At 0530, whistles shrilled in the French trenches. “Forward!” officers shouted. Tanks growled toward the German lines, cannon blasting and machine guns braying. Joinville and Villehardouin lugged the machine gun and its tripod ahead. A pair of glum new fish carried crates full of ammunition strips. Luc had his rifle and an infantryman’s usual equipment. For the moment, nothing more—rank did have its privileges. But he would turn into a beast of burden in a hurry if one of his crew went down. A machine gun was important in the grand scheme of things, a corporal’s dignity much less so.
The French guns increased their range so they didn’t land shells on the advancing poilus. The German guns shortened range so they did. A round from a 105 came down right on top of a tank. Fire fountained from the stricken machine. A black column of smoke mounted to the sky. Machine-gun ammo cooked off with cheerful little popping noises.
“Poor buggers,” Joinville said.
“Wouldn’t even be that much left of us if the shell hit here,” Luc answered. The Gascon grunted and nodded.
A German MG-34 the bombardment hadn’t silenced started spitting death across the field. Luc envied the Boches their weapon. It was lighter than a Hotchkiss gun, and it fired faster, too. You could carry it and fire it from the hip if you had to. He tried to imagine firing the twenty-odd kilos of the Hotchkiss from the hip. The picture wouldn’t form, and for good reason.
Tracers from the German machine gun sparked closer to the Hotchkiss crew. “Down!” Luc yelled. He followed his own order, diving into a shell hole.
“We set up?” Joinville asked.
Anything that gave Luc an excuse not to stand again sounded good right then. “Yeah, let’s,” he said. Joinville and Villehardouin got the heavy Hotchkiss onto the even heavier tripod. One of the new guys fed a strip into the weapon. Staying as low as he could, Luc peered over the forward lip of the shell hole. The MG-34’s bullets had gone past it; now they cracked by again, maybe a meter and a half above the ground: chest-high on an upright man.
Those shapes in the misty, rainy morning twilight were Germans: Germans trying to get away from oncoming Frenchmen. Having been a Frenchman trying to get away from more oncoming Germans than he cared to remember, Luc relished the sight of field-gray backs. He fired a couple of bursts at them. Maybe he’d knock some of them down. He’d sure as hell make the ones he didn’t hit run faster.
A French tank shelled the MG-34 into silence. “Come on,” Luc said. “Let’s get moving again.” His crew hid their enthusiasm very well, but they obeyed. Luc didn’t want to hit his own countrymen in front of the gun.
Tanks smashed paths through the German wire. Here and there, Fritzes still stayed and fought in their battered holes. One by one, they died or gave up. A Landser with a scared, whipped-dog grin on his face showed himself, hands high. “Ami!” he said.
“C’mere, friend,” Luc said, and relieved him of his watch and wallet. Some of these Germans carried fat wads of francs—on their side of the line, French money wasn’t worth much. Luc gestured with his rifle. “Go on back.”
“Danke! Uh—merci!” the new prisoner said. Hands still over his head to show he’d surrendered, he stumbled off into captivity. He didn’t have to worry about the war any more.
Luc did. “Let’s go,” he said. They pushed on through the shattered German defenses. It couldn’t be this easy, could it? It had never been this easy before—he was goddamn sure of that. He had no idea how long it would stay easy, either. As long as it did, he’d go along with it.
OF COURSE THE REPUBLICANS set up a radio outside the POW camp in the park in Madrid. And of course they always tuned it to their own stations. Joaquin Delgadillo hadn’t listened to those when he fought in Marshal Sanjurjo’s army. It wasn’t that the Nationalists jammed them, though they did. And the Republicans jammed Nationalist radio. Sometimes the whole dial sounded like waterfalls and sizzling lard.
But this was Radio Madrid, and they were right next to the sender. It overpowered the jamming with ease. The Republican announcer might have been standing right there, reading from a script. “And now the news,” he said. “French and English armies have gone over to the offensive against the German invaders. Gains of several kilometers are reported. So are rumors that German commanders in France have been sacked because their troops retreated.”
