The War That Came Early: West and East (26 page)

As it pulled out of the dive and roared away, answering fire spurted from the rear decking of a French tank. The tank started to burn. The crew bailed out and ran for cover.

“Bastard’s got big guns under there!” Halévy exclaimed.

“Tell me about it!” Vaclav answered. “What can we do to stop him?”

“Shoot him down,” Benjamin Halévy said. “If you’ve got any other bright ideas, I’d love to hear them.”

Vaclav didn’t, however much he wished he did. He watched the Stuka climb high into the sky again, then dive at another French tank. He and Halévy both fired at the ugly, predatory warplane. If they hit it, they didn’t harm it. At least one of the rounds it fired at the tank struck home—the motorized fort slewed to a stop, flame and smoke rising from the engine compartment. Again, the Stuka flew off at treetop height, then started to climb once more.

Another screaming dive. Another stricken French tank. “Jesus Christ!” Jezek said. “He can do that all day long!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Halévy said. “Sooner or later, he’s bound to run out of gas or ammo—unless we run out of tanks first.”

“Happy day!” Vaclav sent him a reproachful look. “You really know how to cheer me up, don’t you?”

“It could be worse,” the Jew said.

“Oh, yeah? How?” Vaclav demanded.

“The Nazis could have a dozen Stukas armed like that, not just one,” Halévy answered. “Looks like they’re trying this out to see if it works. If it does, they’ll put guns on more planes.”

“Well, they will, on account of it damn well does,” Jezek said. “Does it ever!” Three smashed tanks—three tanks smashed from an unexpected direction—had shot the Allied advance in this sector right behind the ear. Everyone was staring wildly into the sky, wondering if that Stuka would come back again.

And it did. This time, it had to dive through a storm of small-arms fire. But a dive-bomber was armored against nuisance bullets. The designers must have realized it would run into some. Letting them disable it didn’t
seem such a good idea, so the engineers made sure they wouldn’t.
Germans
, Vaclav thought glumly.
They take care of those things
.

“Sure they do,” Benjamin Halévy agreed when he said that out loud. “They wouldn’t be so dangerous if they fucked up all the time, like a bunch of Magyars or Romanians.”

“Well, you didn’t say ‘like a bunch of Slovaks,’ anyway,” Vaclav said.

“Or them,” Halévy replied. “They’re so fucked up, they jumped into bed with the Nazis, right?”

“Afraid so. When the Germans invaded us, I had this one Slovak in my squad, and I wasn’t sure whether he’d shoot at them or try to shoot me.” Vaclav grimaced and spat, remembering.

“So what did he end up doing?” the Jew asked in tones of clinical interest.

“Well, he didn’t try and plug me straight off—I will say that for him,” Jezek answered. “After that, fuck me if I know. We were right at the point of the bayonet, if you know what I mean, and things fell apart pretty fast. Maybe a Stuka blew him to kingdom come. Or maybe he surrendered to the Nazis. If he did, he’s likely a sergeant in the Slovak army by now.”

“In the Slovak army.” By the way Halévy said it, it tasted bad in his mouth. Well, it tasted bad in Vaclav’s mouth, too. Czechs no more believed Slovaks had a right to their own country than Germans believed Czechs had a right to theirs. Slovaks were bumpkins, country cousins, hillbillies who talked funny and drank too much and beat their wives. Only country cousins could take the Hlinka Guard and a fat windbag like Father Tiso seriously.

And now Slovakia
was
a country, with Father Tiso as its tinpot
Führer
, or whatever the devil they called him. The Hlinka Guard did its best half-assed imitation of the SS. And Bohemia and Moravia, the cradle of the Czech nation since time out of mind, had been bombed and shelled to kingdom come, and the German occupiers treated them exactly the way locusts treated a ripe wheatfield. Life could be a real son of a bitch sometimes.

Sometimes it could be a lot worse than that.

“You know what we ought to do?” Halévy’s question derailed Vaclav’s gloomy train of thought, which might have been just as well.

“What’s that?” Vaclav asked. No, he wasn’t sorry to think about something else.

“We ought to let our brass know the Germans have themselves a new toy,” the sergeant said. “If those assholes can pull a stunt like that, we should be able to do the same thing, right?”

