Two Fronts (35 page)

If you had to be somewhere not fighting, there were worse places than Calais. It wasn’t England, but you could—literally—see Blighty from there. Most of the shopkeepers and waiters and barmaids spoke English. The bars weren’t pubs, but they came close. The beer and cider were both good, and Calvados … There was a hell of a lot to be said for Calvados.

To his regret, Walsh didn’t get to linger in Calais this time, not the way he had four years earlier. He got off the ferry that hauled him across the Channel, walked down the dock, and climbed into the back of an enormous lorry from out of Detroit. Almost before he knew it, he was bouncing down a narrow, badly paved road heading east.

The lorry
—truck
was the Yankee word, but he had no truck with it—had a canvas canopy of brownish green. That kept him from peering anxiously up at the sky. If Stukas screamed down on this column of lorries … He’d been through that when the Fritzes made their big push into France. He didn’t care to repeat the experience.

He knew too well the Germans didn’t care about what he cared to do. He couldn’t hear much over the bang and rattle of tires on potholed asphalt, the engine’s steady grunting, and the chatter of the other soldiers who filled the big passenger compartment.

Most of them were young enough to be his children. They shared fags and pipe tobacco. A couple had flasks full of one kind of distilled lightning or another. None of it was as good as Calvados, but Walsh didn’t fuss. A knock of anything strong made him worry a bit less about whatever might be flying overhead.

“If they’re Stukas, you’ll hear the Jericho Trumpets—the sirens they’ve got fixed to their landing gear,” he said. “Whoever thought those up, I’d like to wring his neck like a pullet, bugger me blind if I wouldn’t. The Fritzes want to scare you so much that you piss yourself, and the bastards know how to get what they want, too.”

“Blimey, don’t they ’arf!” said a younger man, a lance-corporal. “I went and did it first time they screamed down and bombed me, and I’m not ashamed to say so.” He wore the ribbon for the Military Medal; no one was likely to call him yellow.

“Anybody who’s seen combat and says he hasn’t had to change his drawers once or twice—well, maybe he’s telling the truth, but he’s got himself one tight arsehole if he is,” Walsh said.

None of the others commented on that. More than one, though, looked up at the canvas stretched over steel hoops as if thinking rather loudly. Walsh had been through enough to let him come out with things others knew but would sooner not have said.

In due course, the unstrafed string of lorries stopped. The soldiers piled out. Walsh already had a round chambered in his Sten gun. That involved a certain amount of risk: the safety on the nasty little submachine gun was no more reliable than any other piece of the botched-together weapon. If the Sten wasn’t the ugliest piece of armament in the world, Walsh had no idea what would be. But it did the job—if the job was something like house-to-house fighting. For longer ranges, a rifle beat it all hollow. But it fired much faster than a rifle could.

They were closer to the sea than Walsh had been in 1938. Gulls wheeled and screeched overhead. They were worse scroungers than soldiers, if such a thing was possible. The breeze came off the water, and smelled of salt and sand. Pretty soon, if the guns pounding up ahead were any indication, the breeze would start stinking of blood and shit and death. Walsh savored the clean smell while he could.

Before he went forward and won the chance to pick up one more wound (or worse, but no one ever wanted to think about worse) for King and country, regimental HQ had to find a slot for him. A bespectacled subaltern in a tent diplomatically distant from the gun pits—as safe a slot as a man in a front-line regiment could find—clicked his tongue between his teeth.

The fellow was about to post him somewhere when a runner came in and set a scrap of paper on the folding table he was using for a desk. The young second lieutenant glanced at the paper and said, “Bloody hell!” He looked up to Walsh. “Can you handle a company for a few days, Staff Sergeant? I realize it’s a deal to ask, but Lieutenant Ormesby just copped one. He was a friend of mine: a year ahead of me at Sandhurst.” He touched the bit of paper. “Doesn’t sound good.”

“Sorry to hear it, sir,” Walsh said. “Always hard when a mate gets hurt.” He knew that too well himself. “I’ll have a go at the company if you want me to, but aren’t there any other officers besides Lieutenant, uh, Ormesby?”

“Not in that company,” the subaltern said. “If you can handle personnel matters, I’ll take that Sten off your hands and go forward myself.”

Walsh liked him better after that. He wasn’t back here only because he didn’t want to get any closer to the action, then. Truthfully, the sergeant answered, “I’d do more good up there. You wouldn’t care to see the balls-up I’d make of your work.”

