The War That Came Early: West and East Read online

  “One moment.” The Berlin cop was self-important, like most policemen the world around. “First tell me why you have not returned to the United States.”

  “I was supposed to go back on the Athenia, but it got sunk on the way east,” Peggy said.

  “Ach, so. The miserable British. They would do anything, no matter how vicious, to inflame relations between your country and mine.” The policeman proved he could parrot every line Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry spewed forth.

  Like almost everybody in the U.S. Embassy, Peggy figured it was much more likely that a German U-boat had screwed up and torpedoed the liner. Like Germany, England loudly denied sinking her. If anyone knew who’d really done it, he was keeping it a deep, dark secret. To Peggy, that also argued it was the Germans. Everything was secret around here, whether it needed to be or not.

  “That was several months ago, though. Why have you not left since?” the policeman persisted.

  “Because your government won’t let me go unless I have full passage back to America, and that’s not easy to arrange, not with a war on,” Peggy said. The Nazis had come right out and said they were afraid she’d tell the British just what she thought of them if she stopped in the UK on the way home. She’d promised not to, but they didn’t want to believe her.

  Maybe they also weren’t so dumb after all, dammit.

  The cop scratched his head. “You may go,” he said at last. “Your passport is in order. And you are lucky to be here instead of in one of the decadent democracies. Enjoy your stay.” He gave her a stiff-armed salute and stumped away.

  Peggy didn’t burst into hysterical laughter behind him. That also proved she was winning self-control as she neared fifty. She walked down the street. When she stepped on a pebble, she felt it. Her soles were wearing out. Leather for cobblers was in short supply, and as stringently rationed as everything this side of dental floss. Some shoe repairs were made with horrible plastic junk that was as bad as all the other German ersatz materials. What passed for coffee these days tasted as if it were made from charred eraser scrapings.

  She started to go into a café for lunch. Food these days was another exercise in masochism. The sign on the door—Eintopftag—stopped her, though. Sure as hell, Sunday was what the Master Race called One-Pot Day. The only lunch available was a miserable stew, but you paid as if you’d ordered something fancy. The difference was supposed to go into Winter Relief. Peggy had heard it got spent on the military instead. That sounded like the kind of shabby trick the Nazis would pull. She was damned if she wanted to give Hitler her money when he’d use it to blow up more of France, a country she liked much better than this one.

  She had some bread—war bread, and black, but tolerable once you got used to it—and apples back in her hotel room. She hadn’t intended to eat them today, but she’d forgotten about Eintopftag. She wouldn’t put an extra pfennig in the Führer’s war chest, and Eintopf was always swill, anyway.

  Tomorrow? Tomorrow would take care of itself. She’d believed that ever since she was a little girl. If coming much too close to getting killed several times the past few months hadn’t changed her mind, nothing less was likely to.

  JOAQUIN DELGADILLO FLATTENED OUT behind a pile of broken bricks like a cat smashed by a tank. The Republican machine gun up ahead spat what seemed like an unending stream of bullets not nearly far enough above him.

  “Stinking Communists,” he muttered into the dirt. This machine gun happened to be French, not Russian. Joaquin couldn’t have cared less. Like everybody in Marshal Sanjurjo’s army, to the depths of his soul he was convinced the people on the other side took their orders straight from Stalin.

  After all, weren’t the International Brigades fighting in the ruins of Madrid’s University City, too? And weren’t the International Brigades a bunch of Reds who’d come to meddle in what was none of their damned business?

  Germans and Italians fought on Marshal Sanjurjo’s side. Joaquin didn’t think of them as meddlers. They were allies. And they weren’t spraying machine-gun rounds right over his head.

  “¡Maricones!” someone from his side of the line shouted at the Internationals. Even groveling in the dirt the way he was, Joaquin giggled. Oh, it wasn’t that he hadn’t called the Republic’s foreign mercenaries faggots along with anything and everything else he could think of. It was just that his own battalion CO, Major Uribe, was the biggest fairy who didn’t have wings.