“Right,” Jezek said, but his voice lacked conviction. The Germans were good at pulling new stuff out of the hat. That was part of what made them Germans, at least in a Czech’s eyes. How good the French and English were at the same game … The war was a long way from new, but the French were just now figuring out that German tank tactics beat the snot out of their own half-bright ideas.

Benjamin Halévy gave him a crooked grin. “C’mon, man. We’ve got to try,” the Jew said. “We keep our mouths shut, nobody with the clout to do anything about it will find out what’s going on for another month and a half. You think the tankers’ll tell?”

Vaclav considered that, but not for long. Tankers thought their big, clattering mounts were perfect. They wouldn’t want to admit that the enemy had come up with a big new flyswatter. Sighing, Jezek said, “Let’s go.”

The next problem, of course, was getting an officer to listen to them. Two noncoms, one a Czech, the other a Czech
and
a Jew (naturally, the French thought of Halévy as a Czech, even if he’d been born in France—he spoke Czech, didn’t he?), didn’t have an easy time getting through to the fellows with fancy kepis. At last, though, a captain said, “Yes, I’ve already heard about this from other soldiers.”

“And?” Halévy said. The captain looked at him. He turned red. “And … sir?” Even Vaclav, with his fractured French, followed that bit of byplay.

“I will do what I can,” the captain said. “I don’t know how much I can do. I am not in the air force, after all.”

Sergeant Halévy translated that for Vaclav. Then he went back to French to inquire, “Sir, if no one says anything at all to the air force, what will happen then?” He also turned the question into Czech.

“Rien,”
the officer replied.
Nothing
was a word Jezek followed with no trouble. The Frenchman went on, “But it could also be that the air force will do nothing just because the army is screaming at it to move.”

“Those pilots don’t want everybody in the army spitting at them, they’d better start treating German tanks the way the Nazis treated ours,” Vaclav said. Sergeant Halévy did the honors with the translation. Vaclav thought it sounded better in Czech than it did in French.

“Yes, yes,” the captain said impatiently. He looked from one grubby front-line soldier to the other. “Now, men, you have done your duty. You have done what you thought you had to do, and you have done it well. You can do no more in this regard—it is up to me to take it from here. I will do so. You had best return to your own positions, before the officers set over you start wondering where you are, and why.”

Go away. Get lost
. The message, once Halévy translated it, was unmistakable. And the Jew and Vaclav went. What else could they do? Maybe the officer would make some progress with his superiors and the air force; maybe not. But two foreign or half-foreign noncoms couldn’t.
Back to the war
, Vaclav thought gloomily, and back to the war it was.

THE SPANISH NATIONALISTS HAD ALWAYS
had more artillery, and better artillery, than the Republicans. Up on the Ebro front, Chaim Weinberg had got resigned to that. It was part of the war and something you had to deal with, like the endless factional strife between Communists and anarchists on the Republican side. Since the Soviet Union supplied Communist forces in Spain while the anarchists had to scrounge whatever they could wherever they could, the red flags had had a big advantage over the red and black.

Now nobody supplied anybody in Spain, not in any reliable way. Everyone was too busy with the bigger war off to the northeast. Both sides had forgotten about this particular brawl between progressive and reactionary forces—except for the people still doing the fighting and dying here.

The Nationalists still had the guns Hitler and Mussolini had lavished on Marshal Sanjurjo. What they didn’t have any more were the endless crates of high-quality Italian and German ammunition. They’d already fired it off. So if they wanted to shoot at the Republicans defending Madrid, they had to use shells they made themselves.

Spanish factories didn’t turn out nearly so much ammo as the ones in Germany and Italy. Not only that, Spanish artillery rounds, like Spanish small-arms ammunition, were junk.

Chaim didn’t know why that should be so, but it was. At least half the shells the Nationalists threw at the Republicans lines just north of University City were duds. He would have liked to think the workers in the munitions plants were sabotaging their Fascist masters. He would have liked to, but he couldn’t. The ammo that reached the Republicans from factories in Madrid and Barcelona was every bit as crappy. The workers on the Republican side should have had every incentive to do the best work they could. They
did
have every incentive, in fact, but the best work they could do wasn’t very good.

“And what do you expect?” Mike Carroll asked when Chaim complained about that. “They’re Spaniards, for Chrissake. They’re brave. They’d give you their last bullet or their last cigarette or the shirt off their back. But they haven’t heard about the twentieth century. Hell, they haven’t heard much about the eighteenth century—and what they have heard, they don’t like. As far as they’re concerned, it’s still 1492. They’ve cleaned out the Moors, and they’re waiting to see what happens when that Columbus guy gets back.”

