He went back into the tent. Joe Billings had bought them both fresh pints while he was outside. Pretty soon, he’d buy a round himself. They’d both be pissing all night long.
He was nursing a headache the next morning. That didn’t keep the personnel wallahs from sending him up to his new slot: senior underofficer for an infantry company. All the young lieutenants eyed him as if he were a leper. And well they might. They had the seniority of rank, but he had that of experience. They could order him around, and they didn’t have to do what he told them to do—not by military law they didn’t. But they might land in worse trouble for ignoring him than he would for ignoring them.
One of them asked him, “Did you go through it the last time around?”
“Yes, sir.” Walsh tapped his leg. “Bought part of a plot, but not the whole thing.” He grinned crookedly. “Weather’s better for it here than it is back in Blighty—I’ll tell you that. Hardly aches at all.”
The subaltern nodded. His name was Wilf Preston. He had a sunburned, wind-chapped face full of freckles, and he looked hardly old enough to have escaped from public school: his posh accent said he’d likely gone to one. He hesitated before continuing, “Speaking of Blighty, were you, ah, in London when the government, ah, changed?”
“Yes, sir,” Walsh repeated. By the way Preston asked the question, he already knew the answer. That’s … interesting, Walsh thought. My reputation goes before me. They aren’t leery just because staff sergeants are supposed to eat second lieutenants without salt.
He wasn’t used to having that kind of reputation. For the rest of his life, he would be the man who’d brought in Rudolf Hess, the man who’d known Winston Churchill, the man who’d helped topple Horace Wilson in a military coup. He might be a lowly staff sergeant, but people with far more power than lowly lieutenants would look sidelong at him from here on out. Who are your friends? they’d wonder. What can you do to me if I cross you?
If he shouted “Boo!” young Wilf Preston would probably jump right out of his skin. It was tempting—damned if it wasn’t. Instead, he pointed west and asked, “Could you tell me what Musso’s lads are up to, sir?”
“They’re just patrolling for the time being,” Preston answered with transparent relief. “So are we, mainly. They haven’t shown a great deal of push since we drove them back over the border. We have the feeling that the only reason they attacked at all was so Benito could show Adolf he was strafing us for ducking out of the alliance against Russia.”
“Pity he can’t be his own fool instead of Hitler’s,” Walsh said.
Up at the front, a mile or two from where they talked, gunfire started up. Walsh began to unsling his Lee-Enfield, but noticed Preston wasn’t getting excited. “They always open fire around this time of day,” the subaltern said. “We think they have orders to shoot off so many rounds every morning, and this is how they make their quota.”
“War shouldn’t be about work rates,” Walsh said. “If it were, all the soldiers would unionize—and likely go out on strike. Then you’d need to hire blacklegs if you wanted any killing done.”
Preston looked at him in yet another new way. “You’re quite daft, aren’t you?” he said.
“Who, me?” Walsh shrugged. “I do my best.”
HANS-ULRICH RUDEL WOKE to a soft drumming against the canvas of his tent. He was afraid he knew what that was, but he might have been wrong. He stuck his nose outside to see. Said nose, and the rest of his face, met raindrops. He didn’t take the Lord’s name in vain. Even now, he remembered he was a minister’s son. But he did say something that never would have come out of his mouth before he joined the Luftwaffe.
The rain poured down from a pewter sky. Hans-Ulrich squelched over to the mess tent. Some of the flyers in there had already started drinking. One of them raised a flask in salute to him. “Have a snort, Rudel!”
“You know I don’t do that,” Rudel answered.
“You may as well. We sure as hell aren’t going up for a while.” Peter took a long pull at the flask. Did his cheeks and nose turn redder, or was that only Hans-Ulrich’s sanctimonious imagination?
Preferring not to dwell on it, Rudel said, “It may stop. The ground may dry up again.” He didn’t believe himself, either. He’d been in Russia the autumn before. He knew what these rains were like.
So did Peter, who laughed raucously. “Go talk to a virgin, pal! This weather’s fucked us before, and it’s fucking us again.”