  Most of the time, Joaquin would have had trouble understanding how a flaming queer could rise so high in the Nationalists’ straitlaced army. Not with Bernardo Uribe. The major was, quite simply, the bravest man and the fiercest fighter he’d ever seen. The only miracle with Uribe was that he hadn’t got his head blown off long since. As long as he stayed alive, nobody was going to care where he stuck his dick.

  As abruptly as if someone had shut off a faucet, the machine gun fell silent. Major Uribe’s high, sweet voice rang through the bruised silence: “Look alive, sweethearts! We’re liable to have company for tea!”

  The first time he came out with something like that, Joaquin’s eyes almost bugged out of his head. The second time the major did it, Delgadillo nearly pissed himself laughing. Now he took it for granted.

  So did Sergeant Carrasquel. Joaquin never laughed at him. Carrasquel was the kind of guy who’d tear off your head and then spit in the hole. He was a good sergeant, in other words. “Major’s right,” he rasped now. “Those fuckers’ll hit us, sure as the devil. Don’t let ’em push you back.”

  Joaquin ground his teeth. Something in his lower jaw twinged. One of these days—if he lived, if he ever got out of the line—he’d have to visit the dentist. He feared that worse than he feared facing the International Brigades. He’d seen a lot of war. He knew what it could do. He’d never been to the dentist. What you didn’t know was always scary.

  He did know that, if Sergeant Carrasquel ordered no retreat, somebody behind the line would be waiting to shoot him if he tried. Both sides gave troops that duty, to make sure people kept their minds on what they were supposed to be doing. The only trouble was that, while you could call the men in the International Brigades every filthy name in the book, anybody who’d ever bumped up against them—and Joaquin had, along the Ebro—knew they were damn good fighting men.

  Between the Devil and a hard place. A rock and the deep blue sea. As Joaquin chambered a round in his old Mauser, he hardly noticed the phrases were all mixed up in his head. He didn’t want to look out over the brick pile that had sheltered him from the enemy machine gun. If some rotten Red with a scope-sighted rifle was up on some high ground, waiting to blow his brains out …

  A grenade burst, maybe fifty meters in front of him. Something clanged off his brick pile, flipped up in the air, and fell down a few centimeters from his face. It was a bent tenpenny nail. Along with grenades from every country in Europe, both sides used homemade models. A quarter-kilo of explosives, some nails or other metal junk, a tobacco tin if you had one, a blasting cap, a fuse … You could blow yourself up, too, of course, but you could also do that with a factory-made bomb.

  Where grenades went off, men wouldn’t be far behind. Grenades weren’t like machine-gun bullets; they didn’t fly very far. Joaquin popped up for a look—and a shot, if he had one. He hated to show himself. Yes, he wore a helmet: a Spanish one, almost identical to the German style. But it wouldn’t keep out a rifle bullet. He’d seen much too much gruesome proof of that.

  Sure as hell, there was an International, scrambling from one bit of maybe-cover to the next. The fellow had red hair and foxy features. Wherever he came from, he was no Spaniard. Catching sight of Joaquin, he started to bring his rifle to his shoulder.

  Too late. Joaquin fired first. The foxy-faced man from God knew where clutched at himself and started to crumple. Joaquin didn’t wait to find out whether he was dead or only wounded. Down he went again. Some other hard case from the middle of Europe or across the sea might be drawing a bead on him right now.


  Most Spaniards on both sides were lousy shots. Without false modesty, Joaquin knew he wasn’t. He had been, but Sergeant Carrasquel cured him of it. Carrasquel was a veteran of the fighting in Spanish Morocco. He knew how to make a rifle do what it was supposed to do: hit what you aimed at. All the survivors in his squad shot well.

  And so did the Internationals. Some of them had learned soldiering a generation earlier, in a harsher, less forgiving school than even Spanish Morocco. The younger Reds had picked up their trade from the veterans—and anyone who lived through a few weeks of fighting made an infinitely better soldier than a raw recruit.

  Joaquin wriggled like a lizard to find a fresh place from which to shoot. No one before had been watching the rubble pile from which he’d fired. Somebody would be now. He was grimly certain of that. You didn’t want to give them two chances at you. For that matter, you didn’t want to give them one chance at you. All too often, though, you had no choice.

