Two Fronts twtce-5

by Harry Turtledove

  Bombs whistled down on the island. They seemed to fall at random; the Zeros did at least joggle the Americans’ elbows. Lying in a shallow trench, Fujita heard explosions far and near. He hoped the albatrosses weren’t getting blown up. They hadn’t done anything to deserve to be bombed.

  He knew he had. War was like that. You hurt the people on the other side every chance you got, as hard as you could. If they didn’t give up, they paid you back with all the strength they had. Eventually, one side or the other decided it had had enough and gave up.

  It seemed a stupid way to settle the world’s disagreements. No doubt it was a stupid way, only nobody had come up with a better one. People had been fighting wars, some smaller, some larger, for as long as there’d been people. Chances were they’d go right on fighting them, too.

  And Japan always wins in the end. Always, Fujita thought. That made him feel a little better as the American bombs kept falling on Midway, but not so much as he’d hoped.

  Bullets cracked past, a meter or two above Aristide Demange’s head. The Germans were spraying the French lines with machine-gun fire again. They wanted to keep Demange’s countrymen from getting frisky.

  Most of the rounds you never saw. Some were tracers, so the assholes serving the MG-34 or MG-42 could see what their stream of bullets was doing. When one of those flew by, you thought you could light your cigarette on the red streak it left in the air.

  Demange lit a Gitane-with a match. He spat the tiny butt of the last one he’d smoked into the mud. A couple of good, hard puffs started reducing the new smoke as well.

  How many packs have I gone through since the war started? he wondered. He didn’t know the answer in numbers, but sometimes numbers didn’t matter. He’d gone through as many packs as he could, and he had the cough to prove it. The only times he hadn’t chain-smoked were when the tobacco ration didn’t get through to wherever he happened to be.

  He’d felt weird then: light-headed, dizzy, shaky. Probably too much oxygen getting through to his brain. He couldn’t imagine what else might cause it.

  Down the trench from him, the Communist private named Marcel groused, “Don’t those cochons ever run low on ammo?” He was the tall one of the pair, not the short-Demange finally had them straight.

  “Hold up the red flag with the hammer and sickle on it,” the lieutenant said, Gitane bobbing in his mouth as he spoke. “That’ll make the Nazis fold up and run away. Sure it will.”

  Marcel sent him a reproachful look. “The Fascist swine are in retreat in the Soviet Union, sir.” Several more bullets cracked over them as the enemy murder mill traversed. Marcel grimaced. “They sure aren’t in retreat here in Belgium.”

  “You stupid piece of shit.” Demange enjoyed it when he could focus his boundless scorn for all mankind on one luckless individual. “The dumb Boches bit off more than even they could chew over there. They’re fighting on a front a couple of thousand kilometers across. When they have to fight here, too, of course they’re gonna get stretched too thin and have to fall back from the Ivans. It’s not ’cause Stalin is the second goddamn coming of Jesus Christ, you dumb prick. It’s because he has a fucking huge country.”

  “He runs it with power to the proletariat, too,” Marcel said. “If we would only do that-”

  He got no further. Demange cut him off. “My ass,” the veteran growled. “I was there, kid. I saw the Russian proletariat. Hell, I shot some of the Russian proletariat. A bunch of those guys, when they found out we were Frenchmen instead of Germans, they went over to us faster than those machine-gun bullets are going over us now. Some of them went over to the Nazis, too, but most of ’em figured Hitler was an even bigger salaud than Stalin. That’s the figuring you’ve got to do-which one of ’em makes the worst con.”

  “Hitler does,” Marcel said confidently.

  “Well, for now the big shots back in Paris think you’re right,” Demange said. “But that doesn’t turn Stalin into a bargain. The only thing that could ever turn Stalin into a bargain is, mm, Hitler.”

  He was lighting another fresh Gitane when the Germans started lobbing mortar bombs at the poilus in the trenches. If you had a good, thick parapet in front of you and you kept your head down, machine-gun bullets were just an annoyance. As long as you stayed in your hole, you had to be mighty unlucky to get hurt.

