“Yeah, well, nobody held a gun to your head and made you get on a boat,” Chaim answered. “Now that I think about it, me, neither.”
“¿Qué dices?” asked one of the Spaniards who plumped out the Abe Lincolns. Chaim thought he went by Paco, but wasn’t quite sure. He’d never set eyes on the guy till he came back to the trenches.
“What’s he say?” Izzy asked. He’d been in Spain as long as Chaim. He could cuss some in Spanish, but that was about it.
“He said, ‘What did you say?’ ” Chaim answered. He did some more explaining, in both English and Spanish. Then he added, “I wish we had a mortar handy. That’d make those fuckers and their machine gun say uncle.”
“¿Qué dices?” Paco asked again. Chaim repeated himself in the Spaniard’s language. Then he had to explain the explanation to Izzy.
Paco spoke excitedly: “But we do have one!” He hurried away, staying low—he was learning.
“Where’s he going?” Izzy said. “Is he running off, the little son of a—?”
“No, no,” Chaim broke in. “He said we do have a mortar. Since when?”
“I dunno.” Izzy shrugged. “I don’t remember if the French Communist Party sent it to us or we captured it off the Nationalists.”
If the Communist Party of the United States stashed a mortar and some bombs at its headquarters in New York City, J. Edgar Hoover and his G-men would land on it in hobnailed boots, close it down, and send the leading American Reds to jail for about a million years. Things were different in Europe. Political parties of the left and the right took themselves a lot more seriously over here. Chaim, who also took politics seriously (if he didn’t, what was he doing in Spain?), leaned that way himself.
Paco not only knew the Abe Lincolns had a stovepipe, he knew where the critter was hiding. Maybe ten minutes later, mortar rounds started stalking the Nationalist diehards. The first one landed so far short, it was scarier than the enemy machine gun. But succeeding bombs walked toward and then came down on the battered foxholes Sanjurjo’s men were holding.
All the same, the machine gun opened up when the Abe Lincolns moved forward. The mortar crew must have been watching, perhaps through field glasses. More bombs landed on the Nationalists. Now the nasty little piece of field artillery had the range. The new shells didn’t scare the piss out of the guys they were supposed to help.
“Come on!” Chaim scrambled out of his own trench and ran toward the enemy line. “Follow me!”
The rest of the men in the assault party did follow him. He would have ended up slightly dead (or, sad to say, more than slightly) if they hadn’t. The mortar hadn’t put all the Nationalists out of action. Bombardments never did, however much you wished they would. A couple of men popped up with rifles. Shots from the oncoming Abe Lincolns made them fire wildly, though. And when one of Sanjurjo’s finest tried to point the machine gun at the charging Republicans, Chaim shot him in the face. He fell back with a wild, despairing scream. It had to be the best—or the luckiest—shot from the hip Chaim had ever made.
“¡Viva la Republica!” Chaim yelled as he jumped after the would-be machine gunner.
“¡Chinga la Republica!” a stubborn Nationalist shouted back, raising a Lebel—a French rifle that had been outdated at the start of the last war—to his shoulder.
Chaim shot him, too. The old-fashioned rifle fell from his hands. It went off when it hit the ground, but the bullet buried itself in the dirt. Other Abe Lincolns were cleaning out the rest of the men who’d held them up.
A couple of Nationalists did try to surrender then. The Abe Lincolns disposed of them in a hurry. The new Spaniards who filled out the force were quicker to shoot than the remaining Americans. This wasn’t about fighting Fascism to them. This was about getting rid of people who’d probably done horrible things to their loved ones. Chaim didn’t know why they called a war inside one country a civil war. It was anything but.
None of the Americans said anything about the shootings to their Spanish comrades. It wasn’t as if Sanjurjo’s men didn’t do the same thing. The machine gun also turned out to be surplus from the last war: a water-cooled German Maxim. Once in position, it was as good as any more modern weapon. Getting it there, however, was less than half the fun. It was more portable than an anvil, but only slightly. And the mount from which it fired was massive enough to let somebody preach a sermon on it.
