The War That Came Early: The Big Switch

by Harry Turtledove

  His younger sister, Eva, and his kid brother, Markus, both squealed when they got home from school. They told him about Russian air raids and running for the cellar. “That’s just like fighting, huh?” Markus said.

  “Pretty much.” Willi left if there. Markus was only thirteen. The war would be over—the war had better be over—by the time he got old enough to fight.

  Sure enough, Mother got her fat hen. She’d make a better chicken stew than the thumb-fingered soldiers who cooked in the field. It filled the flat with a savory smell. Father came home not long before the stew was ready. Herbert Dernen worked in a factory that had made clocks before the war and was turning out gauges and dials for panzers and planes these days.

  He’d fought in France in the last war. After a long, measuring look at Willi, he slowly nodded at whatever he saw. “Well, son, now you know” was all he said, and it seemed more than enough.

  “Now I know,” Willi agreed. No, they needed not another word on that score.

  Father understood. So did other men of his generation, and other soldiers on leave. Willi couldn’t find anyone else in Breslau who did. He felt like a stranger, or maybe even a Martian, in his home town. That didn’t stop him from seeing—and kissing, and doing his best to feel up—the girls he’d been friendly with before conscription called. But they were either like his brother and thought they knew all about war because some bombs had fallen here, or they wanted him to explain what the fighting in France was like.

  And he couldn’t. If you hadn’t done it, you’d never get it. In that, it was more like screwing than anything else. He said so once. He thought it would get his face slapped. Instead, it got him laid. Even afterwards, though, he couldn’t tell sweet Susanna what shooting and being shot at and getting shelled and bombed were like. They weren’t like anything.

  He couldn’t tell her about the camaraderie, either, not in any way that would make sense to her. But, when his leave was up, a big part of him was glad, or at least relieved, to head west once more. He was a real, for-sure Frontschwein, all right. God help me, he thought, but it was true.

  uc Harcourt had just found a good place to crap when the sniper got him. It really was perfect. The bushes screened him from sight—or he’d thought so, anyhow. And the leaves were young and soft and green. This side of a goose’s neck, you couldn’t get a better substitute for paper.

  He dug a little hole with his entrenching tool. He undid his belt, dropped his pants, and squatted. The shot rang out. “Aiii!” he howled, and sprang straight up. If the Olympics had a record for a high jump from a squatting position, he broke it by thirty centimeters.

  At the same time, he clapped a hand to the wounded part. It came away bloody. Sure as hell, he’d got shot in the ass. Trousers still at half mast, he rolled behind a big, thick elm. Bullets could penetrate an amazing amount of wood, but he didn’t worry about that. All he wanted was to keep the lousy Boche from seeing him any more. Besides, that last bullet had penetrated him.

  He pulled up the khaki trousers. He didn’t bother with the belt. Holding the pants up with one hand, he hobbled back to the encampment. He’d never tried walking with a wounded gluteus maximus before. It wasn’t one of the experiences you sought out for the sake of having it.

  Lieutenant Demange greeted him with the sympathy he’d come to expect: “The hell’s the matter with you? You look like you just tried to hump a donkey, only the donkey didn’t like it.” Wordlessly, Luc turned around to display the bloody seat of his pants. Demange didn’t care. “If you’re on the rag, couldn’t you find a pad?”

  “Fuck you!” Luc snarled. Enough was too much.

  “That’s ‘Fuck you, sir!’ ” Demange said easily. “All right, go on back and have somebody patch you up. Welcome to the club, if it’s worth anything to you.” A German had shot him in 1918.

  “Not a goddamn thing.” Luc made his slow way back to the aid station.

  A male nurse who smelled of garlic and cologne gave him a shot of novocaine and a tetanus shot, then sutured the wound and bandaged him. “It’s only a crease, not through-and-through,” the fellow said. “You can go back to your unit. They’d skin me alive if I wasted a cot on you.”

  “Thanks one hell of a lot,” said Luc, who’d hoped for some leave. “What do I do when the numbing wears off? It’ll hurt even worse then, on account of the stitches.”

