Two Fronts (46 page)

The International replied in the same language: “Letter for you.”

“I’ll be damned.” Vaclav said that in Czech. He shoved through his countrymen to get to the guy with the mail. Several of the Czechs murmured jealously. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t done the same thing as other soldiers who got mail and he didn’t.

“
Hier, Freund
,” the International said, and handed him an envelope.

“
Danke. Danke schön
.” Vaclav took it over to a fire. He shielded it from the rain with his hand. When he got close enough to the flickering light to read, his heart did a pole vault. That was his father’s handwriting! His letter had got through to Prague, and he’d got an answer.

The stamp in the upper corner of the envelope didn’t look familiar to him. He swore under his breath: the damned thing had Hitler’s face on it, complete with ugly mustache. Printed over the
Führer
were the words
Böhmen u. Mähren
—the German for
Bohemia and Moravia
. The Nazis had even taken away the name of his country!

He tore the envelope open. If only the real Hitler were so easy to mutilate! The letter inside was short. He had a little trouble reading it; some German censor’s rubber stamp blurred and covered up a few words. But he managed.

My dear son
, his father wrote,
so good to hear from you after so long! Your mother and I and your two sisters are all well. I am sorry to have to tell you that Grandpa Stamic
—that was his mother’s father—
passed on a year ago. It was a liver disease, and had nothing to do with the war. Work is hard, but there is work. We eat well enough. Be safe. We will pray for you. With love, Papa
.

“What’s the word?” another Czech asked.

“My dad says there’s food in Prague. He’s working hard. One of my grandfathers died.” It all sounded so flat when you came out with it. But to have heard! To have heard for the first time since the fight in the Sudetenland went to hell!

“So the Nazis really do let letters through if the Red Cross handles them?” The other Czech soldier sounded as if he had trouble believing the German occupiers showed even that tiny bit of mercy and of adherence to international law.

“It’s my old man’s handwriting, sure as I’m standing here, so I guess the assholes do.” Vaclav sounded the same way, because he was amazed. Expecting anything good or even decent from Germans—especially from Germans in uniforms with swastikas on them—wasn’t easy for Czech exiles.

“I’ll send my folks a letter, too,” the other soldier declared. “Up till now, I just figured I was wasting my time.”

Vaclav nodded. “Well, sure. Same here. Christ, this is the first time I’ve heard anything from anybody back in Prague since I went over the border and let the Poles intern me.”

“Give the Red Cross some credit,” Benjamin Halévy said. “Even Hitler thinks twice before he lets them see him acting like a dickhead. Sometimes he does it anyway, mind you, but he does think twice.”

That got the Czechs suggesting where Hitler could stick his second thoughts. Vaclav doubted whether even a man considerably more limber than the
Führer
was likely to be would have been able to stick them in some of those places, let alone twist them once he’d done it. The soldiers had played such games before. It was one more way to coax a few laughs out of misery and to make fifteen minutes or a half hour go by faster than they would have otherwise.

Then somebody noticed Hitler’s face on the stamp. The guy wanted to use it for toilet paper. “Forget that, pal,” Jezek said. “Anybody gets his shit in the
Führer
’s mustache, it’ll be me. I just wish I could do it for real.”

“Don’t we all?” Halévy said. “The queue for that would stretch all the way from here to Berlin—and you’d better believe plenty of Germans would line up along with everybody else.”

“Yeah, well, they can wait way at the back. They don’t get to crap on him till all the others have had their turns,” Vaclav said.

“Sounds fair to me.” The Jew nodded. “If it wasn’t for them, none of the rest of us would’ve had to worry about him.”

They embellished that idea for a while, too. Then the Nationalists lobbed a few mortar bombs their way. Mortars and the finned shells they hurled were cheap, easy to make, and didn’t have tight tolerances. They were well suited to manufacture in Spain, in other words. The way things were right now, Hitler and Mussolini had trouble shipping goodies to Marshal Sanjurjo. Spaniards—even Fascist Spaniards—were stubborn people. Sanjurjo went right on fighting, doing all he could with what he had left and what he could figure out how to build for himself.

