The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (27 page)

Most reluctantly, Charles nodded. “I guess so.”

“Other thing to remember is, the Russians never signed the Geneva Convention. Even the Germans did that,” Luc went on. “So who gives a rat’s ass what that safe-conduct says? Once the Reds
have you, they can do whatever they damn well please. Nobody’s gonna stop ’em. The Red Cross never gets a look inside their POW camps—if they bother keeping POWs alive long enough to put ’em in camps. You understand what I’m saying?”

“You’re saying you like Hitler better than Stalin.” Charles might have been accusing him of picking his nose and eating the boogers.

“No! No, God damn it to hell!
I’m saying I can’t stand either one of those shitheads, and you can’t trust either one of them.” Luc paused to take the tin off the fire. The monkey meat was as ready as it ever would be. His stomach growled gratefully when he stuffed a mouthful into his chowlock. After a gulp an anaconda might have used to engulf a half-grown tapir, he resumed: “It’s like I told you before. I don’t set our foreign
policy, and neither do you. We go where they tell us and we do what they tell us to do there. And if we don’t, our own side’ll make it rougher on us than the Nazis and Reds put together.”

Artillery rumbled, not far enough away. Charles gestured in that direction, asking, “How?”

“They can jail you. They can shoot you, too. And they can make life hell on earth for your kinfolk. If your brother
keeps getting fired; if your son, when you have a son, ends up in a crappy school and blames you for it … They remember. It’s how they stay on top—remembering. And paying back.”

His words made the youngster—three or four years younger than he was now—recoil in horror. “They wouldn’t do anything like that! They couldn’t get away with it!”

“My ass they couldn’t.” Luc scooped more hot bully beef
out of the tin.

“You’re no help at all, dammit.” Charles stomped away from the hut in dudgeon as high as a corpse four days gone.

Luc finished the tin of monkey meat. Then he hunted up Lieutenant Demange. He recounted the conversation with Charles, adding, “You’d better tighten up the sentries, sir. He’s liable not to be the only one who’ll try and go over to the other side.”

“Yeah, chances
are you’re right.” Demange shifted his Gitane to one side of his mouth and spat in disgust out of the other. “That stupid fucking Russian asswipe of a safe-conduct! Jesus God, the clowns like Charles are smart enough to see that their own government lies to them every chance it gets, so how come they aren’t smart enough to see all the other governments’re full of bullshit, too?”

“Beats me.” It
seemed as obvious as an axiom of geometry to Luc. Had he thought that way before the war broke out? He had trouble remembering. He didn’t believe he had—he hadn’t worried much about
politics at all then. So what, though? Lies and incompetence hadn’t come close to sinking France then. Things looked different these days.

Charles didn’t try to desert. Luc dared hope he’d put the fear of God into
him. A couple of nights later, though, two other
poilus
did slip away. Lieutenant Demange swore in furious disgust.

Supplies came up in horse-drawn wagons. Both French and German trucks literally fell to bits when they had to deal with what were alleged to be Soviet roads. Horses didn’t break down, and wagons were easier to repair than motor vehicles. As long as Luc kept getting ammo and food,
he didn’t care how.

With the Germans on their left flank and Hungarians to their right, the French pushed forward. Fighting well was the best way to improve your chances of staying alive. Luc didn’t have anything in particular against the Russians, the way he’d had against the
Wehrmacht
men when they tried to overrun his country. He shot at them anyhow, to keep them from shooting at him.

And,
before long, the advancing French troops came upon a fresh grave in the woods with an Adrian helmet for a tombstone. They dug it up. In it lay one of the deserters. He hadn’t stopped a mistaken bullet. The Ivans had sported with him for a long time before they let him die. The French soldiers quickly buried him again.

“Where’s your safe-conduct?” Luc asked Charles. “Feel like using it now?”

“No, Sergeant,” the kid answered in a very small voice. As if on the training ground, Luc snapped, “What was that? I can’t hear you!”

“No, Sergeant,” Charles said again, rather louder this time.

“All right, then.” Luc let it go. He didn’t need to worry that Charles would skedaddle, not after the youngster saw what was left of that other damn fool. The Russians would have drawn more deserters
had they treated people who went over to them well. But if they wanted to play the game the other way, they’d soon discover the French could, too.

IVAN KUCHKOV PATTED
the round drum that held his PPD’s ammunition with almost the same delight he would have used to pat a barmaid’s
round backside. He never wanted to have anything to do with an infantry rifle again. You didn’t need to aim a PPD.
You just pointed it and fired. If one bullet didn’t do for a Fascist, the next would, or the one after that.

A Nazi with a Mauser could hit him from much farther away than he could hit the Fritz with his submachine gun. In the kind of fighting they were doing, in woods and villages and towns, that seldom mattered. You mostly didn’t see your enemy till he was right on top of you. Then you needed
to kill him in a hurry. The PPD was made with just that in mind.

His outfit kept falling back toward Smolensk. It infuriated him. He wanted to drive the Germans west, not to dance to their tune. The Red Army counterattacked whenever officers thought they saw a chance—or whenever orders came down from above. Sometimes the Russians gained a little ground. Even when they did, they rarely held it
long.

He wasn’t sure about the name of the village where they were fighting now. It might have been called Old Pigshit, a handle it would have kept for centuries. Or it might have been rechristened something like Leninsk after the glorious Soviet Revolution. Either way, it was a stench in the nostrils—and a lot like the miserable hole in the ground where Ivan had grown up.

One way in which it
differed from that particular hole in the ground was the broad expanse of grainfields and meadows to the north, south, and west. “Couldn’t be better country for panzers,” said Lieutenant Vasiliev. Ivan was convinced the political officer fucked pigs, but even a pigfucker got it right every once in a while.

