The War That Came Early: The Big Switch

by Harry Turtledove

  Then another Chinese looked him over. This guy spoke to him in bad French. “Don’t get it,” Pete managed.

  “Ah,” the Chinese man said, and tried again in English: “You hurt? Where hurt?”

  “Fucking everywhere!” Pete said. He tried to use his right arm to point. The pain almost drove him under. “Arm especially,” he gasped.

  To his surprise, the Chinese man produced a syringe from a small leather case and gave him a shot. He felt better right away. If that wasn’t morphine, he didn’t know what it would be. As he drifted toward sleep on a warm cloud of contentment, the Chinese man started bandaging him. A doc, was Pete’s last clear thought. How about that?

  When he really came back to himself, he was inside the American consulate. The shot was wearing off. Every nerve screamed. The Navy doc who took care of the Marines didn’t want to give him more dope. “You aim to end up a junkie?” the white man asked.

  “Right now, buddy, I don’t give a fuck,” Pete said fervently. Muttering, the Navy doctor stuck him. This time, Pete didn’t go away as the pain receded. “Where’s Vera? How’s she doing?” he asked as soon as he could think of anything outside his own torment.

  “The woman you were with unfortunately did not survive the explosion,” the doctor answered, his voice disapproving. “I was told she must have died very quickly and did not suffer.”

  Pete wailed. Even drugged, even with his own hurts still tormenting him, he yipped like a puppy taken from its mother. Tears poured down his face. He wanted to kill the doctor for telling him something like that. He wanted to call the man a liar, too. He wanted that more than anything, but he knew he couldn’t have it.

  “She can’t be dead,” he said. “I loved her.”

  “I’m sorry, son.” The Navy doctor didn’t sound one bit sorry. “You ask me, the Chinese aren’t doing themselves any good with these terror bombs. The Western powers will just decide Japan can do whatever she wants to put down maniacs like that. I bet the Chinks are a bunch of Reds, trying to give Stalin a helping hand.”

  Pete hardly heard him. He’d just betrayed his own hopes. I loved her. Morphine didn’t keep him from noting the dreadful finality of that past tense. He believed Vera was gone. How could he live without her? He had no idea. He didn’t much want to try. He wailed again.

  That made the doctor give him another shot. This one wasn’t morphine. It knocked him for a loop, whatever it was. When he woke up, it was the following afternoon. He didn’t want to believe that, but the strips of sunlight coming in through windows he knew faced west gave him no choice.

  He looked around the sick bay. He was the only guy in it. If any other Marines had been watching The Wizard of Oz, they’d either got off scot-free or they’d bought the whole farm.

  The doctor walked over to him when he saw him awake. “How are you doing?” the man asked.

  “Awful,” Pete said honestly.

  “I believe it. Fractures, abrasions, contusions … You’re lucky to be here.”

  “Some luck.” Pete wanted to wail again, not for himself but for his lost love.

  “I am going to recommend that we evacuate you to Manila,” the doctor said as he stuck Pete once more. Now he wasn’t going on about addicting him. He’d had a better chance to see how badly hurt Pete was. And maybe he hoped the morphine would help dull the pain in Pete’s soul along with the one filling his battered carcass.

  That was a forlorn hope. “What’s wrong with the hospitals here?” Pete asked. “I want to be near—” He couldn’t go on. He choked up instead.

  “You can’t do anything for her here,” the doc said. “You’ve got to know that. It isn’t like you two were married or anything. And besides, any excuse that lets us get our personnel out of here, we take. Hospitals here are still here, and we can’t protect you if you’re in one of them.”

  Protect him from whom? More Chinese bombers? The Japs? Himself? No, they couldn’t protect him from any of those, and he couldn’t protect himself, either.

  ll right.” It wasn’t all right, not even slightly, but Luc Harcourt wasn’t about to admit it till he found out what the hell was going on here. Since he didn’t know, he asked: “What the hell is going on here?”

  One of the poilus in front of him had a fat lip. The other had a mouse under one eye. They glared at each other as if they would sooner have tangled with machine guns than with fists. Fat Lip jerked a thumb at Mouse. “Sergeant, this con is a filthy Communist. He says he doesn’t want to fight the Russians no matter what kind of orders we get.”

  “Merde,” Luc said wearily. He’d been waiting for this kind of crap to break out. The only thing that surprised him was how long it had taken. “Did you really say that, Boileau?” Were you really that dumb?

  “You bet I did, Sergeant.” The man with the shiner sounded proud of his own stupidity. He gave his accuser a withering glance. “And Paul here isn’t just a squealer. The fairy wants to suck Hitler’s cock.”

