“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.
This was plenty bad enough. Dirt trickled down between his bits of planking. It wasn’t just that it got on the back of his neck as he huddled there. If one of those bombs set all the dirt above him crashing down, he would die without any direct enemy wound. How good had his carpentry been? One way or the other, he’d find out. No, he didn’t want it to be or the other.
More and more bombs whistled down. Bombs were eas
y to make: impact fuses, explosives, and sheet metal. Even Spaniards had a tough time screwing up the combination. The Nationalists had it down solid. “Enough already, goddammit!” Chaim screamed. No one paid any attention to him.
Eventually, bombs started falling farther away. The drone from the bombers’ engines faded, then disappeared. It was over—till the next time. Chaim crawled out. He nodded to Mike Carroll, who was emerging from his bombproof at the same time. Then he peered over the battered parapet, to make sure Sanjurjo’s men weren’t rushing forward to take advantage of the bombing run.
They weren’t. German troops probably would have been. However brave Spaniards were—and both sides were, above and beyond the call of duty—they weren’t what anyone would call efficient. The landscape had been drastically rearranged. Except for a few saplings leaning at odd angles, it might have come straight from the cratered moon.
Seeing he wouldn’t need his rifle right away, Chaim set it down. He pulled another Gitane from the pack. He missed his mouth the first time he put it in, and he needed three or four tries before he could light a match.
Mike watched with knowing eyes. “I’ve been there,” he said. “Give me another one, will you?”
“Sure,” Chaim said. If the other International had teased him, he probably wouldn’t have. But Mike had indeed been through the mill with him. They smoked together. Little by little, Chaim stopped shaking. Cigarettes helped as much as anything, except maybe brandy. Trouble was, nothing helped much.
“WATCH YOURSELF, PETE,” Herman Szulc warned. “Here come the Japs.”
“I see ’em,” Pete McGill answered. They’d patched things up, after a fashion. And on Shanghai’s mad, crowded streets, missing Japanese soldiers was harder than seeing them. The Japs were the only people who behaved as if all the Chinese frantically hawking this, that, and the other thing—and the Europeans who livened up the throngs—weren’t there at all. They marched straight ahead. If you didn’t clear out, they’d knock you down with rifle butts (or just shoot you, if they happened to be in a lousy mood) and then walk over you. You couldn’t do anything about it. Shanghai was theirs.
Pete got out of the way, along with his Marine buddies. They stood out in the crowd, not just because they were white but because they stood a head taller than most of the Chinese around them. Pete met the eyes of a noncom. He nodded first, with respect but without fear. Respect would do. The Jap nodded back, as if to say, Maybe some other time, but not now. Then he shouted at his men. They were already stiff as robots. They got stiffer yet.
“Goddamn monkeys think they’re as good as white people,” Szulc muttered.
“Watch it, Herman,” Sergeant Larry Koenig snapped. “Too many folks here savvy some English.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Szulc said. They weren’t on duty; he didn’t have to kowtow to Koenig because the sergeant had those three stripes on his sleeve.
“You better watch it, Herman.” Pete still enjoyed sticking the needle in. “Way you go on, you figure Polacks are as good as white people.”
“Ah, your mother,” Szulc said. If he’d been drunk they might well have started banging away at each other right there. But it was still morning. Nobody’d got potted … yet.
Another company of Japanese soldiers marched by. They did think they were as good as white men. Their faces were hard and impassive, but every line of their bodies shouted their pride. We beat the crap out of the Russians once, and now we’re doing it again, they might have yelled. And if you Yankees want to fuck around with us, step right up. We’ll knock your ass over teakettle, too.
They couldn’t have been more different from the Chinese who scrambled away from them. The Chinese knew they were licked. Everybody knocked them around. They couldn’t do a damn thing about it, any more than a wife stuck in a rotten marriage could when her husband beat her up for the hell of it. She might hate. Hell, she had to hate all the more when she had no hope. Hate or not, though, she was stuck. She had to take it. So did the Chinese.
“Good thing the Japs don’t know you got yourself that White Russian girlfriend,” Herman Szulc said with a leer. “They’d probably figure she was radioing everything you tell her straight to old Joe Stalin.”
“Jesus Christ, Herman, shut the fuck up!” Pete said. “You open your big dumb mouth any wider, you’ll fall right in.”
“Who you callin’ dumb?” Szulc growled. Some dumb guys didn’t have a hint that they weren’t the brightest bulbs in the chandelier. Others were uneasily aware that their candlepower left something to be desired. You really pissed them off when you called them stupid, because down deep they feared you knew what you were talking about. Szulc was one of those. He folded his hands into rocklike fists.
“Knock if off, Herman,” Sergeant Koenig told him. “You got him, so he got you back.”
“He called me a Polack first,” Szulc said. Sometimes the Marine Corps looked a lot like third-grade recess.
