The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (10 page)

Several hands shot into the air. Had Theo been a man who asked out loud the questions that formed in his head, his would have been one of them. Since he wasn’t, he kept his hand down. So did Adalbert Stoss, though his expression was eloquent.

Captain Schellenberg pointed to one of the men. “Go ahead, Rudi.”

“Sir, how are these National Socialist Waddayacallems different from the Ivans’ political commissars?”

That would also have been the first question Theo asked. By the way the rest of the panzer crewmen nodded, it was uppermost in their minds, too. Everyone eyed the company commander. What would he say? What
could
he say?

“I’ll tell you how they’re different, boys. They’re ours, that’s how,” Schellenberg answered.

That was blunt enough and then some. But it raised as many questions as it answered—probably more. “What do we need ’em for?” Rudi demanded, which was certainly one of those questions. “Are people in Berlin saying we’ve gotta read
Mein Kampf
before we plan an ambush? Soldiering doesn’t work that way.”

There was an understatement. Theo had looked at
Mein Kampf
. He admired Hitler for making Germany a respected nation once more. Looking at the
Führer
’s book did nothing to increase his admiration. It struck him as rubbish—energetic, passionate, sometimes clever rubbish, but rubbish all the same.

Schellenberg chose his words with obvious care: “We need men who are loyal to the state and loyal to the government. If this is how we get them, I’m for it. Don’t forget, we had generals trying to overthrow the
government in the middle of a war. How can we win when something like that happens?”

Maybe the government shouldn’t have started the war in the first place
, Theo thought. But Schellenberg had a point. Nothing good would happen to the
Reich
if the government were toppled at a time like this. The war effort would surely have gone straight down the WC.

Then again, nothing good would happen to Germany if she lost the war Hitler had started, either.

“Other questions?” Captain Schellenberg asked.… “What is it, Bruno?”

“Sir, are these Leadership Officers”—Bruno spoke the name with obvious distaste—“going to squeal on us if we say anything they don’t happen to like?
You
know how soldiers go on. If we can’t blow off steam every once in a while, life’s hardly worth living.”

Several other men nodded, Theo and Adi and Hermann Witt among them. Bruno had it right. Soldiers
would
call their superiors and their civilian leaders a pack of idiots. Sensible officers paid no attention to most of that kind of talk. But what were the odds a National Socialist Leadership Officer would turn out to be sensible? Long, mighty long. The clumsy title seemed made to draw fanatics, people who know everything there was to know about Nazi doctrine but not a goddamn thing about panzers or rations or anything else that really mattered.

“They’re not here to be rats,” Schellenberg said firmly. “Honest to God, they’re not. The government wants the
Wehrmacht
to follow its lead, that’s all. So when we do have one of these fellows assigned to us, give him a chance, all right?”

Nobody said no, not out loud. Nobody in Theo’s crew complained where he could hear it. Were he a more outgoing sort, he might well have complained himself. But keeping his mouth shut was his natural style.

He wasn’t at all sure about Sergeant Witt’s politics. The panzer commander did his job. He did it well: he was smart and brave. But, if he hated Hitler and everything the Nazis stood for, he had the sense not to shout it from the turret on the Panzer II. By the same token, if he pawed the ground and whinnied every time he heard the
Horst Wessel Lied
, he didn’t advertise that, either.

Theo thought Adi Stoss had reason not to want a National Socialist Leadership Officer anywhere within a hundred kilometers of him. Then again, Adi also had reason not to discuss his reasons with anybody else.

Unless, of course, Theo was all wet. The radioman chuckled, very softly, to himself.
Me, all wet?
he thought.
Impossible! Couldn’t happen! I’m much too shrewd to make dumb mistakes
.

The Leadership Officer got to the company after a nasty skirmish with some Soviet officer. Bruno went back to an aid station swathed in bandages. Scuttlebutt was, he might not keep his arm. Neither of his crewmates was even that lucky. The panzer men weren’t in the mood to welcome Lieutenant Horst Ostrowski with open arms.

He didn’t look like a wild-eyed fanatic. He wore an Iron Cross Second Class and a wound badge—he hadn’t been commanding a desk in Dresden or something before he got this assignment. He talked about the need to beat the Russians so Central Asia didn’t grab a foothold in Central Europe.