Huddled in the mud, Vaclav said, “I wish England and France would send the Republic a couple of hundred tanks. New tanks, I mean, not the worn-out junk they don’t want for themselves any more. We’d have the Nationalists howling for mercy and on the run in about a week.”

“Wouldn’t even take that long,” Halévy said, his voice muffled because his mouth wasn’t more than a centimeter out of the muck. “But don’t hold your breath, not unless you want to turn bluer than a French uniform from the last war.”

“Don’t they care whether they win?” Vaclav demanded.

“Good question. I wish I had a good answer for you,” Halévy replied. “Remember, they both sent armies into Russia to fight on Hitler’s side. They don’t want Germany to conquer them, but they aren’t dead keen on knocking the Fascists flat, either.”

Jezek wished he could have called the Jew a liar. But if England and France had been serious about taking on the Nazis, they would have hit Germany hard from the west as soon as Hitler attacked Czechoslovakia. It hadn’t happened then. All this time had passed since. Everyone had spent oceans of blood and snowdrifts of money. And the Western democracies still weren’t more than half serious about the war.

The Spaniards were, on both sides. Mortar bombs kept falling on the Czechs’ trenches. The foreign tanks that might have turned the war around were nowhere to be seen.

IVAN KUCHKOV HAD
watched Soviet forces retreat for years. Now the Red Army was moving forward in the Ukraine, even though it wasn’t winter. The Germans still fought hard in every village and on every north-south water line, no matter how small, but they were distracted in a way they hadn’t been before. Now they had to worry about the West, too, and they’d taken a lot of men out of the Soviet Union to fight back there. The ones who were left could slow down the Russians, but couldn’t stop them.

Right this minute, Kuchkov’s company wasn’t even facing Fritzes. The bastards in front of them were Romanians. Some of the swarthy men in the dark brown uniforms were brave enough. More surrendered on any excuse or none. They didn’t want to be here. They didn’t have artillery and tanks to put some weight on their side, the way the Hitlerites did.

So they came up to the Russians with their hands held high, hopeful smiles on their faces. “
Kamerad!
” they shouted, just as the Germans did.

They were miserably poor. Hardly anyone, even the officers, had anything worth stealing. Their field ration was cornmeal mush—
mamaliga
, they called it. They were willing—eager, in fact—to share it with their captors. Kuchkov wasn’t so eager to take it. Most of the time, he could do better scrounging off the countryside.

“Friends?” asked the Romanians who’d picked up bits and pieces of Russian. “Friends now?”

“You’re fucked now, is what you are,” Kuchkov would tell them. “You’re totally fucked, as a matter of fact.”

Most of the time, they couldn’t understand him. Or maybe they didn’t want to understand. They’d managed to surrender. They hadn’t got killed trying. The hard part was over. Now they could sit in POW camps till the war was over. Then they’d go home. The worst thing they had to worry about was whether their girlfriends were blowing the guy next door while they were stuck behind barbed wire.

That’s what they thought, anyhow. They were only Romanians. Germans knew better, and often saved a last bullet for themselves so they wouldn’t have to give up to Red Army men.

Yeah, the prisoners would end up in camps. Maybe they’d even be called POWs. But maybe, having got their hands on the enemy soldiers, Soviet authorities wouldn’t bother with games any more. That was how Ivan would have bet. The poor damned Romanians would probably go straight into the gulags, and odds were they’d never come out again.

Chopping down trees in Siberia’s endless forests? Building roads? Digging canals? Mining gold, up north of the Arctic Circle? The possibilities were endless. All of them used up men at hideous rates. You might die a few centimeters at a time, but you’d die, all right. At least the last bullet finished things in a hurry, and you didn’t hurt any more after that.

None of the Russians said a word about such things to the Romanians. It wasn’t that the prisoners wouldn’t have followed, though most of them wouldn’t have. It was more the front-line soldiers’ impulse to cause themselves as little trouble as they possibly could. Pretty soon, the Romanians would realize they might have been smarter to fight it out. Some of them would have had a chance to get away. By the time they did figure that out, though, the NKVD would have taken charge of them. And that would be too late.

Kuchkov watched them trudge off into captivity. They were laughing and singing and cracking jokes in their incomprehensible language. That wouldn’t last long.

