“Leave me some,” Anastas said.
“Leave me some, sir,” Sergei said. The drunker you got, the more important military discipline seemed…unless, of course, it didn’t. He passed Mouradian the bottle. They drank till there was very little left to drink. They would have drunk till nothing was left to drink, but they both fell asleep first.
Getting up in the morning was as bad as Yaroslavsky had known it would be, or maybe a little worse. The first thing he did was drink half the remaining vodka. He would have drunk all of it, but Anastas snatched the bottle out of his hands. “To each according to his needs,” the Armenian croaked, and no one in the USSR, no matter how hung over, dared quarrel with unadulterated Marx.
Fortunately, the aspirins turned up. Sergei dry-swallowed three of them. Mouradian took four. As sour as Sergei’s stomach already was, the aspirins felt like a flamethrower in there. If he belched, he figured he could incinerate the whole airstrip.
Mouradian didn’t look or sound much happier. “Breakfast,” he said. The mere thought made Sergei groan. Then Anastas added, “They’ll have tea—coffee, too, maybe.”
“Well, maybe.” Sergei peeled back the tent flap and looked out. The sun shone brilliantly off snow. He squinted at the alarming landscape. “Don’t want to bleed to death through my eyeballs,” he muttered.
“Tell me about it!” Mouradian said fervently.
Both being brave men, they made it to the field kitchen. Shchi—cabbage soup—seemed safe enough to Sergei. Anastas stuck to plain brown bread. The cooks had one battered samovar full of tea, another full of coffee. After getting outside of some of that—and after the aspirins took hold—Sergei decided he’d live. Eventually, he would decide he wanted to.
The radio blared out music. Mouradian turned it down. Sergei would have loved to turn it off, but he didn’t dare. People might think you didn’t want to listen to the news. If you didn’t want to listen to the splendid achievements of the glorious Soviet state, people would wonder why not. Some of the people who wondered would have NKVD connections, too. And you’d be heading for a camp faster than you could blink.
Nobody complained about turning down the radio, though. Several other men eating breakfast had red-tracked eyes, sallow skin, and a hangdog expression. When it was snowing at an isolated airstrip, what were you going to do besides drink?
The song ended. An announcer gabbled about the overfulfillment of production norms at factories in Smolensk, Magnitogorsk, and Vladivostok. Not easy to imagine three more widely separated places. “Thus, despite the efforts of Fascists and other reactionaries, prosperity spreads throughout this great bulwark of the proletariat!” the announcer said.
Sergei had nothing against the bulwark of the proletariat. In his present fragile state, though, he didn’t much want to hear about it. He made himself seem attentive even so, as he would have during a dull lecture in school. The penalty for obvious boredom then would have been a rap on the knuckles, or maybe a swat on the backside. He might pay more now.
Music returned. He didn’t have to seem to be listening to that so closely. He couldn’t ignore it altogether, however, or show he didn’t like it. It wouldn’t have gone out without some commissar’s approval: without the state’s approval, in other words. And if the state approved, citizens who knew what was good for them needed to do the same.
At the top of the hour, a different announcer came on the air. This fellow sounded better educated than the joker who’d been bragging about production norms. “And now the news!” the man said.
Several people with Red Air Force light blue on their collar tabs perked up. News from around the world mattered. “Soviet forces continue to punish the Polish reactionaries and the Nazi bandits who support them,” the announcer crowed. “Over the past several days, Soviet infantrymen have driven another twenty kilometers deeper into Poland. Knowledgeable officers report that enemy resistance is beginning to crumble.”
Nobody said anything. Nobody even raised an eyebrow. Sergei didn’t think anyone actually fighting the Poles and Germans believed their resistance was crumbling. He knew damn well he didn’t. That particular item had to be aimed at bucking up civilian morale hundreds if not thousands of kilometers from the front.
“Foreign Commissar Litvinov has protested to the Japanese government about its troop buildup between puppet Manchukuo and progressive Siberia,” the announcer went on.