  Plainly, the male nurse was about to say it wasn’t his problem. Whatever he saw on Luc’s face made him think twice. Instead, he handed over a vial of white pills. “Codeine,” he said. “It won’t make things stop hurting, you understand, but it can take the edge off. And it constipates you. You won’t need to go into the bushes so often for a while.”

  “Oh, hurrah,” Luc said in distinctly hollow tones. Then he asked, “You have any pants around here that aren’t all bloody?” If he waited for the quartermasters to issue him a new pair, he’d keep wearing these for God knew how long. But if he could manage things informally …

  Sure as hell, the nurse said, “Some poor con stopped one with his face. I don’t know why they bothered bringing him back. He wasn’t breathing by the time he got here—I know that.”

  The dead man had bled a little on his trousers, but nowhere near so much as Luc had on his. The pants were loose and too long, but a belt and some sewing would fix that. The people at the aid station, or maybe the stretcher-bearers, had already emptied the poor guy’s pockets. No surprise there. They’d missed an aluminum-bronze franc. Luc added the inheritance to his small store of cash.

  When he got back, Lieutenant Demange said, “Fucking took you long enough. I thought they were cutting off your cheek, like the old lady in that story.”

  Luc had run across Candide. He was surprised Demange had; the veteran seemed unlikely to read anything that didn’t have photos of naked girls in it. You never could tell.

  “So you’ll sleep on your stomach for a while, eh?” Demange went on.

  “I guess,” Luc answered. “Got any other good news for me, or are you through?”

  “Well, I was gonna have you lead a raid on the Boches tonight …” Demange raised an eyebrow to see how that went over. Luc looked back at him without expression. He didn’t jump up and down and yell and scream, the way Demange obviously wanted him to. The older man made a disgusted noise. “Ah, fuck off. You’re no goddamn fun.”

  “Poke somebody you’ve never nailed before, if you want to watch him pitch a fit. In the meantime, let me bum a butt off you.”

  “What? You get your own shot off, then you want a replacement?” But Demange pulled the ever-present pack of Gitanes out of his tunic pocket and handed Luc one.

  In due course, the novocaine wore off. When it did, the wound started hurting worse than it had when Luc first got it. The spot where he got the tetanus shot was sore, too, and it made him feel feverish. He took two codeine pills, then two more. Instead of leaving him sleepy and dopey, they made him feel as if he’d just had four cups of strong coffee. He wanted to do something, even if he couldn’t figure out what.

  The Germans solved that. They pulled a trench raid of their own, a couple of hundred meters off to the left of Luc’s position. He ran to the Hotchkiss gun and fired off strip after strip of ammo at the Boches as they fought and as they retreated. Joinville couldn’t feed the machine gun fast enough to suit him. The piece’s cooling fins glowed a dull red. But it was a reliable piece of machinery. No matter how hot it got, it kept working.

  Luc stayed awake all through the night. When the sun came up the next morning, he saw five dead Germans not far in front of the French lines. The regimental commander was a lieutenant colonel named Jacques Soupault. He had a mean, skinny face, a hairline mustache, and greasy black hair combed straight back. His eyes were black, and cold as a corpse’s. All that notwithstanding, he folded Luc into an embrace, brushed cheeks with him, and made him a sergeant on the spot.

  “Without your promptness, the enemy attack might well have succeeded,” he said. “
Prisoners we took couldn’t talk about anything but ‘that damned machine gun.’ At least three men called it the same thing.”

  By then, Luc was desperately tired. He’d already taken more codeine, to try to keep himself going and to ease the pain in his backside. “Thank you, sir,” he muttered, hoping Soupault would dry up and blow away. The drug wasn’t hitting him so hard this time.

  At last, the officer left. Lieutenant Demange grinned at Luc. “See? You should get shot more often.”

  “You’re trying to make me lose my temper again,” Luc said. “Take another crack at it after I grab some sleep.”

  “Yeah, you were bouncing off the walls, all right,” Demange said. “I dunno what kind of dope the doc gave you, but whatever it was, I want some, too.”

  “Wasn’t even a doc. Only a nurse,” Luc replied.

  “She have big jugs, at least?”

  “He needed a shave.”

  “Boy, you had all the luck yesterday, didn’t you? Except for the dope, I mean.”

