Last Orders: The War That Came Early

by Harry Turtledove

  He played poker. Everybody played poker except for the guys who shot dice and the handful of eggheads who played bridge instead. The eggheads insisted bridge stayed interesting even when you didn’t bet on it (though they did). Pete thought playing cards where no money changed hands was about as much fun as kissing your mom.

  He won a little more than he lost. He was no human slide rule, able to figure odds like an insurance salesman. But he’d played a lot. He knew good hands, not-so-good hands, and hands that looked good but would let you down like a cheating cocktail waitress. And, most important of all, he knew how to lie with a straight face.

  “Fuck you, McGill,” another leatherneck grumbled when Pete raked in a pot. “I can’t tell when you’re bluffing, and I’m sick of getting my ass burned on account of it.”

  “Aw, gee, Edgar, you say the sweetest things,” Pete lisped in shrill falsetto. He batted his eyelashes at his victim. That broke up the whole table (though actually they were sitting on a couple of blankets). For some reason, nothing on God’s green earth seemed funnier than an unshaven, smelly Marine mincing like a fruit.

  Even Edgar laughed, though he looked pained when he did it. “Whose deal is it, anyway?” he asked, trying to shift attention away from himself and Pete.

  The game went on. Pete didn’t win all the time—nowhere close. The cards wouldn’t let you. The trick was to win as big as you could when you won and not to throw away too much when you lost. And Edgar might have been disgusted, but Pete disguised the truth when he delivered it fairy-style. If Edgar admitted he couldn’t read Pete, that gave Pete a serious edge.

  Not everybody came equipped with a poker face. Pete had played against one guy whose eyebrows jumped every time he got a hand worth betting. The guy didn’t know he was doing it, which didn’t help him. Good cards made another fellow turn pink, as if he’d got caught peeking down a girl’s blouse. Pete didn’t think even a doctor could keep anyone from blushing. But that fellow’s color changes cost him money.

  You studied the people you played against. You tried not to show you were doing it, but you did. You knew they were casing you, too, casing you like a bank vault. You gave away as little as you could by the way you acted and by the way you played.

  If you were a sucker, if you bled money the way a bayoneted Jap gushed blood, the smartest thing you could do was get the hell out of the game. Some guys had the sense to see that. They threw a baseball around or read magazines. Others wondered where this month’s pay had disappeared to, and last month’s, and next month’s, too.

  No Japanese planes bombed them. Bettys from Wake Island could have reached them, but the slanties didn’t bother. They had to realize they might not hang on to Wake much longer, either.

  Then what? Not back to where they’d started, not with Guam and the Philippines still in Japanese hands to shield the Home Islands and the Dutch East Indies. But at least Honolulu would be able to take a deep breath and not worry so much about coming down with anthrax if it did.

  No. The Marines on Midway were the ones who had to worry about that. Which was one big reason they couldn’t get off Midway, dammit.

  Julius Lemp wished the U-30 were out patrolling in the North Sea or the North Atlantic. He even wished his U-boat were hunting Russian freighters and warships in the Baltic. Any time a man wished he were out in the Baltic, he had to hate wherever he was.

  Where he was was Kiel. He and his men remained confined to the naval base. The powers that be didn’t trust them to attack the enemy. The powers that be also didn’t seem to trust them not to attack their own comrades.

  After a lot of wire-pulling, Lemp finally secured another audience with Admiral Dönitz. The commander of the German U-boat fleet gave him a stony stare. “I hope this will be interesting,” he said.

  “So do I … sir,” Lemp answered. “Do you really think that if you turn us loose we’ll head up the Rhine and start sinking barges and tugboats? Or shell our own fortifications here?”

  “Certain people … have wondered about these things,” Dönitz said, plainly choosing his words with no little care. “The political situation is, ah, increasingly delicate.”

  “Is it?” Lemp said. The radio and the newspapers admitted no such thing—but then, they wouldn’t. No one in the officers’ club admitted any such thing, either. But then, you had to be an idiot to speak freely in the officers’ club these days. By now, Himmler’s various security services had swept up most of the fools who couldn’t dog their hatches.

