“Sir, when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, Germany was ready and Stalin wasn’t. But the Russians still won. They were on the side with more resources and more manpower. They just had to buy the time so they could use them,” Marshall said. “I didn’t think they could, but they did. We’re in the same situation now. We and our allies have more men than the Russians and our industry is more productive than theirs. And our bombs have hurt them worse than theirs have hurt us.”
“Every word you say is true, George.” Truman had to resist the impulse to call the Secretary of Defense General Marshall. Having resisted it, he went on, “Trouble is, I’m not sure how much that matters. Stalin wasn’t going to surrender to Hitler no matter what. I don’t have nearly so much confidence in our allies in Western Europe. If Russian soldiers start roaring over their frontiers, they’re liable to decide they’ve been invaded often enough, thank you kindly, and cut a deal with dear old Uncle Joe.”
Marshall weighed that with his usual deliberation—and with his usual poker face. He and Vyacheslav Molotov owned two of the deadest pans Truman had ever run into. Marshall knew the countries, and the people who ran them, too. He’d worn five stars on each shoulder during the last war. Before he ran the Defense Department, he’d been Secretary of State. The aid plan that had been helping Western Europe recover bore his name, and with good reason.
“There is that, Mr. President,” he said at last, sounding reluctant to admit it but too honest by nature to deny it. “The Dutch and the Italians are as shaky as a big bowl of Jell-O right now.”
Truman glanced toward the map again. The Dutch could see—could practically smell—the Russians coming. The Italians were already up to their eyebrows with them. The Red Army held most of the Po Valley, the richest, most industrialized part of Italy. It wasn’t pushing south, into the rest of the boot. No: it was heading west, to give a possible invasion of France two prongs, not just one.
“Too many Communists in Italy before the war started—even worse than France,” the President said. George Marshall nodded somberly. Truman continued, “But West Germany is the big one. If Stalin takes all of it, he has the whole continent in a stranglehold.”
“If he takes all of it, or looks like he’s about to, whatever deals you cut with Konrad Adenauer don’t seem so important,” Marshall remarked.
“Yes, that’s also crossed my mind,” Truman said. The West German Chancellor had asked—begged—him not to use atom bombs on the fragile new almost-country Adenauer was in charge of. Truman understood the logic. He was supposed to be defending West Germany, not laying it waste. The Russians were, and needed to be seen as being, the ones responsible for that.
If, however, there was no free West Germany left to defend…If it turned into a matter of saving Western Europe rather than saving West Germany…In that case, didn’t you do what needed doing and pick up the pieces afterwards?
If there were any pieces left to pick up. If it wasn’t more like spilt milk. All you could do about spilt milk was cry. And even crying didn’t help.
“The genie is out of the bottle, Mr. President,” Marshall said quietly.
“Yeah, he is. And I let him out, and I can’t put him back.” Truman scowled. “If the Red Chinese weren’t massacring our men in North Korea…MacArthur never dreamt they’d come over the border like that. Neither did I.”
“Our best intelligence estimates insisted they wouldn’t.” Marshall paused, looking as unhappy as a man with a largely expressionless face was ever likely to. “Which only goes to show what are thought to be the best intelligence estimates are worth.”
“Not even the paper they’re printed on.” Truman wasn’t just unhappy. He was ticked off. “A lot of folks would say the smart boys who made those estimates and got us to believe them have blood—and plutonium—on their hands.”
“Are you one of those people, sir?” Marshall asked.
“You know damn well I’m not, George,” the President said. “They were responsible for making the estimates. I was—I am—responsible for acting on them. Whatever ends up happening, whether it’s good, bad, or indifferent, it’s my fault.”
Marshall nodded. “Anyone would know at once that you used to be an officer, sir.”
“FDR wasn’t, and he stayed in the hot seat a lot longer than I have.” Now it was Truman’s turn to hold up a forefinger. “But he was a ‘former naval person,’ hey? Just like Churchill.”
“Not quite like Churchill.” Marshall was relentlessly precise. “Franklin Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy. That is an important job. But Churchill was First Sea Lord. Especially during wartime, that’s one of the two biggest jobs in the British government, right up there with Prime Minister.”