  He raised himself up high enough to see over his new pile of bricks. Once upon a time, this miserable wreckage had housed the department of agriculture. He’d seen a shattered sign that said so. The ruins had changed hands a lot of times since then, though.

  Joaquin gasped. There squatted an International, not three meters away. The Red looked just as surprised—and just as horrified—as Joaquin felt. Neither man had had the faintest idea the other was around. They both fired at the same instant. They were both veterans, both experienced fighting men, both presumably good riflemen.

  They both missed.

  “Fuck!” Joaquin said fervently. He grabbed a broken brick and flung it at the International. The brick didn’t miss. It thudded against the other man’s ribs and kept him from working the bolt on his French rifle. The fellow said something hot and guttural. Then he jumped down behind Joaquin’s rubble pile and tried to stick him with his bayonet.

  With a desperate parry, Joaquin drove aside the long knife on the end of the other rifle. He’d learned bayonet fighting. Sergeant Carrasquel made sure you learned everything that had anything to do with soldiering. He’d learned it, but he’d never had to use it before. He knocked the International’s feet out from under him with the barrel of his own rifle.

  Then they were clawing and grappling and kneeing and gouging, there in the dirt. They were a couple of wild animals, snapping for each other’s throats. One of them would get up again, the other wouldn’t. It was as simple and mindless as that. In the end, what else did war come down to?

  A rifle cracked. It wasn’t Joaquin’s. When he heard it, he figured it had to be the International’s. And if it was, he had to be dead, and hearing the reverberations from the next world. He prayed he would rise to heaven, not sink down to hell.

  But the foreigner was the one who groaned and went limp. Hardly believing he could, Joaquin shoved the man’s suddenly limp body away from him. He bloodied his hands doing it—a human being held a shocking amount of gore.

  There on the ground a couple of meters off to one side sprawled Sergeant Carrasquel, rifle in hand. “You had a little trouble there,” he remarked.

  “Only a little,” Joaquin said, as coolly as he could with his heart threatening to bang its way out of his chest. After a moment, he managed to add, “Gracias.”

  “De nada,” Carrasquel said. “If you would’ve shot the asshole in the first place, you wouldn’t’ve had to dance with him.”

  “Dance? Some dance!” Joaquin laughed like a crazy man. Relief could do that to you. Then he lit a cigarette and waited for whatever horror came next.

  LUC HARCOURT SEWED a second dark khaki hash mark onto the left sleeve of his tunic. He sewed much better now than he had before he got conscripted. Work with needle and thread wasn’t something the French army taught you. It was something you needed to learn, though, unless you wanted your uniform to fall apart. You had to make repairs as best you could; the French quartermaster corps was unlikely to minister to your needs.

  Sergeant Demange came by. Things were quiet in front of Beauvais, the way they had been on the border before the Germans made their big winter push. Luc wished that comparison hadn’t occurred to him. He was proud that the poilus and Tommies had stopped the Nazis at Beauvais and not let them get around behind Paris the way they planned. He was even proud he’d made corporal, which surprised him: he sure hadn’t cared a fart’s worth about rank when the government gave him a khaki suit and a helmet.

  The Gitane that always hung from the corner of Demange’s mouth twitched when he saw what Luc was doing. “Sweet suffering Jesus!” he said. “They’ll promote anything these days, won’t they?”

  “It must be so,” Luc answered innocently. “You’re a sergeant, after all.”

  You had to pick your spots when you razzed a superior. After he’d just razzed you was a good one. Demange wasn’t just a superior, either. He was a professional, old enough to be Luc’s father—old enough to have got wounded in 1918. He was a skinny little guy without a gram of extra fat. No matter how old he was, Luc, six or eight centimeters taller and ten kilos heavier, wouldn’t have wanted to tangle with him. Demange had never heard of the rule book, and knew all kinds of evil tricks outside of it.

  He grunted laughter now, even if it didn’t light his eyes. “Funny man! You know what that two-centime piece of cloth is, don’t you? It’s all the thanks you’re gonna get for not stopping a bullet yet.”

  “If they keep promoting me for that, I hope I’m a marshal of France by the time the war’s over.” Luc poked himself with the needle. “Nom d’un nom!”

