Hitler's War Read online

  He saw the same thing. As Chaim wrapped a puttee around the wound to slow the bleeding, he said, “I can go home now. Admiral Horthy won’t draft me.”

  “Mazel tov,” Chaim said dryly. “He’ll shoot you instead, and not in the foot.” Gyula was close to forty. He’d fought in the last war, and for Bela Kun in Hungary’s short-lived Communist revolution. If he went back to Budapest, he’d be about as welcome as the smallpox.

  “Right now, I wouldn’t mind. Hurts like a motherfucker,” Gyula said. “Got any morphine?”

  Chaim shook his head. “Sorry. Wish I did.” He meant that. He could have got nailed as easily as Gyula. Dumb luck, one way or the other.

  The stretcher-bearers showed up then. They were Internationals, too. That was good—or Chaim thought so. They’d be gentler with Gyula as they took him away. Spaniards faced their own pain with stolid indifference…and they were even more indifferent when somebody else got hurt.

  Away they went. They wore Red Cross smocks and armbands. That might keep the Nationalists from shooting at them. On the other hand, it might not. This was a rough old war. You really didn’t want to let the other side capture you, no matter which side you were on.

  Cautiously, Chaim straightened up till he could peer over the lip of the trench. He wanted to make sure Sanjurjo’s bastards weren’t swarming forward. As soon as he did, he ducked down again. He wouldn’t come up again in the same spot. He knew better than that. Why give the snipers a free shot at you? Guys who did that ended up with a new hole in the head.

  He took a swig from his water bottle. It wasn’t water, but sour white wine—horse piss, really. But it was less likely to give you the galloping shits than Ebro water was. He’d had dysentery once, and was glad he’d got over it. He sure as hell didn’t want it again.

  When he looked again, ten or fifteen yards down the trench from the place where he’d last popped up, he spied two or three Nationalists looking out of their trenches a couple of hundred yards away and toward him. As he ducked, he saw them ducking at the same time.

  They’re scared of me, he thought, not without pride. They even looked like Fascist assholes. Like most of Sanjurjo’s better troops, they wore German-style helmets. But they were scared of a dumb Jew from New York City. If that wasn’t a kick in the nuts, he didn’t know what would be.

  If you had a rifle in your hands, you were dangerous. It was as simple as that. The thing you had to remember, though, was that the other son of a bitch was dangerous as long as he had a rifle, too.

  VACLAV JEZEK STUMBLED OVER THE border. Behind him, Slovakia was going to hell in a handbasket. The Germans were breaking in from the west. The Hungarians, not about to miss a chance to seize again what they’d ruled for centuries, were breaking in from the south. The Slovaks were up in arms—German-supplied arms—against what was left of Czechoslovakian authority. Ingrate bastards, Jezek thought, not that anybody gave a damn about his opinion.

  He didn’t know what the Poles would do with him—to him—either. Poland was also more or less at war with Czechoslovakia. By now, Tesin would be Cieszun, or however the hell the Poles spelled it. He doubted whether his own country tried very hard to defend the mining town. When a lion jumped you, you didn’t worry about the jackals.

  The country was rough and broken. Most of the leaves were off the trees, though, which made people easier to spot. And, being off the trees, the leaves lay underfoot. Every time Vaclav took a step, they crunched underfoot. They might as well have shouted Here I am!

  But so what? He didn’t want to sit around in a Nazi POW camp till the war ended. Whatever the Poles did to him had to be better than that…didn’t it? Behind him, he could still hear bombs and shells bursting and machine guns going off. More Czech soldiers—the ones who could—were stumbling north, out of the fighting. They’d made the same calculation he had. Now…were the lot of them right?

  Somebody up ahead shouted something. Vaclav almost understood it. Polish and Czech were closely related—not so closely as Czech and Slovak, but still.…A word here and there came through, even if each of them seemed to carry an extra syllable or two.

  Vaclav stood still. He thought that was what the Pole was telling him to do. “I give up!” he shouted back. “You can intern me!”