Since Hans-Ulrich feared he was right, he walked over to see what the field kitchen had turned out. It was a thick stew of boiled buckwheat groats—kasha, the Ivans called the stuff—and onions and carrots and bits of flesh. Pointing to one of those bits in his mess tin, Hans-Ulrich asked, “What is it?”
“Meat.” The fellow who’d ladled out the stew gave back a laconic answer.
“I figured that,” Rudel said with exaggerated patience. “But will it neigh when I bite down? Or bark? Or meow?”
“As long as it doesn’t ask you for a loan, Herr Oberleutnant, odds are you’re better off not knowing,” the cook replied.
Sighing, Rudel decided he was likely to be right. He sat down on a bench and spooned up the stew. They’d never serve it at the Adlon—although food inside the Reich was nasty these days, too. The meat had been boiled so long, he couldn’t tell what it had started out as. It tasted … meaty. He emptied the tin tray faster than he’d expected. He would have gone back for seconds if he hadn’t worried that the cook would laugh at him.
There was a strange thing. Around his neck hung the Knight’s Cross, proof that he didn’t fear anything enemy flak might do to his Stuka—or to him. Yet the thought that an enlisted man who needed a shave might mock him kept his behind glued to the planking.
Courage, and then again courage. Before the war started, he hadn’t understood that it came in different flavors. And what kind of courage was required for an Aryan holder of the Ritterkreuz to sleep with a half-Jewish barmaid? To love her? Hans-Ulrich shook his head. It wasn’t like that—quite. Even having anything to do with her, though, took bravery unlike either bearding a cook or diving on an enemy panzer. It took a certain amount of moral courage, though Rudel himself was unlikely ever to see it in that light.
Colonel Steinbrenner ducked into the mess tent. At a training base in Germany, no doubt, the flyers would have stopped shoveling in kasha and mystery meat. They would have put down the vodka jugs (no, they wouldn’t have had any vodka jugs to begin with). And they would have leaped to their feet, stiffened into attention, and saluted the squadron commander.
A couple of them nodded. One man paused in lighting a cigarette long enough to wave. The rest went on with what they were doing. Steinbrenner took that for granted. He shed his officer’s cap and scowled at the drops of water on the patent-leather brim. “Fucking wet out there,” he remarked.
“Too right it is,” said the pilot with the cigarette.
One of the men passing around the jug held it out to the colonel. He laughed, shook his head, and went over to the pot full of stew. The cook filled his mess kit. Then Steinbrenner caught Hans-Ulrich’s eye, wordlessly asking, May I sit next to you?
Hans-Ulrich nodded and did his best to look eager and inviting. Discipline at the front didn’t work the way it did in the Reich during peacetime, but you needed some mighty good reason to tell your squadron commander to get lost, and he had none.
“How’s it going?” Steinbrenner asked as he parked himself.
“In this weather, sir? It’s not going anywhere,” Rudel said.
“You’ve got that right, anyway. The Landsers’ll just have to live without air support for a while. Well, so will the Russians.” Steinbrenner dug into breakfast. He chewed thoughtfully before delivering his verdict: “I’ve had worse, but I’ve sure had better. What’s the meat?”
“Don’t know,” Hans-Ulrich admitted.
“Didn’t you ask?” Steinbrenner said.
“Yeah, but the cook said I’d be better o
ff not finding out,” Rudel answered.
The squadron commander turned and shouted at the guy behind the cauldron: “Hey, Klaus, what did you kill before you dumped it into this slop?” He didn’t worry about the enlisted man’s precious sensibilities.
And Klaus didn’t worry about his, either. “Sir, I believe that’s your granny,” he replied. The mess tent erupted with laughter.
Colonel Steinbrenner spooned up some more meat. His jaws worked again. He shook his head. “Nah. Granny’d be tougher than this no matter how long you stewed her.” More laughter. The cook held up the ladle in salute, acknowledging the hit.
Hans-Ulrich knew he couldn’t have done anything like that. He could sass Sergeant Dieselhorst that way, and maybe a couple of the other flyers he felt comfortable with, but not a cook he didn’t care a pfennig for one way or the other. Yes, Colonel Steinbrenner was older than he was, but Rudel suddenly realized more than age and rank went into running a squadron.
