Last Orders: The War That Came Early

by Harry Turtledove

  “I do remember, and I thank you for that, too, sir,” Vaclav replied. It might even actually mean something, especially since the brigadier handed him a scroll and a passport that made it highly official. Czechoslovakia, these days, was more a defiant state of mind than anything else. Having connections with a country that really existed could be useful, all right.

  His own countrymen gave him three cheers as he returned to the ranks. The Republican general went back to Spanish to finish his speech. Most of it, Vaclav realized, was for local consumption. The Republic was showing its own people how nice it was to its foreign allies.

  When they got on the train that would take them up to France, the Republic showed its gratitude in a real way. It put them in second-class cars with padded seats, not on the hard benches of third class. Vaclav wiggled in his. “I could get used to this,” he said.

  “Don’t,” Halévy told him. “As soon as we cross the border, it’s liable to be 8 HORSES OR 36 MEN.”

  “A box car!” Jezek made a face. That was what the French painted on the sides of each one so nobody could mess up the carrying capacity. “They really know how to show they care, don’t they?”

  “They care that we can kill some Boches for them. They care that they can use you up—and me, too—instead of some genuine Frenchmen,” Halévy told him. “Don’t worry about it, mon vieux. Pretty soon, the Spaniards won’t care, either.”

  “You know how to make me feel good, don’t you?” Vaclav answered his own question before the Jew could: “Nah. If you were a blonde with no morals, then you’d know how to make me feel good.”

  “Funny guy.” Halévy glanced over at the antitank rifle leaning against the wood paneling of the second-class car’s wall. “I wish Hitler would come within a couple of kilometers of the front. Then you could do unto him as you did unto Sanjurjo. But from what I hear, Hitler didn’t take chances like that even before you plugged the Marshal.”

  “Too bad.” Vaclav cocked his head to one side and studied Halévy. “How do you hear shit like that?”

  “I keep my eyes open.” Halévy paused for effect. “My nose sees all kinds of interesting things, too.”

  “Will it see my fist if I punch it?” Vaclav didn’t bother to find out. He was just joking around.

  When they got to the border in the Pyrenees, a Spanish military band played a farewell for them even though it was the middle of the night. The French soldiers on the other side seemed much less interested. They herded the Czechs to the next train. They didn’t thrust them into box cars smelling greenly of horseshit. They did give them third-class cars with hard benches jammed too close together. Vaclav would have been more annoyed had he been more surprised.

  No one on the French side of the border cared at all about the Czechs’ Spanish rank badges and medals. The French attitude was that foreign badges on foreign men meant nothing in their country. Three officers with fancy kepis did take Benjamin Halévy off to one side and question him for more than an hour before they finally let the troop train roll out of the station.

  “What was that all about?” Vaclav asked. “They think you were smuggling hashish or something?”

  “Worse than that—much worse.” Halévy rolled his eyes. “They said I was wearing rank badges I wasn’t entitled to. That a sergeant should become an officer while they weren’t looking … Not so long ago, it would have been a matter for Devil’s Island. We spoke of this before, and about how they wouldn’t let me stay promoted.”

  “Uh-huh. Like I told you then, fucking good thing your name isn’t Dreyfus,” Vaclav said.

  “You’ve got that right. But he was already an officer. Not me! They accept no such improper promotions, as they made ever so clear,” Halévy said. “So I’m just a noncom again, and lucky to be that. They also made it clear how lucky I am. They could have court-martialed me for going on with the war while they were busy sucking up to Hitler.”

  “Sucking him off, you mean,” Vaclav said savagely.

  Halévy waved a forefinger at him: a very French gesture. “You can talk about them like that. They aren’t your superiors. They are mine, and I’m stuck with them. They did finally admit I still enjoy the privilege of dying for my country. Isn’t patriotism grand? Oh, and have you got a cigarette?” They smoked while the train clattered north and east, toward the bigger war.

  Colonel Steinbrenner climbed up onto a wooden crate so everybody in the squadron could see him. Hans-Ulrich Rudel was up near the front of the crowd anyway, as usual. Even by German standards, he was compulsively punctual. And he wanted to hear what the squadron CO had to say.

