Last Orders: The War That Came Early

by Harry Turtledove

  And what he said sounded like love poetry next to the fusillade of curses that poured from Adi Stoss. Most of what the driver said was aimed at himself. His tight left turn, after all, was what had made the Panzer IV shed the track in the first place.

  “Himmeldonnerwetter!” he fumed. “A seeing-eye dog right out of driving school could have done that better than I did! I mean, a fucking blind seeing-eye dog could have.”

  “Take it easy, Adi,” Hermann Witt said. “I told you to turn left, and you turned left.”

  “And this piece of shit went and came off,” Adi snarled. “If I’d been a little smoother, it wouldn’t have.”

  He gave a savage tug on the rope attached to one end of the thrown track. Little by little, the crew were wrestling the links over the return rollers and back toward the drive sprocket. Once they got the track onto the sprocket—if they ever did—they could reattach it to the other end, adjust the tension, and ride off into the sunset like cowboys in an American Western.

  Sergeant Witt, perhaps incautiously, said as much. Adi clapped a muddy hand to his muddy forehead—he’d already used the gesture before, more than once. “Sure we can,” he said. “If we don’t bog down completely in the meantime. If the Ivans don’t jump us. If—”

  “If you don’t quit pissing and moaning,” Witt broke in. Just like the track, the panzer commander’s patience had come apart.

  Adi Stoss stared at him. Witt hardly ever barked like that. When he did, he had good reason to. Adi, luckily for him, owned enough mother wit to see as much. “Sorry, Sergeant,” he said, his voice sheepish.

  One of the things that made Witt a good panzer commander was not staying mad at the other guys in the crew. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get back to work, then.” Another thing that made him a good commander was working hard and getting filthy like everybody else.

  As they yanked and strained and swore, they all kept their Schmeissers where they could grab them in a hurry. Theo didn’t think any Red Army men were in the neighborhood, but he wouldn’t have sworn an oath in court. The Germans called their Russian foes Indians not least because of how they popped up where you least expected them. And thinking about riding off like cowboys naturally called Indians to mind.

  In the distance, artillery grumbled and machine guns chattered. When you were cooped up inside your steel box, you never heard things like that. All you heard was the engine’s growl and the rattle and clank of the suspension. Enemy bullets hitting the panzer sounded like gravel on a tin roof. Odds were you wouldn’t hear the round that got through your armor. You’d just hear yourself scream—but not for long.

  After a couple of hours of scraped knuckles and broken fingernails and a cut or two, they had the track back in place. Kurt Poske surveyed their handiwork and delivered the verdict: “Boy, that was fun.”

  “My ass!” Adi said.

  The loader eyed him, then shook his head. “Sorry, sweetheart,” he lisped in falsetto, “but it’s not your ass I crave.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” Adi told him. “If you talk that way, though, you’re probably after Theo’s instead.”

  Theo jumped. He hadn’t expected to get dragged into the raillery. To make sure Kurt had no doubt where he stood on such things, he clapped a battered, protective hand to the seat of his grimy black coveralls. Everybody laughed.

  “Come on, girls.” Sergeant Witt lisped and shrilled, too. “Let’s get back to business, shall we?” His voiced dropped into its normal register. “No chocolate-stabbers in this crew. That’s one thing we don’t have to worry about, anyway.”

  As Theo clambered into the panzer again, he was chewing on Witt’s comment. By Adi’s expression, so was he. Also by his expression, he wasn’t so sure he fancied the flavor.

  But Witt was all business after Adi fired up the Maybach engine and the panzer got moving again. At the sergeant’s order, Theo radioed the company commander and regimental headquarters to let them know the crew had got the track back on. They both acknowledged the report. If they were delighted at the news, they hid it very well.

  As the panzer chugged along, Adi glanced toward Theo and said, “I’m trying to drive like I’m on eggs. I don’t want to have to do that again any time soon.”

  “I believe you,” Theo said.

  Adi smiled, as people often did when they got Theo to talk. Then he said, “I hope we stop in one of those Russian villages with the bathhouse where you throw the water onto hot rocks and you steam till you can’t stand it any more—then you get a bucket of cold water in the kisser or jump in the snow if it’s wintertime and whack each other with the birch-twig bundles. I’ve got all the dirt in the world on me right now.”