He didn’t go on from there to realize Steinbrenner had asked to sit next to him for a reason. He was a gear with a worn-down tooth or two, and didn’t fit smoothly into the squadron’s mechanism. Had he realized something like that, he would have taken another step toward being ready to lead such an outfit.
“So what are you going to do now that flying gets tricky?” Steinbrenner asked him. Then the colonel shook his head once more. “Now that flying gets stuck in the mud, I should say.”
“Oh, I don’t know, sir. Maybe I’ll see if I can con a furlough out of my squadron commander,” Rudel said blandly. “Some people can drink so that weeks seem to go by in days. If you don’t drink, though, weeks stuck in the mud seem more like years.”
“Best argument for drinking I’ve heard lately,” Colonel Steinbrenner remarked. Hans-Ulrich hadn’t intended it as anything of the kind, but he could see how the older man might hear it that way—and jab him with it. Steinbrenner went on, “If you did get a furlough—by some miracle, you understand—where would you go? What would you do? And ‘Anywhere away from here’ isn’t a good enough answer.”
Now Hans-Ulrich chose his words with care: “Well, I might take a train back to Poland to get away from the war for a bit. To, ah, Bialystok.” Why deny it? Steinbrenner knew about Sofia.
He nodded. Yes, he was unsurprised. “And how’s your girlfriend there?”
“That’s what I’d like to find out, sir. She, ah, she doesn’t write much,” Rudel said. In point of fact, Sofia didn’t write at all. He’d never told her not to, but she knew getting love letters—or any letters—from a Mischling wouldn’t be good for him.
Colonel Steinbrenner nodded. “That may not be the worst thing in the world,” was all he said, but it told Hans-Ulrich he not only knew about Sofia but also about her racial makeup.
If they wanted to make a case against me, they could. The weight of the Knight’s Cross on his neck felt most reassuring to Rudel. But that kind of thing wouldn’t stop them if they decided you were disloyal. It might slow them down, but it wouldn’t stop them. The only thing that would stop them was obvious, unswerving loyalty to the Reich and to National Socialism. Hans-Ulrich had it, in abundance. He also had a half-Jewish girlfriend. Would that make them doubt the other? All he could do—if he didn’t want to give Sofia up, and he didn’t—was hope not.
YOU EXPLAIN HOW you messed up. You promise not to do it again, and you mean what you’re saying from the bottom of your heart. After that, the sun’s supposed to come out and everything’s supposed to be wonderful: just the way it was before. It’s straight out of a Hollywood script.
Peggy Druce was discovering that real life didn’t work out the way movies did. It was nothing she hadn’t suspected before. But, despite confessions, she and Herb couldn’t seem to go back to the way they’d been before she sailed for Europe in late summer 1938. They could talk about forgiving each other. Meaning it was harder—harder than she’d ever expected.
It wasn’t anything showy or dramatic. He didn’t haul off and belt her one. She didn’t smash crockery over his noggin. They still enjoyed each other’s company, at the dining-room table and even in the bedroom. They weren’t going to end up in divorce court. Nothing like that.
But all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again. Peggy felt the lack, the way she’d felt it when she woke up from the ether without her wisdom teeth. She could still go back there with her tongue and remember when she’d had them. She could remember this other thing that was missing now, too.
They’d given her codeine to keep the extractions from hurting so much. She wished there were also a pill for this. She tried bourbon, but that seemed to make matters worse, not better.
Herb was drinking more these days. He wasn’t drinking what anybody would call a lot, but he was drinking more. Peggy wondered if she should say something about it: at least let him know she’d noticed. In the end, she kept her mouth shut. She also wondered whether she should have done that about their adventures while apart.
She didn’t think so. This was better than the looming thing in the room with them that neither had wanted to admit was there. The trouble was, she’d thought that better would turn out to be the same thing as what kids called all better. Nope. And the difference between the one and the other was enough to tempt her back toward the Old Grand dad bottle again.
