The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (25 page)

Whang!
That was a big shell hitting, and devastating, a tank. The machine brewed up at once. You could kill tanks with artillery, but most antitank guns were of smaller caliber than the monster that fired that round. The Germans made an 88mm antiaircraft gun. Being Germans, and thorough, they also made an armor-piercing shell for it. Chaim would have bet that was what had put paid to the French tank.

And another round from the same gun, whatever the hell it was, blew the turret clean off another S-35. “It’s like the bastard tipped its hat when it got hit by that one,” Chaim said. It wasn’t a bad joke … as long as you didn’t happen to be inside the turret when the big shell hit. If you did, you were too dead to appreciate the wit. You were, in fact, scorched raspberry jam.

The last two surviving tanks decided they wanted to go on surviving. They wheeled around almost in their own length and hightailed it
for the rear. One tank used the thick black smoke rising from another that had been killed as a smoke screen for its own getaway.

Chaim had trouble blaming the crews, though he knew people in positions of authority might have no trouble at all. Going forward into certain death was a losing proposition.
And what about going forward into likely death?
his mind gibed. Advancing without armor support sure made death more likely. His own death, for instance.

Not surprisingly, the Republican attack bogged down. Chaim wasn’t the only Abe Lincoln who could see that Sanjurjo’s soldiers would slaughter them if they banged their heads against a stone wall without tanks to smash it down. They’d gained a few hundred meters before things went south. Okay, fine. Chaim pulled a fancy entrenching tool off his belt (some Italian who’d taken Mussolini’s orders would never need it again) and started improving the hole in the ground in which he huddled.

Dirt flew from more holes and bits of shattered trench as other members of the battalion imitated him. Or, more likely, he was imitating others. He doubted he was the first one who’d decided the Abraham Lincolns had gone about as far as they could go. You didn’t need to belong to the German General Staff to figure it out. No more tanks equaled no more advance. If that wasn’t one of Euclid’s axioms, it should have been.

Now … would the Nationalists counterattack? Not right away, anyhow. They might have feared the tanks would come back or more would show up. Chaim knew better, but he wasn’t about to tell them. He kept on digging. He’d spent a lot of time in foxholes. If you worked at it, you could make them nearly bearable. Work he did.

CORPORAL BAATZ GLOWERED
at Willi Dernen. “Let me see that paper one more time,” he said suspiciously.

“Sure.” Willi handed it over. Did Awful Arno think he could have forged a certificate of leave? He might have, if he’d thought he could get away with it. But he hadn’t. This one was legitimate. Could Baatz make the same proud claim?

Still unhappy, the underofficer handed it back. “If you’re even one minute late returning to duty, your ass is mine,” he declared.

“Sure, Corporal,” Willi repeated. He would have said anything to get Awful Arno out of his hair. “Can I go now?”

“Yeah, go on. Get out.” Baatz wasn’t about to do anything so bourgeois—so human—as to wish him a good time. That wasn’t his style. Why one of his own men hadn’t shot him … 
Why haven’t I shot him?
Willi wondered.
Easy to do in combat. I probably wouldn’t’ve got caught
.

All he wanted to do now was get away from Baatz, get away from the war. He gave his Mauser and grenades to the
Feldwebel
in charge of the company’s weaponry. The senior noncom told him to have fun on leave. They weren’t all shitheads. Some of them sure were, though.

Out of the line. Away from Awful Arno. Then the chain dogs were on him. So
Landsers
called military policemen because of the metal gorgets they hung around their necks. Once more, his papers passed muster. The
Kettenhunde
never cracked a smile, but they waved him on.

Antiaircraft guns stuck their snouts into the sky around the train station. The stationmaster was also a
Feldwebel
—and, at a guess, a veteran of the last war who’d been called up to help run the military trains. Willi showed him the leave papers. “All right, son,” the gray noncom said. “Where do you want to go?”

“Breslau. That’s where I’m from,” Willi answered. Homesickness, long swallowed, welled up inside. “All the way over on the other side of the
Reich.
”

“Thought so, by the way you talk.” By his own musical, half-Scandinavian drawl, the
Feld
came from Schleswig-Holstein, up near the Danish border. He puffed on a pipe and nodded to himself. “Well, we can do that.”

And he did. Along with the leave permit, which he returned, he gave Willi a round-trip ticket to Breslau. “Do I have to pay anything?” Willi asked.

The
Feldwebel
looked affronted. “Don’t be silly. You’re in the service of the
Reich
. If we can’t take care of our own, what are we good for?”

Luxurious that care wasn’t. Willi’s seat was hard, and the car packed
with soldiers getting away from action for a while. The stink of so many bodies that hadn’t washed lately would have bothered Willi … had he noticed it. He fell asleep almost as soon as the train started rolling. The hard seat and crowding bothered him no more than the thick fug. He’d slept in plenty of worse places. Nor was his the only snore rising to the low ceiling—far from it.

When he woke, he was back inside Germany. The train was rolling through countryside that hadn’t been bombed or shelled. It looked abnormal to Willi. He’d been at or near the front too goddamn long. He wanted to say something to somebody about it, but he had no friends sitting close by. Half a dozen soldiers in the car were still sawing wood, too. He kept his mouth shut. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have practice. When Awful Arno ordered you around, biting your tongue became a matter of self-preservation.