  “It is.” Dönitz spoke with chill certainty. “There are at the moment certain, ah, unfortunate disagreements over some policies between the Führer and, ah, a faction within the General Staff. And if you tell anyone I told you that, I will call you a liar to your face and I will make sure you envy the fate of a destroyer that hits a mine. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir,” Lemp replied. “You have a way of making yourself very plain, sir.”

  He hoped to make the admiral smile. No such luck. Dönitz’s eyes stayed as cold and gray as the North Sea at this season of the year. “And you and your men have a reputation for raising trouble, here and up in Norway. So is it any wonder some people don’t want to let you out of port in a U-boat stuffed with torpedoes and 88mm shells?”

  The unfairness of that took Lemp’s breath away. “Sir,” he said stiffly, “the only reason the lads kicked up their heels a little in Namsos was that it made an impossible liberty port. No girls, hardly any beer … You know what a U-boat patrol is like, sir. You know how the men want to blow off steam afterwards.”

  “They almost blew up the town,” Dönitz said. “Twice.”

  Lemp had wondered whether that would come back to haunt him. He’d never dreamt it would come back to haunt him like this. “Sir, what happened in Namsos had nothing to do with politics,” he insisted.

  “And, no doubt, you will also tell me your desire to keep on your boat an electrician’s mate the SS found unreliable had nothing to do with politics, either.” Dönitz was, or affected to be, implacable.

  “Nehring was a good electrician’s mate. He was the best one in the boat, in fact. I didn’t want some thumb-fingered idiot screwing with my batteries. Was it his fault he came from Münster?”

  “Ah, so that was why the SS didn’t trust him, is it?” the admiral said. “Münster is … Münster is a running sore. I don’t know what else to call it, and I wish I did.”

  “Sir, Nehring was about as political as your ashtray,” Lemp said, which was nothing less than the truth. “They pulled him off the boat because they had the vapors, not on account of anything he did.”

  “Right now, Lemp, coming from Münster is a political act,” Dönitz replied. “You may not like that. The people who come from Münster may not like it, either. But they will not be trusted by the present government, any more than they would be if they were Jews.”

  What he said came from his mouth as if he were reading from an official report. How did he feel about the present government and its politics? How did he feel about that General Staff faction he’d mentioned? He had to have opinions. God didn’t issue human beings without them. What they were, though, Lemp couldn’t divine.

  He did say, “Right now, I’d take a Jew who was as good an electrician’s mate as Nehring. The rating they gave me isn’t terrible, but he’s not that good. Jews served in U-boats in the last war, didn’t they?”

  “They did.” Dönitz bit off the two-word admission. “They do not now. They will not now. And have you any idea how thin the ice is under your feet, Lemp? I have but to repeat what you said now and you will end up envying whatever happened to your Nehring.”

  “If I thought you were the kind who repeated such things, sir, I wouldn’t have said it,” Lemp answered. “But I thought you were someone who wanted people to tell him the truth. Maybe I was wrong.”

  “Maybe you were,” Dönitz agreed, which made frigid chills run up Lemp’s spine. The admiral continued, “In politics, truth is whatever th
ose in power say it is. As military men, we have to recognize that.”

  “Even when the truth looks different to us?”

  “Even then. If the truth looks different to you, the leaders will think that is because you are betraying them.”

  Even when what they see as the truth leads us into a two-front war, and one we’re losing? Lemp wondered. No wonder Münster was a running sore, in that case. He’d got away with one piece of frankness, just barely. Dönitz’s scowl said he wouldn’t get away with two. All he said, then, was, “Please send us out to sea, sir.”

  The commander of the U-boat fleet read his mind entirely too well. “That is not necessarily an escape for you, either,” Dönitz said.

  “No? Then I’d always be sure who the enemy was.” Lemp decided to poke again after all.

  To his disappointment, he didn’t faze the admiral. “Maybe not. But you might leave me with the feeling that I had blood on my hands.”