  Mortars whispered up and whined down. If one landed beside you, it would slice you into dogmeat even if you stayed behind your parapet. Demange despised mortars. So did every foot soldier who’d ever been on the receiving end of an attack. You couldn’t hide from them, and the bastards on your own side wouldn’t let you run away from them, either.

  Screams rose from the next job over in the trench. Somebody over there had caught it, all right-caught it pretty bad, by the horrible noises he was making. Rolled into a ball in the bottom of the trench, Demange wished the bearers would cart off the luckless bugger. His shrieks were plenty to demoralize a whole regiment.

  At last, they fell silent. Maybe he’d passed out. Maybe he’d died. Whatever had happened, he couldn’t feel his tormented body any more. That was a mercy, and not such a small one. People could be so dreadfully wounded, they begged you to kill them and thanked you if you had the nerve to do it.

  War movies didn’t show stuff like that. A wound in a war movie meant a clean, white bandage-where were the blood and the mud? — and a nurse with big tits to bat her eyelashes at you while you recovered. If only life worked out so neatly … especially for that sorry fool over there.

  The next interesting question was whether the Germans were going to follow up all this ironmongery with an attack of their own. They hadn’t been doing that very often in Belgium. They were content to let the Tommies and poilus come at them, and to slaughter the Allies when they tried.

  You never could be sure, though. Whenever you thought you knew what the Boches were up to, they’d let you figure you were right for a little while and then, when you were good and set up, they’d shove it right up your ass.

  Regretfully, Demange unfolded from the fetal position. Even more regretfully, he got up on the firing step and peered over the top of the parapet. That brought the machine-gun bullets terrifyingly close to the top of the crest on his helmet. Why that stupid crest was there he’d never known, in the last war or this one. To give style? It didn’t seem reason enough. The Tommies and the Ivans got along fine without crests. So did the Germans, whose helmets were hands down the best in both wars.

  “Up! Up, you shitheads!” Demange yelled. “They’re moving!” He unslung his rifle-no pissy officer’s automatic for him-and started banging away at the oncoming Boches.

  He felt better when French machine guns began gnawing at the enemy. The German attack soon ran out of steam. The Fritzes didn’t have any tanks supporting their foot soldiers. The infantrymen sensibly decided there was no point to getting killed when they hadn’t a prayer of making any real advance. They trotted back to their start line or at most hung on in shell holes between the lines.

  After a while, a German officer stood up waving a white flag: a bed-sheet nailed to a pole. Firing on both sides slowly died away. The officer strode forward, still carrying the flag of truce.

  As soon as the German got within shouting distance, Demange yelled, “Far enough, pal!”

  The Boche obediently stopped. “An hour’s cease-fire?” he shouted back in guttural French. “So we can pick up our wounded?”

  “Send your guys hiding in the craters back to your start line and you can have it,” Demange answered.

  “D’accord,” the German agreed after a short pause for thought. “We gain little advantage from them anyhow.”

  Demange saw it the same way-for now. But the Germans might try to reinforce them under cover of darkness. Then they could make more trouble here tomorrow or further down the line. “An hour’s cease-fire, starting-now!” he called to his own men. “Don’t shoot at their stretcher-bearers, and let their troops go back out of no-man’s-land.” T
he German officer turned and bellowed auf Deutsch.

  Out came the Boches with Red Cross vests and with Red Crosses painted inside white circles on their helmets. The effect, to Demange, was that of a wolf dyed pink. It still looked dangerous, but now it looked peculiar, too. The bearers hauled wounded men back toward German aid stations. Unwounded Germans scuttled away to their entrenchments. Demange guessed not all of them would abandon the ground they’d so painfully won, no matter what their officer promised. Nobody ever kept promises all the way. Demange wouldn’t have, in the German’s shoes. A night patrol would root out the ones who’d stayed behind, and then this stretch of front could get back to normal.

  No more Flying Fortresses had raided Munster, for which Sarah Bruck thanked the God in Whom she had ever more trouble believing. Maybe the daylight raid cost the RAF more than it wanted to pay. Other English bombers still hit the town by night, though.

