The War That Came Early: West and East Read online

  Actually, it did make Luc feel better. The sergeant was a handy man to have around in a tight spot. Luc was damned if he’d admit it, though. He rounded up the men he’d been leading since he made PFC: a couple of veterans and the new fish just finding out what the water was like. The news thrilled them as much as it had him.

  “Why us?” one of them whined.

  “Because you’ll get your miserable ass court-martialed if you try and wiggle out, that’s why,” Luc explained. “Maybe the Germans won’t do for you. Your own side? You know damn well they will. Be ready an hour before midnight.”

  Nobody bugged out before the appointed hour. The French soldiers must have feared their own gendarmerie worse than the Nazis. Sergeant Demange said, “We’ll get ’em at the latrine trenches. Easiest way I can think of to nab the sons of bitches. C’mon.”

  He made it sound easy. Of course, sounding easy didn’t mean it was. Luc had already had that lesson pounded into him. They had to make it across no-man’s-land without any German sentries spotting them. The night was dark, but even so.… Then they had to get past the enemy’s forward positions. Luc was sweating enough to let him smell his own fear.

  Sergeant Demange, by contrast, took everything in stride. “This is too fucking simple,” he whispered as the Frenchmen crawled past the German foxholes. “No ten-meter belts of wire, no continuous trench line … Nothing to it.” He sounded affronted, as if he’d expected the Germans to do a better job and wanted to ream them out for being sloppy. Luc wasn’t so choosy.

  Finding the latrine trenches proved easy enough. Something in the air gave them away. The Germans used lime chloride to keep the stench down, but even that couldn’t kill it. Clutching their rifles, the Frenchmen waited in the bushes nearby.

  They didn’t have to wait long. A yawning Boche ambled over and squatted above a trench. Demange hissed at him in bad German. Luc thought he said he’d blow the Nazi a new asshole if he didn’t get over here right now. That made the enemy soldier finish what he was doing a lot faster than he’d expected to. He didn’t even try to clean himself. He just yanked up his trousers and followed orders.

  “Amis! Amis!” he whispered in equally bad, very frightened French.

  “We’re no friends of yours. Shut up if you want to keep breathing.” After a moment, Luc added, “You stink.” Abstractly, he sympathized. He’d stunk worse than this a time or two.

  He was just glad the prisoner didn’t want to be a hero. That would have shortened everybody’s life expectancy. A few minutes later, another German stood at the latrine trench and unbuttoned his fly. Sergeant Demange asked him if he felt like getting circumcised with a bullet. The Boche pissed all over his own boots. After that, he was amazingly cooperative.

  “We need more than two?” Luc asked.

  “Nah. They asked for a couple, and that’s what we’ll give ’em,” Demange answered. “Now let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  Luc had never heard an order he liked better. The German captives were at least as good at sneaking across broken ground as the poilus herding them along. They didn’t let out a peep till they were inside the French lines. They seemed pathetically grateful still to be alive.

  Luc knew exactly how they felt.

  PARIS IS WORTH A SOMETHING. One French king or another had said that, or something like that, a hell of a long time ago. So much Alistair Walsh knew—so much, and not a farthing’s worth more. The veteran underofficer had picked up bits and pieces of knowledge over the years, but too many of them remained just that: bits and pieces. They didn’t fit together to make any kind of recognizable picture.

  Staff Sergeant Walsh did know what Paris was worth to the Nazis, even if not to that long-ago and forgotten (at least by him) French king. It was worth everything. And, since they couldn’t get their hands on it—no matter how bloody close they’d come—they were doing their goddamnedest to ruin it for everybody else.

  He’d got leave at last—only a forty-eight-hour pass, but forty-eight hours were better than nothing. He could go back to the City of Light. He could drink himself blind. He could watch pretty girls dance and take off their clothes. He could visit a maison de tolerance, where a girl would take off her clothes just for him … if she happened to be wearing any when he walked into her upstairs room.

  He could do all that—if he didn’t mind taking the chance of getting blown up while he did it, or the almost equally unpleasant chance of spending big chunks of his precious, irreplaceable leave huddling in a cellar somewhere and praying no bomb scored a direct hit on the building overhead.