  Sergeant Dieselhorst stood behind Rudel and to his left. A cigarette dangled from the corner of Dieselhorst’s mouth. That and his elaborately uninterested expression made him look like an American gangster. Hans-Ulrich didn’t own enough of a death wish to tell him so.

  Steinbrenner raised a hand. The flyers and groundcrew men fell silent. Everybody wondered what was going on. The colonel had summoned them all, but he hadn’t said why.

  “The Führer’s going to talk tonight,” Steinbrenner said. “Some of you will already know that, but I want to make sure nobody misses it. This is supposed to be one of the most important speeches he’s given since the war started. You’ll want to hear it for yourselves instead of getting it by bits and pieces from the newscasts and the papers.” His arm shot up and out in the Party salute. “Heil Hitler!”

  “Heil Hitler!” the men echoed, returning the gesture as they shouted the slogan.

  Hans-Ulrich wanted to hear Hitler speak. Part of what made the Führer so marvelous was that, while you listened to him, all your doubts disappeared. Rudel had plenty of doubts he needed to exorcise.

  “Good,” Steinbrenner said. “I hope that, after he speaks, we’ll have a better notion of where we’re going and what we’ve got to do to get there. Whatever it is, for Germany’s sake, we’ll do it.”

  “Heil Hitler!” the Luftwaffe men chorused again. Along with most of the others, Hans-Ulrich gave the Party salute once more. The squadron commander returned it.

  As the men drifted apart, Albert Dieselhorst came up alongside Hans-Ulrich. “Well, that was interesting,” the radioman and rear gunner remarked.

  “Interesting how?” Rudel asked.

  “Mm, for one thing, the colonel talked to us about this speech himself. He didn’t give the job to Major Keller. I would’ve guessed the National Socialist Loyalty Officer would have told us about political stuff.”

  “That’s true. I hadn’t thought about it, but it is,” Hans-Ulrich said. “Whatever the Führer’s going to say, then, it must be important—especially since he’s speaking from Münster.”

  “Yes. Especially.” Sergeant Dieselhorst’s voice was dry. Neither of them seemed to want to take that any further. The less you said about a place where rebellion still bubbled, the better off you were. After they walked on for a few more steps, Dieselhorst added, “And the colonel didn’t say anything about what’ll be in the speech.”

  “I guess he doesn’t know,” Hans-Ulrich said.

  Dieselhorst nodded. “I guess you’re right. But that’s interesting, too. Most of the time, when the big cheese is going to come out with one of these fancy speeches, the brass has a pretty good idea of what he’ll say ahead of time. They need to know which way to jump, and they need to get us peasants ready to jump that way.”

  “Huh.” That hadn’t occurred to Hans-Ulrich, either. He eyed his worldly crewmate. “All these things you know, all these things you think about, how come you’re not a Party Bonz yourself?”

  The sergeant started to say something, then plainly decided not to. After a few more steps, he took another shot at it: “I never much wanted to have anything to do with politics, sir. You have to tell too many lies to too many people. Doesn’t matter a bit which side of the fence you’re on. You just do. It’s part of the game, the same way dive brakes are part of the Stuka’s game.”

  “Huh,” Rudel said again.
“I never looked at it like that.”

  “Of course not, sir. You think telling a lie’s a sin.” Dieselhorst sounded amused and indulgent, the way a father might while talking about his little boy’s antics. “I’m just not very good at it, and I don’t think it’s much fun. So I’m better off here in the Luftwaffe than I would be working in some Gauleiter’s office.”

  Hans-Ulrich started to deny that he thought lying was sinful. As Dieselhorst had before him, he caught himself. He couldn’t deny it unless he felt like lying himself—which would indeed be a sin. You could put a preacher’s son in the cockpit of a warplane. You could even turn a preacher’s son into a good National Socialist. What you couldn’t do was make him forget who his father was, and what his father stood for.

  All he did say, then, was, “I guess I wouldn’t make such a great politician, either, then.”

