The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (14 page)

They rode into town in a wagon driven by a Polish farmer. It had a boatlike body and big wheels, and handled the slop better than anything the Germans had brought with them. “We ought to make these ourselves,” Lau remarked. “If the mud’s this bad here, it’ll only be worse when we get into Russia.”

“How
could
it be worse?” Hans-Ulrich asked.

“I don’t know,” Lau answered. “But I’ll tell you something else, too—I don’t want to find out.” When Hans-Ulrich looked at it from that perspective, he decided he didn’t want to, either.

Bialystok was as bad as he’d thought it would be, or else worse. It was a Polish provincial town. It was a Polish provincial town that had been part of the Russian Empire before Poland revived like the mummy in the American movie, which meant it had always been cut off from German
Kultur
, even the diluted version that seeped into Austrian Poland. And it was a Polish provincial town packed full of Jews.

Long black coats, some trimmed with fox fur. Broad-brimmed black
hats. Sidelocks. Bushy beards. Women in wigs and scarves and dresses that swept the sidewalks—when there were sidewalks. Gabble in Polish, which Hans-Ulrich didn’t understand, and in Yiddish, which he didn’t want to understand. He felt as if two hundred years had fallen off the calendar.

Some of the shops had signs in Yiddish. The strange characters might as well have been Chinese, for all the sense they made to him.

The Jews eyed the jackbooted Germans in
Luftwaffe
gray-blue as warily as the Germans looked at them. It wasn’t only past confronting present—
past confronting future
, Hans-Ulrich thought. The Jews knew what the National Socialist government of Germany thought of them. Even a Polish provincial town had its newspaper (yes, edited by a Jew) and its radio sets. The Jews knew, all right.

But Stalin’s greed had put Poland and Germany on the same side. And so, no matter what they might be thinking, some of the Jews in their long coats nodded to the
Luftwaffe
officers. Along with his comrades, Hans-Ulrich found himself nodding back.

A big blond Pole—he looked like a big blond bear—ran the tavern the Germans picked. Rudel couldn’t tell what the barmaid who came over to their table was. She was pretty—he could tell that. She understood German well enough, too. “Mineral water,” he told her when she glanced his way.

She nodded. “With what?”

“Just mineral water, please.”

She raised an eyebrow. He nodded back at her to show he meant it. Helpfully, Ernst Lau explained, “He gets his long trousers pretty soon, sweetheart, but he doesn’t have ’em yet.”

She raised that eyebrow again. What color were her eyes? Not quite brown, not quite green. Hazel wasn’t exactly right, either, but it came closer than any other word Hans-Ulrich could find. “He can drink what he wants,” she said, her voice cool. Did Yiddish flavor her German, or only Polish? Once more, Hans-Ulrich had trouble being sure. On thirty seconds’ acquaintance, he got the feeling he’d always have trouble being sure about her.

When she brought back the mineral water, she took the top off the bottle where he could watch her do it. The barman hadn’t spiked it, she
was saying without words. “Thanks,” he told her, both for the bottle and for the courtesy. Then he asked, “What’s your name?” The worst thing she could do was walk away without answering.

For a second, he thought she’d do just that. But, after the momentary hesitation, she said, “Sofia.”

“Sofia what?”

“How did you know?” she said, and did walk off. What was he supposed to do with that?
Try to find out more
, he told himself, wondering if he could. He’d found one thing, anyhow: a fresh, good reason to come back to Bialystok. He wouldn’t have bet on that when he climbed into the wagon.

“MOSCOW SPEAKING,”
the radio declared. Sergei Yaroslavsky didn’t think he was likely to be listening to any other station. For one thing, he recognized the announcer’s voice. For another, this was a Soviet radio set, and picked up only the frequencies of which the government approved.

The samovar in the corner of the Red Air Force officers’ wardroom bubbled softly to itself. More officers drank vodka than tea, though. Sergei hadn’t known Poland shared the
rasputitsa
—the mud time—with Russia. But the squadron’s SB-2s weren’t going anywhere for a while. Neither was anything else for a few hundred kilometers in any direction you chose.

“Happy day,” somebody said. “What’s gone wrong since this morning?”

