In front of Demange, Luc Harcourt’s blood steamed in the snow. The Germans were still well over half a kilometer away. It had taken one hell of a shot to punch Harcourt’s ticket for him. Well, punched it was; that one had torn his throat out. He’d lie here till the wolves found him.
Which didn’t mean Demange wanted to lie here with him. The veteran glanced back over his shoulder, working out what he needed to do next. The stupidest thing you could do was move before you decided where you were going and how you intended to get there.
He crawled backward, trying his best to keep Harcourt’s body between him and the German sniper. Acting as cover was the last favor the kid could do him or anybody else. When Demange had gone about as far as he could go that way, he scrambled to his feet and sprinted for the cover of some snow-covered bushes.
A Mauser bullet snapped past him, viciously close. He dove behind the bushes, his breath harsh in his throat. I’m getting too old for this crap, he thought. All those chain-smoked Gitanes … He spat out the butt he had in his mouth now. The last thing he wanted was for that fucking Nazi to spot cigarette smoke yelling Here I am!
Can I take him out? he wondered. He had a lot of practice with a rifle, but he was only a good marksman, not a great one. And his piece wasn’t all that accurate out past three or four hundred meters. If the guy who’d potted poor damned Harcourt wasn’t carrying one of their man-hunting fancy Mausers, Demange would have been astonished. All of which meant that, in any kind of long-range duel, the odds were on the other fucker’s side.
Then a Hotchkiss machine gun opened up. Puffs of rising snow traced its stream of bullets across the ground. Demange loved machine guns … when they were shooting at the other clowns. He wasn’t nearly so fond of them when they tried to put his lights out.
Now the sniper would have to keep his head down, though, unless he craved a round in one ear and out the other. And if he couldn’t fire, or would be rushed when he did, now looked like a terrific time to put some more distance between him and the lieutenant’s precious, irreplaceable self.
He used the bushes to screen his movements from the Boche. The asshole might be willing to pop up for a shot if he got a good target. Best not to give him one, then. All the same, the spot between Demange’s shoulder blades, that stretch of skin right above his spine, itched madly as he hustled toward the Red Army lines.
No 7.92mm round ripped through that spot, or any other. Demange thanked the God in Whom he’d long since quit believing. He hadn’t stopped anything big in this war, not yet. He sure as hell did in 1918. The more you know about getting shot, the less you wanted to do it again.
A horrible clanking monster rumbled straight at him: a whitewashed T-34. It looked as if it could make canapés out of every French tank ever manufactured. The reason it looked that way was simple: it could. The commander rode with his head and shoulders out of the hatch. Recognizing Demange as a Frenchman, the Ivan waved a mittened hand as the T-34 clattered past.
“Watch out for a sniper up ahead!” Demange yelled. He doubted the Russian heard, or understood if he did hear. He’d tried, though. What else could you do?
He soon discovered he should have warned the driver to watch out for one of the Germans’ fearsome 88mm multipurpose guns, but he’d had no idea the damn thing was in the neighborhood. The Boches hadn’t wasted it on anything so trivial as foot soldiers. A T-34, now, that they took seriously. A big armor-piercing round slamming into steel plate sounded like an accident in a steel mill. The T-34 slewed sideways and started burning. A diesel engine didn’t go to blazes the way a gasoline-powered one did, but there were limits to everything.
Demange wasted maybe a second and a half feeling sorry for the unlucky cons inside the T-34. Then he trotted on toward the Russians’ lines. Whatever the tank wouldn’t do now that it had been intended to, it had got the Germans off his back for a while. From his point of view, what more could he want?
As promised, there were lanes through the barbed wire. The Ivans had even gone to the trouble of marking them with strips of red cloth. Never a trusting soul, Demange yelled “Friends! We’re friends!” as he came forward. He didn’t want his new comrades potting him by mistake.
A Russian appeared out of nowhere. One second, he wasn’t there. The next, he loomed up in front of Demange, a snowman with a submachine gun. Instead of mowing the lieutenant down, he pointed with the stubby barrel. “You go that way,” he said in bad, palatal French.