  He made Demange laugh again, this time in real amusement. “The war may go on a long time, sonny, but it ain’t gonna last that long.”

  “Well, maybe not.” Luc chuckled, too. It wasn’t a bad line, and a sergeant’s jokes automatically seemed funny to the men he led.

  German 105s started going off in the distance. Luc looked at his watch. Yes, it was half past two. Those shells would land on a road junction a kilometer and a half to the south. When the Boches weren’t trying to pull the wool over your eyes, they could be as predictable as clockwork.

  “Dumb cons,” Sergeant Demange said with a contemptuous wiggle of his Gitane. “Like we’re going to run anything through there at this time of day! What kind of jerks do they think we are?”

  “The same kind they are, probably,” Luc answered.

  “Then they really are dumb,” Demange said. “Maybe Englishmen wouldn’t notice what they’re up to, but we’re French, by God! We’ve got two brain cells to rub together, eh?”

  “Most of us do. I’m not so sure about our officers,” Harcourt said.

  That was safe enough. Any sergeant worth his miserable joke of a salary looked down his nose at the men set over him (privates looked at sergeants the same way, something sergeants tended to forget). And Demange had been a noncom a very long time. “Oh, officers!” he said. “You’re right—officers can’t find their ass with both hands half the time. But they’ll have sergeants to keep ’em from making donkeys of themselves.”

  “Sure, Sergeant,” Luc said, and left it right there. Yes, lieutenants and captains did need sergeants at their elbow. But that said more about their shortcomings than about any great virtues inherent in sergeants. So it seemed to a new-minted corporal, anyhow.

  Demange stamped out his cigarette just before the coal singed his lips. Then he lit another one and strode off to inflict himself on somebody else in the platoon.

  Luc lit a Gitane of his own. It wasn’t as good as Gitanes had been before the war. Everything had gone down the crapper since then. Captured Germans loved French cigarettes, though. Luc knew why, too: their own were even worse. Poor sorry bastards, he thought, puffing away. And what they used for coffee! A dog would turn up its nose at that horrible stuff.

  Almost as big as a light plane, a vulture glided down out of the sky and started pecking at something in the middle of the kilometer or so that separated the French and German lines right here. Maybe it was a dead
cow or sheep. More likely, it was a dead man. If it was, Luc hoped it was a dead Boche. The Germans had been falling back in these parts, so the odds were decent it was.

  Closer to him, blackbirds hopped across the torn-up, cratered dirt with their heads cocked to one side. Plenty of worms out there—and plenty of new worm food, too, even after the vultures ate their fill. The vultures and the blackbirds—and, no doubt, the worms—liked the war just fine.

  You could walk around out in the open. Sergeant Demange was doing it. Odds were the Germans wouldn’t open up on you. Luc didn’t want to play the odds. It would be just his luck to have some eager German sniper itching to test his new telescopic sight right when he decided to take a stroll.

  Peeking out of his foxhole, he could see Germans moving around in the distance. That had happened last fall, too. The Boches had stayed very quiet in the west while they were flattening Czechoslovakia. The French had advanced a few kilometers into Germany, skirmished lightly with the Wehrmacht, and then turned around, declared victory, and marched back across to their own side of the border.

  When the Wehrmacht marched into France, it didn’t dick around. If Luc never saw another Stuka—better yet, if no Stuka pilot ever spotted him again—he wouldn’t shed a tear. And, if the war ever ended, he would happily buy drinks for all the Stuka pilots who hadn’t spotted him.

  Demange came back just before sunset. “Got a job for you, Corporal Harcourt.” The stress he gave the rank convinced Luc it would be a dirty job. And it was: “When it gets good and dark, take a squad to the German lines, nab a couple of prisoners, and bring ’em back for questioning. The boys with the fancy kepis want to know what the damned Boches are up to.”

  “Thanks a bunch, Sergeant!” Luc exclaimed.

  “Somebody’s gotta do it. I figure you have a better chance to come back than most.” After a moment, Demange added, “If it makes you feel any better, I’m coming along. I played these games in the trenches last time around.”