  “Yeah. Except for the dope.” Luc yawned. “I am going to sleep. Why not? I’m a sergeant now—Soupault said so. What else do sergeants do?”

  “Now you’re trying to get a rise out of me,” Demange said accurately. “I’d make you sorry, but you did a good job last night, even if you had some help from the pills.”

  When was the last time Demange had said something like that to him? When was the last time Demange had said something like that to anybody? The veteran was far quicker to show scorn than praise.

  “Since you are a sergeant, you may have to give up your precious gun,” Demange said. “You can tell more people what to do now.”

  “Don’t want to.” Luc yawned again, wider. “I have a slot I like. I’m good at it, too. So why would they take it away?”

  “Because you’re lucky, that’s why. That’s how you get promoted: do something cute while the officers are watching. Go on, curl up somewhere. They won’t yank you off the piece till you wake up.”

  “The way I feel right now, that’ll give me another month. At least.” Luc headed off to find somewhere he could rest.

  Lieutenant Demange’s laughter followed him. A sergeant! He wouldn’t just have to shorten his new trousers. Eventually, he’d get a yellow hash mark to replace the two brown ones he wore now. More work with needle and thread. After I sleep, he told himself. I’ve earned it.

  “SOMETHING’S COOKING,” Herman Szulc declared.

  Pete McGill warily eyed his fellow Marine. He had to get along with Szulc. The number of Americans—and of leathernecks in particular—in Shanghai was too low to let what you thought about somebody show too much. But Pete hadn’t liked him or trusted him since he tried to say Vera was out for what she could get and that she hadn’t really fallen in love the way McGill had.

  “You bet something’s cooking,” Max Weinstein said. “The proletariat is rising up against its imperialist oppressors.” How you could be a pinko and a Marine at the same time was beyond Pete, but Max managed. Pete didn’t know how good a pinko he was, but he made a damn good Marine, even if he drove other people nuts sometimes.

  “Thank you, Josef Stalin,” Szulc said. Weinstein flipped him the bird. Ignoring it, Szulc went on, “Nah, what I heard was that the Chinamen were gonna make things hot for the Japs here in Shanghai.”

  “That’s what I told you,” Max pointed out. “Whoever said Polacks were dumb knew what he was talking about.”

  “Same guy who said sheenies were cheap, I bet,” Szulc said, which shut Max up with a snap. Into the sudden silence, Szulc continued, “What people are sweating about is, the Chinks’re gonna give white people the most grief, see if they can get us or England or France mad enough to jump on Japan.”

  “You think that’s true?” Pete asked, interested in spite of himself.

  “All I know is what I read in the newspapers.” Herman Szulc was about as far removed from Will Rogers as a human being could be. And none of this was in the Shanghai papers, whether in Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, or Japanese. Japan censored everything. Editors crossed the military government at their peril. For public consumption, everything in Shanghai was just fine.

  Max tried again: “I believe it. We’re the ones who cause trouble around here, so we’re the ones the oppressed proletariat’s gonna go for. Only stands to reason.”

  “We’re the ones? White men are the ones?” Szulc said incredulously. “How about all the slanty-eyed shitheads who bow down to Hirohito?”

  “They’re only imitating what the Europeans and Americans taught ’em,” Weinstein answered.

  “We cause trouble? How about vaccination? How about newspapers?” Pete said.

  “I think the first one was discovered here. I know goddamn well printing got invented here,” Max returned.

  Pete couldn’t have said whether that was true or not. Max would bluff when he talked, the same way you’d bluff playing poker. Do it every so often and it helped your game. Do it too much and you looked like an asshole. But Pete had more cards to play: “Chinks didn’t invent steamboats or railroads or cars or movies or phones or planes or the stuff that goes with ’em. They didn’t invent your Commie bullshit, either. What’s-his-name—Groucho Marx—did.”

  “Karl, for Chrissake.” That crack genuinely pained Max, where the rest rolled off his back. His ears turned pink. Thinking about Marx, Pete found that funny. The Jewish Marine went on, “The Chinese proletariat has the sense to see what a good thing Marxism-Leninism is—which is more than I can say for a couple of dumbfuck leathernecks.”

