Two Fronts twtce-5 Read online

  Pretty soon, flowers would bloom. They’d smell sweet, but not sweet enough to quell the stenches. Birds would sing, when you could hear them through the rumble of artillery and the machine guns’ deadly chatter.

  When Vaclav pissed and moaned about it, Benjamin Halevy eyed him with his usual air of detached amusement. “I didn’t know we had a poet among us,” the Jew said.

  “Oh, fuck you!” Vaclav snarled.

  Halevy tapped the little metal star that marked him as a second lieutenant. “That’s ‘Oh, fuck you, sir!’ ” he said.

  Vaclav laughed. What were you going to do? In the line, you made your own fun. If you didn’t, you sure as hell wouldn’t have any. A few hundred meters away, the Fascist bastards on the Nationalist side were no doubt cracking the same kind of dumb jokes.

  Then the Czech sniper stopped laughing. Homesickness and weariness hit him like a blackjack behind the ear. “Christ, I wish I were back in Prague!” he burst out. “I’ve been carrying a gun for three and a half years. I’m fucking sick of it.”

  “Here. Have a knock of this.” Halevy offered his canteen. Vaclav took it. It was full of Spanish brandy-not good, but strong. He swigged, then wiped his mouth on his sleeve and handed back the canteen. The Jew went on, “Some of the people here started two years before you did, you know.”

  “That’s right!” Vaclav said in surprise. Not many countries had got it before Czechoslovakia did, but Spain was one of them. He looked around. It was the landscape of war, all right: trenches, shell holes, barbed wire, ragged and muddy uniforms. How many times had this stretch of ground gone back and forth between Nationalists and Republicans? How many more would it change hands till somebody finally won, if anyone ever did? Better not to wonder about such things. Instead, Vaclav asked, “Got a cigarette?”

  “That’s also ‘Got a cigarette, sir?’ ” the Jew observed, but he pulled out a pack and handed it to Vaclav. The smokes were Spanish: even harsher than the stove polish and barbed wire the French put in their cigarettes. Given a choice, Vaclav would have opted for a better brand. Given a choice, he never would have come to Spain to begin with. Beggars didn’t get choices like that. He took a cigarette, scraped a match against the much-repaired sole of his boot, and hollowed his cheeks to draw in smoke.

  He let it out again with a cough. “Jesus Christ! Is that phosgene, or what?”

  Halevy also lit up. After a judicious puff of his own, he answered, “More like mustard gas, I’d say.”

  They both went right on smoking. You could complain about the tobacco as much as you pleased. Everybody did. You couldn’t do without it, though. Almost everybody on both sides smoked like a factory chimney. Going without cigarettes while he hid himself somewhere in no-man’s-land always gave Vaclav the jitters. He sometimes thought a smoke would be worth getting shot. He didn’t yield to those temptations, but he had them.

  As if to fuel them, Halevy said, “Marshal Sanjurjo’s still out there somewhere.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Vaclav waved that away. “Like he’s gonna come out and stand in the same place where I plugged what’s-his-name-Franco. Nobody’s that goddamn dumb, not even a Nationalist Spanish general.”

  “Cojones,” Halevy murmured.

  That was a Spanish word the Czech understood. There weren’t many, but he’d picked up the dirty bits first, as he had with French. And maybe it was a question of balls. Would Sanjurjo say, in effect, I’m not afraid to go where Franco got shot? If he did, he was liable to be sorry-but not for long, not if he stopped a 13mm armor-piercing antitank round.

  During the night, the Nationalists shelled the Czechs and the Internationals. They hit them harder than most Republican troops. Vaclav, huddling in what he devoutly hoped was a bombproof, could have done without the gesture of respect.

  As soon as the shelling stopped, Jezek tumbled out and rushed to a firing step, ready to repel the enemy’s infantry if they pressed the attack. But they didn’t. The Nationalists just wanted to hurt their foes without much risk to themselves. Who wouldn’t make war on the cheap if he could?

  Republican guns gave back a belated response after sunup the next morning. Maybe the artillerists wanted to see what they were shooting at. Maybe they hadn’t had any shells handy during the night. Maybe they’d been drinking sangria in a cantina back of the line, and catching crabs from the barmaids. Maybe … Who the hell knew, or cared?