“Right. Well, off you go, then.” The junior officer explained to Walsh how to find his new post, adding, “Mind how you move up from the apple orchard. The Fritzes throw mortar bombs at you if they see you.”

“Thanks for the heads-up.” Walsh ducked out of the tent and waved to the men serving the 105s. Even in this chilly weather, they worked stripped to the waist. Up he went. Teams of aid men with Red Cross armbands brought back a steady stream of wounded. One of them might have been the unfortunate Lieutenant Ormesby, but Walsh didn’t pause to inquire.

The subaltern’s apple orchard had been pretty well torn up. Walsh might not have recognized it if he hadn’t been looking for it. He stuck some twigs into the strip of inner tube he’d put on his tin hat just above the brim. That might help break up his outline. Or nothing might help. The craters in the field ahead argued that the Germans were much too alert.

Well, all he could do was his best. He dashed forward, dodging like a rugby half who smelled a try. He’d got almost all the way to the battered village past the field before the boys in
Feldgrau
lobbed a couple of mortar rounds his way. Both fell a good hundred yards behind him.

“ ’Oo the ’ell are you?” asked a grimy, unshaven Tommy in a uniform he hadn’t changed for a long time. The way he curled his lip made Walsh ashamed of his smooth chin and clean clothes.

He gave his name and rank regardless, finishing, “They sent me up to take charge of things till they can find an officer for the company.”

“ ‘Appy bleedin’ dye.” The Tommy curbed his enthusiasm very well. Suspiciously, he asked, “You ever smell smokeless powder before?”

“You weren’t even a gleam in your pa’s eye the first time I got shot,” Walsh answered. “The last time was this past summer. I’m just back to duty after the wound healed.”

“Hrm.” A grunt. The soldier rubbed his bristly chin. “Well, you
may
do, then.” He still sounded anything but sure.

“You can tell me where to head in later, if you still want to,” Walsh said. “In the meanwhile, don’t you think we’d better dig these holes deeper?” He grabbed his own entrenching tool so the other man could see that
we
was no figure of speech.

“Bugger me blind! You
do
know what you’re about.” Now the Tommy spoke in tones of deep and genuine astonishment. In minutes, dirt was flying from shovels all over what was left of the village.

AS HANS-ULRICH RUDEL
scrambled out of his Stuka and the groundcrew men covered the revetment with camouflage netting, he breathed out a long, weary sigh. His breath smoked. Sergeant Dieselhorst lit a cigarette. “Another one down,” Dieselhorst said, his cheeks hollowing.

“That’s about the size of it,” Hans-Ulrich agreed. He hurried out of the revetment. He usually relished the smells of gasoline and motor oil and hot metal that clung to his Ju-87. Not today, for some reason. He needed fresh air—and Dieselhorst’s nasty cigarette sure didn’t help.

It was cool and cloudy, but it wasn’t raining and it wasn’t freezing. Not all the fields around the airstrip had gone yellow and lifeless, the way they would have in Russia with winter nearly here. Some still showed green. Half a kilometer away, past the barbed wire, a Belgian farmer in overalls puttered around in one of them.

Sergeant Dieselhorst came up beside Rudel. The pilot smelled the cigarette smoke even before he noticed the other man’s footfalls. Nodding out toward the Belgian, Hans-Ulrich remarked, “I wonder what that clown’s doing—know what I mean?”

“You mean you wonder if he’s keeping an eye on us,” Dieselhorst said.

Hans-Ulrich nodded. “Right the first time.”

The sergeant chuckled harshly. “Well, in Russia you wouldn’t’ve needed to wonder. He damn well would have been.” Another chuckle, even dryer than the first. “Of course, in Russia we would’ve shot any Ivan who got that close to one of our bases.”

“Belgium’s a more crowded place,” Hans-Ulrich said, which was putting it mildly. After a moment, he added a wistful coda: “And some of the Belgians like us, too.”

“There is that.” Sergeant Dieselhorst softened the concurrence with a coda of his own: “Some of the Russians liked us, too. Of course, their other choice was Stalin. He could make damn near anybody look good by comparison.”

“Naughty.” Hans-Ulrich wagged a finger at him. “Are you trying to get me to report you to the
Sicherheitsdienst
?”

“Nah.” Dieselhorst shook his head as he ground out the cigarette under his boot. “If you were gonna do it, you would’ve done it by now.”

