“Beats me,” Mike answered cheerfully. “You know what, though? I don’t care. I’m gonna shoot it at Sanjurjo’s boys, and I’ll hit more of ’em with it than I would with the Spanish crap we’ve been using.”
“You got that right,” Chaim said. But he was someone who cared about why. He always had been. He wouldn’t have been a Marxist-Leninist—and he wouldn’t have been in Spain—if he weren’t.
He hunted up a French International he knew. Denis was older than he was: a Great War veteran. The Frenchman drank too much, but he was a good fellow to have around when things got tough. He also shared Chaim’s relentless itch to know. And, since he was a Frenchman, Chaim hoped he’d got word of which way the wind blew in his native land.
Chaim spoke no French. Denis knew no English; his German was limited to obscenities and the kinds of commands you might give to prisoners. He and Chaim stumbled along in Spanish. Neither was perfectly fluent, and each had an accent that sometimes puzzled the other, but they managed.
“How much do you want to bet even the War Ministry doesn’t know what’s going on with the ammo?” Denis said. “Maybe the Spaniards spread some money around and loosened things up—unofficially, of course.”
“Oh, of course.” Chaim fought dry with dry. “But the Republic is always broke. Where did it get the money?”
Denis spread his hands. They looked a lot like Chaim’s: the nails were short and ragged, and the callused palms had dirt ground into them. “I don’t know mierda like that. Maybe they got their gold back from the Russians.”
“Sure. Maybe they did.” Chaim exchanged a knowing look with Denis. Now that Stalin had the Republic’s gold reserves—to protect them and to pay for war supplies—how likely was he to send them back? No matter how good a Marxist-Leninist Chaim was, he didn’t believe it for a minute.
The cynical glint in Denis’ eye said he didn’t, either. But he didn’t come out with anything like that, not out loud. Talking too much could land you in more trouble than you ever wanted to see.
In musing tones, Denis said, “I wonder how happy the fucking Nazis would be if they knew France was juicing their little friends’ worst enemies here.”
“They’d be enchanted,” Chaim answered with a sly grin. “Just enchanted.” Encantar—the verb to enchant—bore an obvious resemblance in Spanish to cantar, to sing. After a beat, Chaim realized the relationship to a singing word was there in English, too, but it wasn’t so plain in his native tongue.
“Fuck ’em all, enchanted or not,” Denis said. “If Daladier’d ever spit Hitler’s cock out of his mouth …” He shook his head. “Too much to hope for.”
“Any which way, we’ve still got these cartridges,” Chaim said. No matter who, at whatever level in the French chain of command, had turned a blind eye, the crates were here. They wouldn’t go to waste, either.
AS PEGGY DRUCE CRISSCROSSED Pennsylvania and made forays into other states to promote the war effort, she found herself facing an odd fact: the fight might be on, but it didn’t seem to make much difference.
For one thing, it was so far away. Two thousand miles from Pennsylvania to the Pacific. Another two thousand from the Pacific to Hawaii. And another two or three thousand miles after that to where the guns were actually going off. Hitler’s fight against Stalin was closer than FDR’s battle with Tojo and Hirohito.
And, for another, it hadn’t affected the country much. Grocery stores were still full of unrationed food. Most gasoline went to the military, and you couldn’t get new tires for love or money. That turned the Sunday-afternoon drive into a thing of the past, but it was about as far as restrictions went. It was more than enough to make people piss and moan as if complaining were going out of style.
Peggy thought they were nuts. Of course, she’d seen Germany. One look at what went on there would have been plenty to make the grumblers turn up their toes. No gas at all for any civilians but doctors. No tires, either—in fact, the Germans took tires and batteries from civilian vehicles so the Wehrmacht could use them. Rationed clothing. All the new stuff was shoddy, or else made of cheap synthetic fibers. And the food … Next to no fruit. Precious little meat. Milk for kids and expectant mothers only. Lots of potatoes and turnips and cabbage and black bread. Awful cigarettes, and even worse ersatz coffee.
The Germans bitched about it. Not even the SS could stop that. But bitching was all they did. They let off steam, and then they went back to the serious business of conquering their neighbors.