  Samuel Goldman seemed absurdly cheerful about it. “Well, I don’t lack for work, anyhow,” he said one evening over supper. “For a while there, when England and France were at peace with the government, I was afraid they’d want me as much as a laborer as they did when I was a professor.”

  “Supper’s good,” Hanna Goldman said, which both wasn’t and was an answer. The Nazis hadn’t let Sarah’s father go on teaching at the university. Expelling him from the faculty had been a disaster. If they threw him out of the labor gang, that would be a catastrophe.

  He nodded to Mother now. “Not too bad, if I say so myself.” He preened just a little. The spaetzle and the tinned fish that went with them had come from his inspired scrounging.

  It wasn’t impossible for Jews to survive in the wartime Reich without such help, not quite. Life might be lived, yes, but it wasn’t worth living. Barely enough food, and almost all of it dreadful … They wanted you to know what they thought of you, all right.

  When Father couldn’t steal better edibles than German Jews were legally entitled to, he stole clothes. Sarah had no idea how he’d managed to stuff a cashmere sweater into one of his inside jacket pockets, but he had. Even the yellow Stars of David she’d sewn onto it, front and back, didn’t seem to deface it too badly.

  She supposed that was her vanity talking. After so long in the altered old clothes she’d got from the rabbi, anything nice seemed extra wonderful. With the wretched clothing ration Jews got, she might have been able to buy a sweater like that around the turn of the twenty-first century-provided she didn’t need anything else in the meantime.

  The only reason she had that sweater was that some Aryan woman had got blown to gory smithereens. Father and the other laborers in his gang, Jews and petty criminals alike, robbed the dead whenever they saw the chance. The people the RAF killed didn’t need their things any more. The laborers who cleaned up the mess the bombers left behind did, desperately.

  Sometimes Sarah salved her conscience by thinking that the woman who had owned her sweater was a raging anti-Semite, and that it served her right for the sweater to pass to a Jew. But she had no way of knowing that. The Nazi big shots who ran Munster did everything they could to make life miserable for Jews, sure. So did some ordinary folk. Most people in the town, though, were just trying to get by from one day to the next and hoping their relatives in the Wehrmacht were all right. They didn’t have the time or the energy to run around screaming “The Jews are our misfortune!”

  Sarah hoped her brother in the Wehrmacht was all right, too. That was all she could do. If anything did happen to Saul, she wouldn’t find out about it. He had-she hoped he still had-his assumed name and identity. Whatever happened to him, wherever he was, he was bound to be better off than he would have been had the authorities grabbed him after he smashed in that gang boss’s head when the vicious man hit him once too often for no reason.

  Saul hardly ever got mentioned in the Goldman house. When he did, it was always in the past tense. Sarah and her mother and father never said a word about his hiding in plain sight of the National Socialist authorities.

  Father didn’t always scavenge goodies when the RAF hit Munster. Sometimes nothing was left to scavenge: houses and shops and blocks of flats often went up in flames. Sometimes younger, sprier men beat him to the goodies. And sometimes the firemen and police who were also on duty kept laborers from grabbing the way they wanted to.

  “I’d mind that less if they didn’t steal for themselves,” he said after being thwarted by a fireman. “But they do. I’ve watched them.”

  “Not fair!” Sarah said in angry sympathy.

  He smiled crookedly. “Yes? And so?” She had no comeback for that.

  When his scrounging was bad, the luck she had shopping mattered more. That luck would never be good, of course. Jews were allowed in stores only just before closing time, after Aryan customers had picked over whatever happened to be available. But sometimes what she could get was truly awful, while sometimes it was only wretched. Like everything else, misery had its degrees.

  Since the trams were also denied to those who wore the yellow star, she walked all over Munster trying to find this, that, or the other thing. She often thought she used as much energy getting food as she took in when she finally ate it. She didn’t know what she could do about that, either. She and her parents were all much thinner than they had been before the Nazis took over. She doubted there were any German Jews who weren’t.

