enthusiastic about putting a spike in Hitler’s wheel? Plenty of folks, even Jews, seemed not to get excited about Fascism. Dumb assholes, Chaim thought scornfully.

  Artill
ery rumbled, off to the northwest. The Nationalists were closest to the heart of the city there. In fact, they’d pushed into Madrid in the northwest. Most of the university lay in their hands. It had gone back and forth for the past couple of years. Whenever one side felt strong, it tried to shove out the other. Now it looked as if both sides had decided to shove at the same time, like a couple of rams banging heads. Only time would tell what sprang from that.

  The university was less than two miles north of the royal palace. Chaim had been by the palace, just to see what it looked like. Marshal Sanjurjo had declared he would restore the King of Spain if his side won. That sure hadn’t kept the Nationalists and Germans and Italians from knocking the snot out of Alfonso XIII’s digs. If he ever came back, he could live in the ruins or in a tent like everybody else.

  When Chaim said as much, Mike Carroll made a sour face. “If the reactionary son of a bitch comes back, that means we’ve lost.”

  “Yeah, well, if we do we probably won’t have to worry about it any more,” Chaim said. He didn’t mean they would get over the border to France, either. The Nationalists didn’t take many prisoners. Come to that, neither did the Republicans. Chaim didn’t know which side had started shooting men who tried to give up. That didn’t matter any more. The Spaniards might not make the world’s greatest professional soldiers, but when they hated they didn’t hate halfway.

  He listened anxiously to find out whether any of the newly launched shells would gouge fresh holes in the rubble right around here. In that case, they might gouge holes in him, which was not something he eagerly anticipated. But the bursts were at least half a mile off. Nothing to get hot and bothered about—not for him, anyhow. If some poor damned Madrileños had just had their lives turned inside out and upside down … well, that was a damn shame, but they wouldn’t be the first people in Spain whose luck had run out, nor the last.

  Republican guns answered the Nationalist fire. Those were French 75s. The sound they made going off was as familiar to Chaim as a telephone ring. The Republicans had a lot of them: ancient models Spain had bought from France after the last war, and brand new ones the French had sent over the Pyrenees when the big European scrap started. All at once, the neutrality patrol turned to a supply spigot when the French and English realized Hitler was dangerous after all.

  And then, after the Wehrmacht hit the Low Counties and France itself, the spigot to Spain dried up. The Republic would have been screwed, except Sanjurjo also had himself a supply drought: the Germans and Italians were using everything they made themselves.

  One of the explosions from the 75s sounded uncommonly large and sharp. Weinberg and Carroll shared a wince. Chaim knew what that kind of blast meant. The French guns mostly fired locally made ammunition these days. And locally made ammo, not to put too fine a point on it, sucked. Chaim carried Mexican cartridges for his French rifle. He didn’t trust Spanish rounds. German ammunition was better yet, but impossible to get these days except by plundering dead Nationalists.

  A barmaid stepped out of a cantina and waved to the two Internationals. “¿Vino?” she called invitingly.

  Chaim surprised himself by nodding. “C’mon,” he told Mike. “We can hoist one for the poor sorry bastards at that gun.”

  “Suits,” Carroll said. You rarely needed to ask him twice about a drink. Very often, you didn’t need to ask him once.

  The cantina was dark and gloomy inside. It would have been gloomier yet except for a big hole in the far wall. It smelled of smoke and booze and sweat and urine and hot cooking oil and, faintly, of vomit—like a cantina, in other words. Mike did order wine. Chaim told the barmaid, “Cerveza.” He tried to lisp like a Castilian.

  She understood him, anyhow. Off she went, hips working. She brought back their drinks, then waited expectantly. Chaim crossed her palm with silver. That made her go away. He raised his mug. “Here’s to ’em.”

  “Here’s to what’s left of ’em, anyway,” Carroll said. They both drank. Mike screwed up his face. “Vinegar. How’s yours?”

  “Piss,” Chaim answered. Sure as hell, the beer was thin and sour. But, save for a few bottles imported from Germany, he’d never had beer in Spain that wasn’t. You could drink it. He did.

  And Mike got outside his vinegary red. He raised his glass for a refill. The barmaid took care of him and Chaim. He paid this time. Outside, the not-distant-enough enemy guns started booming again. Again, nothing came down close enough to get excited about. That was good enough for Chaim. He’d go back up to the line PDQ. Till he did … What was that line? Eat, drink, and be merry, he thought, and deliberately forgot the rest of it.