By the way a lot of Americans carried on, they wanted to string Roosevelt up from the nearest lamppost. “He said he wouldn’t get us into a war, and then he went and did!” If Peggy’d heard that once, she’d heard it a thousand times. It was commonly followed by, “Who the devil cares what goes on way the devil over there across the ocean?”
“You’d be singing a different tune if the Japs had hit Pearl Harbor as hard as they wanted to,” she would answer.
“If, if, if,” the naysayers said. “Who gives a darn about might-have-beens? It didn’t happen, so what are you jumping up and down about it for?”
What would really have got Pennsylania’s attention was a war closer to home. Had Hitler declared war on the USA … But he hadn’t. He had warned that German U-boats would go after American ships in the Atlantic now that England was fighting him again, but that was as far as he’d gone. He seemed to be telling Roosevelt, If you want to declare war on me, go right ahead. Be my guest.
Peggy had a picture of FDR doing that. Right next to it, she had a picture of Congress refusing to ratify the declaration. The Japs had started shooting at the same time as they declared war on America. That didn’t leave anybody much choice. Hitler, for once, seemed content to let his opponents make the first move.
And, because he did, he confused American politics. (That plenty of people wanted to see Stalin, roasted, on a platter with an apple in his mouth sure didn’t hurt.) “Why are folks so blind?” Peggy asked when she got back to Philadelphia after one of her politicking swings.
Herb looked at her. “ ‘No one in this world, so far as I know, has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people,’ ” he quoted with obvious relish.
“Is that Barnum?” Peggy asked.
“Nope.” Herb paused to light a cigarette. “Old Phineas Taylor said ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’ Same sentiment, different words. The other one’s from Henry Louis instead.”
“Oh. Mencken,” Peggy said with faint—or maybe not so faint—distaste. “Back in the day, I used to think he was the cleverest man alive.”
“That’s okay, sweetie. So did he,” her husband said.
Peggy snorted and went on, “But he started wearing thin when he went after Roosevelt like a stray dog chasing a car. And he’s one of the jerks who stand up and whinny when they play Deutschland über Alles.” She shuddered. Whenever the Nazis announced a victory on the radio, they preceded it with the German national anthem and the Horst Wessel Lied, the Party’s song.
“He always has been. He left the Baltimore Sun for a while during the last war because he liked the Kaiser too well,” Herb said.
“Did he? I didn’t remember that,” Peggy confessed. “The other funny thing is, how come two of the snottiest so-and-sos the country’s ever seen both went by initials instead of their names?”
“Well, I kind of sympathize with Barnum,” Herb said. “If I got stuck with Phineas, I wouldn’t want the world to know about it, either. But there’s nothing wrong with Mencken’s monicker. Maybe he just needed a short waddayacallit.”
“Byline,” Peggy said.
“Yeah. One of them.” Herb nodded. “You’re right, though. It’s funny.”
“Looking back at things, the Kaiser wasn’t such a bad guy,” Peggy said. She watched Herb bristle, as she’d known he would. After all, he’d put on khaki and gone Over There to settle Wilhelm’s hash a generation earlier. All the same, she stuck out her chin and went on, “Well
, he wasn’t, darn it. Compared to Hitler, he was a regular Rotarian, honest to God.”
“Compared to Hitler, Stalin’s a Rotarian, for crying out loud,” Herb said. “Unless you’re a Rotarian yourself, I mean.”
“Or unless you’re Mencken,” Peggy put in.
“Or unless you’re Mencken,” her husband agreed. “Of course, he doesn’t like Jews much, either. One more reason for him to root for the Nazis against the Reds.”
“I know Mencken doesn’t like Jews, but I don’t think he has any idea how much Hitler hates them,” Peggy said slowly. “You know who the luckiest people in the world are? All the Jews in Poland.”
Herb blinked. “How do you figure that?”
“Poland’s on Hitler’s side. If it weren’t, he’d be murdering the Jews there. I mean murdering, no two ways about it. The Poles don’t love Jews, either, but they don’t want to see them dead. Not like that, anyhow.”
