Counting Up, Counting Down

by Harry Turtledove

  Whatever the wormwood-filled gas shell had done to Barrès, its effects had not left him. Nor, as he’d thought, had they diminished. Rushing hard toward him came a host of cavalry straight from the imagination of a madman. The horses wore breastplates of fire and brimstone; their heads looked like those of lions. Instead of tails, snakes grew from the end of their spines, snakes with great poisonous fangs. The lion heads breathed out flames and smoke. Some of the riders had wings.

  “Gas!” Fonsagrive shouted. “Horsemen with poison gas!” Barrès nodded. His gas helmet kept him safe. And he had before him a target of which machine gunners could commonly but dream. He fired and fired and fired, till the cooling fins on the Hotchkiss gun glowed red. Fonsagrive fed him strip after strip of ammunition.

  “The Boche is mad, to attack us with cavalry,” Barrès said. “But however mad he is, they shall not pass!”

  That he, too, was mad, to see the German Uhlans as he did, went without saying. But a man who had spent so long breathing absinthe fumes could hardly be expected to remain in his right mind. And anyone on the front lines at Verdun was apt to be mad anyhow. He was sane enough to keep the machine gun pointed in the right direction, and that was the only thing that really mattered.

  Some of the improbable-looking cavalry charged back toward the German lines, as had some of the footsoldiers who’d looked to him like giant locusts. The Germans shot them down as cheerfully as Barrès did. He laughed. They were making his work easier for him.

  He did not think any of the horsemen got into either set of trenches. Both the Empire and the Central Powers kept cavalry divisions behind their lines, awaiting breakthroughs that never came. Cavalry, in any case, melted under machine-gun fire like frost melting under hot sunshine. To anyone who’d spent time in the trenches, that was obvious. Generals on both sides, though, had a way of staying back at nice, comfortable headquarters. What was obvious to the soldiers who did the fighting and dying must not have seemed so plain ten or twenty kilometers behind the line.

  At last, Barrès stopped shooting. “Have we got a jam?” Fonsagrive asked anxiously.

  “Not at all,” Barrès replied. “The gun performs splendidly. But I see nothing more alive in front of me. Why, then, should I waste cartridges I shall need to try to beat back the next German attack?”

  Rain mixed with sleet—Verdun surely had the most abominable climate in all of France, and yesterday’s warmth was forgotten—began pelting down. A great clap of thunder sounded, and another, and another, until there were seven in all. Jacques Fonsagrive laughed. “Do you know, mon ami,” he said, “that I used to be frightened of thunder, and would hide under my bed during a storm?”

  “Artillery fire will cure one of that, n’est-ce pas?” Barrès said. “I would like to hide under my bed when the Boche shells us. I would like to have a bed under which to hide when the Boche shells us.”

  “An iron bed, by choice,” Fonsagrive said. “But yes, after artillery, how is one to lose one’s nerve over thunder?” He shook his fist at the sky. “If there is a God up there, which, as I have said, I do not believe, how could He do worse to us than what the Germans and our own officers have visited upon us here? Such a thing would not be possible.”

  Barrès scratched himself. “It could be that you are right. But it could be that you are wrong, too. After all, when the Boche shelled us with poison gas yesterday, he did kill a great many rats, as we both noted.”

  “I beg your pardon.” Fonsagrive’s nod was full of exquisite, understated irony. “If God is as all-powerful as most fools say, no doubt He could give us rats and poison gas at the very same time. Or He might simply give the rats gas helmets, which would save Him a miracle.”

  “Very good. Oh, very good indeed.” Barrès clapped his hands. “I wish we had a chaplain here, to listen to these brilliant blasphemies.”

  “Chaplains are no fools,” Fonsagrive said. “Nothing requires that they come to the front line, and so they do not. If nothing required me to come to the front line, I would not either, I assure you.”

  “Nor I,” Pierre Barrès answered. He shrugged. “But the nations are angry. It is the time of the dead. And so we are here: the dead, but not quite yet.” The ground shook under his feet. “Is that an earthquake?”