“Churchill handled both of them pretty well, you’d have to say. Well, so did Roosevelt.” Truman made a face. He was blathering on about this stuff so he wouldn’t have to make the military decisions he’d come to Marshall’s office to make. “If we are going to stop the Russians, we will have to apologize to Adenauer. That’s how it looks to me. Using A-bombs in Germany—maybe in Italy, too—looks to me to be the only hope we have of containing them. The only way we have of keeping our other European allies in line, too.”
“I was going to mention that if you didn’t, Mr. President,” Marshall said.
“I bet you were.” Truman rolled his eyes. “I am really sick and tired of listening to Charlie goddamn de Gaulle going on about how soft the Germans have it. Germany got pulverized in the fighting. I don’t call that soft, whether de Gaulle does or not.”
“If you expect a Frenchman to stay rational after Paris gets hit, sir, you’re expecting too much.”
“Obviously. But the Russians have dropped atom bombs on Germany, too, not that the French remember that.” Truman chuckled harshly. “De Gaulle doesn’t care whether everything east of the Rhine turns into radioactive glass by day after tomorrow—not as long as the wind blows the fallout toward Russia and not toward him, he doesn’t.”
“That’s about the size of it, Mr. President,” Marshall said. “Shall I draft, for your review and revision, orders to use atom bombs against the forward Russian positions? If we do that, of course, we can’t rule out the likelihood that they’ll do the same to ours. We also can’t rule out the chance that they’ll strike cities and other targets behind the lines.”
London. Amsterdam. Brussels. The names tolled like mournful bells inside Truman’s head. “We can make them sorrier than they make us,” he said. “I wish one of ours had caught Stalin. That would have solved a lot of our problems.” He sighed and scowled and sighed again. Stalin animated the USSR the way Hitler’d animated Nazi Germany. Truman didn’t believe there could be peace as long as the Soviet dictator lived.
“COME ON, you stupid lice!” the Feldwebel shouted, for all the world as if it were still 1943, still the Führer’s war, still the Wehrmacht. “Into the motherfucking trucks!”
That was a model Gustav Hozzel wasn’t familiar with. But lack of familiarity wasn’t what made him ask, “How come, Feld? We’re holding the Ivans pretty good where we’re at.”
“How come? How come?” The sergeant acted as if he couldn’t believe his ears. He probably couldn’t; the Wehrmacht hadn’t encouraged privates to question noncoms. “What are you, Hozzel, a goddamn American or something? We get into the trucks because we’ve got orders to get into the trucks. They give us the orders, and we follow ’em. That’s how things work, see?”
Max Bachman saw the flaw in that, the same as Gustav did. “And then the war-crimes tribunal shoots us because we followed them,” he said in a low voice.
Low, but not low enough. “You another troublemaking Scheissekopf, Bachman?” the Feldwebel growled.
“Not me.” Max denied everything, as Gustav would have. He mooched toward one of the waiting American-built trucks. Gustav had hated those beasts in the last war. They let the Russians move up to and around the battlefield faster than his own poorly motorized side could. He
headed for that truck, too. The plundered AK-47 was slung on his back.
“See what kind of shit you end up in for mouthing off?” Rolf said as he scrambled in behind Gustav.
“Wunderbar, Herr Gruppenführer,” Gustav answered with sour relish. “Come on, General Staff guy. You tell me why we’re retreating when the Reds can’t knock us back.”
The ex-Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler man opened his mouth. Then he closed it again without saying anything. After a couple of seconds, he took another stab at it: “I don’t know, but I don’t need to know. The officers who gave the orders must’ve had some good reason for ’em.”
“You fought on the Ostfront, and you say that?” Gustav rolled his eyes. “I’ve seen Catholics with less faith in Pope fucking Pius than you. Stupid orders happen all the damn time, and you know it as well as I do.”
“This is a stupid order, too,” Max added. “We may pull out of Germany altogether if we retreat from here.”