Herb took a last drag on the cigarette, stubbed it out in a brass ashtray on the end table by his chair, and lit another one. A thin, straight whisper of smoke rose from the ashtray till he noticed and did a proper job of killing the butt. In a low, troubled voice, he said, “You see stories buried at the bottom of page nine in the paper: pieces where the Russians claim the Germans are massacring Jews.”
“Uh-huh. You do. You don’t see a heck of a lot of stories where the Germans deny it, either,” Peggy said.
“I know.” Herb smoked the new cigarette in quick, fierce puffs. “I’d always thought it was because claims like that weren’t even worth denying, know what I mean? Now I wonder.”
“I’ve wondered all along,” said Peggy, who’d seen the fun the Nazis had with Jews ever since the day they invaded Czechoslovakia. She’d done more than wonder, in fact. She’d believed every word.
“We should do something about that,” Herb said.
“Toss me your cigarettes, will you?” Peggy said, liking him very much. He was the best kind of American. Show him something wrong and he wanted to set it right. The only trouble was, Europe didn’t work that way. So much history piled up on the hatreds there that sometimes pinning the blame was impossible after all this time. Which didn’t stop people from slaughtering one another in carload lots to try to drown an ancient slight in blood.
Good American tobacco helped her not think about any of that for a little while. Maybe, if all the Europeans and the Japs were this prosperous, they wouldn’t want to smash in their neighbors’ skulls with pickaxes any more.
Or maybe they would, but they’d choose a fancier grade of pickaxe to do their dirty work. That struck Peggy as much too likely. She shook her head. The more you looked at this old world, the more fouled up it seemed to be. And she hadn’t even started drinking yet.
Chapter 14
Theo Hossbach knew the way to Smolensk. Whenever his Panzer III and the other machines in the regiment turned toward the Soviet stronghold, the Ivans fought twice as hard as they did the rest of the time. And, considering how much trouble they made any time at all …
He didn’t think the old Panzer II in which he’d gone through so much with Hermann Witt and Adi Stoss would have survived this campaign. No sooner had that gone through his head than he laughed at himself. Of course the old panzer wouldn’t have survived the campaign. It damn well hadn’t.
So now he’d had to get used to two new crewmen. All things considered, he would have been happier charging a Red Army machine gun with a Luger. The Russians could only kill him. They wouldn’t want to try to get to know him.
He had new duties, too, but that wasn’t so bad. Now he sat up front in the panzer, next to Adi, with the radio set between them. He could see out. He needed to see out, because he was in charge of the bow machine gun as well as the radio. He could use them both at once if he had to, controlling the gun with a padded mount that accommodated his forehead.
Getting used to two new people’s habits seemed much harder. Kurt Poske liked to sing and whistle to himself. Sometimes the loader didn’t even realize he was doing it. Theo wanted to reach back and smash his kneecap with a wrench. It might have been better had Poske managed to stay on key. On the other hand, it might not. He still would have been there.
Lothar Eckhardt, by contrast, cracked his knuckles. Everybody probably did that once in a while, but the gunner did it all the time. It sounded like gunfire coming from behind Theo. He could have come up with a million noises he would rather have heard.
A Panzer II’s turret had room for only one man. Sergeant Witt had had to command the panzer and load and fire the cannon and the coaxial machine gun. That left him as busy as a one-armed paper hanger with the hives, but he did it for a long time. He didn’t need to any more, not with this bigger, more modern machine. But everything seemed to come with a price.
Driver and bow gunner/radioman could talk to each other without their crewmates’ hearing. They could, but mostly they didn’t. Theo didn’t talk much no matter what. Adi made more noise, but he respected his comrade’s peculiarities. That was one of the things that made soldiering beside him a pleasure.
As they rattled along one morning, Theo found a question escaping him: “You all right with the new guys?”
Adi glanced over in surprise. A sentence from Theo was like a couple of chapters from anybody else. “Ja,” he answered, pitching his voice so it wouldn’t carry back to the turret. “Pretty much. We’d all be dead by now if they didn’t shoot straight.”