  Any which way, Vaclav got to scout no-man’s-land while the Nationalists were keeping their heads down. The two barrages had torn up the landscape-again. He looked for new hiding places from which he might torment Sanjurjo’s men. Then a short Republican round burst in front of the trench and showered him with dirt. He ducked as fragments whined not far enough overhead.

  “Fucking assholes!” he shouted. “Whose side are they on?” He brushed at his uniform, for all the world as if it would do any good.

  “They’re artillerymen,” Benjamin Halevy said. “If it’s in front of them, it’s a target-and it’s all in front of them.”

  “Too right, it is,” Vaclav said. Warily, he straightened and looked out toward the Nationalist trenches again. That new crater with the tall lip facing the enemy’s line … That just might do. Republican shells kept coming down. With his luck, they’d flatten the hidey-hole before he ever got to use it.

  But they didn’t. He crawled out to it under cover of darkness. Yes, it was the kind of place he needed. He had foliage stuck to his helmet with a strip of inner tube. A muddy burlap cloak with branches thrust into it also helped break up his outline. And he camouflaged the antitank rifle’s long barrel well before light could give him away.

  Then he settled down to wait. He wanted a cigarette, but no, not enough to risk his life for one. He knew the urge would grow on him. He gnawed garlicky Spanish sausage instead. He’d taste that all day, too, but it wasn’t the same thing, dammit.

  He eyed the Nationalist lines through a magnified circle with crosshairs. Men in yellowish khaki did the kinds of things soldiers did. Out beyond ordinary rifle range of the Republican forward trench, they didn’t take much cover. They didn’t think they were in any great danger, and they were right. Jezek didn’t feel like wasting his rounds on ordinary jerks. Those fat, fancy bullets were reserved for extraordinary jerks.

  Maybe he’d lie here till darkness came again. He didn’t fire every day. When he did pull the trigger, he wanted his shots to mean something. He also didn’t want to get killed himself. He swung the heavy rifle a couple of centimeters to the right, then peered through the scope again.

  A glimpse of a fabric long familiar but not seen for some time made his attention snap back to it. The Nationalists wore that diarrhea-colored khaki. Republican forces used khaki, too, khaki or denim or whatever civilian stuff they happened to own. No Spaniard, though, had a uniform of Feldgrau.

  Sanjurjo and Hitler, of course, had been in bed together since the war in Spain started. The Germans had helped the Nationalists take Gibraltar away from England. German troops and flyers of the Legion Kondor let the Nazis field-test weapons and doctrines. But Germany’d paid Spain much less attention since the big European fight heated up.

  So what was this Nazi officer doing here now? Whatever it was, he wouldn’t keep doing it long. Neither he nor the Spaniard with him worried about snipers. They were more than a kilometer away from the front. Why should they?

  Vaclav showed them why. The antitank rifle slammed against his shoulder. The German stood stock-still for a moment, then crumpled. No, he wouldn’t report back to Berlin, or even back to Marshal Sanjurjo. They paid a sergeant pathetically little, but Vaclav knew damn well he’d earned his handful of pesetas today.

  Chaim Weinberg huddled in a hole scraped into the front side of his trench, waiting for the Nationalists to quit shelling the front. Sanjurjo’s shitheads were ticked off about something, sure as hell. This was what they did when they got up in arms: used the big guns to make the Republicans sweat. Chaim was sweating, all right.

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sp; Latrine-trench rumor said the Czech sniper with the elephant gun had punched some Wehrmacht big shot’s ticket for him. When you got punched with that piece of artillery, you stayed punched, too. Gotta ask him the next time I see him, Chaim thought as another round from a 105 crashed down. That Vaclav knew some German, and Chaim’s Yiddish came close enough.

  What really worried the International, though, was why a German officer had been looking over the Republican lines in the first place. Ever since the balloon went up in Czechoslovakia, and especially since Gibraltar went under, they’d had Spain on the back burner.

  His fertile imagination could conjure up plenty of reasons for them to bring it to the front of the stove again. If the Nationalists smashed the Republic, German planes in northeastern Spain could pay France back for rejoining the fight against Fascism by knocking the crap out of the southern part of the country. Maybe Sanjurjo could even mount some half-assed raid across the Pyrenees. That would set the froggies hopping like fleas on a hot griddle.