“That’s another twenty-five, thirty kilometers,” Gustav said. “We’d better not retreat that far.”
“If we do,” Rolf said darkly, “it’s a sure sign the Americans aren’t serious about staying in Germany and fighting it out with the damned Reds.”
“They’ve had a hell of a lot of soldiers killed and maimed for people who’re just playing around,” Gustav pointed out.
Rolf gave him a dirty look. “You know what I mean.”
“Half the time, Rolf, I don’t think even you know what you mean,” Gustav said.
The Waffen-SS veteran gave back a gesture that meant different things depending on who used it. When an Ami formed his thumb and forefinger into a circle and held up the other three fingers, Gustav had learned, he meant everything was fine. But when a German did that, he was calling you an asshole.
Guidebooks said the town of Wesel was surrounded by pleasant meadows and green forests. The sorry bastards who wrote guidebooks hadn’t looked at the place and its environs since the Amis and Germans did their goddamnedest to hold the Red Army out of it. Gustav did look, out the back of the truck. The town, which had been smashed in the last war and then rebuilt, was leveled again. Wrecked vehicles and shell holes dotted the meadows, like carbuncles and smallpox scars on the face of a man with horrible skin. Shells and bombs and rockets and machine guns had chewed the forests to kindling and toothpicks.
“All we need now is a flight of Shturmoviks to come shoot us up,” Rolf said. “That’s still just as much fun as it was in Hungary back in ’45.”
“Or in Poland,” Gustav said.
“Or in Czechoslovakia,” Max agreed. They all chuckled, on nearly identical sour notes. Among the three of them, they’d done nearly everything German soldiers on the Eastern Front could do.
Nearly. None of them had been at Stalingrad. As far as Gustav knew, none of the Landsers who’d surrendered there had come home even yet. He wondered how many were still alive somewhere in Russia, and whether any still were. He and Max and Rolf hadn’t got stuck in any of the smaller pockets the Ivans had cut off, either. Not many who had came out again.
“How far back are they taking us?” Max muttered discontentedly after the truck, and the others in the convoy, had jounced along for a while—the highway was in no better shape than the meadows and forests.
“A good long ways, looks like,” Gustav said. “Here, have a knock of this.” He drank from a little flask of schnapps he’d extracted from a trouser pocket.
“Don’t mind if I do.” Max also drank. After a moment’s hesitation, he offered Rolf the flask.
“Danke schön.” Rolf tilted his head back. His Adam’s apple worked. He handed the flask back to Gustav. “Afraid I killed it. Pretty good hooch, though. I’m obliged.”
Which meant that, next time he had some, he’d share…if he happened to feel like it. Gustav stowed the flask again. “Wasn’t that much in there to begin with,” he said, to let Rolf know he wasn’t sore it came back empty.
“Fuck me!” Max said a little while later. “We are in Holland.”
“Ja.” Gustav had seen the sign announcing the border, too. He didn’t like it any better than Max did, and not much better than Rolf. If that fat Feldwebel had been in this truck with them, they would have taken turns scorching him up one side and down the other. That wouldn’t have been a Wehrmacht kind of thing to do, but it would have been a human kind of thing.
Rolf scorched him even though he wasn’t here: “That stinking turd probably spent the war on garrison duty in Oslo, screwing the Norwegian girls. Pricks like him always have the luck.”
As soon as the Germans got out of the truck, the Feldwebel and others like him started shouting, “Stay close to your transport! Stay close to your transport! Don’t go wandering off!”
“Well, hell,” Gustav said. “I was going to knock a Dutchman over the head, steal his bicycle, and take off for Amsterdam to see the sights.”
Max wagged a finger at him. “You better watch out, funny boy, or they’ll put you in the movies.”
Rolf wagged a finger at him, too—a different finger. That gesture was American by origin, but there weren’t many Europeans these days who didn’t understand it. Laughing, Gustav gave it back.
A couple of Dutchmen on bicycles did ride up to look the newcomers over. When they realized the soldiers were Germans, not Americans, they spoke to each other in their own language. It was close enough to Gustav’s that he could almost understand them. He thought the gist was something like I hoped we were rid of these shitsacks for good.