Hearing that made Sergei’s headache get worse. This borderland between the USSR and Poland was nowhere in particular. He tried to imagine fighting a war at the eastern edge of Siberia. That was Nowhere in Particular with capital N and P. The only reason either the Soviet Union or Japan cared about it was because of strategy. Other than that, the whole area could go hang.
Vladivostok was the USSR’s window on the Pacific. It was a window frozen shut several months a year, but never mind that. Vladivostok also sat on the end of the world’s longest supply line: it was the place where the Trans-Siberian Railroad finally stopped. It wasn’t a million kilometers from Moscow—it only seemed that way.
What would happen if the little yellow monkeys who lived in Japan tried to seize the railroad and cut the town’s lifeline? How long before Vladivostok withered? How long before the Japanese could just walk in? Sergei was too young to remember the siege of Port Arthur and the Russo-Japanese War as a whole, but he knew about them. Few Soviet citizens didn’t. Even though the Tsar’s corrupt regime was to blame for the Russian defeat, it still rankled.
Brooding about it made him read some of what the radio newscaster was saying. When he started paying attention again, the man was saying, “And the French government has declared that the front is Paris. The French say they are determined to fight in the capital itself, and to fight on beyond it even if it falls. They did not have to do this during the last war. Whether they will live up to their promises, only time will tell.”
“If they’d done better by Czechoslovakia when the war started, they might not be in this mess now,” Anastas Mouradian said. “They’ll probably expect us to pull their chestnuts off the fire for them, too.”
“Too fucking bad if they do. We’ve got enough worries of our own,” Sergei said.
“German radio reports that Adolf Hitler has indignantly denied any military coup was attempted against him,” the announcer said. “Reliable sources inside Germany report that at least four prominent German generals have not been seen for several weeks, however.”
No one eating breakfast said anything to that. No one imagined anything could be safe to say. No one even wanted to look at anyone else. The look on your face could betray you, too.
Soviet generals—far more than four of them—started disappearing in 1937. Like some of the Old Bolsheviks who started getting it in the neck at the same time, a few confessed to treason in show trials before they were executed. Others were simply put to death, or vanished into the camps, or just…disappeared.
It wasn’t only generals, either. Officers of all ranks were purged. So were bureaucrats of all ranks, and so were doctors and professors and anyone who seemed dangerous to anyone else.
Now the same thing was happening in Germany? Sergei had sometimes thought that Communists and Nazis were mirror images of each other, one side’s left being the other’s right and conversely. He’d never shared that thought with anyone; had he tried, he would put his life in the other person’s hands. He wished the idea had never crossed his mind. Just having certain notions was deadly dangerous. They might show up on your face without your even realizing it. And if they did, you were dead.
Or maybe worse.
So did the enemy have to worry about the kinds of things that had convulsed the Soviet Union for the past couple of years? Good, Sergei thought. If both sides were screwed up the same way, the one he was on looked to have a better chance.
LUDWIG ROTHE LIT A GITANE he’d got from a German infantryman who’d taken a pack from a dead French soldier. It was strong as the devil, but it tasted like real
tobacco, not the hay and ersatz that went into German cigarettes these days.
“Have another one of those, Sergeant?” Fritz Bittenfeld asked plaintively.
“You look like a hungry baby blackbird trying to get a worm from its mama,” Ludwig said. Fritz opened his mouth very wide, as if he really were a nestling. Laughing, Ludwig gave the panzer driver a Gitane.
“Chirp!” Theo Hossbach said, flapping his arms. “Chirp!” He got a cigarette, too.
They’d all smoked them down to tiny butts when a blackshirt who’d been prowling around the panzer park finally got to them. “Can I talk to you boys for a minute?” he asked, a little too casually.
His shoulder straps were plain gray, with two gold pips. That made him the SS equivalent of a captain. How could you say no? You couldn’t. “What’s up, sir?” Ludwig tried to keep his voice as normal as he could.
“You men have served under Major Koral for some time—isn’t that so?” the SS man said.
“Ja,” Ludwig said. Fritz and Theo both nodded. No harm in admitting that, not when the blackshirt could check their records and find out for himself that Koral had led the panzer battalion since the war started.