  The Luftwaffe visited almost every night now. Ever since it became clear the French capital wouldn’t fall into Germany’s hands like a ripe plum, Hitler seemed to have decided to knock it flat instead. With so much of northern France under German occupation, his bombers didn’t have to fly far to get there. They could carry full loads every night, drop them, and go back to bomb up again for a second trip before daybreak.

  All of which made Paris the greatest show on earth. The circus just had to find itself a new slogan. Paris was every pinball machine and every fireworks display multiplied by a million. Searchlights darted everywhere, trying to pin bombers in their brilliant beams so the antiaircraft guns could shoot them down. Tracers from the guns scribed lines of red and gold and green across the sky’s black velvet. Even the bursting bombs were beautiful—if you didn’t happen to be too close to one when it went off.

  Paris had already taken a lot of punishment. The Arc de Triomphe had a chunk bitten out of it. The Eiffel Tower was fifty feet shorter than it had been—and a meteorologist who’d been up at the top was never buried, because they couldn’t find enough of him to put in a coffin. The Louvre had been hit. So had Notre Dame.

  You needed to be determined, then, or maybe a little loopy, if you wanted to visit Paris. Some people said Hitler had vowed to wipe the capital of Germany’s great continental rival off the face of the earth. Others claimed he was trying to terrify the Parisians, and the French in general, into tossing in the sponge.

  From what Walsh knew of the corporal who’d promoted himself field-marshal, and from what he knew of Germans, that last seemed likely to him. Schrechlichkeit, they called it—frightfulness. If you went into Paris with a forty-eight-hour pass, you had a respectable chance of not coming back. On the other hand, if you were anywhere near Paris with pass in hand and you didn’t go in … well, you might never see another chance.

  And so Walsh jumped into the back of a British lorry along with the other lucky sods who’d wangled a bit of leave. The lorry bounced over potholes the size of baby washtubs. Just outside of town, it got a flat. The passengers piled out to give the driver a hand. Changing a tire in the rapidly deepening dark was always an adventure. Walsh learned some bad language he’d never heard before. For a man who’d been a soldier for more than half a lifetime, that was almost worth the trip into town by itself.

  Hitler might hope to frighten the Parisians into surrendering, but he hadn’t had much luck yet. The city was blacked out, of course, but it seemed noisier than ever. Touts stood in front of every establishment, shouting out the delights that lay beyond the black curtains. Quite a few of them used English; they knew a lot of Tommies would be here to blow off steam.

  “Girls!” one of them yelled. “Beautiful girls! Wine! Whiskey!”

  That all sounded good to Walsh. He pushed past the tout and into the dive. The glare of the electric lights inside almost blinded him. Loud jazz blared from a record. Before the war, there likely would have been a band. How many of the musicians were playing to amuse their buddies in the trenches right now?

  Above the bar, a sign said PARIS CAN TAKE IT in English and what was bound to be the same thing in French. “Whiskey,” Walsh told the barkeep, and slid a silver shilling across the zinc surface.

  “Coming up,” the fellow answered in tolerable English. He was graying at the temples; a black patch covered his left eye socket. He didn’t look piratical—
he looked tired and overworked. “Ice?”

  “Why bother?” Walsh answered. With a shrug, the bartender gave him his drink. He hadn’t asked for good whiskey. He hadn’t got it, either. He consoled himself with the reflection that he probably also wouldn’t have got it if he had asked for it. He made the drink disappear and put another shilling on the bar. “Why don’t you fill that up again?”

  “But of course.” The bartender did. He nodded toward the stage. “The girls, they come on soon.”

  “Good enough, pal.” Walsh knocked back the fresh drink. After a couple, good and bad didn’t matter so much. Any which way, your tongue was stunned.

  The girls weren’t wearing much when they started their number. What they did have on sparkled and swirled transparently as they started gyrating on the little stage. They weren’t so gorgeous as they would have been at the Folies Bergères—this was just a little place—but they weren’t half bad. And they rapidly started shedding their minimal costumes. Walsh pounded the bar and whooped. So did other soldiers and flyers in a camouflaged rainbow of uniforms.