  The Pole came out from behind a tree. He wore a greenish uniform, not brown like Vaclav’s (not filthy and tattered like Vaclav’s, either) or German field-gray. The bayoneted rifle he carried looked extremely businesslike. Moving slowly and carefully, Vaclav unslung his own piece and laid it on the ground in front of his feet.

  With a nod, the Pole advanced on him. They tried to talk. It was an exercise in near misses and frustration. Then the Pole—a big blond fellow—raised an ironic eyebrow and asked, “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”

  “Ja,” Jezek said miserably. Two Slavs, having to go back and forth in German!

  “Gut,” the Pole said. “Jetzt können wir wirklich einander verstehen.” And they could really understand each other now, no matter how much Vaclav loathed the idea. Still in German, the Pole went on, “Give me your name and rank and unit.”

  Dully, Vaclav did. “What will you do with me?” he asked.

  “We have a camp a few kilometers to the north,” the Polish soldier answered. “Did you say you wanted to be interned before?”

  “Ja,” Vaclav said again.

  “I thought so, but I wasn’t sure,” the Pole said. “Well, you will be. You are not a prisoner of war, not here. Poland and Czechoslovakia are not formally at war.”

  “No. You just grabbed,” Jezek said bitterly.

  With a shrug, the big man in the green uniform answered, “So did you Czechs, after the last war. Otherwise, the coal mines down there would have been ours all along. And then you act like your shit doesn’t stink.”

  “Oh, mine does. I know that,” Vaclav said. “But if you are friends with Hitler, he will make you sorry.”

  “Better him than Stalin and the damned Reds,” the Pole retorted.

  “You find friends where you can. At least the Russians did something for us. More than France and England did,” Vaclav said.

  “What did you expect? They’re full of Jews,” the Pole said. No wonder he liked Hitler better than Stalin. He stooped, picked up Vaclav’s rifle, and slung it over his own shoulder. Then he pointed north. “The camp is that way. Get moving, Corporal Jezek.”

  Shoulders slumped in despair, Vaclav got moving.

  The night was cool and damp. Most nights were, as October moved toward November. Willi Dernen peered at the Frenchmen who’d nipped off a few square kilometers of German soil.

  They were warmer than he was. They’d started a fire and sat around it. From 300 meters, he could have potted them easily. Orders were not to piss them off, no matter what. If they wanted to sit on their asses as if they hadn’t crossed the border, they were welcome to.

  If they’d really come loaded for bear…

  Willi’s shiver had nothing to do with the weather. He was a blond, stolid watchmaker’s son from Breslau, all the way over on the other side of the Reich. He could hardly follow the German they spoke here, and the locals had trouble with his accent, too. But he’d been on the Westwall since France and England declared war. He knew what would have happened had the French put some muscle into a push instead of tiptoeing over the border.

  They would have smashed the Westwall as if they were made of cardboard. Not a Landser here thought any differently. The Westwall was Goebbels’ joke on the democracies. On paper, and on the radio, it was as formidable as the Maginot Line. For real, construction gangs were still frantically building forts and obstructions. And the Westwall didn’t have nearly enough troops to man what was already built.

  Most of the Wehrmacht had gone off to kick Czechoslovakia’s ass. What was left…the French outnumbered somewhere between three and five to one. That was the bad news. The good news was, they didn’t seem to know it.

  One of the Frenchmen pulled out a concertina and beg
an to play. The thin, plaintive notes made Willi shake his head. How could the guys on the other side listen to crap like that? Horns, drums, fiddles—that was music.

  Beside Dernen, Wolfgang Storch whispered, “We ought to plug him just so he’ll shut up, you know?”

  Trust Wolfgang to come up with something like that, Willi thought. He whispered back: “Damn you, you almost made me laugh out loud. That wouldn’t be so good.”

  “Why not?” Storch said. “Probably make the Frenchmen piss themselves.”

  Willi did snort then, not because Wolfgang was wrong but because he was right. Willi had come that close to pissing himself when he was part of a firefight right after the French came over the border. The guy next to him took one right in the belly. The noises Klaus made…You didn’t want to remember things like that, but you couldn’t very well forget them. When Willi went to sleep, he heard Klaus shrieking in his nightmares. He smelled the other man’s blood, like hot iron—and his shit, too.