Everything he said seemed harmless enough. All the same, Theo wished he
were
back at that desk in Dresden, or whatever his previous assignment had been. Again, the radioman didn’t think he was anywhere close to the only guy with the same wish.

BACK IN THE TRENCHES
in front of Madrid, Chaim Weinberg didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. He did know he ought to be pissed off, and he was. He had a good notion of who’d screwed him, and he hadn’t even got kissed. That pissed him off, too. La Martellita had a blowjob mouth if ever there was one—to look at, anyway. He’d never got to feel it on John Henry. Not against his lips, either, for that matter. She couldn’t stand him, so she’d put him back where he started.

Only a handful of old sweats from the States were left in the Abe Lincolns. Spaniards filled out the ranks, as they did in all the International Brigades these days. The surviving Americans thought his return was the funniest thing that had happened lately.

“Watsamatter wit’ you, boychik?” said another New Yorker, a Jew who went by the name of Izzy. “You had it soft in Madrid. How’d you manage to screw it up this time?”

Chaim didn’t like that
this time
, not even slightly. “Talent,” he said, and tried to let it go at that.

No such luck. Izzy was a born agitator. He was a New York Jew in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade—of course he was a born agitator. “What did you go and do?” he asked, eyeing Chaim shrewdly. “Get somebody important mad at you? Can’t get away with that, boychik, not even in the classless society you can’t.”

“Oh, fuck off,” Chaim answered. Izzy laughed like a loon. Chaim almost hauled off and belted him. He would have, if that hadn’t been the same as admitting the other guy was right.

Izzy wasn’t the only veteran who thought he was the most comical—and the dumbest—thing on two legs. He couldn’t fight all of them, not if he wanted to live to do anything else. He didn’t know what all he wanted to do later on, but one thing seemed glaringly obvious. He wanted to get an apology from La Martellita. If he couldn’t get an apology, a blowjob would do just as well. Maybe better.

First he had to live long enough to collect one or the other (even both, if he got really lucky). He hadn’t got sent to the trenches just because La Martellita put in a bad word somewhere. He hoped like hell he hadn’t, anyhow. The Republic was trying to push the Nationalists away from the capital. Whenever the Republic tried something that took hard fighting, in went the International Brigades. That had been true ever since the Internationals got to Spain.

And, though Spaniards filled out the Brigades’ ranks these days, it remained true even now. The Americans and Englishmen and Poles and Germans and Italians and Hungarians and God knew what all else who remained gave the International Brigades experience and
esprit de corps
no purely Spanish outfit could match. The foreign volunteers had and passed on experience the Spaniards couldn’t match, too. Germans who hated Adolf Hitler’s guts owned just as much professional expertise as the ones who fought in the
Legion Kondor
.

Naturally, Marshal Sanjurjo’s men understood all that as well as the Republicans. Naturally, the Nationalists kept their own élite troops opposite the Internationals’ positions. Naturally, any advance against those Fascist soldiers was a lot tougher than it would have been against the usual odds and sods who filled out the ranks on both sides.

You outflanked a bunch of odds and sods, they either ran away or surrendered. Raw troops were as sensitive about their flanks as so many ticklish virgins. You outflanked a bunch of men who knew what they were doing and really meant it, and they hunkered down, dug their foxholes deeper, turned their machine gun your way if they had one, and defied you to winkle them out. Doing it wasn’t much fun.

“¡Chinga tu madre!”
one of Sanjurjo’s finest shouted back when a man from the Abe Lincolns yelled that he should give up. A sharp burst of fire followed the obscenity: this gang of Nationalists did have a machine gun.

Some of the bullets snapped by overhead much too close for comfort. “Boy, I wish I was takin’ hot dogs outa boilin’ water back at Coney Island,” Izzy said.

“Yeah, well, nobody held a gun to your head and made you get on a boat,” Chaim answered. “Now that I think about it, me, neither.”

“¿Qué dices?”
asked one of the Spaniards who plumped out the Abe Lincolns. Chaim thought he went by Paco, but wasn’t quite sure. He’d never set eyes on the guy till he came back to the trenches.

