Last Orders: The War That Came Early Read online

  More and more men came down from the sky. They landed to the west of him, in the direction the C-47 was flying. One of them let out a yell he could hear from a couple of hundred yards away. The luckless guy didn’t get up. He lay there clutching an ankle and howling like a wolf.

  A jeep chugged up to Pete. “Hop in,” the driver said, so he did. The little utility vehicles could go damn near anywhere. The only trouble with them was, after they’d jounced over rough terrain for a while, you thought your kidneys would fall out.

  McGill pointed toward the hurt Marine. “Pick him up next,” he said. “He landed bad.”

  “Okey-doke.” The driver put the jeep in gear and went over to the man. “Give you a hand, pal?”

  “You better,” the other leatherneck answered. “I sure as shit busted somethin’ in there. I heard it crack when I hit, an’ it hurts like a mad son of a bitch.” He did some fancier cussing as the driver and Pete hauled him up and got him into the back of the jeep.

  “Got your morphine syrette in your wound kit?” Pete asked him. “If you want, I’ll stick you.”

  “Yeah, that’d be good,” the other Marine said. His face was gray and drawn; he had to be hurting bad. Pete knew what that pain was like. He’d broken bones before. He fumbled in the pouches on the guy’s belt till he found the one with the wound dressing and the sulfa powder and the syrette. Pulling off the cap, he drove the needle home and pushed the plunger.

  “I’ll take you both back to Schofield Barracks,” the driver said. “They got a hospital there.”

  Even on the road, the jeep didn’t have the smoothest ride in the world. The injured Marine groaned at every bump till the morphine took hold. Then he let out a soft sigh of relief.

  Schofield Barracks, west of the central town of Wahiawa, had taken damage from Japanese air raids. It was an Army base. The hospital accepted the injured man without any trouble. The driver had to talk to a light colonel, though, before he got permission to return Pete to his fellow leathernecks.

  Since the Army was doing him a favor, even if with no great enthusiasm, McGill kept his opinion of it to himself. But he remained damn glad he was a Marine. And now he was a Marine who could fly!

  When Julius Lemp brought the U-30 into Namsos, he wondered whether the U-boat base in the far north of Norway would be ready for him and his rowdy crew. Namsos had been a nothing town before Germany occupied it. But its position made it important in wartime. German U-boats staging from Namsos could easily get out into the North Atlantic. Or they could go up into the Barents Sea and harry the English convoys bringing supplies to the Russian ports of Murmansk and Archangelsk.

  Proper U-boat bases had bars and brothels where sailors who’d been cooped up inside a smelly steel tube for weeks could blow off steam. The last couple of times the U-30 put in there, Namsos had been badly deficient in such amenities. His men sparked disorders that came within centimeters of turning into open mutiny.

  When the U-boat tied up at a pier this time, Lemp discovered it had a welcoming committee, all right. A couple of dozen stalwart shore-patrol men stood waiting in the planking in naval-infantry uniforms that looked a lot like what the Wehrmacht wore. Each of them had a Stahlhelm on his head, a truncheon on his belt, and a Schmeisser in his arms.

  “What the devil is this?” Lemp called from the conning tower as his soldiers tossed lines to ordinary Kriegsmarine personnel on the pier, who made the U-30 fast.

  “Sir, we don’t want any trouble when your men come ashore,” answered the young lieutenant, junior grade, who seemed to be in charge of the shore-patrol detachment.

  “I don’t want any trouble, either. And my men don’t,” Lemp said irately. “They just want to be able to have a good time.”

  “What you mean by having a good time is tearing the place to pieces … sir,” the junior officer said.

  “Leck mich am Arsch! That’s a bunch of Scheisse!” Lemp yelped. “They never would have got out of line if there were anything to do here. But I guess when you’ve got to stay am Arsch der Welt, you don’t notice things like that.”

  “Sir,” the puppy said one more time, his voice so stiff it would have snapped if you tried to bend it, “accommodations have improved since the last time the U-30 made port here, sir.” He plainly used the title of respect twice in one sentence to convey the exact opposite: insubordination by supersubordination, you might say. After a long, angry breath, he went on, “Your men will be allowed out from the barracks in small groups, with armed escorts. They may drink. They may enjoy female companionship. If they put one foot out of place, I promise we will jug them … sir.”

