Last Orders: The War That Came Early

by Harry Turtledove

  Not long after dark came a sharp knock on the door. Sarah and her mother and father stared at one another in horror. Not now! she thought. Not when they’re throwing the Nazis out! It isn’t fair!

  The knock came again, and a deep voice with it: “Open up! I know you’re in there!”

  What would he do if they didn’t? Start shooting through the door? That seemed most likely to Sarah. It must have to her father, too, because he gestured helplessly toward the doorway. All at once, he seemed very old.

  Legs numb with fear and despair, Sarah walked to the door and opened it. A tall man dressed all in black strode in. He carried a Schmeisser. A metal death’s-head badge gleamed on his cap. He quickly closed the door behind him to keep light from leaking out.

  He looked Sarah up and down. That arrogant stare made her want to hit him. So did the grin that stretched across his strong-cheekboned face. Then he said, “Hi, Sis. Haven’t seen you in a hell of a long time.”

  Those numb legs didn’t want to hold Sarah up. She had to lock her knees to keep from falling on the floor. More slowly than she might have, she realized he was wearing black coveralls, not a tunic and trousers. The glittering death’s head was a panzer crewman’s insigne, not the SS’s.

  “Saul?” she whispered.

  “Guilty,” he said. “Guilty of all kinds of things these past few years, I’m afraid.” He nodded to Samuel Goldman. “Hey, Pop. Well, now I’ve been through the mill, too. Some fun, huh?” Only after that did he tack on, “Hi, Mom. Made it this far, anyhow.”

  Little by little, they all began to believe the prodigal son had returned. The story came from the wrong Testament, but none of them was inclined to be fussy. They crowded round Saul and hugged him and kissed him and pounded him on the back. The one thing they didn’t do was make a whole lot of noise. They didn’t want the neighbors to know they had anything to celebrate.

  “What are you doing here?” Sarah asked after they dragged her older brother to the sofa.

  “Well, we got pulled out of Russia to help sit on all the wicked rebels in Münster,” he answered. “I thought that was pretty damn funny all by itself. Then when the generals staged the Putsch against the Führer, most of the crews in the regiment sided with the Salvation Committee.” His face clouded. “I don’t think my panzer gang killed anybody I was friends with. I don’t think so, but I’m not sure.”

  Quietly, Samuel Goldman said, “I never had to wonder about that, thank God. The last time around, the civil war didn’t start till after the regular fighting ended, and I managed to stay out of it.”

  “We got your letter,” Sarah said. “We knew you got into the Wehrmacht. After that, all we could do was hope.”

  “And pray,” her mother added. People were rarely as secular as they thought they were before hard times hit.

  “You got it? That’s good. I figured writing the Breisachs across the street was a better bet than sending it straight to you—as long as they didn’t turn me in,” Saul said. “And a lot of Aryans just went with the Jew-baiting because the Nazis told ’em to. They didn’t all enjoy it.”

  “We’ve seen the same thing,” Sarah agreed.

  “How did you get to be Adalbert the panzer man?” Father asked. “How did you get papers that said you were?”

  “I owe one of the guys I played football with for that—owe him more than I can ever pay back, I guess. He knew people who took care of it for me,” Saul said. “These days, I think of myself as Adi more than I do by my real name. Unless you called me Moses, you couldn’t have stuck me with a more Jewish handle.”

  “It wasn’t a problem at the time,” Father said stiffly.

  “I suppose not,” Saul allowed. “And it may not be a problem any more. The Rathaus and all the paperwork in it are up in smoke. I ought to know—my panzer helped blast it.”

  “My marriage certificate.” Sarah sounded sadder than she’d dreamt she would.

  Her brother stared at her. “Your what?” He shook his head. “I guess I’m not the only one who had a life while I was in the Wehrmacht. Who is he? Where is he? What’s he do?”

  “He’s dead.” Even now, Sarah started to puddle up when she said that. “He was Isidor Bruck, from the baking family.”

