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 bor
der-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.’ ”
That sounded good even after being translated into Russian. Most foreign gibes lost their flavor once they left their native tongue. Churchill must have seemed uncommonly witty in English.
“Although Churchill is a member of Prime Minister Chamberlain’s Conservative Party, Chamberlain has gone out of his way to assure the English Parliament that Churchill does not speak for him or his government,” the newsreader said portentously.
“Chamberlain is playing with his dick again,” one of the pilots said in disgust. The Chimp couldn’t have put it any more plainly-and probably would have put it about the same way. The news didn’t sound good. If Chamberlain was criticizing Churchill, and Churchill was criticizing cutting a deal with the Nazis… What was the likely result? Trouble for the Rodina, that was what.
More trouble for the Rodina, Sergei mentally corrected. The Soviet Union already had as much country as any self-respecting country needed.
After music replaced the news, Major Konstantin Ponamarenko-Colonel Borisov’s replacement as squadron leader-said, “You men will know-not everything that happens comes on the radio right away.”
Heads bobbed up and down, Yaroslavsky’s among them. The main purpose of Radio Moscow news was to hold up morale on the home front. Sergei had thought as much himself not long before. He hadn’t looked for the new squadron commander to acknowledge it so openly.
Ponamarenko went on, “You will also know that the situation in the field is developing in a way that might possibly be better.”
He waited for more nods. He got them. Sergei admired him. The pilot had rarely heard a more graceful way of admitting the USSR was getting the snot knocked out of it.
“Don’t waste time worrying about those French and English whores,” Ponamarenko said earnestly. “They can’t get at us yet, and we can’t get at them, either. Worry about the German cocksuckers, and about their Polish lap dogs yapping along behind them. We can hit back at them, and we damn well will.”
Sergei nodded one more time. You had to show you agreed. Somebody was always watching you. No: somebody always might be watching you. You always needed to stay on your guard. It was all right to remember that Stalin had started the fight with Poland the winter before, looking to pick up Wilno on the cheap. If the General Secretary hadn’t, the Soviet Union would still be at war with Germany, but only in a formal sense, since neither side could have struck at the other without violating some buffer state’s neutrality. Well, now the USSR had done just that, and this was what the Soviet workers and peasants got for it.
Yes, it was all right to remember Stalin might well have outsmarted himself. But it wasn’t all right to show you remembered such things. You never could tell who might notice, and report. You never could tell when you might disappear.
“What I’m saying is, we are going to be flying missions inside what was Soviet territory before the war,” Ponamarenko continued. “We will try to drop our bombs only on the heads of the Fascist jackals, of course. Of course.” He bore down on the repeated phrase. “But accidents happen in war. I don’t have many virgins here. You know that. And I need to tell every one of you-don’t worry about them. Some of our explosives may do a little harm to Soviet citizens. If the rest of our loads help drive the invaders out of the Motherland, though, that’s a price worth paying. Do you hear what I’m telling you, Comrades?”
By the way the flyers’ heads moved, they might have been on springs. This also was nothing that hadn’t occurred to Sergei before. He didn’t want to hurt his own people. He’d never dreamt such a dreadful thing might be possible when he first put on the uniform he wore.
However dreadful the possibility might be, it was here. And Ponamarenko had it right. If the bombers hurt the invaders worse than the locals, their strikes were bound to be worthwhile in the long run. A surgeon cut you up to make you healthier in the long run.
But you still had a scar after the operation. And it still hurt while you recovered from it. Sergei wished he hadn’t thought of any of that.
Every once in a while, war seemed easy, even to someone like Theo Hossbach who knew better most of the time. When the German panzers smashed through the Low Countries and into northern France, it was obvious the Wehrmacht was playing a faster, deeper game than the Dutch and Belgians, the English and French, who tried to slow it down. Unfortunately, the enemy caught on just before Germany managed to slam the sword all the way home.
Now, again, the panzers rolled forward as if nothing in the world could slow them down. The experienced German troops outclassed the Ivans as effortlessly as Adi Stoss had outclassed the infantrymen he played against on that snowy Polish football pitch.
Maybe-probably, even-an individual ground pounder was in better shape than Adi. Russian panzers were often better than German machines. But when Stoss got the ball, he knew what to do with it. And even when he didn’t have it, he knew whe
re to go so he might get it, or so he might keep the guys on the other side from causing trouble.
The Germans were like that as they pushed from Poland into Byelorussia (and into the northern Ukraine, too, but Theo knew about that only by rumor and by brags on Radio Berlin). The panzers struck, then sped on, leaving it for the German and Polish infantry slogging along in their wake to clean up the Ivans they’d shattered.
And the Ivans couldn’t figure out what to do about it. It was as if their manager had to shout in directions from the touchline to get them to move. Left to themselves, they would defend in place till they got smashed up, but they maneuvered only slowly and awkwardly. They might have those formidable panzers, but they didn’t know how to use them.
The Germans did. They took advantage as quickly and eagerly as a guy trying to screw his girl. And they were screwing the Russians, all right. People talked about Smolensk and Vyazma. When people got excited, they talked about Moscow and Leningrad.
Theo talked… very little. When he sat in the bowels of the Panzer II, he relayed orders from the platoon CO, the company CO, regimental HQ, division HQ… Whatever came in through his earphones, he faithfully passed on to Hermann Witt. And he sent back the panzer commander’s responses. Witt had to needle him only every once in a while to make sure he exercised his voice enough to do that.
“Don’t keep it all to yourself, Theo, my dear,” he would say. “They put that set in there for a reason, you know.”
And Theo would nod. And he’d do better for a while. But only for a while. He was too much a creature of the deep silences inside his own head ever to grow comfortable with the racket of the outside world.
While they drove, while they fought, he didn’t have much to do with Adalbert Stoss. How could he, when they had their places at opposite ends of the Panzer II’s fighting compartment? Adi talked to Theo-who didn’t?-but he wasn’t a guy who yakked all the time for the sake of yakking. And his job needed him to pay attention every single second, which Theo’s didn’t.
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