“I will go that way,” Demange agreed, speaking slowly and clearly. Afterward, he thought the Red Army man understood his obedience better than his reply.
He spotted a few more Russians as he tramped along. A couple of them gave him and the poilus who’d come in more brusque directions. He wondered how many more of the snowsuited cochons he wasn’t seeing. The Russians knew things about camouflage other people didn’t even suspect. Their strength was like an iceberg: nine-tenths of it hid below the surface.
Finally, he came to an officer—a captain, by his collar tabs—who wore khaki. He relaxed a bit himself then, deciding he was out of any possible sniper range. The captain carried a clipboard and a pencil. His French was pretty fair: “Give me your name, your rank, and your pay number,” he told Demange.
“Whatever you want.” Demange rattled them off. He assumed half a dozen Russians he couldn’t see crouched somewhere nearby, ready to gun down anybody stupid enough to argue or complain.
The captain wrote things down in a language and a script Demange couldn’t begin to follow. He also took the information from the enlisted men who trailed Demange. Then he gestured with the pencil, the same way the guy in the snowsuit had with his machine pistol. “Go that way, past the trees, another kilometer. Get into one of the trucks you find.”
Demange sketched a salute. “You got it.” He turned to his men. “Come on, you lugs. One more lousy kilometer, then we’re done marching for a while.”
“At least they aren’t taking away our rifles,” one of the French soldiers said.
He was right. Demange found that mildly encouraging, too—but only mildly. If the Russians wanted to slaughter them from ambush, how much would their rifles help?
The trucks gave Demange pause, much the same way as the sight of his first T-34 had some weeks earlier. They were big, sturdy, broad-shouldered machines that made every design engineer in France, Germany, and England look like an amateur, and a half-assed amateur at that. If the Russians made trucks like these and tanks like those, how come they were still such fuckups?
Then he saw letters of his own alphabet on the trucks’ grillwork. STUDEBAKER, they proclaimed. The Russians hadn’t made these trucks. They’d got them from the Americans. That was something of a relief. The Americans had a real talent for manufacturing things. He remembered that from the last war, that and their puppyish enthusiasm. They were new to the fight, and still eager for it. All the French soldiers left alive then had long since shed such stupidity.
Another moon-faced Ivan with a submachine gun waved him and some of his men into the back of one of the Studebakers. Three or four Frenchmen were already inside. Before long, the compartment was packed as tight as a tin of anchovy filets. “Anybody know where they’re going to take us?” asked one of the fellows who’d got there ahead of Demange.
“As long as it’s away from the front, who gives a damn?” the lieutenant returned.
He was as grimy and unshaven as any enlisted man. His greatcoat hid his rank badges. The men who didn’t know him treated him the same way they would have treated one of their own. That suited him fine; he’d never wanted to be an officer to begin with.
The truck’s engine rumbled to life. The driver put the big beast in gear. Wherever they were going, they were on their way.
IN THE SUMMERTIME, the stinking Fritzes pressed forward and Soviet forces fell back. Ivan Kuchkov had seen that in all three summers of the war. During the winter, though, all bets were off. The Nazis weren’t such hotshots once snow started comi
ng down. They were soft pussies, the Germans. All the good weather in Western Europe spoiled them rotten.
As far as Ivan was concerned, the Ukraine had pretty easy winters. It got a hell of a lot colder and snowed a hell of a lot more farther north. But even the weather here was plenty to screw up the Fascist bastards. Their tanks didn’t want to run. Sometimes even their gun oil froze up.
When you killed a guy who couldn’t shoot back because the bolt on his Mauser was stuck tight, you had to feel a little sorry for him. But you blew his head off anyway, and you were a jackass if you felt more than a little sorry while you did it. What was he doing hundreds of kilometers inside your country except trying to murder you and fuck your sister and steal everything you ever had or would have? Ivan was a jackass all kinds of ways—he even recognized some of them—but he wasn’t a pitying jackass.