  “Christ on His cross! I think you’d treat an English U-boat crew better than you’re treating us,” Lemp said.

  “They’d probably behave better, too, sir,” the junior officer retorted. “Your other choice is remaining confined to the boat during refitting.” That was no choice at all, as he and Lemp both understood. The first thing you wanted to do when you came into port was get the hell off the cramped, stinking boat. Lemp was tempted to swing the deck gun around and start lobbing 88mm shells at the base commandant’s headquarters. The scary thing was, he knew his sea wolves would not only do it if he gave the order, they’d cheer while they were doing it.

  But no, you had to act like a grownup, even—often especially—when you didn’t want to. “All right,” Lemp said with a sigh. “We’ll do it your way. We’ll come out peacefully, and we’ll play nice. Wait here. I’ll go below and give the lads the good news.”

  They took it as hard as he’d expected. Their objections were loud and profane. “You should have told that Schokostecher where to put it, skipper!” one of them shouted. He was a petty officer with several years’ service, too, which really alarmed Lemp.

  “No, dammit. We’ve got to play nice,” he said, as he had to the punk on the pier. “This isn’t a joke.”

  “You bet it isn’t!” another sailor yelled.

  “This is for the boat,” Lemp said—if that didn’t hit them where they lived, nothing would. If nothing would, Lord help them all. “We’ve got into trouble twice here. Third time and they really would scuttle us. Drink some beer. It sounds like they do finally have a brothel, so screw the girls. But don’t brawl and don’t break things. You hear me?”

  They heard him. They didn’t like it, but they did. They came up the ladder, down the conning tower, along the deck, and onto the pier in their filthy clothes, with long, greasy hair and badly groomed beards. They hardly looked like members of the same species as the spick-and-span shore patrolmen, much less members of the same armed force.

  But they had their own pride. As they passed the neat men with helmets and machine pistols, they asked them things like “Ever been seasick, pal?” and “Ever done any fighting?” and “Know what fuel oil smells like?” and “Did you tell your mommy you were coming way up here?” The shore patrolmen didn’t answer. They gave a good, game try at not changing expression. Try as they would, though, they couldn’t keep the backs of their necks and their ears from going red as hot coals.

  Julius Lemp waited in front of the junior lieutenant until that worthy, his own ears on fire, saluted. With a certain irony, Lemp returned the gesture. Escorted by the shore patrolmen, the U-30’s men went off to the ratings’ barracks. The lieutenant, junior grade, took the U-boat’s tiny contingent of officers to the slightly better quarters their rank entitled them to.

  “Is there an officers’ brothel, too, sonny?” Lemp inquired. “Or wouldn’t you know about that?”

  “Sir, there is one,” the puppy answered stiffly, and his ears went red all over again.

  “Well, isn’t that nice?” Lemp scaled his unstiffened, white-crowned officer’s cap onto a cot. “Might as well freshen up a bit before I go find it. Somebody ever tell you where it was at?”

  Biting the words off between his teeth, the junior officer gave precise directions. Then he spun on his heel and hurried away, as if to escape before he said something tha
t might not be in the line of duty. Lemp’s quiet chuckle behind his back only made him go faster.

  Lemp had a duty call to the base commandant to make before he could visit the brothel or the officers’ club. Cleaning himself up before he saw Captain Böhme also seemed a good idea. He couldn’t give his superior the same kind of hard time he’d inflicted on the very young lieutenant. After a bald report about the latest patrol, he did say, “I think singling out my crew the way you have is unfair, sir.”

  The commandant fixed him with a cold gray stare. “That, Commander, is too damned bad,” he growled. “I did not single out your hooligans. They did it to themselves when they tried to turn this base inside out and upside down two leaves running.”

  “If they would have had a better chance to relax—” Lemp began.

  Waldemar Böhme cut him off: “It’s a rough old war for everyone, Commander. You are dismissed. Try to keep your nose clean, too.”

