Last Orders: The War That Came Early (2 page)

One of the senior privates in Baatz’s squad dolefully surveyed himself in a polished steel shaving mirror. “Don’t see much point to getting out a razor,” Adam Pfaff said. “I’d cut me more than I’d cut my whiskers, all bitten up the way I am.”

“You’ll shave like everybody else,” Baatz growled. “It’s in the regulations.”

“A lot of things that are in the regulations sound great in Germany, but they turn out to be really stupid here in Russia.” Insubordination was Pfaff’s middle name.

Baatz glared at him and ran a hand over his own bitten-up but reasonably well-shaven face. “If I can do it, you can do it. And if I’ve got to do it, you’ve fucking well got to do it, too.”

He never could gauge ahead of time what would work on the
Obergefreiter
. “All right, Corporal. I guess that’s fair,” Pfaff said now, and started scraping away.

No sooner had he rinsed off his razor and stuck it back in his kit than the Ivans started shelling the German positions in the area. All the
Landsers
jumped for the closest foxhole, and most of them got into cover while the Russian shells were still screaming down. The ground shook from one burst after another. The Russians weren’t the most efficient soldiers God ever made, but they always seemed to have artillery falling out of their assholes.

If a 105 came down right on top of you, cowering in a foxhole wouldn’t do you a pfennig’s worth of good. Baatz knew that all too well. If a shell came down on top of you, they’d bury you in a jam tin … if they could scrape enough of you from the mud to bother with a burial at all. He knew one fellow who’d taken a direct hit and vanished from the face of the earth, teeth, belt buckle, boot-sole hobnails and all. Gone. Off the map.

You tried not to think about things like that. Sometimes, though, your mind kept coming back to them, the way your tongue kept coming back to a bit of gristle stuck between two teeth. Because there were plenty of worse things than dying from a direct hit. Then, at least, you never knew what happened. Baatz had listened to men shriek for hours, sometimes for more than a day, begging their friends and even their enemies to kill them and end their agony. He’d never had to do that himself, but he knew men who had.

Anything that can happen can happen to you
. One more truth that wartime brought out, and one more Baatz did his best not to remember. He already had one wound badge, and an amazing scar on his arm. He wasn’t anxious for fate to do any more carving on him.

His anxiety or lack of same, of course, might have nothing to do with anything. “They’re coming!” someone bawled through the roar of bursting shells.

The Ivans had come up with a hideously sneaky trick. They would
stop shelling a narrow corridor—sometimes only fifty meters across—and send in their infantry there while they kept plastering the rest of the front. Any defender who wasn’t in the corridor and stuck up his head to shoot at the advancing Reds was asking for a fragment to blow it off.

If you didn’t stick up your head and shoot, the Russians would get in behind you. They were like rats—they squeezed through any little hole. Then you could kiss your sorry ass good-bye. They’d shoot you or bayonet you or smash in your skull with an entrenching tool. Or they’d take you alive and see what kind of fun they could have with you. The USSR never signed the Geneva Convention. Neither side in the East played by any rules this side of the jungle’s.

Swearing and praying at the same time, Baatz popped halfway out of his hole and started shooting. The Mauser slammed against his shoulder again and again: a good, familiar ache. An Ivan in a dun-colored uniform tumbled and fell. Baatz wasn’t sure his bullet got the bastard, but he’d been firing in that direction. He’d take credit for the kill in his own mind.

A couple of foxholes farther south, Adam Pfaff was also banging away at the Russians. He’d painted his rifle’s woodwork a gray not far from
Feldgrau
. He claimed it improved the camouflage. Baatz thought that was a bunch of crap, but the company CO let Pfaff get by with it. What could you do?

Right this minute, trying to stay alive mattered more than the weird paint job on an
Obergefreiter
’s rifle. Baatz slapped a fresh five-round clip into the magazine of his own Mauser and went on firing. A tiny, half-spent shell fragment clanged off his helmet. It didn’t get through. When the last war started, they’d gone into battle with headgear made of felt or leather. Baatz remembered his old man talking about it, and about how in the days before the
Stahlhelm
any little head wound was likely to kill you. You couldn’t make a helmet strong enough to keep out a rifle bullet but light enough to wear. Just blocking fragments, though, saved a hell of a lot of casualties. Baatz knew that, without his helmet, he’d be lying dead now, with no more than a trickle of blood in his hair—maybe not even that.