  “What a fool you are,” Fonsagrive said. “That’s someone’s ammunition dump going up. I hope very much it is an ammunition dump of the Boche going up.” He cocked his head to one side, to hear from which direction the roar of the explosion would come.

  So did Barrès. He heard no explosion, though, only the endless patter of the rain. And then, through the rain, high and thin, came a seventh trumpet blast. He glanced over to Jacques Fonsagrive. The loader nodded: he had heard it, too. They both braced themselves for whatever the Germans might throw at them next.

  “We are not dead yet,” Barrès repeated. “We have heard six of these horn calls, and endured them. What is one more?”

  “Perhaps one too many,” Fonsagrive said. “But then again, perhaps not, also.”

  The ground shook again. There were lightnings and thunderings. The sleet turned to hail. After shell fragments, hail was at worst a minor nuisance. But, little by little, the foul weather eased. The sun came out once more—not by stealth, as it had before, but simply because the wind blew away the clouds.

  Barrès and Fonsagrive both nodded. “It is done,” they said together.

  They looked at each other. Somehow, it should not have been their voices saying those words, but Another’s. They both shrugged. Who had time to think of Another, here in the man-made hell of Verdun? And, as Jacques Fonsagrive had said, what even from the last of days could be worse than that which soldiers endured here?

  Barrès took off his gas helmet. A last few raindrops fell, though the sky seemed clear. They tasted of salt, almost as if they were tears.

  A buzzing in the air swiftly swelled to a mechanical roar. With a grunt of fright, Barrès threw himself into the hole he’d scraped in the trench. Bullets from the machine guns of several low-flying avions decked with black crosses chewed up the French entrenchments. Men screamed as they were wounded.

  As soon as the avions had passed, Barrès emerged and sent what ammunition was left in his machine gun after them. He did not think he scored any hits. A man on the ground with a Hotchkiss gun knocked down an avion only by luck. He knew it. He accepted it. But if a man on the ground did not bet, how could he hope to win?

  Maybe his puny act of defiance angered the Germans. Whatever the reason, their artillery opened up on the position his regiment occupied. A man on the ground with a Hotchkiss gun could do nothing whatever against artillery. Barrès knew that, too. He had trouble accepting it. That was one of the reasons he hated gunners so much.

  Slow as usual, the French artillery eventually got around to responding to the Boche bombardment. That tardiness was another reason why Barrès hated gunners, even gunners in horizon bleu. Also as usual, all too many of the French shells fell short and landed on the same trenches the Germans were pounding. That gave Barrès—and every other poilu—a most excellent reason for hating his own gunners.

  By the time the two rival sets of artillerymen (so Barrès supposed they were, even if they sometimes seemed joined in a malign alliance against the French infantry) had finished plowing up the trenches and the ground between them, no one could have told from what manner of creature the chunks of flesh out there had come. Germans? Very likely. Horses? Very likely. Giant locusts with scorpion stings? No one could not have proved otherwise.

  Little by little, the shelling slowed. Barrès came out of his hole, wondering if the Boche intended rushing up the slope at him. But the men in field-gray seemed content for the time being to stay where they were. He took out a tin of singe, opened it, and stared resignedly at the red, red meat inside.

  Jacques Fonsagrive was opening some tinned beef, too. “I wonder if the cuistots will be able to get more bread up here any time soon,” he said.

&nbs
p; “Whether they do or not, we’ll get by,” Barrès answered. “We still have monkey meat and we still have pinard. We can go on a while longer.”

  “You have reason, mon vieux,” Fonsagrive said. “And the fighting’s been a little quieter the last couple of days, eh?”

  “Yes, I think so.” Barrès nodded, then shrugged. “Who knows? I would not care to bet on it, but we might even live. You have any more tobacco?” Fonsagrive passed him a Gitane. He lit it and took a long drag. “Ahh. Thanks. That’s good, by God.”

  In This Season

  Here is another tale of man’s inhumanity to man in our century, this one set in the Second World War rather than the First. There are powers, and then again, there are powers—and there are also Powers. “In This Season” is the story of a collision between them. I owe Marty Greenberg a thank-you for this one, for letting me put a Chanukah story in an anthology of Christmas tales.