One more thing the veteran was right about. Some of what Dieselhorst said about National Socialism and about what it did to the
Reich
’s foreign policy went far beyond what was safe. But how many times had the rear gunner and radioman saved Hans-Ulrich’s one and only neck? More than he cared to remember. He hoped he understood what gratitude was. The sergeant might not care for the people who ran Germany. He’d served the country well for a long time, though. Didn’t that matter more?

The SD and the
Gestapo
would have said no. Sometimes, you needed not to listen to what certain other people were saying, no matter how loudly they happened to be saying it.

Instead, Hans-Ulrich listened to the distant rumble of artillery. It was so easy to listen to, he wished it were more distant still. Recognizing the German guns was easy. The others … He’d been away from this front too long. “Are those French cannon or English?” he asked.

Albert Dieselhorst cocked his head to one side, considering. “French, sir, I think,” he said at last. “The 75s are, for sure. I don’t know about the 105s. They sound like a new mark to me, so I can’t tell who made them. Any which way, 105s are bad news.”

In the last war, foot soldiers had hung all kinds of nicknames on the shells their guns fired and on the ones the enemy aimed at them. Boys playing at war after the shooting ended naturally used the names they got from their fathers and uncles and older brothers. Hans-Ulrich knew them as well as any
Frontschwein
in the Kaiser’s army. The kids shooting at one another with toy guns in 1950 would probably need some new names for their imaginary shellbursts.

When Rudel spoke that conceit aloud, he startled a laugh out of Dieselhorst. “I never would have wondered about that in a million years, sir,” the older man said. “Must be a reason you’re an
Oberleutnant
and I’m just a dumb
Feldwebel
.”

“I’ll tell you what you are,” Hans-Ulrich said. Sergeant Dieselhorst gave forth with a questioning grunt. Rudel told him: “You’re a sand-bagger, that’s what.”

The sergeant laughed some more. He wagged a still-gloved finger in Hans-Ulrich’s face. “And where did the likes of you learn about card players’ wicked habits … sir?”

Rudel’s ears heated. If there was one thing he hated, it was getting ragged for being a minister’s son. He hated it all the more because he was one. “Playing cards isn’t against my religion,” he said stiffly.

“Then how come you don’t do it more?” Dieselhorst probed.

“Because I’m lousy, and losing money’s against my religion.” Hans-Ulrich jabbed at himself before his crewmate could do it: “And hey, I’m not even a Jew.”

“I bet that’s not what you told your girl in Bialystok.” Sergeant Dieselhorst did his own revising this time: “No, it wouldn’t’ve mattered, would it? Unless you got yourself a clip job I don’t know about, she’d have worked that out—or worked it in—for herself.”

“Give it a rest, why don’t you?” Hans-Ulrich answered, not rising to the lewd suggestion. He missed Sofia more than he’d thought he would when the squadron came back to the West. She wasn’t just an amusement for when he got some leave. She’d lodged in the crevices of his mind the way a piece of gristle could lodge between the teeth. His thoughts worried at her as his tongue would have worried at the gristle. He needed some mental floss to get her out of there, but didn’t know where to find it.

“That’s what she said, right?” Sergeant Dieselhorst’s grin was perfectly filthy. It was also perfectly friendly. If it hadn’t been, Hans-Ulrich might have tried to deck him. He also might have got a rude surprise for his trouble—a thought that had crossed his mind before. He had size and youth and speed on his radioman/rear gunner. When it came to experience …

So it didn’t turn into a fight or anything close to a fight, especially when Dieselhorst’s smile
was
friendly. Instead, Hans-Ulrich said, as much to himself as to his crewmate, “Maybe I’ll write her a letter. Find out how she’s doing, y’know? Find out if she misses me even a little bit.” If she didn’t, maybe he could stop missing her.

But the sergeant’s grin disappeared. “You sure that’s a good idea, sir?” he asked, in tones that couldn’t mean anything but
You out of your expurgated mind, sir?

You could screw a woman who was a
Mischling
first class. You could have a fine old time doing it, too, as Hans-Ulrich had reason to know. If she was a Polish national, and so not subject to the laws against German Jews and half-breeds, so much the better. But if you showed signs that you’d been rash enough to fall in love with her, well, that would give the SD something to think about, sure as the devil it would. Not even the most loyal, most naïve fighting man (and Rudel won top marks on both counts) looked forward to that.