He had that right, no two ways about it. Eckhardt had been a pretty good gunner before he got this slot. The Reich’s training centers took care of that. And Sergeant Witt, with his own wealth of experience, made the kid better than he had been. Except for singing and whistling, Poske did all right in action, too. Loader was the most junior position in the five-man crew.
None of that had much to do with what Theo meant, though. He tried again: “They give you a hard time?”
“Nah.” Stoss shook his head. “No worse than usual. Nothing a guy can’t handle, know what I mean?”
Theo nodded. Even the usual kind of ragging could rub a man raw. If Heinz Naumann, the guy who commanded the old Panzer II before Sergeant Witt, hadn’t got killed, he and Adi would have fought it out. Theo was sure of that. He was also pretty sure Adi would have done for the late sergeant. Lucky it didn’t happen—lucky for everybody but Naumann.
One more question formed in Theo’s head. He didn’t ask it. Like a cat, he had a very clear sense of limits.
An authoritative voice spoke into his earphones: “Look for Ivans ahead, map square Red-6.”
“Red-6. I hear you,” Theo responded, and relayed the news to Witt.
A brief pause followed. No doubt the panzer commander was checking his maps. German maps of Russia weren’t nearly so good as the people who printed them thought, but you did the best you could with what you had. Profanity followed the pause. “Now they tell us,” Witt said. “We’re already in square Red-fucking-6.”
As if on cue, machine-gun bullets clattered off the right side of the Panzer III’s hull. If not for the hardened steel, some of them would have punctured Theo. They sounded like pebbles tossed onto a corrugated-iron roof—but not enough like that. Pebbles on an iron roof might startle, but they wouldn’t scare the piss out of you.
Though he had a vision port over there, he didn’t want to open it. That might have let in a bullet or two, and he would rather have dealt with angry wasps. Wasps only made you wish you were dead. The Russians used old-fashioned, heavy, water-cooled machine guns, like the German Maxim from the last war. They weren’t very portable, which didn’t mean they wouldn’t chew holes in you once they did get set up.
“Panzer halt!” Sergeant Witt ordered, and Adi Stoss hit the brakes. The turret slewed sideways. Witt gave crisp commands. Eckhardt fired—once, twice. Shell casings clattered at the bottom of the fighting compartment. The stink of cordite filled the panzer. Witt grunted in satisfaction. “Forward again, Adi,” he said, and traversed the turret so
it faced the front once more.
That machine gun wouldn’t bother anyone else. Theo still wondered how many other Ivans lurked over to the right. German foot soldiers would find out—probably the hard way. No trees off in that direction, so there probably weren’t any Red Army panzers lurking there. He could hope not, anyhow. He could—and he did.
He peered out through his forward vision port. That one boasted thick armor glass, like the stuff in a Stuka’s windshield. It also had a steel shutter to keep the glass from getting nicked when bullets started flying. Scars and divots on the armor glass said the shutter didn’t always get used. You needed to know what was going on … didn’t you?
Back in the Panzer II, Theo had never known what was going on, or no more than the radio and his crewmates told him. Now he could see out. Monkey curiosity made him keep doing it, too, though as often as not he couldn’t change anything. He could, and did, tell himself it was line of duty. He had the machine gun, after all. But a lot of the time he was just nosy.
He stiffened in dismay at the same time as Adi let out a horrified yip: “Fucking Ivans!” Where the devil did they come from? One second nothing, the next a swarm of riflemen springing from the ground like the warriors old what’s-his-name, the Greek, got when he sowed the dragon’s teeth.
Well, Theo had some dragon’s teeth of his own. The bow machine gun chattered, spitting brass out of the side of its mouth. The turret machine gun hammered away, too. The Russian infantrymen went down in waves like threshed barley. But the ones who didn’t get shot kept coming. They were brave, too, damn them.
And they wouldn’t just have rifles. Some of them would carry Molotov cocktails. Theo didn’t want to think about blazing gasoline dripping into the panzer—no, not even a little bit. So many things that would catch fire, from paint to explosives to precious flesh. They’d have grenades. One of those through a hatch could ruin your day. Or bigger charges would blow off a track. A stuck panzer was like a hamstrung bull waiting to be slaughtered.
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