A few of the towns through which the train rolled showed bomb damage. The locals probably thought they’d survived disaster. They didn’t know how lucky they were. If they stayed lucky, they wouldn’t find out.

More chain dogs came through the cars at a stop, checking people’s papers. Willi showed his without hesitation. Why not? They were good. Farther back in his car, the military policemen caught somebody whose papers weren’t good, or who didn’t have any. They dragged the poor bastard away. “I can explain,” he kept saying. If he couldn’t, he’d landed in more trouble than he knew what to do with.

Willi had zwieback and a tube of butter in his pockets. Hoping the dining car would give him something better, he made his way to it. The stew was cabbage, potatoes, and tripe rubbery enough to use as a tire retread. The coffee was German ersatz, not spoils taken from French houses. It tasted bad and had next to no kick. All things considered, butter smeared on crackers might have been better.

Because the train traveled slowly and made many stops, he took almost a day to cross the country and get to Breslau. People got on and off. Some of them were civilians. Some of the civilians were women. Hearing women talking in a language he could understand was a treat he’d forgotten.

Breslau was a city of bridges, set right in the middle of the Silesian
plain. It was also a city of many smokes. There was coal nearby, and iron, so factories worked round the clock. And it was a city of many Jews. Willi had known that before, but he hadn’t thought about it one way or the other. Riding the streetcar out to his folks’ block of flats, he got his nose rubbed in it. The yellow stars on the clothes of people on the street leaped out at him. No yellow stars on the streetcar passengers, though. Public transport was for Aryans only.

No one sat near him. People stood up instead, as far away as they could. He realized he really could use a bath. He was a little embarrassed, but only a little. If they couldn’t figure out he was just back from the front, too bad.

Even if he was ripe, his mother squealed and almost squeezed the breath out of him when he knocked on the door. “Why didn’t you wire that you were coming?” she demanded.

“I thought I’d surprise you,” he said.

“Think? You didn’t think.” But Klara Dernen didn’t sound angry. “Now where am I going to get my hands on a nice, fat hen?” She winked. “There are ways that don’t cost ration points. Magda owes me. If she’s got one, or knows where to get one …”

“Sure,
Mutti
,” Willi said. You could always find a way around rules you didn’t like, whatever they happened to be. He’d seen that.

A hot bath! When was the last time he’d had one? He couldn’t remember. It had been a while, though. He put on civilian clothes when he got out of the tub. The pants were too big through the waist, but all his shirts felt tight at the shoulders. He was in better shape than he had been before the
Wehrmacht
got him.

His younger sister, Eva, and his kid brother, Markus, both squealed when they got home from school. They told him about Russian air raids and running for the cellar. “That’s just like fighting, huh?” Markus said.

“Pretty much.” Willi left if there. Markus was only thirteen. The war would be over—the war had better be over—by the time he got old enough to fight.

Sure enough, Mother got her fat hen. She’d make a better chicken stew than the thumb-fingered soldiers who cooked in the field. It filled the flat with a savory smell. Father came home not long before the stew was ready. Herbert Dernen worked in a factory that had made clocks
before the war and was turning out gauges and dials for panzers and planes these days.

He’d fought in France in the last war. After a long, measuring look at Willi, he slowly nodded at whatever he saw. “Well, son, now you know” was all he said, and it seemed more than enough.

“Now I know,” Willi agreed. No, they needed not another word on that score.

Father understood. So did other men of his generation, and other soldiers on leave. Willi couldn’t find anyone else in Breslau who did. He felt like a stranger, or maybe even a Martian, in his home town. That didn’t stop him from seeing—and kissing, and doing his best to feel up—the girls he’d been friendly with before conscription called. But they were either like his brother and thought they knew all about war because some bombs had fallen here, or they wanted him to explain what the fighting in France was like.

And he couldn’t. If you hadn’t done it, you’d never get it. In that, it was more like screwing than anything else. He said so once. He thought it would get his face slapped. Instead, it got him laid. Even afterwards, though, he couldn’t tell sweet Susanna what shooting and being shot at and getting shelled and bombed were like. They weren’t
like
anything.

He couldn’t tell her about the camaraderie, either, not in any way that would make sense to her. But, when his leave was up, a big part of him was glad, or at least relieved, to head west once more. He was a real, for-sure
Frontschwein
, all right.
God help me
, he thought, but it was true.

uc Harcourt had just found a good place to crap when the sniper got him. It really was perfect. The bushes screened him from sight—or he’d thought so, anyhow. And the leaves were young and soft and green. This side of a goose’s neck, you couldn’t get a better substitute for paper.

He dug a little hole with his entrenching tool. He undid his belt, dropped his pants, and squatted. The shot rang out.
“Aiii!”
he howled, and sprang straight up. If the Olympics had a record for a high jump from a squatting position, he broke it by thirty centimeters.

At the same time, he clapped a hand to the wounded part. It came away bloody. Sure as hell, he’d got shot in the ass. Trousers still at half mast, he rolled behind a big, thick elm. Bullets could penetrate an amazing amount of wood, but he didn’t worry about that. All he wanted was to keep the lousy
Boche
from seeing him any more. Besides, that last bullet had penetrated
him
.

He pulled up the khaki trousers. He didn’t bother with the belt. Holding the pants up with one hand, he hobbled back to the encampment. He’d never tried walking with a wounded
gluteus maximus
before.
It wasn’t one of the experiences you sought out for the sake of having it.