West of Kiev, the German and Soviet positions looked more like interlaced fingers than anything resembling a line. A Stavka officer who planned and proposed dispositions like those would have got sent to the gulag or a punishment battalion in nothing flat. None of this had been planned; like a lot of war, it just happened. The Russians had gone ahead where they could. The Germans hung on to villages, and to the roads that let them keep the villages supplied.
To complicate things even more, Ukrainian bandits in the woods bushwhacked Russians and Germans almost impartially. A lot of them would have been pro-Nazi if only the Nazis gave them the chance. But the Germans liked Ukrainians no better than they liked Russians. More often than not, they couldn’t even tell them apart, or didn’t bother trying. So the bandits took potshots at them, too.
One of the reasons so many of the bandits would have gone over to the German side if only the Germans wanted them was that they hated Jews even more than most Russians did. Kuchkov had no great love for Zhids himself. Guys like Avram Davidov, though, got more useful in this kind of country. Avram knew what to be nervous about. The short answer was, everything. And when the short answer was everything, the long answer didn’t matter.
The Ukrainian nationalists’ big disadvantage was that they didn’t have an actual country on their side. No factories made rifles and mortars and hand grenades just for them. No trains and trucks made sure weapons reached them in—literally—carload lots. They had to make do with hunting rifles and whatever they could steal from the Germans and Russians.
On the other hand, they were desperately in earnest. The only reason most of the Red Army men and their foes in Feldgrau wore their country’s uniform was that they would have got it in the neck if they’d tried to say no to the fat sons of bitches who’d conscripted them. The bandits went out to fight because they felt like fighting. They didn’t have a country on their side, but they sure wanted to. It made a difference.
Right now, Ivan and his men crouched in amongst some trees that wanted to be a proper forest but didn’t quite know how. Avram’s eyes flicked across a field to some more trees that might have been an orchard before Stalin started tearing the Ukraine a new asshole but had plainly stood forgotten ever since. The little Jew didn’t point; the Red Army men’s cover wasn’t all that great.
“Somebody’s in there, Comrade Sergeant.” Davidov sounded as spooked as a guy wandering the corridors of a haunted castle in some bad horror film.
“German cunts?” Kuchkov asked. That was his first guess because his officers said there were supposed to be Nazis around here somewhere. He let them do his thinking for him. He knew he wasn’t real good at it himself.
Unhappily, Avram shook his head. “I think they’re Banderists.” He was hardly ever cheerful. Now he looked and sounded even gloomier than usual. Stepan Bandera was the bandit chief in charge of most—not all, but most—of the jerks who wanted to fly the gold-and-blue flag, stamp their stupid trident on everything that didn’t move, and go around grunting in their almost-Russian language.
“Fuck,” Kuchkov said. “You sure?”
“Two or three of them showed themselves there for a few seconds.” Davidov still didn’t point. He did add what he plainly thought was a clincher: “One of ’em was wearing a cloth cap.”
“Fuck,” Kuchkov repeated. Real soldiers would wear helmets, or maybe service caps or berets. Only a yokel off a farm would dress like a yokel off a farm. Ivan went on, “We don’t need this extra fucking shit, you know?”
“Sorry, Comrade Sergeant.” Sasha sounded as if he meant it. He was like anybody else: getting shot or ripped to pieces by artillery fire didn’t appeal to him one hell of a lot. After a moment, he asked, “What shall we do?”
Ivan only grunted. He had no idea how many Ukrainians were lurking over there. He didn’t want to have to attack them across open ground. If they had a machine gun, or maybe even if they didn’t, they could murder every one of the men who’d come at them.
He grunted again. Then he picked up a branch not quite as long as he was and tied his snow smock to it by the arms: not much of a flag of truce, but he had to hope it would do. “I’ll parley with the bitches,” he said. “If they don’t turn me loose, or if anything else gets fucked up, send somebody back to regimental artillery and have ’em blast the living shit out of those trees. Got it?”
The Jew nodded. If anybody in this section could be counted on to take care of something like that, he was the guy. Waving the improvised white flag, Ivan started across the field toward the forgotten orchard. It was a long, slow, lonely walk. They could kill him if they wanted to. No—they wanted to kill him, and they could. It wasn’t the same thing.