  “I joined the Kreigsmarine to fight, sir,” Lemp said. “If the Royal Navy sinks me, they get the credit. You don’t get the blame.”

  “At the start of the war, I would have agreed with you,” Dönitz answered. “Now … Now I’m not so sure. Our losses have gone up alarmingly the past few months. I feel as if I have blood on my hands every time I send out a U-boat.”

  He was a cold-blooded, cold-hearted Navy officer, not Lady Macbeth. That he should say such a thing amazed Lemp. All the same, the U-boat skipper came back with, “Anyone can have a run of bad luck, sir. And we’ve handed the limeys more grief than they’ve given us.”

  “I am not quarreling with your courage. I am quarreling with your equipment,” Dönitz said. “England has ways to detect and attack our U-boats for which we’ve found no good countermeasures. Our slide-rule pushers are not even sure they understand all of them.” He held up a broad-palmed hand. “None of that is to leave this room.”

  “Yes, sir.” Lemp was too worried by the admission even to think of protesting. “I know their hydrophones beat the devil out of anything they had in the last war, but—”

  Dönitz cut him off: “It’s more than that. It’s worse than that. Any time a U-boat surfaces, it seems, an enemy plane or warship rushes at it. It has to be radio detection. We have that, too—we use it to watch for enemy bombers. But we have not been able to build a detector to sense whatever they’re using. It may as well be black magic.”

  Lemp thought about some of the RAF and Royal Navy attacks he’d been through. They’d come out of nowhere—or so it seemed to him—and they’d come straight at the U-30. Without a good crew and some luck, he wouldn’t be standing here to listen to the U-boat force commander’s lament.

  “None of this is to leave the room, either,” Admiral Dönitz added.

  “I wouldn’t think of it, sir,” Lemp answered honestly. He couldn’t stay, and now he couldn’t go out, either. He was in as much trouble as the rest of the Reich.

  Staff Sergeant Alistair Walsh crouched in some bushes. He had a chicken-wire cover on his tin hat with branches stuck up in it, so he looked something like a bush himself. His uniform, khaki to begin with, was splotched with mud and grass stains. From more than a few feet away, no one who didn’t already know he was there would have had the slightest idea.

  The only trouble was, the Germans didn’t care. They had a couple of MG-42s in the ruins of the Belgian farm buildings ahead, along with what seemed like all the ammunition in the world to feed them. They’d fire a burst, traverse a little, and fire another one. They weren’t particularly aiming, or Walsh didn’t think they were. They just wanted to kill anyone who might be in front of them, whether they could see him or not.

  Jack Scholes crawled over to Walsh. Only the buttons on the front of his battledress tunic kept him from getting lower to the ground than he was. A snake would have been proud to own him as a cousin. Without raising his head even a quarter of an inch, he said, “Captain ’ammersmif says we’ve got to tyke out them bloody MGs.”

  “Jolly good,” Walsh answered sardonically: it was anything but. “And does he say how we’re supposed to do it?”

  The tough little Cockney shook his head without getting it any higher off the ground. “ ’E wants you to ’andle it.”

  “He would,” Walsh said without heat. This was what he got for being a veteran staff sergeant. Subalterns, lieutenants, even captains were suppose to lean on men like him. Men like him kept junior officers from making too many mistakes that got them and a raft of soldiers killed.

  It wasn’t even as if Captain Hammersmith were wrong. They did need to take out those machine guns. Otherwise, the Fritzes would go on murdering Tommies within a two-mile-wide semicircle in front of their position for as long as they had ammo. And, being Fritzes, they would have piles of it.

  But attacking the MG-42s would get more men killed. They had plenty of open ground in front and on both flanks, and more soldiers in field-gray to the rear. Coming straight at them, you needed to have made out your last will and testament beforehand, because chances were you wouldn’t stick around to take care of it afterwards.

  “Have we got trench mortars? Can we get trench mortars?” Walsh asked. If he could drop bombs down on top of the Germans, he’d solve the problem on the cheap. The new company commander should have been able to figure that out for himself, no matter how unweaned he was.

  “Oi’ll arsk ’im,” Scholes said, and slithered away.