No matter how sneaky the Russians were, they weren’t going to
ram through the German lines this time. Along with the stubborn riflemen, an MG-34 and one of the new, quick-firing MG-42s hosed the Ivans’ corridor down with bullets. Russians could be recklessly, even maniacally, bold. Or they could skedaddle like so many savages. This time, they skedaddled, dragging their wounded behind them as they pulled back.

Some of their wounded: a soldier in a khaki greatcoat thrashed and screamed just a couple of hundred meters in front of Baatz’s foxhole. He took aim to finish off the sorry son of a bitch—and to shut him up. But then another Russian ran back, waving his arms to show he wasn’t carrying any weapons.

Baatz was about to pot him anyhow. Yes, he was a brave man. To Baatz, that meant he needed killing all the more. One of these days, he’d show up again, this time toting a machine pistol. But a couple of Germans yelled, “Let him live!” Reluctantly, Baatz didn’t pull the trigger.

The Russian waved toward the German foxholes—he knew he could have got his ticket punched right there. He hauled his countryman onto his back and, bent almost double, lumbered away toward the east.

Squeezing liver paste from a tinfoil tube onto a zwieback cracker later that day, Baatz was still discontented. “I should have nailed that turd,” he grumbled, and stuffed the food into his face.

“World won’t end,” Adam Pfaff said as he lit a cigarette. “Sometimes they let us pick up our guys, too. The war’s hard enough the way it is. We don’t need to make it even worse.”

“They’re Russians. Do ’em a favor and all you get for it is a kick in the balls,” Baatz said. Since he outranked Pfaff, he got the last word. He wished like hell he’d got that Ivan, too.

Vaclav Jezek hadn’t known what summer heat was like till he came to Spain. The Czech had thought he did, but now he owned he’d been just a beginner. The sun northwest of Madrid beat down on his head as if out of a blue enamel bowl that focused all its heat right there.

He lay in a shell hole in the no-man’s-land between the Republicans’
barbed wire and the stuff the Fascists strung. He had branches and bits of greenery on his helmet and here and there on his uniform. They didn’t block the heat. They weren’t supposed to. They did help break up his outline, to make it harder for Marshal Sanjurjo’s men to spot him out here.

His antitank rifle also had its long, straight barrel bedecked with leaves and twigs. The damn thing wasn’t much shorter than he was. It weighed a tonne. The French had made it to fire a slug as wide as a man’s thumb through a tank’s armor. It could do that … to any tank made in the 1930s. It was as powerful a rifle as one man could carry and fire. Even with a muzzle brake and a padded stock, it kicked harder than any mule ever born.

No matter how powerful it was, it couldn’t kill the bigger, heavier modern tanks the war had spawned. To the logical French, if it couldn’t do the job for which it was made, it was useless.

French logic, though, reached only so far. The antitank rifle fired a very heavy bullet with a very high muzzle velocity. The round flew fast and far and flat. It might not be able to cope with a Panzer IV, but it could knock over a man at a couple of kilometers. It was, in other words, a perfect sniper’s rifle.

In France, Vaclav had killed German officers who made the fatal mistake of thinking they were too far behind the line to worry about keeping their heads down. When France hopped into Hitler’s arms for a while, she generously allowed the Czechs who fought for their government-in-exile to cross the border into Spain and take service with the Republic. Vaclav brought the antitank rifle with him. By then, he would have killed anybody who tried to take it away from him.

After a couple of years here, he knew enough Spanish to get fed. He knew enough to get drunk. He knew enough to get laid. He could cuss some, too. He had the essentials, in other words. Anything past the essentials, no. He spoke pretty good German—a lot of Czechs did—which helped him with the men of the International Brigades but not with the Republicans. Most of the Spaniards who could
Deutsch sprechen
fought on Sanjurjo’s side.

Like the rest of the Czechs, he’d made himself useful here. He’d actually used the rifle on enemy tanks. Sanjurjo’s men tried sending
some old Italian tankettes against the Internationals. They had enough armor to laugh at ordinary small-arms fire. Not at what his overmuscled elephant gun could do, though.