As if to punctuate his words, another dud thudded in fifty meters away and buried itself in the hard brown dirt. That was too close for comfort; it would have been dangerous had it gone off. Chaim nodded—what Mike said held some truth. But only some, as he pointed out: “So how come the Republic won the election, then? The kind of progressive government Spain had—the kind our chunk’s still got—doesn’t come out of 1492. Not out of 1776, either.”

“Think of it as a peasant uprising,” Carroll said. “Spain was like Russia. It was one of the places where the jerks on top came down hardest on everybody under them. So of course it was the place where the reaction against oppression hit hardest. That’s how the dialectic works, man.”

More shells came in from the Nationalist gun pits off in the hills. Some of these burst, fortunately none too close to the arguing Internationals. Chaim peeped over the parapet to make sure Sanjurjo’s soldiers weren’t trying anything under cover of the barrage. He ducked down in a hurry:
no point letting snipers get a good look at him. Then he took out a pack of Gitanes and lit one.

“Can I bum a butt off you?” Mike asked eagerly. “I’m all out.”

“Sure,” Chaim answered without rancor, holding out the pack. Mike would do—had done—the same for him plenty of times.

The big blond American leaned close to Chaim for a light. “Thanks.” Carroll took a drag. He made a face as he exhaled. “Fuck me if I know how the Frenchies smoke these goddamn things all the time.”

“Better than nothing,” Chaim said, which wasn’t disagreement. He chuckled sourly. “See? This is what it really comes down to: shitty shells and shitty tobacco, not the dialectic.”

“Oh, no.” Mike stuck out his chin and looked stubborn. “Oh, no. Everything comes down to the dialectic in the end. Without the dialectic, the world makes no sense. And if the world makes no sense, who gives a rat’s ass about shells and cigarettes?”

“If you don’t, how come you keep working on your bombproof there?” Chaim retorted. “And who just scrounged that cigarette? Wasn’t it some guy who looks a lot like you?”

With the evidence still sending up a thread of smoke from the corner of Carroll’s mouth, he couldn’t very well deny the charge. He did look exasperated. And he had his reasons, which he proceeded to spell out: “If a political officer hears you talking like that, you’ll be lucky if you get off with public self-criticism. You could end up in a lot more trouble than that, and you know it.”

Chaim did. He didn’t like it. He took American-style freedom of speech for granted. He also took the revolution of the proletariat for granted. When one set of ideals ran headlong into the other like a couple of linemen on a football field, he ended up with a bad case of … what did the guy with the glasses and the chin beard call it at this one lecture he’d gone to?

“Cognitive dissonance!” he said happily.

“Huh?” Mike said. He could talk about the dialectic till everything turned blue, but if something wasn’t in the Marxist-Leninist lexicon, he didn’t know and didn’t want to know. Chaim thought that made him narrow, but more Communists were made in his image than in Chaim’s.

“Never mind,” Weinberg said. Then, alert as a prairie dog at a rattlesnake convention, he sat up and pointed north. “What’s that?” he asked, his voice rising in alarm.

“Airplanes!” Mike said. “Lots of airplanes!” Cigarettes and ammo might not trump the almighty dialectic, but airplanes did. Carroll wasted no more time discussing them. He dove into the bombproof Chaim had been teasing him about only a few minutes earlier.

Chaim had a bombproof, too, shored up with whatever bits of timber he could liberate. He didn’t jump into it right away. He had a prairie dog’s curiosity. It made him stare up at the swarm of Ju-52/3s and He-111s rumbling across the sky, all of them, it seemed, straight toward him. The Junkers trimotors were obsolete as bombers, except in Spain. The Heinkels still did their deadly work everywhere from England to the Soviet border.

Where were the Republican fighters that would have given this air armada a hard time? Wherever they were, they weren’t here, and here was where they needed to be. When bombs started tumbling out of the enemy planes, Chaim dove for his burrow like any prairie dog that wanted to live to raise a new litter.

Air attack was even worse than artillery bombardment. Chaim thought so when he was being bombed, anyhow. When he was being shelled, his opinion changed. It changed again when machine guns tried chewing him to bits. Whatever was happening to you
right now
was the worst thing in the world … till something else happened.