Chaim said as much to Izzy, and got the groan he deserved. When he tried to translate the joke for one of the Spaniards, he discovered it worked in his language but not in theirs.
There were other things to worry about. Going on with the advance, for instance. He hadn’t had any particular rank when this attack started. He still didn’t, come to that. But both Americans and Spaniards seemed to expect him to tell them what to do next. He’d given an order before. It had worked. Not so surprising, then, that they expected more of the same.
He wanted to be a de facto officer the way he wanted a second head. His new order consisted of, “Well, let’s go, goddammit.”
They went. They drove everything before them. The Nationalists fled all the way to Valladolid, eighty miles west of Madrid. Marshal Sanjurjo was so dismayed, he hopped in a plane and flew back to Portugal. The Fascist cause in Spain collapsed. In Rome, Mussolini ground his teeth in fury. In Berlin, so did Hitler. Because of Chaim’s brilliant command, the progressive powers won the war.
Well … no. It wasn’t like that. Easier to dream of La Martellita going down on him than to look for so much from one grudged order. But the Abe Lincolns did capture that machine gun and go on to gain several hundred more meters of ground. Somebody must have put in a good word for Chaim, because a Republican major general (who wore overalls like a factory worker—and like La Martellita, though he didn’t fill them out so well) came up to the new front line, shook his hand, and kissed him on both cheeks.
The major general had been eating garlic. “You did some political indoctrination in the city, sí?” he asked. Chaim admitted it. “Why did you leave that post?” the officer inquired. Chaim only shrugged. Taking that for modesty, the general said, “Would you like to go back?” Chaim nodded, hoping he didn’t seem too eager. La Martellita would be furious. Aww—wasn’t that too bad?
he airport outside Stockholm. A tall, blond Swedish foreign-ministry official stamping her passport. “I don’t believe this,” Peggy Druce said dazedly. “It can’t be true.”
“If you like, Madame, I will pinch you.” The official spoke almost perfect English. If he had a slight singsong Scandinavian accent, so did plenty of people from Minneapolis.
“But … But …” Only a few days before, Peggy had been thinking about Warsaw as a stepping stone to Hungary and, eventually, to Romania or Greece. Even though one of their staff members had suggested it, everybody at the American embassy was sure she was nuts for wanting to try it. That didn’t mean the people there weren’t helping her. Maybe they didn’t care if she got blown up. Maybe they were glad to send her on her way even if the odds of that were pretty good. She didn’t endear herself to everyone, not if people stood in the way of what she wanted. More than a few Nazis would have agreed with the embassy personnel about that.
Now, though, a big, beautiful Swissair DC-3 sat on the runway outside the terminal. It was going to fly from Stockholm to London, and she had a seat on it. The foreign-ministry official’s gaze clouded, ever so slightly. “Now that Denmark and southern Norway are no longer considered a war zone, air traffic by neutrals has resumed,” the man said, no expression in his voice or on his face.
Now that the Germans have sat on the Danes and Norwegians and driven the English and French way the hell up into the frozen north. That was what he meant. How did he feel about it? Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes might as well have been brothers. This fellow probably wasn’t happy about being the only brother left free and independent. Then again, Sweden did a lot of business with Germany. Quite a few Swedes admired Hitler—one of Peggy’s more alarming discoveri
es in what otherwise seemed a civilized country. So she didn’t ask the official what he thought of the foreign situation. He could think whatever he damn well pleased. She was getting out of here.…
Wasn’t she? He handed back her passport. Nervously, she asked, “Is there anything else?”
“No, Madame. May you have a safe and pleasant journey.” He opened the door that led out from the terminal. Freezing air rushed in. Would winter never give up? He continued, “You are still very early, but you may board the airplane if you wish.”
“Yippee!” Peggy said, and charged toward the American-built airliner. There was an expression the fluent diplomat likely hadn’t heard before. Or did they show cowboy movies here? The mere idea was plenty to set Peggy giggling.
Speaking of accents, she could barely follow the Swiss steward’s German when he asked for her ticket and passport. Seeing that he was talking to an American, though, he switched to pretty good English: “Yes, everything seems to be in order. You may be seated. We will take off in about an hour.”