  “Not all of it.” Theo spoke again. He held up his hands so Adi could see he was wearing a good bit of the world himself.

  “Well, maybe you’re carrying some, too.” Adi dropped his voice so Theo could still hear but the three crewmates back in the turret wouldn’t be able to: “You haven’t been carrying yours for the past two thousand years, though.”

  Theo wondered what he was supposed to say to that. He said what he usually said: nothing.

  “You know what the real bastard is?” Adi hadn’t expected anything different, and went on without waiting for any kind of reply: “The real bastard is, if they come for me, it won’t matter that I’ve spent a couple of years blowing up Ivans with you clowns. They won’t care. And all of you are liable to wind up in deep shit if they decide you knew about me but didn’t say anything.”

  “Knew what?” Theo asked, as if he hadn’t the faintest idea what the driver might be talking about.

  “Ach, so. Funny, Theo. I’m laughing, see?” The noises that came out of Adi’s mouth might have sounded like laughter to him, but they wouldn’t have to any normal human being. After those noises, he said, “Knew why—or one of the reasons why—I don’t go to soldiers’ brothels. The girls’d be too likely to remember me afterwards.”

  All this was as close as he ever came to naming his real—and serious—problem. Theo didn’t think it was that big a worry. The girls German authorities dragged into soldiers’ whorehouses in these parts rarely had a long afterwards in which to remember anybody, or any body part. Of course, that in itself was another reason both Theo and Adi stayed away from such establishments.

  When they bivouacked, it wasn’t in a village with a bathhouse. It was in the middle of a muddy field with the grass and weeds all torn up by panzer tracks and starting to yellow. There was a field kitchen in amongst the other panzers. Because their Panzer IV got there late, the stewed grain and turnips and sausage in the boiler were getting cold. Theo and his crewmates filled their mess tins anyhow. The stew spackled over the empty places between their ribs.

  You hated to get under your panzer in weather like this. It was liable to sink down into the mud and squash you. If you used shelter halves to make a tent, you’d put your blanket on the mud. If you used the shelter halves for ground sheets, you’d get rained on. Theo slept sitting up inside the panzer. He was so tired, he didn’t care about being uncomfortable. The other guys fought the rain. To him, that was their problem.

  During the summer, Spain got hotter than Czechoslovakia ever did. Vaclav Jezek bitched about that. During the winter, the cold of the central Spanish plateau pierced him to the root. He bitched about that, too.

  During the fall, it rained. He really bitched about that. Any soldier hated being in the field while God pissed on him. A sniper, who had to stay in one place for hours at a stretch, hated it even more.

  Benjamin Halévy was as sympathetic as usual: “You can always throw away your elephant gun and go back to being an ordinary soldier, you know.”

  Vaclav hated the antitank rifle’s weight and clumsy length. He clutched the monster as if it were his beloved just the same. “I’ve lugged this fucker all over Western Europe,” he said, exaggerating a little but not all that much. “I’ll be damned if I get rid of it now. It’s part of me.”

&n
bsp; “Like a wart. Or a tumor,” Halévy said.

  He might have been right. Vaclav was too stubborn to care. If he weren’t, he wouldn’t have wound up in the army of the Czechoslovakian government-in-exile to begin with. He gave Halévy a gesture that, to the American Internationals, meant everything was fine. To someone from Central Europe, it implied something else. Halévy chuckled. He never got stuffy about rank. And if he weren’t a stubborn anti-Fascist himself, he wouldn’t have ended up in Spain, either.

  Out Vaclav went before dawn the next morning. If he caught pneumonia lying in a shell hole that slowly filled with water … then he did, that was all. He hadn’t yet. He’d come down with the trots from eating bad food a few times, but that was about all. He didn’t know anybody who’d fought for a while without having that happen to him.