In a different—perhaps not such a very different—tone of voice, a question like that might have earned the bigmouth who came out with it a trip to the gulag. It also might have done that if the pilots and copilots hadn’t started drinking. You made allowances for somebody who got plastered, especially when you were on the way to getting plastered yourself.

“Valiant Red Army forces continue to press attacks against the subhuman Fascist German beasts and their Polish stooges. Considerable territory has been gained,” the newsreader declared. If you’d never heard of the
rasputitsa
, you might believe that. Or if the considerable
territory was to be considered in meters and not kilometers, it might even prove technically true. The war in Poland had really and truly bogged down.

But when they gave the fellow on the radio the lying copy, what was he supposed to do? Tell the truth instead, assuming he knew what it was? They’d shoot him. They’d do horrible things to him first, and worse things to his loved ones, no doubt where he could listen to them scream. He went along, the same way everybody else did.

“A Committee of Polish National Liberation was announced today in Pinsk,” the man with the smooth voice continued. “Its role will expand as the workers and peasants of the peace-loving Soviet Union free their Polish brethren from the oppression they have suffered at the hands of the Smigly-Ridz cabal.”

Smigly-Ridz was turning out to be Hitler’s puppet, though odds were he would deny that if anyone called him on it. And the Poles on the Committee of National Liberation were Stalin’s puppets. Sergei wondered if he would have seen things so clearly without the vodka sparkling through him.

“Yet another Japanese attack on the outworks of Vladivostok was repelled with loss yesterday,” the newsreader said. “Red Air Force bombers punished the aggressors.”

Sergei raised his tumbler. “Here’s to Stas!” he said. The other flyers drank with him.

“In daring strikes, Soviet bombers also brought the fighting home to Tsitsihar and Harbin,” the man continued. “The Japanese lackeys of the so-called state of Manchukuo had the gall to protest, but General Secretary Stalin and Foreign Commissar Litvinov rejected their foolish babbling out of hand.”

“Good for Stalin!” growled Colonel Borisov, the squadron commander. The vodka made his nose red as a strawberry. It also made him sound even more sure of himself than he would have otherwise.

Heads bobbed up and down all along the table, Sergei’s among them. He wasn’t currying favor—he thought Borisov was right.
So-called state of Manchukuo
was right! The Manchukuans were just as much puppets of the Japanese … as those Poles in Pinsk were of Stalin. What went around came around, sure enough.

“In western Europe, France and England both claim gains against the Nazi hyenas,” the announcer said. “German radio denies the claims. Dr. Goebbels, of course, is the prince of liars, but the degenerate capitalists of western Europe are not far behind. Be it noted that neither France nor England has properly suppressed its native Fascist movement. Significant factions within both countries favor abandoning the fight against the Hitlerites and banding together with them for a crusade against the stronghold of the proletariat on the march.”

“Bring on the French swine! Bring on the Englishmen, too! We beat them after the last capitalist war, and we’ll smash ’em again! See if we don’t!” Yes, Borisov had taken a lot of vodka on board.

Vladimir Federov politely called him on it: “But, Comrade Colonel! Imagine the Nazis with no enemy in their rear. If they throw everything they have at us …” He let his voice trail away.

“We’ll fucking smash ’em, I tell you!” Colonel Borisov thundered.

Federov wanted to argue more. Sergei could see as much. His gesture urged his copilot to take it easy. If Borisov remembered this after he sobered up, or if somebody reminded him of it, Federov would not be happy.

Anastas Mouradian would have shown what he thought with a lift of a few millimeters from one black, bushy eyebrow. Everyone but Borisov would have noticed, and nobody would have been able to prove a thing. Southerners had that subtlety. Federov, plainly, didn’t.

The newsreader talked about overfulfillment of steel-production norms. He praised the Stakhanovite shock workers of Magnitogorsk, and added, “No German bombing plane will ever be able to reach them and disrupt their labors!”

He was bound to be right about that. How many factory towns beyond the Urals belched smoke into the sky around the clock as they made all the things the Soviet Union needed? Hundreds, maybe thousands. They would have been villages before the Revolution, if they were there at all. Distance kept them safe from Nazi bombardiers.