  That got a laugh out of Sergeant Dieselhorst. “Maybe not. Each cat his own rat, or that’s what they say.”

  “Is it?” Hans-Ulrich hadn’t heard it before, but he’d long since decided that Dieselhorst had done and heard all kinds of things he hadn’t.

  He realized Germans wouldn’t be the only ones listening to this speech. It would go all over the world by shortwave. It would be history in the making. That made him want the sun to speed across the sky and set so he could find out what was on the Führer’s mind.

  It gave Dieselhorst different ideas. “What do you want to bet every Luftwaffe pilot who flies anything faster than a Stuka will be over Münster and its approaches while Hitler’s talking to make sure the RAF doesn’t drop any bombs on him?”

  Hans-Ulrich hadn’t thought of that, but he nodded. “Makes sense to me.”

  He ate supper without paying much attention to what went into his mess tin. Considering the stews the field kitchen turned out, that might have been just as well. After he cleaned up the kit, he joined the crowd of Luftwaffe men gathered in front of a radio hooked up to a truck battery. At the moment, someone was playing Bach on a piano. Some of the flyers and groundcrew men looked bored. Rudel enjoyed the music; he’d been listening to it since he was a baby. That was another souvenir from his father.

  Then the Bach program ended. The radio played “Deutschland über Alles” and the “Horst Wessel Lied”: national anthem and Party anthem. That was what they always did before they broadcast anything important.

  “Here is the beloved Führer of the Grossdeutsches Reich, Adolf Hitler, speaking to the German Volk and to the world from the city of Münster,” gabbled an announcer with an excited voice.

  “People of Germany, I have come to Münster to tear up treason by the roots,” Hitler declared. “It is because of treason that our war against the Jew Bolsheviks of Moscow and the Jew capitalists of London and Paris and New York City has not gone as well as we should have hoped. They are not content with corrupting the peasant Untermenschen and mongrel factory workers they exploit. No! Instead, they whisper their filthy venom into German ears as well.”

  He had an Austrian accent and an Austrian habit of peppering everything he said with particles: little words that added emphasis but that many, maybe even most, German-speakers would have left out. But his voice was such a splendid instrument that even such tics seemed not to matter—no, seemed to disappear—after a sentence or two.

  “When Germans seek to rise against the German state and seek to hinder the struggle against Bolshevist barbarism, they cannot be doing this on their own. No, they must be incited by outside agitators, and by the filthy, wicked Jews still resident in the Reich. And they must be punished for their betrayal of Volkisch ideals. They must be, and they shall be!” Hitler’s voice rose and grew more urgent. “We will make them bend the knee! We will make them tremble in fear. We will—”

  The speech abruptly broke off. There was a noise that might have been a shot or might have been an explosion. Then only the soft, staticky hiss of the carrier wave came out of the radio.

  Theo Hossbach sprawled on the grass with the other crewmen from his panzer and the rest of the regiment, listening to the Führer telling the world about what he was going to do to Münster and the people who lived there. The radio was turned up loud so everyone could hear in spite of the noise from all the airplanes overhead.

  And then, all of a sudden, the speech stopped. Theo heard a kind of a bang from the radio. At almost the same time, he heard kind of a bang from the direction of Münster.

  “Scheisse!” one of the men in black panzer coveralls said loudly. He got up and whacked the radio with the heel of his hand. It went on hissing, but the Führer’s speech didn’t come back. He said “Scheisse!” again, even louder than the first time.

  Adi Stoss leaned toward Theo. “The trouble’s not in the set, is it?” he murmured.

  Since Theo was a radioman, he supposed he was the logical one to ask. He hadn’t checked out the radio, though, and he hated being wrong even more than he hated talking in general. All the same, some kind of answer seemed called for. “I … wouldn’t think so,” he said reluctantly.

  That hiss went on and on, probably for two or three minutes. More bangs and booms came from the direction of Münster, though not from the radio set. That might not have meant anything much. You could hear bangs and booms from Münster almost every night. The people in town who didn’t fancy the regime used darkness as a camouflage cloak to help them strike at its backers. The timing now seemed intriguing, though.