  “I know him. Uh, I knew him. I played football against him. Uh, I’m sorry,” Saul said. “Too much, too quick. And now I’ve got to get out of here. I’m not supposed to be here at all, which is putting it mildly.” He hugged and kissed Sarah and her mother and father once more in turn. Then he slipped out the door and vanished into blacked-out night. Sarah stared after him. Only the remembered feel of his arms around her made her doubt she’d dreamt the whole thing.

  Vaclav Jezek had fought in the slag piles of France’s industrial northeast before. Crossing over the border into Belgium didn’t change the way the landscape looked by one iota. But now the forces of the Czechoslovakian government-in-exile weren’t fighting, even if they had come up to the front.

  Not fighting ate at Vaclav. “What are we doing here?” he demanded of, inevitably, Benjamin Halévy.

  “That’s a big question, isn’t it?” Halévy said. “Wouldn’t you do better talking about it with a priest?”

  “Oh, fuck yourself!” Vaclav exploded. “God damn it to hell, I want to kill Nazis. I feel like an atheist in a coffin, all dressed up with no place to go.”

  “Cute. Definitely cute.” The Jew mimed applause. “They should put you on the radio. You’d have people in stitches.”

  “If you don’t quit acting like a wise guy, you’ll need stitches,” Jezek said. “What are we supposed to do when they won’t let us fire at the Germans? I can see the bastards over there, going about their business.” He pointed to the Nazis’ field fortifications. Sure as hell, the Germans in them didn’t bother keeping their heads down. The ceasefire was holding as what they called the Salvation Committee slowly gained the upper hand on the loyalists or diehards or whatever name you wanted to stick on them.

  “It was like this on the Western Front for a while right after the war started, too,” Halévy said.

  “When England and France stuck their thumbs up their asses while Hitler raped my country, you mean,” Vaclav glossed bitterly.

  “That’s right.” Benjamin Halévy admitted what no one could possibly deny. The Jew went on, “Next thing we knew, we were trying to keep the Feldgrau bastards from sticking a swastika flag on top of the Eiffel Tower.”

  “Served you right, too.”

  “I guess it did.” Again, Halévy seemed to hope a soft answer would turn away wrath. “But I don’t think that’ll happen this time around. The Germans have seen they can’t conquer the world. Now they’re hoping like hell the world can’t conquer them.”

  “Everybody’s crazy to let ’em get away with a peace that doesn’t knock the snot out of them,” Vaclav said. “I mean, crazy. You think they won’t try this shit again as soon as they patch things up at home? Third time lucky, some general will think, and maybe he’ll be right.”

  “Maybe he will,” Benjamin Halévy said with a somber nod. “It doesn’t look like anyone’s going to make Germany spit out Austria, does it? She’s the biggest, richest country in Europe even without it. With it, she’s the same thing only more so. But it seems as though most Austrians would just as soon be Germans, so there you are.”

  “Austria? Fuck Austria! Fuck Austria in the neck!” Vaclav said. “It looks like those shitheeled Slovak bumpkins will get to keep their own country, too, and the Fritzes will get to keep mine.”

  “If somebody called me a shitheeled bumpkin, I don’t know that I’d want to stay in the same country with him,” Halévy observed.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Like most other Czechs, Vaclav knew in his bones that his Slovak cousins damn well were hayseeds straight off the farm. Anyone who listened to their back-country accent for longer than five seconds would say the same thing. Anyone who knew how the Hungarians sat on them for generations and didn’t let them even learn
to count further than they could on their toes would, too. Benjamin Halévy didn’t know any of that, as Vaclav pointed out: “You grew up in Paris.”

  “Why don’t you say ‘You damned Jew’ and hand me my yellow star, too?” Halévy asked, a sardonic glint in his eye.

  “That’s not what I was talking about. I know what you’re worth. I’ve seen it.” Vaclav turned his head, hawked, and spat. “I know what Father Tiso’s worth, too—not even that much.”

  “All right.” Halévy stopped. He shook his head. “No. It’s not all right. I’m sorry, Vaclav, but it’s not. I know what you’re worth, too. You’re a hell of a good man. But when you start telling me that anybody—anybody at all—is this, that, or the other thing because he’s a Slovak or a Jew or a German or a Chinaman or a Mexican or, or anything, you know what you’re doing? You’re doing Hitler’s work for him, that’s what.”