  But the Republic wouldn’t fall any time soon. It had been teetering in 1938. After Hitler jumped the Czechs, though, France and England threw enough supplies into Spain to level the war, and it had stayed pretty much level since. Chaim shook his head as he tried to make himself smaller. Christ, but 1938 was a long time ago now! A marriage ago. A child ago. A lifetime ago.

  All at once, the shellfire let up. The first thing Chaim did was stick a cigarette in his mouth. His hands shook as he lit it. Shellfire always took a toll on you. Some guys couldn’t get over it. There were beggars in Madrid who twitched all the time. Odds were they’d been reasonably good soldiers once. Modern war dished out more than a lot of human beings were made to take.

  Chaim was still with it: at least well enough to make sure the Nationalists didn’t try anything cute while they figured they still had the Abe Lincolns punchy. A couple of Republican machine guns sprayed murder out across the lunar ground between the lines to send Sanjurjo’s men the same message. A Nationalist Maxim hammered back. Chaim ducked, though none of the bullets came close.

  A few feet away, Mike Carroll hopped down off the firing step. He was a lot taller than Chaim, so more of him stuck up above the parapet unless he was careful. And he was: he’d been in Spain even longer than Chaim. You learned and you lived. You could learn and not live. Bad luck always lay around the corner somewhere. But you couldn’t not learn and live. Stupidity was its own punishment.

  “Wonder what the Fritzes are up to,” Mike said. He’d also heard the scuttlebutt about Vaclav, then.

  “Nothing good,” Chaim said with doleful certainty.

  “Tell me about it,” Mike said. “Germans are nothing but bad news. Even the Fritzes in the Internationals are a bunch of Prussians. And if the Nazis are sniffing around again …”

  “Less I see of ’em, better I like it.” Chaim hadn’t seen any Nazis here, not with his own eyes. But he believed Vaclav had shot one. The way the Nationalists were throwing hate around sure argued for it.

  Mike changed the subject, asking, “How’s your kid?”

  “He’s great,” Chaim answered with a grin. “He’s at that silly age, where his own toes are the funniest goddamn things in the world. He can laugh and roll over and kinda sit up. He says something that sounds like dada, but he doesn’t know it’s me.”

  “Sounds like a baby, all right.” Mike might have heard more than he’d really wanted to know. Perhaps incautiously, he asked another question: “And how’s his mother doing?”

  Chaim’s face went hard. “La Martellita is … going along,” he said in a voice like a slammed door. She was not only going along, she was going out with a Red Army captain, one of Stalin’s henchmen who’d stayed in Spain because they had no chance of getting back to the USSR. By everything Chaim had heard, the Russian was shorter and squatter and homelier than he was himself.

  If he ever did see the guy, he figured he’d punch him in the nose. If La Martellita had given him the bum’s rush for some tall, handsome Spanish grandee (a Spanish grandee with sense enough not to have joined the Nationalists; there were a few, though not many), he could have lived with that. But a Russian plug-ugly? Maybe she just liked apes.

  It was, no doubt, a good thing Chaim had never set eyes on the Red Army captain. If he did give the son of a bitch a fat lip, he might end up in front of a firing squad. The Republic took its friendship with the Soviet Union very seriously.

  Maybe La Martellita took up with him not because he was built like a hydrant but because he was a Russian Communist. Did it feel better because you were getting shtupped by somebody from Marxism-Leninism’s holy land? If you expected it to, then it probably did. Women worked that way. Chaim thought it felt great all the goddamn time.

  The Nationalists’ loudspeakers came to life then. “You should all come over to our side. You’re just helping the atheistical Russians!” The man at the microphone stumbled a little over atheistical, but he managed to bring it out.

  He got nothing but laughs, though. The Nationalists were so wrapped up in the Catholic Church, they thought their enemies were, too. That screwed up their propaganda, especially when they aimed it at the Internationals. “Us, we’re the atheistical Americans, by God!” Chaim said, and laughed harder than ever.

  Then the Nationalist propaganda announcer said, “And half the filthy Bolsheviks-more than half-are Jews! Do you want to do what the disgusting Hebrews tell you to do? Of course you don’t!”