“Sacked? I’m surprised they didn’t shoot them,” someone behind Joaquin said. He found himself nodding. Both sides in Spain had executed officers who went back when their superiors thought they should go forward. As for common soldiers … That went without saying. Common soldiers always got it in the neck—or the back of the head, depending.
“In Poland, the forces of the workers and peasants, the glorious soldiers of the Red Army, continue to press forward against the Fascists and their sympathizers,” the newsreader went on. “Many Germans and Poles willingly surrender to join the Socialist cause.”
Nationalist radio continually reported German and Italian triumphs. Somebody had to be lying. Before Joaquin was captured, he would have been certain it was the Republicans. He wasn’t so sure any more. These days, he wasn’t sure of anything. Maybe both sides were lying as hard as they could. That wouldn’t have surprised him—oh, no, not even a little bit.
“American President Roosevelt has proposed an end to the war on the basis of all sides’ returning to their positions before the fighting began,” the announcer said. “In rejecting this, Hitler likened it to unscrambling an egg. He said Czechoslovakia would never be independent again, and that Germany would fight on to ultimate victory.” The man let out a dry chuckle. “How Germany can gain ultimate victory while retreating in both east and west, Hitler did not explain.”
Joaquin didn’t know what to make of that. Every time he saw the Germans in action here in Spain, they made things go forward. The Italians who came to help Marshal Sanjurjo didn’t care about the fight one way or the other. But Germans … Germans made things happen.
He made the mistake of saying that to Chaim Weinberg. The Republic agitator from the United States turned the color of a sunset. “Fuck ’em all,” he said. “Fuck their mothers, too, up the ass.”
“You hate them so much because they’re Fascists?” Delgadillo said.
“Because they’re Fascists, sí,” Weinberg answered. “And because they hate Jews.”
A light dawned. Weinberg was a Jew himself. He might have put that reason second, but he meant it first. “Spaniards hate Jews, too,” Joaquin said. “Do you hate Spaniards? Why did you come here if you hate Spaniards?”
“It’s different here,” the American mumbled.
“Really? Different how?” Joaquin asked, honestly puzzled. “Hate is hate, isn’t it?”
“With you Spaniards, hating Jews is only a—a tradition, like,” Weinberg said. “You don’t go out of your way to do it.”
“How can we?” Joaquin laughed out loud. “You’re the first Jew I ever saw in my life. We threw ours out hundreds of years ago.”
“Maybe that’s it,” Weinberg said. “You people just know you used to hate Jews. There are still plenty in Germany, and the Nazis go to town on them.”
That had to be an English idiom translated literally; Joaquin had heard Weinberg do such things before. The American made himself understood, but you never doubted you were listening to a foreigner. After working out what he had to mean, Delgadillo said, “What about the Estados Unidos? Is your country a Jews’ paradise?”
Weinberg snorted. “Not hardly. But it could be worse. Some people there do hate Jews, yes. But more of them hate Negroes worse. They treat Negroes the way Europeans treat Jews.”
“But you would sooner change how Spain does things than how your own country does them, eh?” Joaquin said shrewdly.
The American—the Jew—started to say something. Then he closed his mouth with a snap. When he opened it again, he let out a sheepish chuckle. “Well, you may be right,” he said, which surprised Joaquin. He hadn’t thought Weinberg would admit a
ny such thing. Weinberg went on, “Other Americans are trying to make things better for Negroes. I thought fighting against the Nazis was more important.”
“How many of the Americans working for your Negroes are Jews?” Delgadillo asked.
“Quite a few. Why?”
Now Joaquin found himself surprised again, in a different way. “I would have guessed your Jews would let your Negroes go hang. As long as other Americans have Negroes to hate, most of them leave Jews alone. Isn’t that what you said?”
“Yes, I said that, but it doesn’t mean what you said it means.” On the far side, the free side, of the barbed wire, Weinberg paused to figure out whether that meant what he wanted it to mean. He must have decided it did, because he went on, “Injustice to anyone anywhere is injustice to everyone everywhere. You have to fight it wherever you find it.”
“You must enjoy tilting at windmills.” Joaquin had never read Don Quixote. He’d read very little. But Cervantes’ phrases filled the mouths of Spaniards whether they could read or not.