  “Zu Befehl, mein Herr!” Lemp put as much spite as he could into his salute. He feared the commandant was immune to such childish gestures, but it was all he could do.

  Having been dismissed, he drank bad schnapps at the officers’ club and had a skinny blonde in the brothel perform an unnatural but enjoyable act on him. Afterwards, they talked a little, a luxury his men wouldn’t enjoy. She spoke fair German, with a singsong Scandinavian intonation. “What will you do after the war?” he asked her.

  “Change my name and move away,” she said matter-of-factly. “What will you do?”

  He started to answer, then realized he hadn’t the faintest idea. He’d made no postwar plans. It was as if he didn’t expect to be around to worry about it. And maybe he didn’t. When you were a U-boat skipper, the odds weren’t on your side.

  Now Aristide Demange had a name for the prissy second lieutenant who’d been running this company after the late Captain Alexandre stopped a machine-gun burst with his belly and chest. The con was called Louis Mirouze. He practically exuded spit and polish.

  Past making sure his men kept their weapons in good working order, Demange didn’t care about spit and polish. He would have got rid of Mirouze in a heartbeat except for one thing: the youngster was recklessly brave. He took chances Demange thought suicidal, and hardly seemed to notice he was doing it. An officer like that had no trouble getting his men to follow him.

  Things in southern Belgium being what they were, too often officers had to try to get men to follow them straight into the blast furnace. It wasn’t as if the Germans didn’t know they were there and didn’t know they were coming. It wasn’t as if the Boches hadn’t had plenty of time to get ready for them, either.

  One attack on a farm village that—surprise!—turned out to be much more strongly fortified than it looked thinned the company of men whose names Demange hadn’t even learned. The doctors would learn some of those names as they tried to put the poor bastards back together. Others would be for the graves detail to find out.

  After they drew back to their start line, Demange took Mirouze aside and said, “We would’ve been better off if you hadn’t tried to push so hard there.”

  “I thought we could take the place,” Mirouze answered. “We were ordered to, so we had to do our best.”

  Demange rolled his eyes. “Spare me! The jerks who give those orders don’t know their assholes from their sisters. All that happened was, we took more casualties than we needed to ’cause you wouldn’t see it was hopeless.”

  “If we could’ve got into that lane—” Mirouze started.

  “Merde!” Demange cut him off. “That was no good, either. What do you want to bet they had a couple of MG-42s around the corner waiting to chop us into ground round? You get into trouble when you start sending the poilus out to die and they see they haven’t got a chance in hell to carry out their mission.”

  He knew the hard way how true that was. In 1917, several French divisions had mutinied instead of making the big attack the clowns in the fancy kepis told them to put in. The government and the Army eventually got things under control again by mixing executions and concessions, but it was close. More importantly, they managed to keep the Boches from finding out about the mutiny. The Kaiser’s bastards could have torn a hole in the line kilometers wide, but they never moved.

  Louis Mirouze wasn’t around yet in 1917. He might have learned about the mutinies in his training, but they were just school lessons to him. And who ever gave a damn about school lessons? Nobody, not since Cain sneaked away from Adam to play hooky. Abel stuck around for all the classes. No wonder Cain went and murdered him!

  “We have to keep the pressure on the enemy,” Mirouze insisted. “It keeps him from sending reinforcements against the Russians.”

  “Fuck the Russians. Let them take care of themselves. I’m worrying about us,” Demange said. “Only reason Stalin’s better than Hitler is, he’s farther away.”

  “You are of course an expert on this, sir?” Mirouze asked with frigid politesse.

  “Hell of a lot more than you are, kid,” Demange said. “I was fucking in Russia with our expeditionary force. I’ve seen the place. The only reason more Russians don’t go over to Hitler is, he jumps on ’em even harder’n Stalin does. Proves he’s a damn fool in the end, you ask me. But plenty’d sooner see him than Uncle Joe any which way. Russia! Pah!” He spat out his cigarette butt with the disgusted exclamation and lit a new one.

  “I … did not know you had served in the Soviet Union,” Mirouze said slowly.