And he’d killed General Franco with the antitank rifle. Not as good as blowing off Sanjurjo’s jowly head, but the next best thing. He’d got a medal for that, and a wad of pesetas to go with it that gave him one hell of a spree in Madrid.

Marshal Sanjurjo had an even bigger price on his head than his late general had. If the marshal ever decided to inspect these lines and came within 2,000 meters of wherever the Czech happened to be hiding, Vaclav vowed that he was one dead bigwig.

Meanwhile … Meanwhile, he waited. He spied on the Nationalists’ lines with a pair of binoculars wrapped in burlap. He’d stuck cardboard above their objective lenses so no untimely reflections would give him away. And he’d taken the same precaution with the objective on the rifle’s telescopic sight.

Careless snipers had short careers. He wanted to go back to Czechoslovakia after the war ended … if the war ever ended, and if there was any Czechoslovakia to go back to once it did. Dying in France fighting against the Nazis, he would at least have been playing against the first team. Making a mistake that let some Spaniard in a diarrhea-yellow uniform plug him would just be embarrassing.

No, not just embarrassing. Painful, too.

Not much was going on now on either side of the line. Here and there, a rifleman would take a shot at somebody in the wrong uniform who was rash enough to put himself on display. Most of the time, the would-be assassin was a crappy shot and missed. His attempted victim would dive for cover.

Vaclav was anything but a crappy shot. He’d been good when the Czechoslovakian Army drafted him. Plenty of practice in the years since left him a hell of a lot better than good. He could have killed plenty of careless Nationalists at the front line.

But that would have been like spending a hundred English pounds for a glass of beer. Ordinary privates and noncoms weren’t worth killing with an antitank rifle. If he yielded to temptation and let the air out of one of those bastards, he’d have to find a new hiding place. Shooting
twice in a row from the same spot was more dangerous than lighting three on a match. You were telling the enemy right where you were. You were telling him you were stupid enough to stay there, too.

So he ignored the jerks who stuck their brainless heads up over the parapet for a look around. He scanned farther back, to the places where most of the time you wouldn’t need to worry about getting shot. Nationalist officers wore much fancier uniforms and headgear than the men they led. Killing a colonel might do more for the Republican cause than exterminating a company’s worth of ordinary soldiers.

For the moment, though, nobody worth shooting was showing himself. So Vaclav brought down the glasses and surveyed the shattered ground ahead of where he lay. Every once in a while, Sanjurjo’s men sneaked out to hunt snipers. He’d blown big holes in a couple of those guys. He was ruthless about keeping himself in one piece.

And the Spanish Fascists sent snipers of their own out into no-man’s-land. They didn’t have anybody with a monster gun like his. But a good shot with a good rifle could kill a man a kilometer away—not every time, maybe, but often enough to be dangerous. Vaclav knew what the ground was supposed to look like from here. He knew what it was supposed to look like from almost every centimeter in front of the stretch of trench the Czechs held. Knowing such things was like a life-insurance policy. Any little change might—probably would—mark trouble.

He didn’t see any little changes, though. The heat made everybody move at half speed. Let the sun kill the bastards on the other side, the thought seemed to be. Shooting them was too much trouble for soldiers.

After a while, it got to be too much trouble for Jezek. He ate brown bread and crumbly Spanish sausage full of fennel. It could give you the runs, but it tasted good. To kill some germs, he washed it down with sharp white wine from the canteen on his belt. He would rather have drunk beer—he was a Czech, all right. But most Spanish beer tasted like piss, and smelled like it, too. Wine was also easier to come by here.

He wanted a cigarette. He didn’t light one. Smoke could give you away. He wouldn’t get too jittery before he went back inside the barbed wire among his friends and countrymen. He’d puff away once he did.

Some days went by without his firing a shot. If he didn’t see anything worth firing at, he just stayed where he was till it got dark. Let the Nationalists think they’d finally killed him while they were shelling no-man’s-land. It might make them careless. Then they’d give him better targets.

What was this? A truck coming up toward the Fascists’ lines. Canvas tied down over hoops covered the rear compartment. When the truck stopped, soldiers got out. A man hopped down from the passenger side of the front seat, too. That and his uniform told Jezek he was an officer.