  “More than a couple. You’re about the only Red Marine God ever made,” Pete said. “What are you doing in the Corps, anyway? Boring from within? Is that what they call it?”

  “He’s boring, all right,” Herman Szulc said. They looked at each other in surprise—they weren’t used to agreeing.

  Two days later, the Chinese bombed a movie theater full of Japanese soldiers. Maybe the Chinese had invented gunpowder, but a Swede came up with dynamite—Pete did happen to know that. As for who first found the idea of taking swarms of hostages and slaughtering them, well, it had to be as old as the hills.

  The Japs were good at it, though. The flat cracks from firing squads’ rifles went on day and night. Soldiers didn’t just kill with rifles, either. They used swords and shovels and picks and iron bars and whatever else they could get their hands on. People who knew about the Rape of Nanking a few years earlier said this wasn’t so bad as that, but it sure wasn’t good.

  Wailing and moaning and shrieking from the Chinese who made up the vast majority of the people in Shanghai filled the air. Everything at the American consulate went straight to the devil. It didn’t pass go. It didn’t collect two hundred dollars Mex. All the cooks and maids and laundry men and sweepers stayed home. You couldn’t blame them, not when they were liable to get murdered if they were dumb enough to show their faces on the street.

  You didn’t have to be Chinese to buy a plot, either. A Japanese soldier bashed in two French businessmen’s brains with a spade and broke three ribs on another Frenchman before his friends could drag him off. The way Pete heard the story, the friends didn’t try very hard to stop him. He believed it; that sounded like the Japs he thought he knew and didn’t love.

  “So now what’ll happen?” Pooch Puccinelli wondered out loud. “The Japanese government gonna pay France an indemnity, like they did with us after they blew up the fuckin’ Panay?”

  “That’ll make the dead guys happy, all right. Fuckin’ A it will,” Pete said. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about a couple of Frenchmen. He was worried about Vera. He hadn’t been able to get word to her since the Japanese clamped down, and he hadn’t heard from her. He hadn’t heard that anything bad had happened to her dance hall, but he didn’t know that he would. For the time being, the Marines were confined to barracks. He’d never been so tempted to go AWOL.

  Max Weinstein also didn’t sympathize with the dead Frenchmen, but he had d
ifferent reasons: “You’re a capitalist, the only reason you come to China is to exploit the local workers and peasants. You do that, you deserve whatever happens to you, far as I’m concerned.”

  “You’re a sweet old boy, Max—yeah, a real SOB,” Pooch said. “Wasn’t the Chinks who did for ’em, remember. It was the Japs.”

  “They got it on account of they came out here. If they’d stayed home where they belonged, they wouldn’t have,” Max said stubbornly.

  “No, the Nazis would’ve blown ’em up instead,” Pete put in.

  “If you want to see everything that’s wrong with capitalism, and I mean everything, all you gotta do is look at Hitler’s Germany and the Moose’s Italy,” Weinstein said. “There it is, naked.”

  “You start talking about naked, I don’t want to talk about Nazis,” Szulc said. “I want to talk about broads.”

  “That’s ’cause you’re a dickhead,” Max told him. “You think with your dick, and now you’re talking with it, too.”

  Had anybody said that to Pete, he would have tried to murder the guy. Herman Szulc puffed out his chest and looked proud of himself. “I’d sooner talk with my dick than with my Red asshole like you any day,” he said.

  Max surged to his feet. “You stupid fuckin’ Polack—”

  “Yeah, Yid?”

  There they went again. Other Marines got between them. Everybody was as jumpy as a cat in a bar full of Dobermans. The Marines were only a symbolic presence in Shanghai, as they had been in Peking. The real action in these parts was between the Japs and the Chinese. When they started going at each other hammer and tongs, it reminded the Americans of their futility. Nobody liked having his uselessness exposed.

  Pete wasn’t even sure he could protect his woman. If anything in the world felt worse than that, he didn’t know what it would be. Other Marines had had to keep him from going after Herman Szulc, too. Herman had a big mouth, and liked to hear himself talk. One of these days … But not yet. Not yet, dammit, Pete thought, not without regret.