Germany couldn’t hide like that. Soviet aircraft had already delivered stinging blows to East Prussia, and had even raided Berlin a few times. The great powers of the West were supposed to be mighty in the
air. Why weren’t they pounding Hitler’s manufacturing centers harder? Didn’t it prove how halfhearted they were in their war against the Fascists?

When the announcer started going on about wheat and barley production, Sergei stopped listening. Yes, the people of the USSR had to eat. Try as the fellow on the radio would, he couldn’t make figures detailing the number of hectares to be planted anything but deadly dull.

“Collectivization continues to advance,” he said proudly. “The very idea of personal property will soon fade away.”

Sergei owned nothing. His flying suit, his rations, his billet, his bomber … all from the state. The vodka? He wasn’t sure where the vodka came from. He’d downed enough of it so he didn’t care, either. As long as he could get his hands on some whenever he felt the urge, nothing else mattered.

Once the newsreader got into the production reports and the economic news, you could talk over him without fear of being seen as uninterested in the life-and-death struggle on behalf of the workers and peasants—and without everybody frantically shushing you for opening your big trap. One of the pilots said, “Well, we’ve got a few weeks till things dry out. What happens then?”

“It should be the same kind of war it was last year,” Colonel Borisov said. “And the Devil take England and France.”

He was the squadron commander. Because he was, Sergei said only, “Here’s hoping you’re right, Comrade Colonel.” The USSR was a classless society in law. In law, yes. But you’d still get the shitty end of the stick if you pissed off the fellow entitled to tell you what to do. Drunk or sober, Sergei knew that.

And, if he’d spoken his mind, he would have pissed Borisov off. Hitler hated the Soviet Union the way Stalin hated Germany. If the
Wehrmacht
had to stand on the defensive in the West so it could hit harder here, he feared it would do exactly that. If it did, could the USSR withstand the blow?

He had to hope so. Everyone who served the Soviet Union had to hope so. If not, it would be a rugged spring and a worse summer. The USSR was finally over the horrors of the Revolution. Even the purges … Well, they hadn’t stopped, but they’d slowed down. Sergei
thought they had, at any rate. Did the country really need a big, hard foreign war right now?

Need one or not, the USSR was liable to get one. No doubt history and diplomacy justified Stalin’s demand for that little chunk of northeastern Poland last year. But the price for it might prove higher than anyone in his right mind would want to pay.

BACK IN THE DAYS
before the draft sucked Vaclav Jezek into the Czechoslovak army, when he’d thought about France he’d pictured Paris and the Riviera—the parts you saw when you went on holiday. Imagining pretty girls wearing not enough clothes bronzing on the beach under the hot Mediterranean sun … Hell, it made you want to pack your bags and buy a train ticket right away.

Reality, at the moment, was rather different, as reality had a way of being. The harsh landscape of northeastern France was as much a monument to industrial man as the worst parts of Czechoslovakia, and that was saying a mouthful. It was as cold as it would have been back there, too.

Towns were jammed too close together. Piles of coal and slag heaps towered tall as church steeples and factory smokestacks. The dirt looked gray. Even though the war had shut down most of the factories, the air still held a chemical tang that made you want to cough. The foulness must have soaked into the soil.

And, to make things more enjoyable yet, the Germans seemed to plant a machine gun or a mortar on top of every hillock, natural or manmade. They had spotters in the steeples. For all Vaclav knew, they had them in the smokestacks, too. They had lots of artillery, and the gunners were very alert. They’d had time to dig in, in other words, and they weren’t planning to go anywhere.

A mortar crew in
Feldgrau
up on top of a long hillock of rubble must have imagined they were lords of all they surveyed. Which only proved their imagination was as wild as Vaclav’s had been when he thought about the Riviera. He’d sneaked through a sad, scabby-looking wood till he sprawled no more than a kilometer from the Nazis and their pet stovepipe.

“Can you hit them?” Benjamin Halévy asked quietly.

“With this baby? Sure.” Vaclav patted the antitank rifle. “Question is, is it worth it? Once the first guy goes down, they’ll take cover. And they can shoot back over the top of that thing. I can’t hit them once they move.”

“When they slide back to the other side, they can’t see what’s going on over here, right?” The Jew answered his own question: “Right. Not without an observer, they can’t. And you can plug an observer. So, yeah, make ’em move.”