  “Change the frequency,” someone suggested. “See if we can pick up something somewhere else.”

  “No, leave it.” Hermann Witt spoke up with a panzer commander’s authority. “Something funny’s going on. The Führer’s station wouldn’t crap out for no reason at all.”

  There was another interesting point. Had Hitler’s station crapped out not for no reason but for some reason? If it had, what would that reason be?

  No sooner had that thought crossed Theo’s mind than a voice started coming out of the radio. It wasn’t Hitler’s voice. Instead of sounding like a professional rabble-rouser, this fellow seemed tired unto death and had a harsh, abrupt Prussian way of talking.

  “Good evening, people of Germany and people of the world,” he said. “I am Colonel General Heinz Guderian. I find myself heading the Committee for the Salvation of the German Nation.”

  “The what?” Several people there in front of the radio said the same thing at the same time.

  “As I speak to you, Adolf Hitler is dead,” Guderian went on. “We have removed him from power because he led Germany into a war that did not succeed, and because he threw away any chance of a fair result by bringing the United States of America into the European conflict. We took this step with great reluctance, but we also took it with great resolution. Even more than in the last war, the United States is an enemy Germany cannot hope to overcome.”

  “Sweet Jesus Christ!” a panzer crewman exclaimed not far from Theo. “What do we do now?”

  “Some people may not be happy that we have assumed authority in this way,” Guderian continued, which had to rank as one of the champion understatements of all time. “This being so, we need to make it very plain that the Nazi Party is no longer the ruling party in Germany, and is no longer the only party in Germany. As I speak, forces loyal to the Salvation Committee are arresting Göring, Goebbels, Hess, and Himmler.”

  “Sweet Jesus!” That same voice rang out again.

  “Soldiers of the Reich, sailors of the Reich, flying men of the Reich, obey your officers and carry on. We have taken this action to secure an honorable peace, and we believe we can,” Guderian said. “Men who would not confer with Hitler because of his endless lies will do so with our trustworthy officers and civilian representatives. All sides must see that peace is preferable to the past five and a half years of slaughter and destruction. God will surely bless our cause. Thank you, and good night.”

  “Deutschland über Alles” rang out again. The “Horst Wessel Lied” didn’t. That told Theo the Salvation Comm
ittee was running the radio station, anyhow.

  More Bach poured out of the radio set. It was good, calm, peaceful, churchgoing music, music that advertised a good, calm, peaceful, churchgoing Germany to the listening world. Theo hoped the listening world was paying attention. He also hoped the Salvation Committee could get away with the coup—and that Guderian hadn’t been lying through his teeth when he talked about the Committee’s program.

  And he hoped Germany itself and the German armed forces were feeling good and calm and peaceful, whether churchgoing or not. Hitler and the Nazis had been running the country for more than eleven years. They’d had plenty of time to plant their doctrines in people’s heads, plenty of time for those doctrines to flower and fruit.

  Off in the distance, a Schmeisser opened up. An MG-42 answered it. Yes, not everyone would be thrilled to see the Führer overthrown. Which side was the Schmeisser-toter on, and to which side did the machine gunner belong?

  Before Theo could do more than frame the question, somebody right here in the crowd of panzer crewmen shouted, “They can’t get away with plotting against the Führer!”

  “The hell they can’t!” somebody else yelled. Yes, the chickens were coming home to roost, and they weren’t wasting any time doing it.

  With a meaty thud, somebody’s fist connected with someone else’s jaw. Somebody yelled “Death to the traitors!” at the same time as somebody else yelled “Down with the Nazi swine!”

  In an instant, the panzer crews were flailing away, sometimes one against another, sometimes man against man inside a single crew as some showed they were for Hitler and others against him. Theo stuck out a leg and tripped a man he knew to be a loudmouthed Nazi. When he scrambled to his feet, one boot just happened to connect with the back of the loudmouth’s head. It was only an accident, of course. Of course.

  He wasn’t astonished to discover that Adi had flattened another Party sympathizer. If you were sitting next to somebody like that, what were you supposed to do? Wait till he flattened you? Not likely!