“All right,” the SS man said, in now-we’re-getting-somewhere tones. “How often have you heard him express disloyalty toward the Führer and the Reich?”
“Disloyalty?” Ludwig echoed. He had trouble believing his ears. But the SS man nodded importantly. He seemed as full of his own righteousness as the more disagreeable kind of preacher. Picking his words with care, Ludwig said, “Sir, you do know, don’t you, that Major Koral’s already been wounded in action twice?”
“Yes, yes.” The SS man nodded impatiently, as if that were of no account. To him, it probably wasn’t. He went on, “I’m not talking about his military behavior. I’m talking about his political behavior.” You idiot, his gaze added. You’re supposed to know things like that without being told.
Sergeant Rothe bristled at so obviously being thought a moron. But then he chuckled to himself. If the blackshirt figured him for a Dummkopf, a Dummkopf he would be, by God. “Sir, the major just gives me orders. He doesn’t waste his time talking politics with noncoms.”
“What’s going on, anyway?” Theo sounded as innocent as an un-weaned baby. His dreamy features let him get away with that more easily than Ludwig could have.
The SS man didn’t hesitate before answering, “You will have heard that certain Wehrmacht generals betrayed their country by viciously plotting against the Führer?”
Ludwig had heard that, all right, from Hitler’s own lips. Telling the SS man as much struck him as the very worst of bad ideas. “Gott im Himmel!” he exclaimed, as if it were a complete surprise. “I heard it, ja, but I thought it was only enemy propaganda.” Beside him, Theo and Fritz nodded.
“It’s true, all right,” the blackshirt said. “They were disgraces to the uniform they wore, disgraces to the Volk, disgraces to the Reich. And so we must purify the army of all their associates and of everyone who might have shared their vicious views. Now do you understand why I am inquiring about Major Koral?”
“He wouldn’t do anything like that,” Fritz said. “He wouldn’t put up with anybody else who did, either.”
Theo nodded again. “That’s right.”
“I think so, too,” Ludwig said.
“You might be surprised. You might be very surprised indeed,” the SS man said. “We’ve found treason in some places where no one would have thought to look for it if these generals hadn’t disgraced themselves.”
If Ludwig hadn’t heard it from the Führer, he would have wondered what that meant. He did wonder what the SS and the Gestapo were up to now. Had they sniffed out more real treason, or had they “discovered” it regardless of whether it was really there? He didn’t ask this fellow that kind of question. That it could occur to him might be plenty to mark him as disloyal.
He did ask, “Why do you think Major Koral might be mixed up in this…this Scheisse?”
“Scheisse it is,” the SS man agreed. He pulled a scrap of paper from the right beast pocket of his tunic. “He has…let me see…a long history of association with General Fritsche, and also with General Halder. He may have been a Social Democrat before 1933—the record is not completely clear about that, but it is worrisome. And one of his cousins was formerly married to a Jew.”
If Fritsche and Halder were two of the generals who’d tried to overthrow the Führer, that might mean something. Or, of course, it might not. Ludwig had a long history of association with his cats, but he’d never wanted to eat mice himself. The rest didn’t seem to mean much. The Social Democrats had been the biggest party in Germany during the Weimar Republic. They were about as exclusive as a blizzard. Ludwig had no great use for Jews, but he thought one of his cousins was married to one, too. He hoped to God the SS would never dig that out and use it against him.
“Sorry not to be more help, sir,” he said insincerely.
“Like the sergeant said, Major Koral’s always been brave in combat,” Theo added. “Didn’t he win the Iron Cross First Class? Didn’t they put him up for the Ritterkreuz?”
The Iron Cross First Class—just like the Führer, Ludwig thought—one more thing he knew better than to say out loud. But the two awards weren’t really comparable. Lots of officers got the Iron Cross First Class now. For a common soldier in the Kaiser’s army to have won it the last time around was much more remarkable. Even the Knight’s Cross in this war wasn’t the same.