  Late one afternoon, she was coming home with a kilo and a half of flour she’d got across town. Despite the long trip, she was pleased with herself. For what you could get hold of these days, the flour looked pretty good. It had some peas and beans and dried potatoes ground into it, but everybody’s flour these days was like that. People old enough to remember did say the bread in the last war had been even worse, stretched with sawdust and maybe even clay. Sarah could hardly believe it, but there you were.

  And here she was, coming up to the square that fronted on Munster’s Catholic cathedral. The square was about half full of people: women, boys, old men. Most of the men of military age were either wearing one uniform or another or working long hours in factories to give the Reich’s soldiers and flyers and sailors the murderous tools of their trade.

  Some men wore police uniforms, not military ones. Some of them were in the square, too, between the crowd and the cathedral. They clutched truncheons. Two or three of them carried Schmeissers instead. They all looked nervous.

  Sarah felt nervous. A crowd not organized by the state was astonishing in Hitler’s Germany. Sarah scuttled along the walls of the buildings on the far side of the square, as far from the crowd and the police as she could get. She felt like a mouse who’d walked into a gathering of cats by mistake. Maybe they wouldn’t notice her-or the yellow stars she wore.

  The crowd began to move toward the cathedral, and toward the thin line of police in front of it. Voices rose: “Give us back the archbishop! Give us back the archbishop!”

  Archbishop von Galen had presumed to protest the way the Reich disposed of mental defectives (though he’d never said a word about the way the Reich treated its Jews). The Gestapo had grabbed him and hustled him off to prison or a concentration camp. And Munster’s Catholics had rioted. The authorities put them down and made more arrests. But that they’d risen once was a prodigy.

  That they’d been put down and were rising again was whatever went two steps past a prodigy. And that I’m here right now is whatever’s two steps past a calamity, Sarah thought. She hurried along as fast as she could without running and drawing notice to herself.

  “Give us back the archbishop! Give us back the archbishop!” The crowd’s chant swelled ever louder.

  A police official with a megaphone shouted through the chorus: “Disperse this criminal assembly, in the name of the Grossdeutsches Reich!”

  “Give us back the archbishop, in the name of God!” The chant changed.

  When Sarah heard the harsh crack of gunfire then, she could scarcely believe it. Some people in the crowd screamed and ran away. S
ome fell, injured or killed. And some roared and charged the police. They roared louder when they got their hands on a few of the uniformed men. Sarah made her escape. For once, no one paid any attention to a Jew.

  Chapter 24

  Arno Baatz had always wished the soldiers who served under him would like him better. But he’d always assumed it was their fault they didn’t. And, working from that assumption, he’d always wound up disappointed.

  He’d always wished his superiors liked him better, too. Before the war started, he’d gone through the six-week training course that lifted him out of the teeming swarm of private soldiers and into the more glorious ranks of those with the authority to tell that teeming swarm what to do.

  Even a corporal enjoyed such authority, and Arno enjoyed it as much as any Unteroffizier ever minted. He was official and officious. He knew the rules and regulations. He lived by them, and he made the men in his charge live by them as well.

  He was a good soldier himself. He wore the ribbon for the Iron Cross Second Class on his tunic. He wore his wound badge, too-wore it with pride. He’d been an Unteroffizier a devil of a long time. Since before the shooting started, in fact. None of the men set over him had shown the slightest inclination to promote him to sergeant so he could use his talents on a bigger group.

  So I can give orders to more people, he thought. Yes, he knew what he wanted to do, all right.

  That he didn’t get the chance he was sure he deserved only left him even more sour than he would have been otherwise. Combine that with the Wehrmacht’s failure to knock the Red Army out of the war, and Arno Baatz was a less happy man than he might have been.

  These days, the Russians were in the driving seat on the Eastern Front. Germany had to respond to one Soviet thrust after another. Smolensk wouldn’t fall this campaigning season, either. Moscow? Moscow wasn’t even a pipe dream any more. As long as the Reich could hold on to Byelorussia and a chunk of the Ukraine, things … weren’t too bad.