Under other circumstances, he might have been tempted to make something of that. As things were, he felt more like a refugee than the invaders the Dutchmen remembered. He smoked appetizing American cigarettes and ate unappetizing American rations and pretended he couldn’t follow a word of Dutch.
Any artillery the Ivans aimed at the troops who’d pulled out of Wesel fell well short—another measure of how far back they’d gone. All the same, Gustav pulled his entrenching tool from his belt and dug himself a scrape to sleep in, piling up the dirt at the east side. The rest of the guys did the same thing. When you’d seen action, you dug in first and thought about it later.
And, in the middle of the night, a new sun woke him by rising, hideously bright, in the east. Then he saw it wasn’t the sun at all, but a mushroom cloud like the ones the newsreels and the papers showed.
Shivering as he watched it tower high into the sky, he suddenly realized why they’d retreated as far as they had. A little closer and…No, he didn’t want to think about that at all.
—
Istvan Szolovits curled up in a hole in the bottom of a battered trench as if he were a cat. Well, pretty much—cats didn’t wrap themselves in blankets before they went to sleep. He was about as happy as a man could be while fighting in a war he wanted nothing to do with.
One of the reasons he was so happy was that the fighting today had been much lighter than usual. Most of the time, the Americans and Germans in front of the forces in the vanguard of revolutionary socialism’s advance (he was steeped in the jargon, no matter how silly most of him thought it was) fought as hard as they could for as long as they could. They might be heading for the ash-heap of history, but they took as many people’s heroes with them as they could.
Today, though, only rear guards had held up the Hungarian People’s Army—and the Red Army, and the Poles. The enemy soldiers still fought ferociously, but fewer of them were doing the fighting.
Sergeant Gergely seemed pleased, or as pleased as the sour sergeant ever let himself seem. “Maybe we’ve got ’em on the run at last,” he said. “Took long enough, but maybe we have.”
Istvan stuck his head out of the hole. “That’d be good,” he said, meaning it in the sense of I’m less likely to get blown to pieces if we do.
Gergely’s sneering grin told him the noncom knew just how he meant it. But Gergely said, “You think I want to slug toe-to-toe all the goddamn time, you’re nuts. Easy’s always better than hard, ma
n. Christ, we must’ve come eight or ten kilometers past that fucking Wesel place that held us up for so long.”
“Sounds about right.” Istvan’s weary legs and sore feet told how much marching he’d done. That was one of the many reasons he was glad to roll back up in that blanket and dive headfirst into sleep.
He dove into it headfirst—and was smashed out of it he never knew how much later. A light brighter than a hundred suns seared his eyes. He feared it seared his face, too. A few seconds later, a blast picked him up and slammed him into the trench wall like an angry child throwing away a rag doll. He tried to breathe. His lungs didn’t want to find air.
For a second or two, he thought somebody’s 155—American or Soviet, he had no idea, and what difference did it make, anyhow?—had gone off right above the trench. But if it had, where was the deadly shower of metal fragments? People were screaming (though he heard them as if from very far away), but it sounded more like terror than mortal anguish.
As a matter of fact, he was screaming himself. When he noticed he was, he stopped. Slowly, slowly, the green and purple glare faded from before his eyes. His face still felt burned. He was bleeding from his nose. His mouth tasted of blood, too. The overpressure from the blast must have come close to killing him from the inside out.
When he saw the swelling, glowing cloud in the sky above Wesel a few kilometers behind him, he realized his imagined 155 was like a fleabite alongside a great white shark.
“I can’t see! Mother of God help me, I can’t see!” That was Andras Orban, bawling like a baby—and who could blame him? He must not have covered his eyes as fast or as well as Istvan had. Istvan still couldn’t see very well himself, but his eyes did work after a fashion.
He said so, adding, “Hang on, Andras. Pour water on them—that may help a little. Give it some time. With luck, it’ll get better. My eyes are.”
“Up your ass, you fucking kike!” Andras shrieked. “Don’t you understand? I’m blind!”
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