“Fighting against Fascism isn’t tilting at windmills,” Weinberg said. “Fascism is the real enemy.”
“On the other side of the line, they think the same thing about Communism,” Joaquin said.
“On the other side of the line, they’re wrong.” Weinberg sounded as sure of himself as a priest quoting from the Bible. Delgadillo didn’t think that would be a good thing to tell him. The Jew went on, “Communism wants to treat every man and every woman the same way.”
“Badly—they would say over there.” Joaquin still more than half believed it himself. He couldn’t insist on it too strongly, though, not when he depended on good will from these people if he wanted to keep breathing.
“How well did they treat you over there?” the Jew asked. “You were a peasant, and then you were a private. Do you want your son to live the way you used to live?”
Through most of Spain’s history, the only possible answer to that would have been Well, how else is he going to live? Things changed only slowly here, when they changed at all. But Joaquin had seen that there were other possibilities. He didn’t like all of them—he liked few of them, in fact—but he knew they were there. Stalling for time, he said, “I have no son.”
Weinberg snorted impatiently. “You know what I mean.”
And Joaquin did. “Well, Señor, I mean no disrespect when I say this—please believe me, for it is true—but I am sure I do not want my son to grow up a Red.”
“Why?” Weinberg challenged. “What’s so bad about equality?”
“Making everyone equal by pushing the bottom up would not be so bad,” Joaquin said slowly. “Making everyone equal by pulling the top down … That is not so good, or I don’t think so. And it seems to me that is what the Republic aims to do.”
He waited for the top to fall down on him. He’d probably said more than he should have. But the American had asked, dammit. On the other side of the wire, Weinberg paused thoughtfully. “You really are smarter than you look,” he said at last. “The only thing I’ll say to that is, sometimes you have to tear down before you can build up.”
“Well, Señor, it could be,” Delgadillo replied, by which he meant he didn’t believe it for a minute.
Weinberg wagged a finger at him. “What are we going to do about you?”
“It is your choice. You caught me.”
“Maybe I should have shot you when I did.”
“Maybe you should have. I thought you would.”
“Better to reeducate you,” the Jew said. Joaquin wondered if he was right.
PETE MCGILL ENJOYED TALKING with officers no better than any other Marine corporal in his right mind. Officers, to him, were at best necessary evils, at worst unnecessary ones. Sometimes, though, you had no choice. Like St. Peter, officers had the power to bind and to loose.
Captain Ralph Longstreet had never said he was related to the Confederate general of the same last name. Then again, he’d never said he wasn’t. He did have a drawl thick enough to slice. A hell of a lot of Marines—and even more Marine officers, it seemed—were Southern men. Looking up from his paperwork, he said, “Well, McGill, what can I do for you today?”
“Sir, you may have heard I’ve, uh, got friendly with a lady here in Shanghai,” McGill answered. His own New York accent was about as far from what Longstreet spoke as it could be while remaining American English.
The captain capped his fountain pen and set it on his battleship of a desk. “A dancer named Vera Kuznetsova,” he said. “Vera Smith, that would be in English.”
“Uh, yes, sir.” Pete hadn’t known what Vera’s last name meant. He hadn’t cared, either, and still didn’t. But he knew exactly what Longstreet’s tone meant. “It’s not like she’s Chinese or anything, sir. She’s as white as you or me.”
“White Russian, to be exact,” Longstreet said. “What nationality does she have on her passport?”
He had to know the answer before he asked the question. “Sir, her folks got out of Siberia a length ahead of the Reds. She got out of Harbin a length ahead of the Japs. They had papers from the Tsar. I guess she did, too, when she was a baby. Now—” He shook his head.
“Officially, she’s stateless, then.” Captain Longstreet made it sound like a death sentence. For a lot of people, it had been. The wrong papers or no papers at all could be a disease deadlier than cholera.
“Well, sir—” Pete took a deep breath. “She wouldn’t be, sir, not any more, not after she married me.”