  “Don’t come back if we have got them,” Walsh called after him. “Don’t give the Germans the chance at you.”

  He pulled his entrenching tool off his belt and started digging the best scrape he could while flat on his belly. He piled the dirt up in front of him and behind the bush. You commonly needed four sandbags’ worth of dirt to stop a rifle-caliber round: somewhere between a foot and a foot and a half, all well tamped together. Moving that much earth took a while. Well, he had nothing better to do with his time.

  And damned if Jack Scholes didn’t come crawling back. “Ain’t got no fuckin’ mortars,” he reported.

  “Bloody hell,” Walsh said. As soon as he finished with this scrape, he was happy enough to stay here till, oh, 1953. Maybe the Boches would die of old age by then or something. Anything was better than changing that nest in broad daylight.

  Anything … He whistled softly. “Wot yer got, Staff?” Scholes asked. He sounded sure Walsh had something. Coming up with things was what a staff sergeant was for—or he thought so, anyhow. In that, he differed little from the captain.

  “Tell him we’ll try a night attack to settle them,” Walsh said.

  “ ’E wants it done now,” Scholes said dubiously.

  “Then he can take care of it himself, and I’ll write his next of kin a kind letter about what a brave bloke he was—if I’m still here to do the writing,” Walsh answered. “Tell him just like that. And say nights are still long—he won’t have to wait till ten o’clock for the show.”

  “Oi’ll tell ’im.” Scholes snaked off again. This time, he didn’t come back. Walsh hoped that was because Captain Hammersmith saw reason, not because Scholes stopped something going back or moving forward. Since the captain didn’t order an attack on his own, Walsh thought he had some chance of being right.

  The Fritzes stopped hosing down the landscape with bullets as twilight began to deepen. They were an orderly, predictable people—except when they went off the rails and started another world war, of course. They’d packed it in at dusk the night before, too, and the night before that. Nighttime was for rest and food, not for fighting. So they seemed to think, anyhow.

  Most of the time, Walsh agreed with them. All kinds of horrible things could go wrong with a night attack. But at least you might take the Germans by surprise with one. And anything seemed better than rushing forward into the storm of lead. They’d tried that at the Somme, and lost a small city’s worth of dead the first day—which didn’t count the wounded, or what happened over the next few excruciating weeks. This would be a smaller s
laughter, but not necessarily in proportion to the number of men engaged. Head-on slogging wouldn’t go. A night attack might. And so, a night attack it would be.

  Walsh told off two attacking parties. Both would be armed with Sten guns. They’d need to get close, and they’d need to throw around a lot of bullets when they did. They had Mills bombs, too, lots of them, and a bazooka for whatever bunker-busting they’d need to do.

  And they had compasses with radium-painted needles that glowed in the dark. With luck, they’d get close to where they were supposed to go. Without luck … Without luck, the captain or someone else would write Walsh’s kin one of those kind letters. Or maybe they’d just get a wire from the Ministry of War.

  He didn’t worry about that. He worried about getting where he was going in spite of the cold, nasty drizzle that started coming down. The Germans who served those MG-42s would be nice and dry. They might even be warm. All the more reason to hate the buggers.

  Once your eyes got used to it, you could see amazingly well in the dark. Not fine details, no, but plenty well enough to get around. Well enough to navigate, too, if you were careful. And the rain’s dank dripping kept the Germans in their nests from hearing the enemy coming until he was right on top of them.

  That turned out to be literally true. Walsh stuck the muzzle of his Sten into the Germans’ firing slit and emptied the whole magazine. The screams that came from inside were at least as much from shock and horror as from pain. He yanked the pin off a grenade and chucked that through the slit, too. One of his men added another. That took care of that.

  It did for one MG-42, anyhow. The Germans in the other position fired off a flare and started shooting at whatever the hateful white light showed. But, because of the rain, it didn’t show as much as usual. It also didn’t alert their friends farther back that they were in trouble. And some of the Tommies had already got round behind the second machine-gun nest. They quickly finished it with grenades and submachine guns.