  Vaclav chewed on that for a few seconds. He found he didn’t much care for the taste. He tried to spread it around by sharing it: “Tell me you never made fun of the Spaniards that way.”

  “Oh, I’m as bad as the next con,” Halévy said. “We all are. People need other people to make fun of. I try not to be too much worse than the next con, though. I can shoot for that much.”

  Vaclav did some more chewing. Once he’d swallowed his next cud of thought, he said, “I guess it’s like trying to live a Christian life but not trying to be just like Jesus. That’s too much to ask of anybody.”

  “I expect it would be something like that.” The Jew grinned crookedly. “Not that I’d know personally, you understand.”

  “Sure,” Jezek said. They both chuckled. Vaclav lit a Gauloise. After a thoughtful puff, he went on, “You know what? Next to what they smoke in Spain, these fuckers are mild. Who would have imagined that?”

  “Let me have one,” Halévy said. After Vaclav did, he made his own comparison. “Damned if you’re not right. I always used to think Gauloises were two parts phosgene and one part mustard gas. Now they don’t seem so bad.” He stuck out his tongue and tried to stare down at it. The effort made his eyes cross. “I must have had all my taste buds shot off.”

  “Wouldn’t be surprised.” But the jokes went only so far. After Vaclav had tossed away the butt, he said, “I’m still going to end up a man without a country. All of us here in the line are. You can see that coming, sure as shit. We’ve been fighting the goddamn Germans since 1938. Even if we promise to be nice boys, you think any German government’ll let us back in?”

  “Odds aren’t good,” Halévy admitted.

  “Too fucking right, they’re not,” Vaclav said. “And I don’t want to live in Böhmen und Mahren, anyway.” He freighted the German names for Bohemia and Moravia with as much disgust as they would carry, and then some more besides. “I want Czechoslovakia back, dammit!”

  “Complete with Slovaks? Complete with Sudeten Germans?”

  “Rrr.” Vaclav didn’t like thinking that his former homeland made a proper country only if everyone who lived in it agreed that it should. The Germans mostly lived in the mountainous fringes of Bohemia and Moravia, the regions that made what had been Czechoslovakia defensible. The Slovaks filled most of the eastern third. And that didn’t even worry about the Ruthenians or the Magyars or …

  “I know it isn’t right. I know it isn’t fair.” Now that Halévy had made his point, he did his best to sound sympathetic, even sorry. “But making peace now is like trying to unscramble eggs after you’ve dropped about two dozen of them into the pan over a hot fire.”

  “The Germans will pull out of Belgium and Holland. They’ll pull out of Russia. They’ll pull out of the countries up north. They won’t pull out of Czechoslovakia. They’ll just keep fucking us over and over. What am I supposed to do? Find a little war in South America or somewhere that needs a sniper with an antitank rifle? Killing people’s almost the only thing I know how to do any more.”

  He wondered if he could get into Poland with his Spanish passport, with or without the antitank rifle. If he could, he might be able to sneak over the border into his native land. The Sudeten Germans hadn’t wanted to be part of Czechoslovakia, and look how miserable they’d made life for the government. The Czechs wouldn’t want to be part of Germany, so they’d probably try to make life miserable for their overlords, too.

  He might be able to help. He might even have some fun helping. Soldiering taught you all kinds of evil tricks. Odds were the Germans would catch up with him sooner or later. He knew that, but he hardly cared. Why should he? He’d been living on borrowed time for years.

  “Moscow speaking.” The voice that came out of the radio sounded important and self-satisfied, as if the person doing the talking had just had a good dinner served to him by pretty girls not wearing much. It wasn’t always the same newsreader, but it was always the same tone. Anastas Mouradian didn’t care for it. He never had.

  He’d never let on, either. Whom could you trust with an opinion like that? No one, not if you had any sense. The Mouradians had their flaws, but stupidity wasn’t one of them.