“You bet I’ll be seated, Charlie!” Peggy said. The steward blinked. She didn’t care. The DC-3 had two seats on one side of the aisle and one on the other. Peggy discovered hers was on the single side. She didn’t care.
More passengers boarded, speaking several different languages. She recognized English, Swedish, French, and the Swiss dialect of German. And two young Oriental men took the pair of seats across from her and jabbered at each other. Japanese? Chinese? Something else altogether? There she had no idea. When the steward tried German on them, they answered readily enough.
The steward closed the door and dogged it tight. The twin engines rumbled to life. The DC-3’s cabin was soundproofed, but they were noisy even so. They got noisier, too, as the airliner sped down the runway and took off. Clunking noises from under the fuselage were the landing gear retracting. The wheels didn’t stay down through the whole flight. A DC-3 was modern.
Flying through clouds was bumpy. It also made looking out the window a waste of time. She had a copy of Gone with the Wind a secretary at the embassy had given her. She’d read it back in the States, of course, but it was fine for a flight—nice and thick. They’d made a movie of it while she was stuck in Europe! That, she wanted to see. Would anybody still be running it by the time she got home?
Bump, bump … bump. She was glad she wasn’t afraid of flying. She was also glad she had a strong stomach. If you got seasick, you could also get airsick, especially when the plane bounced all over the sky like this. Somebody noisily lost whatever he’d eaten before takeoff. He must have used the bag, because the stink wasn’t bad.
Food on the plane proved as good as what Peggy’d had on dining cars in trains. Drinks flowed freely. If you needed not to think about flying, or about the war, they would lubricate your brain.
And then, out of nowhere, the lean shark shape of a Messerschmitt fighter all but filled Peggy’s window. “Mon Dieu!” a French speaker said. “Merde alors!” another added. The 109 could have hacked the airliner out of the sky with the greatest of ease. Instead, the fighter pilot waved, waggled his wings, and zoomed away.
“This is the captain speaking.” A voice came out of the DC-3’s intercom, first in German, then in French, and finally in English. “The plane was confirming that we are who we claim to be. We may, I am told, expect the same reception as we near Great Britain.”
Sure enough, a Hurricane came out and looked them over. It seemed less deadly than the Messerschmitt, though by all accounts it was a match for the German fighter—one of the few planes that were. As the 109’s pilot had before, the Englishman in the cockpit waved when he was satisfied and flew off.
That snow-dappled brown and green ahead—that was England. Tears filled Peggy’s eyes. She’d made it! Well, almost. She still had to cross the Atlantic without getting torpedoed. If you were going to worry about every little thing …
More clunks from below said the wheels were going down again. The plane descended toward London. Peggy looked for bomb craters. The Nazis had boasted about blasting the British capital back to the stone age. One more lie from Goebbels, because she saw little damage.
And then she was down. The DC-3 came in with hardly a bounce. She felt like yelling Yippee! again, but she didn’t. No point to making all the other people on the plane sure she was a lunatic. If she was, she could claim she was out of her mind with joy. At last—at sweet last!—she’d got to a place from which she could go straight to the States. She didn’t care if she booked the fastest liner or some wallowing scow. She’d still get there.
Barring U-boats, of course. The Nazis still claimed England had sunk the Athenia to enrage America and drag her into the war. Maybe they believed that in Germany. Peggy didn’t think it was good for anything but making flowers grow.
But the odds were still with her. Most ships traveling between England and the USA got where they were going. She really did figure hers would, too. She had every intention of taking the chance.
Stuffing Gone with the Wind into her purse, she stood up and headed back toward the door at the left rear of the cabin. Down a few steps after that, and then her own personal feet touched English soil. That, too, seemed just about good enough for a Yippee! Again, though, she refrained. Herb would have admired her restraint.
Herb! My God! She’d have to get used to having a husband around again. And she was going to have to keep her big mouth shut forever about a drunken night in Berlin. She’d guessed Constantine Jenkins was a fairy. Wrong! So wrong!
After she got her suitcase, she had to clear customs. The inspector frowned at all the stamps that bore the German eagle and swastika. “You’ve had a busy time of it, what?” he said.