Longstreet had been about to light up an Old Gold. He paused just before striking the match. “Why don’t you shut the door, son, and sit your ass down?” he said. Gulping, Pete obeyed. He didn’t think Longstreet sounded friendly all of a sudden—the tone was more like the warden asking a condemned prisoner what he wanted for his last meal. Pete’s anxiety only grew when Longstreet offered him a cigarette: it made him think of firing squads. Not knowing what else to do, he took the coffin nail anyhow. Longstreet waited till he’d got halfway down the smoke before continuing, “You’ve got it bad, don’t you?”
“Sir, I’m in love,” Pete said. “She loves me, too. Honest to God, she does.”
“Well, it’s possible. I reckon stranger things have happened,” Longstreet said. He was a captain; Pete couldn’t bust him in the face. Marrying Vera while he was stuck in the brig would be hard, to say the least. Longstreet went on, “But do you figure she hasn’t got you tabbed for a meal ticket, too?”
All of Pete’s buddies said the same goddamn thing. He was sick of hearing it. “Well, what if she does, sir? She could’ve picked other guys to play games with, but she didn’t. She does love me, and I—” He stopped, his tongue clogging up his mouth. Talking about what he felt for Vera—even trying to talk about it—was far and away the hardest thing he’d ever done. Charging a Jap machine-gun nest would have been nothing next to it. The Japs could only kill him.
Had Longstreet yelled at him (or, worse, laughed at him), he would have sat there and taken it, but something inside him would have died. He expected one or the other. Looking for sympathy from an officer was a losing game. But the captain said, “Well, your sentiments do you credit. And you aren’t going into this with your eyes shut tight, anyhow. That’s something.”
“How do you mean, sir?” Pete asked.
“If you reckon you’re the first Marine to fall head over heels for a Russian dancing girl or a Chinese singsong girl, I have to tell you you’re mistaken,” Longstreet said. “A lot of ’em think their sweethearts were virgins till they charmed the girls off their feet and into bed. You seem to know better than that.”
“Er—yes, sir.” Pete’s ears heated. He’d wished he might have been Vera’s first, but he hadn’t been able to imagine he really was. He mumbled, “She never tried to pretend anything different.”
“One for her, then,” the captain said. “You’ve got it bad, but you could have it worse.”
“All I want to do is make it legal. She does, to
o.”
“I’m sure she does.” Longstreet’s voice was dry as dust. “The advantages for her are obvious. I’m sure the advantages for you are obvious, too, but they aren’t the kind that’s got anything to do with what’s legal and what isn’t.”
Pete’s ears caught fire again. “Well, sir, what the … dickens am I gonna do?”
“It’s not a simple question. First, there’s the issue of whether you ought to marry the, mm, the young lady.” Captain Longstreet raised a hand. “I know you think so now, but whether you will a year from now may be a different story. Like I said, you aren’t the first Marine I’ve seen in this boat.”
“Yes, sir,” Pete muttered. As far as he was concerned, whatever Longstreet knew about love he’d got out of books. You could read about bar brawls, too, but reading about them wouldn’t tell you what getting into one was like.
“And I hate to have to remind you of it, but you are a Marine on active duty,” Longstreet added. “You can’t just go marrying somebody, the way you could if you were a couple of civilians back in the States.”
“I understand that, sir. That’s how come I came to see you.”
“Okay. Now we get down to the really hard part. It’s not easy for a Marine on active duty to get married. He’s supposed to be a Marine first, not a husband first. The country does expect that of him.” Longstreet sighed. “And if you reckon it’s hard for a Marine to get hitched in a regular way, it’s at least five times as hard for him to tie the knot with a stateless person. At least.” He spoke with a certain somber satisfaction.
“Tell me what I’ve got to do. Whatever it is, I’ll do it,” Pete declared.
To his surprise, the captain smiled. It was a wintry smile, but it was a smile even so. “You sound like a Marine, all right,” Longstreet said.
“Sir, I am a Marine, sir!” Pete sprang to his feet and came to rigor mortis-like attention.
“At ease, son,” Longstreet told him. “At ease. Sit down. Relax. Take an even strain. This may happen. I won’t tell you it’s impossible. But it won’t be easy, and it won’t be quick. If you think it will, you’ll burn out your bearings and you won’t get anything for it but heartache.”
The War That Came Early: West and East Page 40