  One of the Frenchmen looked up. The guy with the concertina stopped playing. All of the men in khaki looked around. Willi pretended he wasn’t there as hard as he could. It must have worked, because none of the enemy soldiers got to his feet or anything. Tiny in the distance, one of them shrugged a comically French shrug. The concertina player started up again.

  “Let’s head back and report in,” Wolfgang said.

  “Now you’re talking. You and your stupid jokes.” It was hard to stay really mad when you were whispering in a tiny voice, but Willi gave it his best shot. “We wouldn’t’ve got in a jam if you weren’t such a damn smartass.”

  “Your mother,” Wolfgang answered sweetly.

  Both Germans drew back as softly as they could. The French soldier with the concertina went on playing. Willi took that as a good sign. Maybe the Frenchmen were using the noise as cover. That would be a smart thing to do. It would also be an aggressive thing to do. The French might be smart. They’d shown no sign of aggressiveness.

  All the same, Willi wanted no part of a nasty surprise. All it would take was a sergeant who’d been through the mill the last time around. Willi’s father was a guy like that. When he and his buddies got together and drank some beer, they’d start telling stories. Like any kid, Willi listened. There probably weren’t a lot of guys his age who hadn’t heard stories like that. Some veterans, though, didn’t care to talk. Willi hadn’t understood that, not till Klaus got it. He did now.

  They’d gone about half a kilometer when a no-doubt-about-it German voice challenged them: “Halt! Who goes there?”

  “Two German soldiers: Dernen and Storch,” Willi answered. He and Wolfgang were out in the middle of a field. The Landser who owned that voice might have been…anywhere.

  “Give the password,” the man said.

  “Sonnenschein,” Willi and Wolfgang chorused. A Frenchman poking around could have picked it up from them, but the French didn’t do much of that kind of poking.

  “Pass on,” the sentry said.

  They did. The Germans were ready for anything. The French didn’t seem to be. They didn’t have to be, either—they had numbers, and the Wehrmacht didn’t. But they acted as if that would go on forever. And it wouldn’t.

  Willi got a glimpse of just how true that was when he and Wolfgang finished making their report. They ducked out of Colonel Bauer’s tent and found themselves in the middle of chaos. Soldiers were jumping down from trucks whose headlights were cut down to slits by masking tape. Some of the belching, farting monsters there weren’t trucks at all. They were panzers.

  Both Willi and Wolfgang gaped at them. Willi hadn’t seen a panzer up till now in all the time he’d spent on the Western Front. He supposed there were a few, in case the French decided they were serious about attacking here. But he sure hadn’t seen any.

  “It must be all over in Czechoslovakia,” he said.

  “Ja.” Wolfgang nodded. “Took longer than it should have, too.”

  “Everything takes longer than it’s supposed to,” Willi said. “No matter how smart the generals are, the bastards on the other side have generals, too.”

  Wolfgang laughed at him. “Generals? Smart? What have you been drinking? Whatever it is, I want some, too.”

  “Oh, come on. You know what I mean. If the guys with the red stripes on their trousers”—Willi meant the General Staff—“don’t end up smarter than the generals on the other side, we’re in trouble.”

  “But everybody knows the generals on the other side are a bunch of jerks,” Wolfgang said. “So how smart do our fellows need to be?”

  Before Willi could answer, more panzers rumbled up. Shouting sergeants ordered them under such trees as there were. Not all of them would fit there. Soldiers spread camouflage netting over the ones that had to stay out in the open. Not many French reconnaissance planes came over, but the Wehrmacht didn’t believe in taking chances when it didn’t have to.

  Wolfgang Storch pointed back toward the French soldiers they’d been watching. “Hope those assholes don’t hear the racket and start wondering what’s up.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Willi told him. They laughed. Why not? Their side was doing things. The enemy was sitting around. If the French had no stomach for a fight but one came to them anyway…

  “BURN EVERYTHING,” SERGEANT DEMANGE SAID. “When we pull back into France, we want the Germans to remember we were here.” The cigarette in the corner of his mouth jerked up and down as he spoke.