“Buddy, you don’t know the half of it!” Peggy exclaimed.
Something in her voice brought a thin smile out on his face—the only kind he had, she suspected. “I daresay I ought to give you to the matrons for a strip search and slit the lining of your bag here,” he remarked. “I ought to, but I shan’t.” He plied his rubber stamp with might and main. “Welcome to the United Kingdom, Mrs. Druce. Welcome to freedom.”
“Freedom!” Peggy echoed dreamily. “I remember that—I think.” The customs inspector laughed, for all the world as if she were joking.
NOW THAT ALISTAIR Walsh had got to know him, Dr. Murdoch turned out to be a good source of information. “They’re going to extract us,” he told Walsh one freezing night—as if Namsos came equipped with any other kind. “Sounds like dentistry, eh?”
Walsh’s shiver had nothing to do with the weather. He remembered—painfully remembered—wisdom teeth with which he’d parted company. Army dentists had never heard of the Geneva Convention. Turn them loose on the Fritzes and they’d likely win the war in a fortnight.
“Have you got another fag on you?” the staff sergeant asked. That was the other thing Murdoch was good for: the man was a tobacco magnet. In a place like this, where everything was always in short supply, that made him someone to reckon with. Sure enough, he handed Walsh a packet. Walsh took one—what he’d asked for—and gave it back. He didn’t want the sawbones to think he was greedy. After a long, reverent drag, he asked, “Extracted? How?”
“Ships,” Murdoch answered. “Get in under cover of darkness, be well away by the time the Germans realize we’ve flown the coop. That’s the plan, at any rate—so they tell me.”
What they told him was usually the straight goods. “What happens next?” Walsh wondered out loud. He answered his own question: “The Luftwaffe starts looking for our bloody ships, that’s what. I don’t suppose we’ve got air cover laid on?” He answered himself again: “Too much to hope for. Too far off for fighters to reach.”
“I haven’t heard anything about air cover,” Beverly Murdoch admitted.
“When they find us, then, we’re sitting ducks,” Walsh said.
“Would you sooner be taken prisoner?”
“No-o-o,” Walsh said slowly. “I’d also sooner not drown
, though, if it’s all the same to you. And I’d sooner not be blown to smithereens.”
“What the deuce are you doing in the Army, then?”
That was another good question, no doubt about it. Walsh gave a rueful shrug. “I was in in 1918. Didn’t seem to be much work on the civilian side when the last war ended, so I stayed in. They won’t turn loose of me now till I do get blown up, or till I’m too old to soldier any more.”
“The more fool you,” Murdoch said, and Walsh was in a poor position to tell him he was wrong.
Thanks to the doctor’s warning, he had a couple of extra days to ready his men for the planned withdrawal to the harbor. Everything had to seem as normal as possible, so the Germans wouldn’t pursue with all their strength. That would be what the withdrawal needed, wouldn’t it? Machine guns and maybe tanks banging away as Tommies and poilus and Norwegians tried to board ship? Walsh had been thinking what juicy targets they’d make on the water. They’d be even juicier if they got caught like that.
And a few men—volunteers all, and mostly Norwegians—would stay behind, to man Allied machine guns and try to create the impression that everybody was still in the lines. Walsh admired them without wanting to be one of their number. He aimed to go on fighting the war till the enemy was licked. Mooching around behind barbed wire, eating slop and hoping for Red Cross packages, held no appeal. The Norwegians had a chance of getting away and blending in with the scenery. He didn’t.
On the appointed night, he made his way back toward the docks. Engineers often put up white tapes to guide men and machines in the darkness without showing a light. Here, they’d used black ones to stand out against the snow. It was a nice touch. He wondered where they’d got them.
High above the clouds, airplane engines thuttered. Bombs started raining down far behind the German lines. That was another nice touch. Fighters couldn’t make it here from Blighty, but bombers could. And if the RAF pounded the Fritzes, it would make them think the expeditionary force was staying, not going. Walsh hoped like blazes it would, anyhow.
The War That Came Early: The Big Switch Page 8