  On a day like this, he could get closer to the Nationalists’ lines than he did most of the time. They wouldn’t be able to spot him through the rain. How much he’d be able to see was another interesting question, though. He’d replaced the cardboard overhangs on his binoculars and rifle sight with ones he carved from scraps of wood, but he’d still be peering through the rain himself.

  Strips of torn burlap and bits of foliage attached to his uniform and helmet and rifle broke up his outline. When he found a good hiding place, he’d rub mud on his cheeks and on his hands so he wouldn’t show up against the background.

  Nobody had taught him any of this business. He’d learned it or made it up as he went along. He wondered why no sharp-eyed German had killed him in France before he figured out what was what. A couple of them had tried—he knew that. He was still here, while the Fritzes’ kin back in the Vaterland must have got wires to let them know their loved ones had died for the Führer.

  Come to think of it, this morning he might need to do his face, but his hands would get plenty filthy crawling to his hidey-hole. He found a good one, and improved it with his entrenching tool so the water ran down to the bottom and didn’t pool right under him.

  By the time the gloomy day broke, he was ready for whatever might happen. He lay very still: he might almost have been a forgotten corpse himself. A sparrow certainly thought he was. The stupid little bird landed less than a meter from his face and started hopping around looking for seeds or bugs or whatever else it could pop into its beak.

  “Hey, bird!” he said. “What d’you think you’re doing, bird?” He spoke quietly. He thought it was the motion of his lips rather than the noise he made that scared the sparrow. Whatever it was, the bird let out a horrified chirp and took off as if it had a 109 on its tail. God tracked falling sparrows, didn’t He? Well, here was one going up for Him to watch.

  A few Nationalists started shooting at the Republican line. Each of them fired slowly, taking a long time to work the bolt on his rifle and load a fresh round. They had orders to shoot, but they weren’t happy about them. Or, more likely, they hadn’t had their first slug of espresso yet, so they were only half awake.

  He could have killed them. They were spending way too long up on the firing step, too. But they weren’t worth wasting ammunition on, not for a sniper like him. They weren’t worth giving away his position for, either. The small change of war, Vaclav thought.

  Sanjurjo’s men would have been furious to know how he saw them. They were all heroes in their own minds. A lot of them truly were heroes. Spaniards didn’t even worry about chances no sane German or Czech would take. They were the small change of war even so.

  He swung his binoculars a few centimeters to the right and squinted through them again. He suddenly paid close attention to what he saw there: a fellow with binoculars of his own was looking back at him. Jezek didn’t care for that, not even a little bit. He muscled his rifle over to bear on the Spaniard. Of itself, his right hand slid toward the trigger.

  It wasn’t just that the bastard might be searching for him. Anybody with binoculars was likely to be an officer. An officer might be worth killing. And an officer looking out from the forward trench would be easy to kill, too. From here, Vaclav figured he wouldn’t have much trouble killing somebody over there with a Mauser.

  Nationalist officers often painted their rank badge in gold on the front of their helmets. Part of the point of being a Nationalist officer was showing that you were. They were as aggressively boastful as Spanish Republicans were aggressively egalitarian.

  He had trouble making out how big a wheel this brave fool was. The rain obscured whatever emblem he had above the outthrust brim of his German-style headgear. It did seem to have a lot of gold, though. That seemed promising, at least if you were a sniper.

  The Nationalist lowered the field glasses and turned to say something to someone Vaclav couldn’t see. He could see the man’s round face and heavy jowls, his gray mustache, and the pouches under his eyes.

  “Fuck me,” the Czech whispered as he quickly centered the crosshairs on the target’s head. He didn’t know that was who he thought it was. He didn’t know, no, but the shot was worth taking anyhow.

  Stay in routine, he told himself, and he did. Target lined up? Yes. A couple of deep breaths, in and out. Don’t hurry. Don’t worry. If you hurry and worry, you’ll miss. Don’t think about who it might be. Don’t think at all. Just aim and … shoot.

  He didn’t jerk the trigger. He brought his right index finger back hard enough to take up the slack, and then to fire the piece. The antitank rifle bellowed. Recoil slammed against his shoulder. Yes, he’d added to his collection of bruises. No, he hadn’t done anything stupid like breaking his collarbone.