  “General Secretary Stalin has announced the incorporation of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, and the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic into our glorious Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, bringing the number of constituent republics to fifteen,” the announcer said. “The General Secretary has also announced that Polish Marshal Smigly-Ridz has agreed to cede the city of Vilno and the surrounding territory to the USSR. As Lithuanians are the largest element in the territory population, our magnificent General Secretary and the Politburo have determined that it should be added to the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic.”

  The Politburo, Stas noted, wasn’t magnificent. Well, how surprising was that? The Politburo might possibly have the authority to sneeze without Stalin’s permission. It couldn’t wipe the snot off its upper lip, though, unless the General Secretary countersigned the order.

  “Thus the Soviet Union brings the war against reactionary imperialist and Fascist aggression to a triumphant conclusion,” the newsreader declared. Stas wondered how many times he’d had to practice reading that so he could bring it out without bursting into wild giggles.

  He glanced over at Isa Mogamedov, who also listened to the news in the officers’ tent. Nothing on the Azeri’s swarthy face showed he wasn’t giving the report the grave attention it deserved. If he was sneering inside, he’d learned to do it so it didn’t show.

  Well, so have I, Stas thought. Not a raised eyebrow or a flared nostril betrayed what was going on inside his head. He didn’t let out his own wild giggles and roll around on the bench clutching his sides, either. Sure enough, he was a disciplined fighting man.

  He had to be. A triumphant conclusion? For the sake of a third-rate city that had been Polish, and for the sake of three new Soviet Republics whose people undoubtedly wanted nothing to do with the USSR, that nation had seen Byelorussia, much of the Ukraine, and the RSFSR almost to Smolensk devastated by years of attacks and counterattacks. They would be more years getting back on their feet, if they ever did. Millions had died, probably as many as in the last war. Millions more were maimed. Millions more still had lost their homes, their livestock, their livelihoods …

  The most you could say was that what they had was better than defeat, that Hitler’s panzers might have rolled through Smolensk and even through Moscow, and that nothing would be left of the Soviet Union if that had happened. That was absolutely the most you could say, and if the newsreader had dared to say it the NKVD would have dragged him away—or perhaps shot him right on the air—before he could have finished getting the words out of his mouth.

  As the newsreader had to do if he wanted to go back to his wife and children (and as his pompous voice suggested he wanted to do anyhow), he stuck to the script his minders had handed him: “Now that the war in the west has concluded, the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union can begin to reconsider some of the harsher and more u
njust terms in the armistice imposed on us by the Empire of Japan.”

  That made heads come up all over the officers’ tent. Everybody stared at the radio. So General Secretary Stalin wasn’t going to let Japan get away with swiping Vladivostok, eh? That earlier war hadn’t had anything like a triumphal conclusion.

  Stas didn’t know how smart Stalin really was; he’d never been in a position to find out. He did figure the Georgian was no dope. Stalin wouldn’t have lived to rise to the top in the dog-eat-dog world of the Party after the Revolution had he been stupid.

  Stalin also had sense enough not to choose more than one foreign foe at a time. He’d taken his lumps and liquidated his war with Japan when the fight against Germany heated up. Now that he wasn’t battling the Fritzes for survival any more, he could start thinking about the Russian Far East again. Yes, he was shrewd.

  He’d run things more shrewdly than Hitler had—no two ways about that. Go to war with France and England? Fine! Go to war with France and England and the USSR? Fine! Declare war on the USA while you were at war with France and England and the USSR? Fine!

  Except it wasn’t fine. Even Hitler’s generals had finally figured that out … which was why the Salvation Committee ran Germany right now and the Führer lay unhappily in some nameless grave. If you took on the two biggest industrial powers in the world, the pair of them with four times your population, your story wouldn’t have a happy ending even with England and France on your side. With them against you, too, you were …

  Kaputt. A useful German word.

  “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States of America were allies at the end of the fight against Hitlerite Germany. In fact, that alliance is not the smallest reason the Germans overthrew their bloodthirsty tyrant,” the newsreader said. Since Stas had just been thinking the same thing, he couldn’t even disagree with the man. What was the world coming to? The broadcaster continued, “Now the USSR and the USA both find themselves with grievances against Japan. Working cooperatively, they will be able to stretch the Japanese to the breaking point—and beyond.”