Koenig only laughed. “Yeah? So? What are you, a sheeny like Weinstein?”
“Not me!” Szulc crossed himself. “He ain’t just a yid, neither. He’s a fuckin’ Red. If anybody’s sending shit to Stalin, he’s the guy.”
It was a good thing Max wasn’t there, or he would have tried to clean Szulc’s clock for him. It wasn’t that he wasn’t a Red. But he didn’t let anybody rag on him for being a Jew. There weren’t many Jewish leathernecks. The handful Pete had known were uncommonly tough, even for the Corps.
Before anything else could happen, the clock in the tower of the new Customs House chimed the hour. Pete checked his watch. It was a few minutes fast, so he adjusted it. “Hurray for Big Ching,” he said. It wasn’t Big Ben, but it was halfway around the world from London.
“Lottery ticket?” a woman screeched in the Marines’ faces.
“No wantchee,” Pete said, shaking his head. He’d picked up a bit of pidgin English since coming to Shanghai. It wasn’t used much in Peking. There, the locals either knew English or, much more often, they didn’t. Here, pidgin seemed a halfway house between English and Chinese. People who’d been here longer than he had said it held bits of Portuguese, too, and a mostly Chinese way of putting words together.
“My no savvy,” the woman said.
“You savvy plenty good,” Koenig told her. “Get lost.” That wasn’t proper pidgin, but she understood it anyhow. She said something in Chinese that sounded like a cat getting its tail stepped on. Koenig only laughed. “Good thing I don’t know what that meant, or I’d have to do something about it,” he said.
Then the woman spoke two words of perfectly clear English—“Fuck you!”—and accompanied them with the appropriate gesture. Pete wondered whether she’d learned that from a leatherneck or an English Marine. She’d got it down solid, wherever she’d found it.
And Larry Koenig went nuts. “No slanty-eyed cunt’s gonna give me the finger!” he yelled, and started after her with intent to maim, or maybe to murder. Pete and Herman Szulc looked at each other for a split second. Then they both grabbed the sergeant and held on for dear life.
“Take it easy, man!” Pete said. “You’ll set all the Chinks off!” Sure enough, the small, golden-skinned men and women were pointing and giggling at the spectacle of two white men trying to hold back a third.
“Like I give a shit! Let me go, goddammit!” Koenig tried something Pete had last seen from a dirty-fighting coach before he went overseas.
He still remembered what to do about it—remembered without thinking, the knowledge literally beaten into him. He jerked, twisted … and Koenig gasped in pain. “I’ll break your wrist if you try any more of that,” Pete said, and the other man had to know he meant it. “Now calm down, okay?”
What Koenig said then would have made a Marine sergeant blush—except he was one. “C’mon, man—take an even strain,” Szulc advised, also not letting go. “Just an old Chinese broad. She’s gone now anyway.” So she was; the crowd had swallowed her up.
“I’ll find her. I’ll wrin
g her scrawny neck when I do, too,” Koenig ground out. He surged against the Marines who held him—but he didn’t try anything else cute.
“You and McGill’ve been in China too long. You’re both going Asiatic yourself,” Szulc opined. “You want to clobber this gal for nothing, and he’s all mushy over that gold-digging taxi dancer. This place’ll drive anybody nuts if he stays long enough.”
If Pete hadn’t been hanging on to Koenig for all he was worth, he would have taken a swing at Szulc himself. Then the Chinese would have been treated to the spectacle of three Americans, each trying to beat the crap out of the other two. Even Japanese soldiers would have laughed at that. When the people who hated you fought among themselves, how could you lose?
Simple. You couldn’t. And so Pete didn’t clobber Herman Szulc, no matter how much Herman deserved it. And Koenig did eventually calm down—enough so they could let go of him, anyhow. And they walked on through Shanghai just as if it were their town after all.
NORTH. The front faced north. To Hideki Fujita, that meant one thing and one thing only: the Kwantung Army stood firmly astride the Trans-Siberian Railway. If the Russians wanted to do anything about it, they would have to come to the Japanese. He didn’t think they would have an easy time doing that. His own countrymen had attacked the railroad in other places, too. Japanese radio claimed all kinds of breakthroughs against the Red Army, but Fujita had seen enough to understand that not everything the radio said was exactly true. You needed to impress the foreigners who were bound to be listening.
He did know what was happening behind him. Japanese engineers were systematically tearing up the railroad track and mining the ground on which it had lain. The Russians wouldn’t have an easy time putting the Trans-Siberian Railway back together even if they did drive off the Kwantung Army.
And, without the railroad, Vladivostok would starve. Bombers from Japanese aircraft carriers and from bases in Manchukuo already pounded the town. The Russians were hunkering down for a siege. Well, they’d done the same thing at Port Arthur. It hadn’t saved them then. Fujita didn’t think it would save them now.
The War That Came Early: West and East Page 20