  Some of the Spaniards who filled out the Internationals’ ranks these days might take that seriously. So few Jews lived in Spain-they couldn’t do it legally till the Republic came along-that the locals believed a lot of the anti-Semitic bullshit the Fascists put out. They’d been hearing the same kind of nonsense their whole lives.

  “No wonder the Republic shot so many priests,” Mike Carroll said.

  “No wonder at all,” Chaim agreed. “Shame they couldn’t have shot that braying jackass, too.”

  After the braying jackass finally shut up, one of the young Spaniards in the Abe Lincolns came up to Chaim and said, “You’re the one they call el narigon loco, right?”

  “The crazy kike, that’s me.” Chaim nodded, not without pride. He’d earned the nickname the hard way, with his go-to-hell, no-holds-barred style of cantina fighting. “What about it, Rodrigo?”

  “Well …” Rodrigo, by contrast, sounded almost shy. “Are you a Marxist, then, or are you a Jew?”

  “Absolutamente,” Chaim declared, clearly enunciating each of the six syllables.

  For some reason, that didn’t seem to help the Spanish Abe Lincoln. “But which?” Rodrigo asked.

  “I sure am,” Chaim replied. Rodrigo started to ask him another question, then plainly decided it was a losing fight. The kid mooched off, hands thrust into the pockets of his revolutionary coveralls.

  Mike Carroll laughed, but softly, taking care that the proud Spaniard couldn’t hear him do it. “That wasn’t fair, man,” he said.

  “Hey, neither was the question. You can be a Jew and a Marxist at the same time. Look at all the Old Bolsheviks,” Chaim said.

  “Yeah, and look what happened to them, too,” Mike said, which made Chaim wince. An awful lot of the Jews who’d helped bring off the Russian Revolution ended up starring in Stalin’s show trials or going to the camps or to the wall without benefit of any trial, show or otherwise. The Soviet Union was a rugged place. As far as Chaim was concerned, it still beat the hell out of the Reich.

  Chapter 6

  Alistair Walsh couldn’t stand Germans. The war in North Africa had been going so well. No matter what Mussolini said, no matter how far he stuck out his breakwater of a chin, the Italians mostly didn’t want to fight. The ones who did have some pluck didn’t have the tanks or lorries or planes they needed to do anything with it.

  But with the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe in the game, everything changed. Tobruk hadn’t fallen. The road to western Libya hadn’t opened. As a matter of fact, the English in Egyp
t were more worried about keeping the bloody Fritzes-and the Italians along for the ride-away from Alexandria, the Nile, and the Suez Canal.

  Lose the canal and we’ve gone a long way toward losing the war, Walsh thought glumly. It hadn’t come to that. It hadn’t even come close to that-yet. But he watched the skies with a grim earnestness he hadn’t needed till Hitler came down to give Musso a hand. He’d met Stukas in France and in Norway. He didn’t much fancy them.

  Hurricanes buzzed above the English army. Walsh approved. Hurricanes could give a good account of themselves even against 109s. And they were death on Stukas. Any planes that could hack dive-bombers out of the air seemed absolutely wizard to him.

  He remembered again that he’d actually volunteered for this. I could have stayed back in good old Blighty, he reminded himself. Spring would just be coming into the air.

  That was a good joke, or would have been if only it were funny. With no apparent effort, Egypt got hotter not long after the equinox than England did at the height of summer. Every time the wind stirred the desert, it was as if your eyes got sandpapered. He had goggles, but they didn’t help much. And the flies, which were merely bad during the winter, turned horrific as the blast furnace heated up.

  Tinned bully beef wouldn’t have been inspiring in Norway in the middle of a snowstorm. Having choked it down in just those circumstances, Walsh could take oath on that. But it was worse when you always had to be shooing flies away from it, and when you couldn’t shoo off all of them.

  Like all his comrades in khaki, he ate some bugs along with his beef. They didn’t improve the flavor. Anything that could make bully beef taste worse than it did to begin with went straight into Walsh’s black book.

  He blamed a case of the galloping shits on swallowed flies. A lot of the men in his company had the same complaint. About half of them blamed the flies for it, too. The rest pointed an accusing finger at the water. It was brackish and stagnant and sulfurous to begin with. Heroic doses of lime chloride only made it taste worse. They were supposed to kill the germs lurking in it, but Walsh wouldn’t have bet on that. Some of those germs, land mines wouldn’t have killed.