“Pretty soon, the poor, sorry shitheads’ll see the fucking joke’s on them,” Kuchkov said. He wasn’t used to feeling sorry for an enemy. Neither the Germans nor the Ukrainian nationalists invited sympathy. But the Romanians were pathetic beyond belief. The big bosses in their country had grabbed them, poured them into uniforms, handed them rifles, and sent them off to war with a pat on the back and a good, loud
Lots of luck, suckers!

They might as well have been Russians, in other words.

That, Ivan Kuchkov kept to himself. No one would ever have accused him of being bright. He knew too well that he wasn’t, and that he never would be. But he was not without his own measure of animal cunning. And anyone who’d lived through the Great Terror of the 1930s knew what you could say and what you had to swallow. Anyone who’d lived through the Great Terror knew you’d goddamn well better not mumble in your sleep, either.

The Romanians hadn’t been gone for long when artillery—German artillery—started pounding the Soviet positions. The Nazis were cocksuckers, but they weren’t dumbshit cocksuckers. They understood that they had to give their allies some spine, because the Romanians sure didn’t come equipped with any on their own. And the Nazis understood that the dark-skinned men in the tobacco-brown uniforms with the funny helmets were liable to try to bail out on them any which way. If the Romanians tried it, the Germans who gave them spine would also do their best to give them grief.

Sitting where the Nazis sat, Communist Party bosses would have done exactly the same thing. They might wear different uniforms and spout different slogans, but they thought the same way.

No matter how clearly Ivan Kuchkov saw that, he saw even more clearly that it was one more thing to shut up about. His own country’s rulers would ruin him if they knew they reminded him of the Nazis. And the Nazis would kill him on general principles, sure, but they’d make a special point of killing him if they somehow learned they reminded him of Communist apparatchiks.

Which said … what? Probably that you couldn’t win any which way. Ivan had learned that lesson when he was very small. You couldn’t get out of the game, either. Grabbing a barmaid and jumping on a freighter to somewhere like Peru or Mozambique wasn’t just physically impossible. It lay far, far beyond his mental horizon.

Staying in the game as long as he could didn’t. The first German 105 was still a rising shriek in the air when he jumped into a foxhole he’d dug. Fragments whined over the hole, but none bit him. Dirt rained down on him. A clod thumped off his helmet. It scared him for a moment, till he realized it was only a clod. Smaller bits fell into the narrow space between the back of his neck and his tunic’s collar band. It made his back itch. He hated that. He wiggled in the foxhole, trying to make the dirt go down. Considering what the bombardment could have done to him, the annoyance was tiny, but it was real.

More shells came down. In between the thunderous bursts, Kuchkov heard somebody shrieking. “Poor prick,” he muttered, and pulled himself deeper into his foxhole. He understood noises like that. Anybody who’d been at the front for even a little while did. One of the soldiers had a bad one.

If the man was lucky, they’d drag him back to a sawbones who’d stick an ether-soaked rag under his nose and then patch him up as best he could. Lucky? Very lucky. More likely, he’d keep screaming till he passed out or till he died.

Another shell came down. Something wet splashed the back of Ivan’s hand. It wasn’t just wet—it was hot and red. “Fuck!” he said, and rubbed off the blood against the hole’s dirt wall. Absently, he noticed that the wounded man’s screams had stopped. That burst had probably finished his story once and for all. After a hit like that, there wouldn’t be enough left of him to bury.

Could’ve been me
, Ivan thought. It could have been, but it hadn’t. Not yet. Not this time. All the same, he found himself envying those Romanians shuffling back to the prison camps, and who would have imagined that?

CORPORAL ARNO BAATZ
worried about his own men almost as much as he worried about the Russians. The way he looked at things, that was what a good underofficer was supposed to do. How could the
Reich
hope to win a war with the undisciplined louts who filled the
Wehrmacht
’s ranks unless somebody rode herd on them and kept them in line? It couldn’t be done, or so things seemed to him.

The men didn’t appreciate his efforts. They thought that, just because they were up at the front, they could get away with anything. Maybe some corporals would have let them do it. But
Unteroffizier
Arno Baatz wasn’t one of those soft, yielding souls.