After a while, a shout came from the leafless fruit trees: “Hold it right there, you cocksucking Red!”
“Ah, fuck your mother. You haven’t got a cock big enough to suck,” Ivan answered without much rancor. But he did stop.
“You’ve got some nerve, talking like that out in the open.” The Ukrainian in the orchard made enough of an effort to speak Russian that Kuchkov could follow him well enough. “What do you want?”
“My guys have a radio.” Ivan lied without compunction. “All we have to do is call, and the big guns’ll fuck your position over. If you cunts clear out peaceable-like, we won’t call. I’ll give you half an hour.”
“Why should I believe a guy who licks Stalin’s balls?” The Ukrainian was almost as foul-mouthed as Kuchkov himself.
“ ’Cause I’m standing here, that’s why,” Kuchkov answered. “You think I’d let you shoot my dick off for nothing better’n bullshit?”
“With a Russian, who the hell knows what you’d be dumb enough to do?” the bandits’ spokesman said darkly. Ivan stood out there in the cold wind. He’d figured he would have to wait. The bandit couldn’t just give orders, the way a proper sergeant could. He had to talk his buddies into doing shit.
Ivan made as if to look at a watch he wasn’t wearing. “Twenty-eight minutes now,” he called. “Don’t sit there jerking off. Get your nuts in gear.”
He waited some more, occasionally checking that nonexistent wristwatch. After a while, the Ukrainian said, “All right. Keep your old galoshes on. We’re leaving.” Ivan chuckled. Old galoshes was Russian slang—not quite mat, but close—for a used rubber. Hearing it made him think the bandit meant what he said.
When Ivan did wave his section forward, only half his men came out of their positions. If that wasn’t Avram’s doing, he would have been amazed. You always wanted somebody in reserve. They occupied the orchard with no trouble—the bandits really had gone away. Kuchkov swigged vodka and lit a papiros to celebrate. A bloodless victory was the best kind.
Chapter 26
Like the Goldmans, the Brucks had a radio set. If anything, they listened to it more than Sarah’s mother and father did. Books meant less to them than they did to the Goldmans. Isidor and his folks used the radio to fill in the spaces where the Goldmans would have been reading.
Which would have been all right, if Dr. Goebbels weren’t the fellow giving the orders about what went out over the airwaves. Oh, not even Hitler’s club-fo
oted propaganda boss could screw up everything. Sarah had no problems with Handel and Bach and Beethoven. They didn’t belong to the Nazis alone. They were part of every halfway cultured person’s baggage.
Wagner … Wagner was more complicated. Sarah had been a girl in the days back before the Führer came to power. She remembered her father playing records of Wagner’s operas then. And, after the direction in which the Nazis were taking Germany grew unmistakably clear, she remembered him smashing those records one by one and throwing the pieces in the trash.
That didn’t mean he, or anyone else in the Third Reich, could escape Wagner altogether. Naturally, Hitler’s favorite composer was on the radio all the time. Samuel Goldman had usually turned it off or found another station when that happened. Sometimes, though, Sarah had caught him listening, hardly seeming to realize he was doing it. The Germans made it plain that liking Wagner was a big part of being one of them, and her father’d always wanted nothing more than to be, and to be seen to be, a good German himself.
Besides, some of what Wagner wrote—not all, not to Sarah’s ear, but yes, some—was ravishingly beautiful.
These days, more French treason and French betrayal were on the radio than Wagner. German commentators screamed that France had broken her commitments as an ally and a friend.
David Bruck was nowhere near so sophisticated a man as Samuel Goldman, but did you need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing? “It’ll be two fronts going full blast, same as it was in the Great War,” he predicted. “It didn’t work then. What are the odds it will this time?”
“Do you want it to?” Sarah asked him. “If this regime goes down the drain, maybe whatever comes along next won’t blame everything on the Jews.”
The baker looked startled. “I hadn’t even though of it like that,” he confessed. Turning to his son, he went on, “See what a smart girl you married, Isidor?”
The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat Page 45