  One of the guys in Luc Harcourt’s squad splashed kerosene against the side of a barn. Luc grabbed a burning stick from the cookfire and touched it to a wet place. He had to jump back, or the flames might have got him. The barn sent a black plume of smoke into the leaden sky.

  Other soldiers were torching the farmhouse near the barn. “Hey, Sergeant?” Luc called.

  Demange eyed him as if he were a chancre on humanity’s scrotum. But then, Demange looked at everybody and everything that way. “What do you want, kid?” he said. Make it good, or else lurked menacingly under the words.

  “If we’re doing everything we can to hurt the Boches, how come we’re pulling out, not going forward?” As far as Luc could see, the whole halfhearted invasion was nothing but a sad, unfunny joke. Now it was ending without even a punch line.

  “Well, we went in to give the Czechs a hand, oui?” the sergeant said.

  “Sure,” Harcourt answered. “So?”

  “So now there’s no more Czechoslovakia, so what’s the point of hanging around any longer? That’s how I heard it from the lieutenant, so that’s what the brass is saying.” Demange looked around to make sure no officers were in earshot. Satisfied, he went on, “You ask me what the real story is, we’re scared green.”

  Maybe Demange would end up in trouble for defeatism if somebody reported him to the lieutenant. More likely, he’d eat the platoon commander without salt. And what he said made an unpleasant amount of sense. “We haven’t fought enough to see how tough the Nazis really are,” Luc said.

  “You know that. I know that. You think the old men in the fancy kepis know that?” Demange made as if to wipe his ass, presumably with the collected wisdom of the French General Staff. “Come on, get moving!” the underofficer added. “I think you just want to stand around and gab instead of working.”

  Luc liked work no better than anyone else in his right mind. Even standing around with thirty-odd kilos on his back wasn’t his idea of fun. But the fire warmed the chilly morning. He sighed as he trudged away. Pretty soon, tramping along under all that weight would warm him up, too, but not so pleasantly.

  Every once in a while, somebody off in the distance would fire a rifle or squeeze off a burst from a machine gun. For the most part, though, the Germans seemed content to let the French leave if they wanted to.

  Here and there, the retreating French troops passed men warily waiting in foxholes and sandbagged machine-gun nests. The rear guard would give the Boches a hard time if they were inclined to get frisky. The soldier
s Luc could see looked serious about their job. They probably thought they were saving the French army from destruction. And maybe they were right.

  Maybe. But it didn’t look that way now.

  Luc’s company marched out of Germany at almost exactly the place where they’d gone in a month earlier. Luc eyed the customs post, now wrecked, that marked the frontier. Men had suffered there. And for what? Maybe the important people, the people who ran things, understood. Luc had no idea.

  “It’s the capitalists who are making us pull out,” Jacques Vallat said. He’d been drafted out of an army factory in Lyon, and was as Red as Sergeant Demange’s eyes. “The fools are more afraid of Stalin than they are of Hitler.”

  “Shut your yap, Vallat,” the sergeant said without much heat. “Just keep picking ‘em up and laying ‘em down. When you get to be a general, then you can talk politics.”

  “If I get to be a general, France has more trouble than she knows what to do with,” Vallat replied.

  “You said it. I didn’t.” Demange might have come out of an auto factory in Lyon himself. He showed no weariness, or even strain. By the way he marched, he could have tramped across France with no more than some gasoline and an oil change or two.

  Luc wished he had that endless, effortless endurance. He was a lot harder than he had been when he got drafted, but he knew he couldn’t match the sergeant. Demange was a professional, a mercenary in the service of his own country. With a white kepi on his head, he wouldn’t have been out of place in the Foreign Legion.

  “Back in France,” Paul Renouvin said. “Funny—it doesn’t look any different. Doesn’t feel any different, either.”

  “Oh, some, maybe,” Luc said. “When I camp tonight, I won’t have the feeling some bastard’s watching me from the bushes.”

  “No, huh? You don’t think the Germans’ll sneak after us?” Paul said.

  “Merde!” Luc hadn’t thought of that. He’d figured that, once the French pulled back from Germany, the Boches would leave them alone. Why not? The Germans had pretty much left them alone while they were inside Germany.