  “All kinds of things you don’t know, aren’t there, buddy?” Demange growled. “And, like I said a little while ago, we do what we’ve got to do, sure, but you won’t win the goddamn war all by your lonesome. This stinking company won’t win the war all by its lonesome, either. So try to keep the guys alive, all right? They’ll like you for it, and you won’t need to worry about getting shot in the back ‘by accident,’ know what I mean?”

  Louis Mirouze’s expression said he knew only too well. Such things did happen—usually when you couldn’t pin them on anybody. Then the youngster’s eyes narrowed as he studied Demange. He had to know Demange had won a field promotion. Nobody his age who hadn’t would be just a lieutenant. The French Army’s tolerance for fuckups was enormous, but not limitless—not unless you were a general, anyway.

  No doubt Mirouze was wondering whether Demange had shot an officer in the back “by accident” while he was a common soldier or a noncom. Demange hadn’t, not personally, even if there were a good many officers whose untimely demises he’d mourned not a bit. But if the kid wanted to think he had, he didn’t mind.

  They got the order to go forward again a week later. This time, they had a couple of Somua S-42s with them. The latest French char was almost as good as a long-gunned Panzer IV. It had thicker, better-sloped armor than the German machine, but its cannon wasn’t as powerful. Still, it did stand a decent chance against most of Fritz’s panzers, and it was hell on infantry.

  “On les aura!” Mirouze shouted as he trotted up with the poilus. We’ll get ’em! It had been Pétain’s slogan at Verdun. You saw it on posters in the last war. Demange wondered how the puppy had heard of it.

  The S-42s sprayed machine-gun fire at the German positions ahead. One thing that made them pretty fair chars was that they’d stolen a leaf from the German book. They’d stopped asking the commander to make like a one-armed paperhanger with hives. Now the turret held a gunner and a loader, too, so the commander didn’t have to try to do everything at once.

  Then, quite suddenly, there was a noise like a bad accident in a steel mill. One of the S-42s stopped running and started burning. None of the crew got out. As Demange loped past, he saw a hole in the glacis plate you could throw a dog through. A Panzer IV could kill an S-42. He hadn’t thought a Panzer IV could murder an S-42 like that.

  A moment later, somebody yelled “Tiger!” and pointed behind what was left of a barn. At a distance, you could mistake a Tiger for a Panzer IV. More often, it worked the other way round
—poilus thought the medium was the heavy, and panicked because they did. There was a family resemblance. But the big brother was a much rougher customer than his smaller sibling.

  And this was a Tiger. The surviving S-42 fired at it. The 75mm AP round hit, too. Demange could see sparks fly where hardened steel slammed into hardened steel. But the French char’s shot didn’t penetrate the Tiger’s thick armor. The German machine’s long, fearsome gun swung to bear on its new target. It didn’t traverse very fast—that turret was heavy indeed—but the Tiger’s 88 spoke before the S-42 could fire again.

  One shot was all it took. With a Tiger, one shot was commonly all it took. Flame blasted out of every hatch in the French char. An enormous smoke ring blew from the commander’s cupola, as if the Devil were in there smoking a fat Havana. Ammunition started cooking off inside the steel carapace, with roars from the cannon shells and cheerful popping noises from the machine-gun cartridges. Again, no one came out. The most Demange could hope for was that the poor cons in there died before they hurt too much. He feared even that was a forlorn hope.

  Then the Tiger started lobbing HE at the French foot soldiers. An 88mm shell was big enough to have a good-sized bursting charge and to throw plenty of knife-edged fragments.

  “Down!” Demange yelled. “Dig in!” He yanked the entrenching tool off his belt and followed his own order. Yes, if they couldn’t advance, they could at least try to survive.

  Getting pulled out of the line for a while felt wonderful to Theo Hossbach. As soon as you got beyond range of the Red Army’s guns, the food improved. You didn’t need to worry about waking up dead in the morning. Well, you didn’t need to worry so much, anyhow. You wanted to keep a Schmeisser handy, in case of partisans.

  Mechanics who weren’t hampered by front-line tool shortages and frantic rush went over the Panzer IV from muzzle brake to exhaust pipe. Any time in the field was hard time for a panzer. This one would run a lot better for a while after it went back into combat. When you could count on your machine to do what you needed, you fought more boldly.