  * * *

  Sunset came early to the little Polish town of Puck as winter began. The Baltic slapped in growing darkness against the shelving, muddy beach. The Poles grubbed clams and cockles and whelks from the mud and fried them or ate them in soups. For Puck’s three families of Jews, shellfish were, of course, forbidden food.

  The hunger that gnawed Berel Friedman’s belly made him wonder with increasingly urgent curiosity what fried clams tasted like. In the three months since the Germans overran Poland, Puck’s Poles had come to know hunger and want. As for the town’s Jews—well, falling under Hitler’s yoke made Friedman long to be ruled by Poles again, and what comparison could be worse than that? None he could think of.

  A soft knock on the door distracted him from his gloomy reflections. His wife, Emma, said, “That will be the Korczaks. We’re all here now.”

  “Yes.” He opened the door, nodded to Jacob and Yetta Korczak, chucked their two little boys under the chin. “Welcome, all,” he said. “Gut yontif—happy holiday.”

  “Gut yontif.” Deep lines of worry lost themselves in Jacob Korczak’s graying beard. He laughed bitterly. “As if there are any happy holidays any more.”

  “We go on day by day, as best we can,” Friedman said. “What else can we do?” Behind him, Isaac Geller nodded, not so much from conviction (for his nature was less sunny than Friedman’s) as from despair at finding any better course.

  Friedman made sure the curtains were tightly shut before he took down the silver menorah and set it on the mantel. For the Poles to see him lighting Chanukah candles would be bad enough. For the Germans to see him would be catastrophic.

  He set a slim orange candle in the leftmost space in the menorah, then took another from the box and laid it on the mantel for a moment. He got out a match, scraped it against the sole of his boot. The match caught. Coughing a little at the sulfurous smoke, he picked up the candle from the mantel, lighted it, and used it to kindle the one already in the menorah. Then he put the shamas candle in the menorah’s centermost place, which was higher than the four to either side of it.

  That done, he chanted in Hebrew the blessings over the candles, then translated them into Yiddish for the women and children: “Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, king of the universe, who hast sanctified us with thy commandments and commanded us to light the lights of dedication . . .” (“Which is what ‘Chanukah’ means, after all,” he added in an aside.) “Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, king of the universe, who wrought miracles for our fathers in those days and in this season . . . Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, king of the universe, who hath preserved us alive and brought us to enjoy this season.”

  Though Friedman was in most circumstances a man far from imaginative, the irony of the Chanukah blessing struck him with almost physical force. God might have helped the Jews against Antiochus long ago, but what was He doing about Hitler, whose venom was enough for twenty Antiochuses? Nothing anyone could see.

  Shaking his head, Friedman read and then translated the explanatory passage that followed the blessings in the prayer book: “These lights we light to praise thee for the miracles, wonders, salvations, and victories which thou didst perform for our fathers in those days and in this season, by the hands of thy holy priests. Therefore, by command, these lights are holy all the eight days of Chanukah; neither are we permitted to make any other use of them save to view them, that we may return thanks to thy name for thy miracles, wonderful works, and salvation.”

  All the adults in the crowded little living room exchanged troubled glances above the heads of their children. Where were the victories? The wonderful works? As for salvation, who under the Nazis had even the hope to pray for it?

  If there were miracles, they lay in the hearts of the children. As soon as Friedman stepped away from the menorah, his daughter Rachel, the two Korczak boys, and the Gellers’ son and daughter all squealed, “It’s Chanukah!” so loud that their parents looked alarmed. Children didn’t worry about hard times, but they made the most of celebrations. In a moment, three or four dreidels, some of wood, others baked from clay, were spinning on the floor and on the low, battered table in front of the fireplace.

  “Here, here,” Jacob Korczak said gruffly. “If you’re going to play with dreidels, you need some Chanukah gelt, don’t you?” He dug in his trouser pocket, took out a handful of mixed German and Polish small change, and passed the little coins to all the children. Friedman and Geller did the same.