“What’s he say?” Izzy asked. He’d been in Spain as long as Chaim. He could cuss some in Spanish, but that was about it.

“He said, ‘What did you say?’ ” Chaim answered. He did some more explaining, in both English and Spanish. Then he added, “I wish we had a mortar handy. That’d make those fuckers
and
their machine gun say uncle.”

“¿Qué dices?”
Paco asked again. Chaim repeated himself in the Spaniard’s language. Then he had to explain the explanation to Izzy.

Paco spoke excitedly: “But we do have one!” He hurried away, staying low—he was learning.

“Where’s he going?” Izzy said. “Is he running off, the little son of a—?”

“No, no,” Chaim broke in. “He said we do have a mortar. Since when?”

“I dunno.” Izzy shrugged. “I don’t remember if the French Communist Party sent it to us or we captured it off the Nationalists.”

If the Communist Party of the United States stashed a mortar and some bombs at its headquarters in New York City, J. Edgar Hoover and his G-men would land on it in hobnailed boots, close it down, and send
the leading American Reds to jail for about a million years. Things were different in Europe. Political parties of the left and the right took themselves a lot more seriously over here. Chaim, who also took politics seriously (if he didn’t, what was he doing in Spain?), leaned that way himself.

Paco not only knew the Abe Lincolns had a stovepipe, he knew where the critter was hiding. Maybe ten minutes later, mortar rounds started stalking the Nationalist diehards. The first one landed so far short, it was scarier than the enemy machine gun. But succeeding bombs walked toward and then came down on the battered foxholes Sanjurjo’s men were holding.

All the same, the machine gun opened up when the Abe Lincolns moved forward. The mortar crew must have been watching, perhaps through field glasses. More bombs landed on the Nationalists. Now the nasty little piece of field artillery had the range. The new shells didn’t scare the piss out of the guys they were supposed to help.

“Come on!” Chaim scrambled out of his own trench and ran toward the enemy line. “Follow me!”

The rest of the men in the assault party
did
follow him. He would have ended up slightly dead (or, sad to say, more than slightly) if they hadn’t. The mortar hadn’t put all the Nationalists out of action. Bombardments never did, however much you wished they would. A couple of men popped up with rifles. Shots from the oncoming Abe Lincolns made them fire wildly, though. And when one of Sanjurjo’s finest tried to point the machine gun at the charging Republicans, Chaim shot him in the face. He fell back with a wild, despairing scream. It had to be the best—or the luckiest—shot from the hip Chaim had ever made.

“¡Viva la Republica!”
Chaim yelled as he jumped after the would-be machine gunner.

“¡Chinga la Republica!”
a stubborn Nationalist shouted back, raising a Lebel—a French rifle that had been outdated at the start of the last war—to his shoulder.

Chaim shot him, too. The old-fashioned rifle fell from his hands. It went off when it hit the ground, but the bullet buried itself in the dirt. Other Abe Lincolns were cleaning out the rest of the men who’d held them up.

A couple of Nationalists did try to surrender then. The Abe Lincolns disposed of them in a hurry. The new Spaniards who filled out the force were quicker to shoot than the remaining Americans. This wasn’t about fighting Fascism to them. This was about getting rid of people who’d probably done horrible things to their loved ones. Chaim didn’t know why they called a war inside one country a civil war. It was anything but.

None of the Americans said anything about the shootings to their Spanish comrades. It wasn’t as if Sanjurjo’s men didn’t do the same thing. The machine gun also turned out to be surplus from the last war: a water-cooled German Maxim. Once in position, it was as good as any more modern weapon. Getting it there, however, was less than half the fun. It was more portable than an anvil, but only slightly. And the mount from which it fired was massive enough to let somebody preach a sermon on it.

Chaim said as much to Izzy, and got the groan he deserved. When he tried to translate the joke for one of the Spaniards, he discovered it worked in his language but not in theirs.

There were other things to worry about. Going on with the advance, for instance. He hadn’t had any particular rank when this attack started. He still didn’t, come to that. But both Americans and Spaniards seemed to expect him to tell them what to do next. He’d given an order before. It had worked. Not so surprising, then, that they expected more of the same.

He wanted to be a de facto officer the way he wanted a second head. His new order consisted of, “Well, let’s go, goddammit.”