  He hadn’t done anything stupid like missing, either. If you dropped a boulder on a watermelon from the top of a five-story building, you might get an explosion of red mist and gunk like the one a fat, highvelocity, armor-piercing slug produced when it slammed into some luckless soldier’s temple. Down went the Nationalist officer. He’d twitch for a minute or two, but he was already dead just the same.

  Now—had the assholes in the trenches over there spotted the flash through the rain? Did they know where it came from? If they did, how excited would they get about it?

  He didn’t need long to realize it hadn’t been some overage, overweight major of artillery. The Nationalists started running every which way. Through his field glasses, he saw that they started pointing every which way, too. He breathed a little easier then. No, they didn’t know which hole he was hiding in. They wouldn’t start throwing mortar bombs this way or send out a couple of squads of pissed-off soldiers after him.

  Rifle fire from the Nationalists’ trenches picked up. Machine guns started their malevolent snarl. The enemy artillery bombarded the Republican lines. Wet and chilly in his shell hole, Vaclav lay without moving and began to think he really might have done it.

  Peggy Druce fixed coffee and oatmeal for herself. While the coffee perked, she turned on the radio. It was eight o’clock straight up. She could catch the morning news while she got breakfast ready.

  Well, she could after they tried to sell her soap and toothpaste and canned pork and beans. “A little bit less pork for the duration,” the announcer said, “but just as much delicious goodness!” Undoubtedly just as much per can, too. They wouldn’t lower the price because they’d cheapened the mix. That would be un-American.

  NBC’s three familiar chimes rang out. “Here is the news,” a different announcer said. “American bombers gave Midway Island another pasting last night. Three planes are reported missing. One ditched in the Pacific, and most of the crew have been rescued.”

  Three planes were reported missing. That was what he said. Most people would take it to mean the United States had lost only three planes. If Peggy hadn’t got stuck in war-torn Europe, she would have taken it the same way. But all the warring countries over there told as many lies as they thought they could get away with, and then another one for luck. Three planes reported lost could mean any number down in flames.

  “President Roosevelt is delighted at industrial and agricultural product
ion,” the newsman said. “At a White House dinner last night, he said, ‘We are getting the tools we need for victory, and when we have them we will finish the job.’ The dinner menu included fried chicken, baked potatoes, and peas.”

  Peggy chuckled. That was the kind of plain food any American family might eat. FDR liked fancier recipes. When what he ate made the news, though, he kept it simple.

  After what the President had for dinner came the foreign news. The Germans were denying a Russian breakthrough in front of Minsk. Goebbels claimed Stalin was obviously lying, because the ground in Russia was too muddy to let anyone break through. That sounded reasonable. Of course, when you were talking about the two biggest liars in Europe—a prize for which the competition was steep—who could guess whether sounding reasonable meant anything?

  “And, in the long-running civil war in Spain so closely tied to the wider European struggle, Nationalist radio has at last admitted the death of Marshal Sanjurjo,” the newsman went on. “A Nationalist statement says the marshal ‘died a martyr in the unending struggle against atheistic Bolshevism.’ No successor has been named. The Nationalists deny Republican reports of a power struggle among their generals.”

  That they denied it didn’t mean it wasn’t true. Peggy lit her first cigarette of the morning. The Spaniards didn’t tell lies the size of the ones that came out of Berlin and Moscow, but it wasn’t for lack of effort.

  “Hitler and Mussolini have both expressed their regret over the loss of the man they have often called the liberator of Spain,” the newsman said. “What will happen there now without him remains to be seen.”

  If Hitler and Mussolini missed Sanjurjo, Peggy didn’t need to take out a slide rule to calculate that she didn’t. The Spanish general’s war had given the bigger Fascist dictators—and Stalin—the chance to test their weapons and let their soldiers earn some combat experience. They’d all gone on to bigger and worse things, too.

  She left the radio on while she did the dishes. The sports news was that the Phillies had fired their manager. The A’s were just as lousy. But, since ancient Connie Mack not only managed but also owned the team, chances were he wouldn’t give himself the old heave-ho. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t wound up in the cellar plenty of other times.