  Just before the girls got down to their birthday suits, air-raid sirens started screaming. Polylingual profanity filled the air, burning it bluer than all the tobacco smoke already had.

  After yelling through a megaphone in French, the bartender switched to English: “Cellar this way! Must go! Raids very bad!”

  What no doubt propelled half the fellows in the joint down into the cellar was the hope that the naked cuties would come down with them. No such luck, though. The girls had somewhere else to hide. Some of the rowdier—read, younger and drunker—men started to go up and look for them. Then, even in the cellar, they heard the German bombs whistling down. That stopped that. No matter how rowdy you were, you didn’t want to meet explosives head on.

  Thunderous blasts staggered Walsh and everybody else. A few men screamed. Walsh didn’t, but he didn’t blame them, either. It wasn’t as if he never had when he was under fire. Then the lights went out. More hoarse shouts rose. Walsh put his hand on his wallet, just in case. Sure as hell, before long another hand touched his, there in the pitch blackness. When he stomped, his boot came down on a toe. Somebody yelped. The hand jerked away in a hurry.

  Eventually the lights came on again. The all-clear warbled. The crowd in the cellar trooped upstairs. The bartender started serving drinks. Somebody cranked up the gramophone. On came the girls. Except for ambulances and fire engines wailing outside, the raid might never have happened. Except.

  Chapter 5

  Behind Sergei Yaroslavsky’s SB-2, columns of black smoke rose above Wilno. Some of the columns had surely come from the bombs his plane had dropped. “Well,” he said in some satisfaction, “we’re finally starting to get somewhere.”

  “Oh, yes.” Anastas Mouradian nodded. If he was anywhere near as pleased as Sergei, he hadn’t bothered telling his face about it. “Somewhere. But where?”

  “We’ve got the Poles on the run.” Sergei almost shouted, to make himself heard over the drone of the SB-2’s twin radial engines. “It took a while, but now we do. A week from now, we won’t just be bombing Wilno. We’ll be shelling it—see if we won’t. The Poles are brave, but that only helps so much when you haven’t got the horses—or when the horses are all you’ve got.”

  Mouradian nodded again. He’d heard the same stories Sergei had: about how Polish cavalrymen, square-topped csapkas on their heads and drawn sabers gleaming in the sun, had charged Red Army tanks. You did have to be brave to do something like that. Didn’t you also have to be out of your mind? Not many of the Poles who’d galloped forward galloped back again.

  “All right. Fine. We have the Poles on the run. Now what?” Mouradian said after what seemed a pause for consideration. His Russian was fluent, but carried a throaty Armenian accent. He sounded a little like Stalin on the radio. Sergei thought so, anyhow, but Mouradian got offended when the Russian told him so. If you listened to Stas, Armenian and Georgian were nothing like each other. But, if you listened to him explaining that, he still sounded like Stalin.

  He also took a perverse—a Caucasian?—pride in being difficult. “What do you mean, ‘Now what?’” Sergei said. “We take back the chunk of Poland Pilsudski stole from us while we were fighting our civil war, that’s what.”

  “And what do the Poles do then?” Anastas inquired. “Better yet, what do the Germans do then?”

  The Germans couldn’t do what Sergei suggested. Human beings weren’t made that way. Mouradian chuckled indulgently, as he might have at a six-year-old showing off. Sergei went on, “But who cares what they do? If the Poles make peace with us, the Nazis have to get out of Poland, right?”

  “They’re good at marching into places. They aren’t so good at marching out again,” Stas said, which was bound to be true. He added, “Besides, they’re still at war with us any which way. They have been since Czechoslovakia.”

  “Well, so what?” Sergei didn’t like to think about Czechoslovakia. He and Stas and Ivan Kuchkov had come out again, which a lot of other “volunteers” hadn’t. He’d first made the acquaintance of the Bf-109 there. If he never saw another angular German fighter, he wouldn’t be sorry.

  “So Hitler will find some other way to keep the fight going,” Mouradian predicted. “He hates the Soviet Union worse than he hates France and England.”

  That held a nasty ring of truth. Yaroslavsky was glad to have to pay attention to his flying for a little while as he descended toward this new airstrip on what had been Polish soil. “He may hate us, but is he crazy?” he asked, leveling off again. “Does he want a two-front war?”