About half the villagers had been rash enough to stick around instead of hightailing it
to the east. Maybe they thought the Red Army would push the Nazis back, in which case they were optimists. Or maybe they thought things would get better once the Nazis took over, in which case they were
really
optimists.

Any which way, the
politruk
took charge of them. He set them digging deep, wide ditches across their fields and meadows, not so much to stop tanks as to channel their movements
toward antitank guns.

A peasant with a gray mustache had the nerve to complain: “How the devil can we farm after we tear up the land like this?”

Lieutenant Vasiliev drew his Tokarev automatic from the leather holster on his belt. He held it up to the peasant’s head and pulled the trigger. The report was harsh, flat, undramatic. The peasant fell over. He kicked a few times and lay still. Blood
puddled under him. A wrinkled woman in a headscarf shrieked.

“Any other questions?” the
politruk
asked pleasantly, reholstering the pistol. Vast silence, but for the woman’s sobs. The
politruk
nodded. “All right, then. Get back to work.”

And they did—all of them, including the
babushka
who’d just lost her husband. Sometimes life could be very simple.

Some of the soldiers dug alongside them.
Others turned the village into a strongpoint. Field fortification was a Russian art.
Maskirovka—
camouflage—was another. Making buildings into places that were much stronger than they looked combined the two.

They got less done than Ivan wished they would have. German artillery started probing early in the afternoon. Not even the
politruk
’s pistol could keep the
muzhiks
working after that. They
ran for the trees, more afraid of the big shells bursting—and with reason. Artillery was the great butcher. Everything else was an afterthought beside it.

The soldiers stolidly labored on. Every so often, they flattened out in the antitank ditches when incoming shells sounded close. After the shelling moved on for a while, they stood up again, brushed themselves off, and went back to digging.
A few shells hit in the ditches. A man or two walking around above ground got wounded by fragments.

Scouts fell back toward Old Pigshit or whatever it was, skirmishing as they came. “Stupid Germans aren’t far behind us,” one of them said as he jumped into a trench close to Ivan.
Nemtsi
, the Russian word for
Germans
, meant
tongue-tied ones
or
mumblers;
it went well with the notion of stupidity.
The scout lit a
papiros
.

“Let me have one of those fuckers, will you?” Ivan said. The scout glanced his way, saw he was a sergeant, and gave him a smoke. Kuchkov had expected no less. After a couple of drags, he asked, “Have they got tanks along?”

“I saw some,” the scout answered. He carried a PPD, too. A Red Army soldier was more inclined to believe in firepower than in God.

“They would, the
clapped-out cunts,” Ivan muttered. One of the scout’s eyebrows twitched. All soldiers swore, but Ivan was in a class by himself. He found another question: “Are their peckers up?”

“Why not? They’re advancing,” the scout said bleakly.

Ivan glanced over his shoulder. Maybe a company of KV-1s would clank forward and save the day like the warriors who whipped the Teutonic Knights in
Alexander Nevsky
. Now there was a flick for you!
And maybe green monkeys will fly out of my ass, too
, Ivan thought, mocking himself. Life wasn’t like a movie. Tanks didn’t show up from nowhere just because you needed them like anything. And wasn’t that a goddamn shame?

German soldiers appeared in the distance. Field-gray blended in about as well as khaki, but the Nazis’ black helmets stood out on the horizon.
The
Germans
had tanks along: three Czech machines, either captured or newly built in conquered factories. They were better than Panzer Is and IIs, not so good as IIIs: about like any Soviet tanks this side of the KV-1.

Cautiously, the tanks with the white-edged black crosses on them advanced. Foot soldiers loped between them. A Soviet mortar started thumping. Earth fountained up as the bombs
hit. The Nazi infantrymen dove for cover. One of them was blasted off his feet. Ivan didn’t think he’d get up again.

A tank crew thought about crossing a ditch, but the obstruction proved too wide and too deep. The machine came straight toward the village, then, as the defenders had planned. A hidden antitank gun opened up on it. The gunners needed several shots before they scored a hit, but
the tank stopped and began to burn when they did.

That told the other enemy tanks where the gun was, though. They shelled it into silence, then rolled forward with greater confidence. Another antitank gun knocked one of them out in nothing flat. The last tank scuttled back out of range.

Red Army men with rifles fired at their German counterparts. A machine gun in a tavern opened up on the Fritzes,
too. The Germans hit the dirt and started digging foxholes. They were veteran troops. They weren’t about to make things easy for their foes.

“Well, we’ve stopped ’em,” the scout said. Neither he nor Ivan had fired a shot. The Fascists hadn’t drawn close enough to turn their submachine guns deadly.

“For now, yeah. Right here, yeah,” Ivan said. The Red Army could usually stop the Germans right
here, and for now. Then, somehow, they’d break through a little later somewhere else, and stopping them right here for now wouldn’t matter any more. You’d have to retreat, or else they’d close the ring behind you and grind you to pieces at their leisure.

Lieutenant Obolensky and the
politruk
wanted to make the Germans fight a regular battle for Old Pigshit. Unfortunately, the officers in charge
of the advancing Nazis had too much sense to bang their heads into a stone wall. They were like water; they slid around obstructions. Before long, their 105s started pounding the Red Army men who held the woods a few kilometers south of the village. Ivan could follow the fighting to the south by ear. The Russians in the woods gave way. The Germans pushed through. That meant Old Pigshit would start
flying the swastika pretty soon.

Maybe the place would have held if troops from here had helped the handful of Russians in those woods. Maybe not, but maybe. No one thought to weaken the strongpoint, though. And so, instead of weakening it, the company had to abandon it.

They retreated in good order. They’d be ready to fight again somewhere else before long. The Soviet Union was vast. It could
afford to trade space for time. But you couldn’t win a war with endless retreats … could you?

Chapter 12