The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (30 page)

And, with the bridge down, maybe he could ask Colonel Steinbrenner for a short furlough in Bialystok. He wasn’t sure Sofia liked him, either. Whether she did or not felt at least as important as whether he kept on breathing. Why not? If Sofia liked him, he’d have something to go on breathing for.

GERMAN AND FRENCH
lines ran close together in front of Luc Harcourt’s position. When a Fritz came out in front of his side’s trenches,
Luc could have potted him easy as you please. But the soldier in field-gray carried a couple of items that made him think twice. One was a large white flag of truce. The other, even more curious, was a megaphone.

Luc wondered where the hell he’d found it. Did the Germans issue them, say, one to a battalion? That took thoroughness to what struck him as an insane degree, but you never could tell with the
Boches
. Or had this fellow liberated it from the little French town whose ruins lay right behind the line?

Wherever he’d got it, he raised it to his lips and bellowed through it in gutturally accented French: “We would like a cease-fire! We won’t shoot if you don’t! We should all fight the Russian Jew Bolsheviks instead!” After repeating himself several times, he waved to the
poilus
on the far side of the barbed wire, gravely lowered the megaphone, and withdrew back to some place where things were apt to be safer.

“Give ’em a burst, Harcourt,” Lieutenant Demange rasped. “They came out with that same horseshit while they were squashing Czechoslovakia, remember? Then it was our turn, so they kicked us in the nuts instead.”

Luc did remember the eerie, almost unnatural quiet on the Western front till the German onslaught a couple of weeks before Christmas 1938. With some surprise, he realized he and Demange were two of the very few left in this company who could recall that quiet at firsthand. So many new fish in, so many veterans dead or wounded or down with one frontline sickness or another …

He squeezed the triggers on the Hotchkiss gun. Yes, for the moment it was still his baby, even if he wore a gold sergeant’s stripe. Half a strip’s worth of ammo roared toward the Germans’ line. Demange hadn’t told him to try to kill anybody, so he fired high. In war’s rough language, he was saying no without being rude.

Even if he was polite, he expected the
Boches
to shoot back. But they didn’t. The silence from their side of the line might have been a pointed comment about his burst.

“Be damned,” Joinville muttered. “Maybe they mean it this time.”

“Fuck ’em. Fuck their mothers. Fuck their grannies.” Villehardouin spoke only a little French, almost all of it filthy. He went on in Breton.
Luc understood Breton no more than he understood Bulgarian, but it sounded vile. Joinville had picked up scraps of Tiny’s native tongue. He whistled and clapped his hands. Whatever Villehardouin said, it must have been juicy.

After sundown, German planes rumbled overhead. Searchlights and antiaircraft guns hunted for them, without much luck. But no bombs whistled down from the planes. They dropped leaflets instead. The leaflets carried the same message the
Landser
had shouted out. They also showed a cartoon: a wolf with a Jewish face and a Soviet officer’s red-starred cap attacking a pretty blonde labeled
CIVILIZATION
. A knight called
WESTERN EUROPE
was coming to her rescue with a sword.

The paper was cheap, brownish pulp. All the same … “Not the worst asswipe I’ve found lately,” Luc said. “And it’s a better present than most of the ones the
Boches
try to give us.”

“Boy, you’ve got that right,” Demange agreed. “I wonder if Hitler bit off more than he could chew over there on the other front.”

“Could be,” Luc said. “Germans never tried to make that kind of deal in the last war, did they?”

“I hope to shit, they didn’t,” the middle-aged veteran answered. “They knew we would’ve told ’em to stuff it. You’ve got to figure the fucking Nazis aren’t serious this time around, either.”

“How come? They sure are putting a lot of effort into it. I bet they’ve got guys yelling and planes dropping leaflets up and down the whole front.”

“Oh, sure. But so what?” Demange said. “The way it looks, they just want us to throw in with them on account of they’re so fucking cute, y’know? They aren’t saying they’ll pull out of France or the Low Countries. They aren’t saying they’ll turn loose of Denmark and Norway. They want to rape us,
and
they want us to come while they’re doing it. Shitheads should live so long.”

Luc grunted. Demange had a way with words—not always a pleasant way, but a way. Being nasty didn’t make him wrong. Luc hadn’t heard anything that made him think the Nazis were willing to pull back from what they’d grabbed. Thoughtfully, he said, “I wonder if any of that’s occurred to our diplomats, or to the English.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” Demange advised. “Our boys are a bunch of hyenas in top hats and cutaways. And as for the English … 
Merde alors
, the English fucking boil bacon. Anybody who does that can’t be long on brains.”

Luc hadn’t thought of it like that, which again didn’t mean the foul-mouth reluctant lieutenant didn’t have a point. “Any which way, I’ll be happy as long as this cease-fire holds.”

“Well, so will I,” Demange answered, lighting a fresh Gitane from the stub of his old one. Luc looked wistful, so Demange, muttering, handed him a cigarette, too. Then he continued, “We’d better not go to sleep like we did after old Czecho got it.
Boches
‘re liable to be piling up tanks behind their line, ready to give us another clop in the teeth as soon as we squat over the slit trench with our pants at half mast.”

“You’d think our recon would notice something like that,” Luc said.

Demange laughed raucously. “Yeah, you would, wouldn’t you? And you’d think those
cons
might’ve noticed something the last time, too. Did they? Not fucking likely! So how far can you trust ’em now?”