The SS man looked unhappy enough at Theo’s mild questions. “That has nothing to do with anything,” he said stiffly. “If you recall anything suspicious about him, report it to your superiors at once. At once, do you hear?” He tramped off, his back ramrod straight.
“Jesus Christ on roller skates!” Fritz said. “I think I’d sooner go to the dentist than get another little visit like that.”
“You can spread that on toast and call it butter,” Theo agreed. Ludwig supposed it was agreement, anyhow. The radioman came out with the strangest things sometimes.
Fritz Bittenfeld found a new question: “Should we go tell the major he’s got hounds sniffing on his trail?”
“If we see him in the field, sure,” Ludwig said. “But those fucking goons’ve got to be keeping an eye on him. If we go blab, what happens to us? We stick our dicks in the sausage grinder, that’s what?”
“Oh, that smarts!” Theo said in shrill falsetto. Ludwig and Fritz both laughed. Better to laugh than to grab at yourself, which was what Ludwig’s figure of speech made him want to do. Assuming it was a figure of speech, of course. With the SS, you could never be sure. And if they did it for real…Ludwig wanted to grab at himself again.
Bitterly, Fritz said, “It’s a hell of a note when you find out combat’s not the worst thing that can happen to you.”
“Yeah, it’s a hell of a note, all right,” Ludwig said. “You going to tell me it isn’t true? I can deal with the Czechs and the French and the English. I can even deal with the Russians if I have to. My old man fought in the East the last time around. Yeah, I can cope with that—bet your ass I can. But heaven help me if I’ve got to try and handle the cocksuckers who think they’re on my side.”
He kept his voice down. No one but his buddies could possibly have heard him. Only after the words were out of his mouth did he wonder if he could trust Fritz and Theo. They all trusted one another with their lives on the battlefield. But political matters were different—and, as Fritz had said, worse.
If he and the driver and the radioman couldn’t trust one another…Ludwig swore under his breath. This was the nastiest thing the SS did, right here. If you weren’t sure you could count on people who’d already saved your bacon more times than you could remember, then what?
You were screwed, that was what.
“We’re as bad as the Russians, you know?” Theo said, which was too close for comfort to what Ludwig was thinking. The radio operator went on, “Pretty soon I’m
going to start praying for cloudy weather.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Ludwig demanded.
“Well, if my shadow isn’t there, I don’t have to worry that it’ll betray me to the Gestapo when I’m not looking,” Theo answered. That either made no sense at all or altogether too much.
“Maybe it isn’t there because it’s off betraying you to the Gestapo.” Later, Ludwig wondered about himself. At the time, what he said seemed logical enough—to him, anyhow.
It didn’t faze Theo, either. “Nothing would surprise me any more,” he said. “Shadows aren’t to be trusted. No matter how much you feed ‘em, they never get any fatter than you do. And have you ever seen one that wasn’t as dark as a nigger, even when it was walking on a snowbank?”
Fritz looked from one of his crewmates to the other. “I think you’ve both gone round the bend,” he declared.
“Zu befehl,” Theo said—at your service. He clicked his heels, as if he were a Prussian grandee or an Austrian gentleman with more noble blood than he knew what to do with.
A battery of French 75s near Meaux started shelling the panzer park at extreme long range. Only a few shells came close enough to drive the Germans into the holes they’d dug. They had dug holes, of course; whenever they stopped for more than a few minutes, they dug. Anyone would have thought Wehrmacht men—and their French and English counterparts—descended from moles rather than monkeys.
“Wonder if the SS shithead has enough sense to take cover,” Fritz remarked.
“Nobody’ll miss him if he doesn’t,” Ludwig said. “With a little luck, even the Frenchmen won’t miss him.” Fritz and Theo both groaned. Neither tried to tell him he was wrong.
After a while, when the French guns didn’t blow up any ammunition dumps or show other tangible evidence of success, they eased off. The panzer crews came up above ground. And there was the blackshirt, a pistol in hand, leading Major Koral to a waiting auto with a swastika flag flying above its right fender. Face pale and set, the major got in. The car sped away, back toward Germany.
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