  Chapter 4

  Peggy Druce positively hated Berlin. The Philadelphia socialite had visited the capital of Germany several times between the wars. She’d always had a fine old time then. If you couldn’t have a fine old time in the Berlin of the vanished, longed-for days before Hitler took over, you were probably dead.

  If you could have a fine old time in this miserable land of blackouts and rationing, something had to be wrong with you. Almost all civilian cars had vanished from the streets. Even the parked ones were in danger. One propaganda drive after another sent people out to scavenge rubber or scrap metal or batteries.

  That didn’t mean the streets were empty, though. Soldiers paraded hither and yon, jackboots thumping. When they passed by reviewing stands, they would break into the goose step. Otherwise, they just marched. The characteristic German stride looked impressive as hell—the Nazis sure thought so, anyhow—but it was wearing. Soldiers, even German soldiers, were practical men. They used the goose step where they got the most mileage from it: in front of their big shots, in other words. When the bosses weren’t watching, they acted more like ordinary human beings.

  Columns of trucks and half-tracks and panzers also rumbled up and down Berlin’s broad boulevards. Peggy took a small, nasty satisfaction in noting that the treads on the tanks and half-tracks tore hell out of the paving. Repair crews often followed the armored columns, patching up the damage.

  A Berlin cop—a middle-aged man with a beer belly and a limp he’d probably got in the last war—held out his hand to Peggy and snapped, “Papieren, bitte!”

  “Jawohl,” she replied. Ja-fucking-wohl, she thought as she fumbled in her purse. Her German had got a lot better than it was when she first arrived in Berlin. Getting stuck somewhere would do that to you. She found her American passport and pulled it out with a flourish. “Here,” she said, or maybe, “Hier.” The word sounded the same in English and auf Deutsch.

  The cop blinked. He didn’t see an eagle that wasn’t holding a swastika every day. He examined the passport, then handed it back. “You are an American.” He turned truth to accusation. He was a cop, all right.

  “Ja.” Peggy was proud of herself for leaving it right there. She damn near added Nothing gets by you, does it? or Very good, Sherlock or something else that would have landed her in hot water. Her husband always said she talked first and thought afterwards. Good old Herb! She missed him like anything. He knew her, all right.

  “What is an American doing in Berlin?” the cop demanded. He took it for granted that, even though the USA was neutral, Americans wouldn’t be pro-German. Maybe he wasn’t so dumb after all.

  And Peggy gave him the straight truth: “Trying to get the hell out of here and go home.”

  As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she wished she had them back. Too late, as usual. She’d given another cop the straight truth not too long ago, and he’d hauled her down to the station on account of it. If a desk sergeant with better sense hadn’t realized pissing off the United States wasn’t exactly Phi Beta Kappa for the Reich, she might have found out about concentration camps from the inside.

  If this policeman was another hothead … If his desk sergeant was, too … You never wanted to get in trouble in Hitler’s Germany. And, since the Germans themselves were walking on eggs after a failed coup against the Führer, you especially didn’t want t
o get in trouble now.

  The cop paused. He lit a Hoco. Like any other German cigarette these days, it smelled more like burning trash than tobacco. “If you don’t want to be in Berlin to begin with, what are you doing here?” he asked reasonably.

  “I was in Marianske Lazne when the war started,” Peggy answered, using the Czech name with malice aforethought.

  Sure as hell, the Berlin cop said, “You were where?” Give a kraut a Slavic place name, and he’d drown in three inches of water.

  “Marienbad, it’s also called,” Peggy admitted.

  Light dawned. “Oh! In the German Sudetenland!” the policeman exclaimed. “How lucky for you to be there when the Führer’s forces justly reclaimed it for the Reich.”

  “Well … no,” Peggy said. For the first time, the cop’s face clouded over. See? Keep trying, Peggy jeered at herself. You’ll stick your foot in it sooner or later. Trying to extract the foot, she added, “I almost got killed.”

  For a wonder, it worked. “Ach, ja. In wartime, this can happen,” the cop said, rough sympathy in his voice. Everything would have been fine if he hadn’t added, “With those miserable, murderous Czech brutes all around, you should thank heaven you came through all right.”

  Peggy bit down hard on the inside of her lower lip to keep from blurting something that would have got her sent to Dachau or Buchenwald or some other interesting place. Count to ten, she thought frantically. No. Count to twenty, in Czech! The Czechs hadn’t been the problem. The Germans had. Shelling and bombing Marianske Lazne was one thing—that was part of war. But the way the Nazis started in on the Jews who were taking the waters after overrunning the place … No, she didn’t want to remember that.

  None of it passed her lips. Herb would have been proud of her. Hell, she was proud of herself. The only thing she said was, “Can I go?”