  “Germany almost won the last one,” Anastas answered, which was true even if unpalatable. “And it doesn’t look like America’s going to get into this one.”

  Sergei’s grunt could have been taken as one of effort, because he was cranking down the landing gear. A hydraulic or electrical system would have been easier on the pilot. It also would have been more expensive and harder to build. He—and every other SB-2 pilot—went on working the crank.

  Without American soldiers and munitions, France and England likely would have lost the World War—the First World War, it was now. That didn’t make Soviet citizens love the USA. American troops in the north and the Far East had done their best to strangle the Russian Revolution in its cradle. They’d gone home, grudgingly, only after their best turned out not to be good enough.

  The bomber set down roughly and taxied to a stop. Groundcrew men trotted up as the crew scrambled out of the plane. “How did it go, Comrades?” the chief maintenance sergeant asked.

  “We put the bombs on target in Wilno,” Sergei said. “Not much antiaircraft fire. The Poles are wearing down.”

  “About time,” the sergeant said. “I don’t know why they got so excited over Wilno to begin with—or why we want it, come to that. Damn town is full of Litvaks and Jews.” He spat in the dirt.

  Before Sergei could answer that or even think about it much, Ivan Kuchkov stiffened like an animal taking a scent. He cocked his head to one side, listening intently. Then he said something worse than his usual mat-laced obscenities: “Messerschmitts! Heading this way!”

  Sergei started running before he heard the planes himself. So did everybody else within earshot of the Chimp. Long before the pilot got to the trenches on one side of the runway, he did hear the hateful roar of the fighters’ engines. That only made him run harder.

  He didn’t run hard enough to get to the trenches before the 109s’ machine guns and cannon started stitching down the airstrip. Dust spurted up from the hits. Rounds slammed into the metal and doped fabric covering his SB-2. He didn’t look back. He did a swan dive—if you could imagine a spastic swan—into the zigzagging trench.

  That maintenance sergeant landed in the trench beside him. “Too goddamn close,” Sergei said, panting. “I’m lucky I didn’t break my ankle jumping down here.”

  The sergeant didn’t answer. He wouldn’t, either. A bullet—
or, more likely, a 20mm round—had taken off the top of his head. Blood and brains soaked into the black dirt. One second, he’d been running for cover. The next? It was over. Lots of worse ways to go. Pilots found too many of them. If you got shot down, you were liable to have a lot of time to think before you finally smashed.

  “Bozhemoi!” Anastas Mouradian said. “Poor bugger cashed in his chips all at once, didn’t he?”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Sergei answered as the Messerschmitts zoomed away at just above treetop height. Now he could smell the maintenance man’s blood, and the nastier smells that said his bowels and bladder had let go when he stopped one.

  “Za Stalina,” Mouradian added somberly. About every third Red Army tank and Red Air Force bomber had For Stalin! painted on its side. You fought for Stalin. And you died for Stalin, too. He looked after the 109s. They were long gone now. “You see? The Nazis haven’t dried up and blown away.”

  “Well … no.” Sergei didn’t like to admit that. Oh, he knew Poles could kill him, too. But the Germans, damn them, were much too good at such things. He wondered what they’d done to his plane. It wasn’t burning, anyhow. A couple of bullets through the engines sure wouldn’t do it any good, though. Two of the tires on the landing gear were flat. That would make getting it out of the way for repairs even more fun than it would have been otherwise.

  They’d have to do it, fun or not. They couldn’t just leave the SB-2 in the middle of the runway. Not only did it clog Soviet air operations here, it sent the Luftwaffe an engraved invitation to come back.

  “Planes … We can fight back against planes,” Stas said, and Sergei made himself nod. It was true—to a point. The Bf-109 outdid anything the Red Air Force flew. Both biplane and blunt-nosed monoplane Polikarpov fighters were last year’s models—no, year before last’s—next to it. New machines that could meet the fearsome Messerschmitts on even terms were supposed to be in the works. But the hot Soviet planes weren’t here yet, and the Germans had theirs now. In a low voice, Mouradian went on, “What happens if the Nazis throw their panzers at us?”