“I’ve learned not to trust the
Boches
, either—except to trust them to be sure to cause trouble,” Luc replied with dignity.

“Good job! Maybe you’re not as dumb as you look. Maybe.” Demange’s seamless scorn for all mankind had plenty of room to include Luc.

Come the next morning, the Germans still didn’t fire. They did show themselves, as if confident the
poilus
wouldn’t shoot at them without provocation. As Luc had seen many times before, German discipline was a formidable thing. He wondered if any of the
Landsers
walking around within easy rifle shot had given their officers a nasty look when they were ordered to come out from their nice, safe trenches. He knew damn well he would have.

He waited for Lieutenant Demange to tell him to open up on the
Boches
. If Demange gave the order, he would obey. He didn’t want to face French military justice, a contradiction in terms if ever there was one. But he also didn’t want to start the fighting up again without orders.

And the orders did not come. Neither hard-bitten Demange nor any
of his superiors seemed eager to provoke the enemy. Their attitude looked to be that they could fight if they had to, but that they weren’t going to start anything. Luc felt the same way.

The fellow with the megaphone came out again: “We will trade beer for wine, or tubes of meat paste for good tobacco.”

“Nobody answer,” Demange commanded. Informal commerce did happen now and again. The Germans knew their enemies liked that meat paste. And everybody knew the Fritzes made better beer but worse wine than people on this side of the Rhine. Lieutenant Demange wasn’t about to let such bargaining come out into the open, though.

“Beer tastes like stale piss anyway,” opined Joinville, like most men from the south of France a confirmed wine-bibber.

“How do you know what stale piss tastes like?” Luc asked. Joinville gave him a dirty look. Luc grinned back. Even in a cease-fire, you had to make your own fun.

very time the morning news came on the radio, Sergei Yaroslavsky tensed. He wasn’t the only flyer who did—far from it. The Germans and the Poles were giving the Red Army and Air Force all the trouble they needed and more besides. If the rest of the decadent capitalist powers lined up behind the Hitlerites, the homeland of the glorious October Revolution would be in deadly danger once more.

“Moscow speaking,” came out of the radio at the appointed hour. The pilots and bomb-aimers gathered in the officers’ quarters all leaned toward the set. What new disasters would it announce? Which ones would it try to sugarcoat? The only thing Sergei was sure of was that there would be some.

“First, a report on the fighting in Poland,” the newsreader said. Unfortunately, several of the towns he mentioned weren’t in Poland, but in Byelorussia or the Ukraine. The average Soviet citizen—especially the average citizen who didn’t live near the USSR’s western border—probably wouldn’t know that. Such was bound to be the official hope.

As always, Radio Moscow made things sound as good as they possibly could, or else a little better than that. Again, only someone expert at
reading between the lines—or someone in the middle of the Soviet retreat—was likely to notice. How many people did that include? It was hard to gauge, not least because admitting you noticed anything out of kilter about the broadcasts would win you a quick one-way trip to the gulag.

Lately, though, the fighting hadn’t been the only thing Sergei was worrying about, even if it was going worse than Moscow cared to admit. He waited till the announcer got done listing the Polish (and, sadly, Soviet) towns that had changed hands lately. After that … After that, the man switched to a report on the desultory fighting that went on in the Far East. Vladivostok was lost. The USSR wouldn’t get it back any time soon. What else needed saying?

Something, evidently. “Through reliable sources, the Soviet Union has learned that the Japanese are barbarously mistreating our prisoners of war,” the newsreader announced. “The peace-loving and humane government of the USSR has warned the Japanese Empire through neutral channels to cease and desist from this practice at once. All regimes are liable to punishment for violating the laws of war.”

That sounded good. The only trouble with it was, Japan hadn’t signed the Geneva Convention. She wasn’t obligated to treat POWs according to its rules. And, for that matter, neither had the USSR. Sergei wouldn’t have wanted to be a German or Pole who had to surrender to the Red Army. He wouldn’t have wanted to yield to a German or Pole, either. Since the USSR hadn’t signed the convention, her enemies in the west didn’t have to follow it with Soviet prisoners, either.

But all that was swept away when the newsreader got to what Yaroslavsky and the rest of the Red Air Force officers were really waiting to hear. The man’s voice deepened and saddened as he said, “The ominous lull on Fascist Germany’s western front continues. The reactionary capitalist states will regret throwing their troops against the peasants and workers of the Soviet Union alongside and under the orders of the Hitlerite hyenas if they make that fatal mistake. General Secretary Stalin has stated, ‘We shall resist any and all aggression with the courage and iron determination suited to the workers’ revolutionary vanguard. We shall resist, and we shall triumph.’ Stormy applause greeted his remarks to the Supreme Soviet.”

Nobody in the officers’ lounge seemed to want to meet anyone else’s eye. The USSR was having all it could do to hold off Germany and Poland. Poland was … not much. However reactionary England and France might be, they were great powers. If they came after the Soviet Union with the Nazis, what would happen next? Nothing good, not so far as Sergei could see.

The newsreader went on in somewhat brighter tones: “In England, Winston Churchill continues to speak out strongly against the proposed misalliance with the Nazis. While a reactionary himself—he tried to strangle the glorious Red Revolution in its cradle—Churchill is not blind to the dangers of Hitlerism. ‘The lamb may lie down with the lion,’ he said, ‘but only the lion will get up again—full.’ ”