Then one dreary, rainy, early-darkening afternoon Herb came through the door with more bounce in his step than she’d seen since she got back from Europe. “Ha!” he said as he hung his topcoat on a peg so it would drip on the tile floor.
“Ha?” Peggy asked.
“Ha!” He said it again, even more emphatically. For good measure, he added, “Hoo-hah!” Then he lit a cigarette.
“Okay, now I get it,” Peggy said. “You’re all excited because Glenn Miller just took you on as a scat singer.”
He coughed, blowing out ragged puffs of smoke. “Don’t do that,” he wheezed. “You’ll make me choke to death.”
“Sorry.” She did her best to sound properly contrite. It wasn’t easy; she still wanted to laugh. “Maybe I wouldn’t need to if you’d tell me what’s really going on.”
“Well, I was going to.” Herb took another, cautious, drag on the coffin nail. This time, he didn’t try to explode when he exhaled. “Needed more finagling than I ever thought it would, but I finally did it.”
“That’s nice,” Peggy answered. “Did what?”
“Persuaded Uncle Sam I could do something that would help give the war effort a kick in the pants.” Her husband looked proud enough to bust the buttons on his vest.
And well he might have. He’d been trying to do something for the country ever since Japan attacked the Philippines and tried to hit Hawaii the January before. The trouble—or at least part of the trouble—was, the government was deluged with middle-aged men offering their services. Most of them were too old and too far from war service to be worth anything with weapons in their hands. Getting men to fight and giving them the tools they needed to fight with had to be Washington’s top priority.
Even that wasn’t going so well as people wished it would. Stories about waste and inefficiency and fraud and profiteering showed up in the papers almost every day and in the news magazines almost every week. But the War Department’s worries about everything else ran only a distant second—when they ran at all.
“What will they want you to do?” Peggy asked. It might have been Will I ever see you again? That wasn’t even close to fair, not when she’d gallivanted all over Pennsylvania and beyond, telling eyewitness tales of how nasty Fascism was, so prosperous people—and those not so prosperous—would fork over the cash to let the government take care of whatever it decided needed taking care of.
“Make things run smoother,” Herb said. “Efficiency expert, is what it boils down to. Only they’ll pay me more than a run-of-the-mill efficiency expert, ’cause I won’t be dealing with stuff on the shop floor. I’m supposed to make whole factory syst
ems run better.”
“How much is ‘more’?” was Peggy’s natural next question. Herb named a number. She whistled softly. That was pretty good, all right. Then she asked, “Are they going to draft you so you can do it?”
“Unh-unh.” He shook his head. “They’d have to make me a colonel or something to give me enough clout to do the job, and they don’t want to make colonels out of guys who were corporals the last time around and got out of the Army as fast as they could afterwards. Can’t say I blame ’em, either. So I’ll be a civilian with a fancy letter from the Secretary of War—or maybe from the President; dunno yet—that says I have the power to bind and to loose.”
Peggy looked suitably impressed. “Wow! Can I touch you?” She reached out as if to tap him gently with the very tip of her forefinger.
He grabbed her and squeezed her. “You darn well better, babe.”
She squeezed back. She liked being in his arms. It felt like the right place to be. She only wished there weren’t that little something in the back of her mind. Once upon a time, Gladys the clerk-typist had been in his arms, too. And, once upon a time, Peggy herself had wound up in that American diplomat’s arms.
None of that would happen again. If she hadn’t been sure of it, she wouldn’t have liked being in Herb’s arms any more. All the same, the shadow lingered.
Countries in Europe remembered slights and defeats at the hands of their neighbors that went back centuries. Sometimes, even in this day and age, they chose their allies—and their wars—on account of them. That had always struck a sensible, no-nonsense, apple-pie American like Peggy as insane. Once something was over, it was over.
Wasn’t it?
Well, as things turned out, that depended. She and Herb were finding out for themselves that memories weren’t always so easy to shove aside. And if people who loved each other had trouble doing it, how much harder was it for countries that hated and feared and mistrusted one another?
The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat Page 36