  The letters on the four sides of the dreidels began the Hebrew words that meant “a great miracle happened here.” The sounds of joy from the children as they played, the delight when the person who spun won the pot on a gimel, the moan when shin landed face up and the spinner had to add to the pile, made the house sound like all the Chanukahs Friedman remembered. In these times, that was not the smallest of miracles itself.

  It even began to smell like Chanukah. The rich odors of hot grease and onions flooded in from the kitchen as Emma fried potato latkes: a man could still come by potatoes. But the latkes would be the entire Chanukah feast. No fat goose, no brisket marinated in wine, not this year. Friedman could count on the fingers of his hands the times he’d tasted meat since the swastika flag replaced Poland’s red and white banner over the town hall.

  “We’ll just stuff ourselves the fuller with latkes, then,” he declared. Jacob Korczak glared at him. He just smiled in return. If your children were happy, could you stay grim for long?

  Someone knocked on the door.

  In an instant, the house was silent. The children looked frightened. The adults looked terrified. All the Jews in Puck were gathered together here. Whoever stood outside had to be a goy, then: maybe a Pole; maybe, worse, a German. The Germans were deporting Jews from this part of Poland now that they’d annexed it to their country. Ice in his veins, Friedman waited for the harsh cry, “Juden, heraus!”

  The knock came again. But for that, silence.

  Emma poked her head out of the kitchen. “What shall I do?” Friedman mouthed in her direction. Opening the door and not opening it were equally appalling choices.

  “Open it,” she said without hesitation. “It’s Chanukah, after all. Feeding the stranger is a mitzvah.”

  If the stranger outside was a cruelly grinning SS man in a coal-scuttle helmet, Friedman did not think even God would reckon feeding him a blessing. Of course, if it was an SS man outside, he had better things to eat than the poor fare a handful of Jews could offer him.

  Whoever it was knocked for a third time, not loudly but with persistence. The slow, steady raps helped hearten Friedman. Surely an SS man would not politely knock three times; an SS man would hammer down the door with a rifle butt.

  Friedman raised the bar, threw the door wide. Outside stood the tallest, widest man he’d ever set eyes on, dressed in rags far too small for him. Friedman had never seen him, or anyone like him, before. He looked as though he could have ripped the door off its hinges with his little finger.

  The big man did nothing of the sort. He just stood quietly, looking down at Friedman even thou
gh the living room floor was a tall step above the street. His eyes reflected the flickering glow of the Chanukah candles like a cat’s.

  Seeing those candles, even if at second hand, reminded Friedman why he’d opened the door. He forced his voice not to wobble as he said, “Will you come in, friend, and take supper with us? We have an abundance of good latkes, so help yourself to all you can eat.” He knew he’d lied—no one but Germans had an abundance of anything in Poland these days—but it was not the sort of lie God recorded in his book of judgments.

  The stranger looked at him a moment more. He did not answer, not with words. All at once, though, he nodded. He had to go sideways through Friedman’s door, and duck his head to get under the lintel. When he straightened up inside the house, the hairless crown of his head just missed scraping the ceiling.

  Rachel Friedman was only four years old, too little to be perfectly polite. She stared up and up and up at the stranger, then started to cry. Through her tears, she wailed, “If he eats all he can eat, the rest of us won’t have any!” That set a couple of the other children crying, too. They’d all been hungry too often of late to think of losing a promised feast.

  As host, Berel Friedman did what he could to repair the damage. He knew with a certain somber pride that his chuckle sounded natural. “Don’t worry about the children, my friend. What do children know? As I said, we have plenty. And Emma”—he raised his voice—“bring out the plum brandy for our guest, will you?”

  The big man did not speak. David Korczak, Jacob’s older boy, was twelve. His bar mitzvah would have come next summer, had the Germans not come first. Now he nudged his father and said, “Why does the stranger—”

  “The guest,” his father hissed, also mindful of the proprieties.

  “The guest, I mean,” David corrected himself, then went on, not quite quietly enough, “Why does the guest have emes written across his forehead?”