  “Listen to me,” Luc said. “Listen hard, because this is your first, last, and only chance. You can’t make a mutiny. You can’t disobey orders or tell other people to disobey orders. If you do, they’ll shoot you. Have you got that through your thick wooden head? Well? Have you?”

  “I hear you,” Boileau answered. “I know you have to come out with that kind of garbage. But you’re a proletarian, too, right? Where’s your class consciousness? I bet one man in three won’t follow orders to attack the heartland of the glorious Socialist revolution. Your precious government can’t shoot all of us. To the barricades!” He thrust a clenched fist in the air.

  “Quit trying to sound like Victor Hugo,” Luc said, which earned him a wounded look.

  “You ought to have the military gendarmerie take him away, Sergeant,” Paul said. “He’s talking sedition!”

  Boileau thrust his arm in the air again, this time in a Nazi salute. Paul jumped on him. They fell to the ground, slugging and swearing. “Cut it out!” Luc yelled. “Cut it out, goddammit!” When they didn’t, he kicked them both with savage impartiality.

  For a bad moment, he wondered if that would make them gang up on him. Fortunately, it didn’t. They separated. Now Boileau had two black eyes, while Paul, whose last name Luc couldn’t—and didn’t want to—remember, was bleeding from the nose.

  “Save it for the enemy, will you?” Luc snapped.

  They might have been doing a vaudeville turn out in the provinces. Their timing impeccable, they pointed at each other and chorused, “He’s the enemy!”

  “No. Nom d’un nom, no,” Luc said. “We’re all Frenchmen together. We do what the government tells us, or we’re all screwed together.”

  “We do what the government tells us, and we’re all screwed together,” Boileau said. The Communist soldier walked away, rubbing at sore ribs.

  “Are you going to let him get away with that?” the rightist soldier demanded indignantly.

  “Paul …”

  “Yes, Sergeant?”

  “Why don’t you fuck off?” Luc made it a friendly suggestion. Under it, though, lay the warning that he would whale the kapok out of Paul if the private didn’t fuck off. Paul eyed him, considering. The sergeant’s hash mark didn’t change Paul’s mind. Luc’s look of anticipation was a different story. Muttering, Paul departed—not in the same direction Boileau had chosen. That was good, anyhow.

  It was the only good thing Luc could see about the situation. He did what he did when he didn’t know what else to do: he hunted up Lieutenant Demange. If anybody was above (or maybe below) politics, Demange was the man. He hated the whole human race, white, black, yellow, brown, and Red.

  Luc poured out his tale of woe, finishing, “How many sergeants are trying to deal with this shit right now, all over France? What can I do about it? What can anybody do about it? We’re liable to have a civil war on our hands!”

  “Yeah, I know,” Demange said, the perpetual Gitane in the corner of his mouth twitching as he spoke. “You aren’t the fi
rst guy who’s come to me up in arms about it, either.”

  “What can I do?” Luc asked again.

  “Sounds like you did what you could—and I hope you booted both those assholes good and hard,” Demange said. “As long as they remember they’re soldiers and do what you tell ’em, we’re all right. If they don’t …” His ferret face screwed up in a nasty grimace. “If they don’t, it’s gonna be worse than 1917.”

  “Ai!” Luc winced. Any Frenchman would have. Things in 1917 had got mighty bad. After one more failed offensive against the Boches, whole divisions of the French Army had mutinied. A combination of executions and granted privileges kept things below the point of full explosion, but barely. The army was useless for the rest of the year. The Germans could have walked over it in the spring or summer if they’d ever learned about the mutinies. Somehow, they didn’t. Germans could be blind in the most peculiar ways.

  Demange glanced east. German soldiers wandered around out in the open, confident the cease-fire would hold. Part of the deal was that they would evacuate France once the French and English went into action with them against Russia, but they were still here now. “Want to find out what they think about it?” Demange asked with a sour sneer.

  “I already know. They’re laughing their nuts off,” Luc said bitterly.

  “You don’t want to fight alongside ’em, either, do you?” Demange said.

  “No more than you do,” Luc answered. “I don’t mind shooting Russians. Plenty of Russians nobody’d miss for a minute, I bet. But son of a bitch, Lieutenant! Marching with the fucking Nazis?”

  “It’s like you said to your privates—if they tell us, ‘Do it,’ we’ve got to do it,” Demange said. “Will I jump up and down about it? Not a goddamn prayer I will. But maybe it’ll turn out for the best—I dunno.”

  “Fat chance … sir,” Luc said.

  “Sorry, kid. I don’t know what else to tell you,” the older man said. “This is what they’ve cooked for us, and we’ve got to eat it.”

  “Even if it tastes like shit?”

  “Even then.” Demange sounded disgusted, but he nodded. “No matter how crappy it tastes, mutiny’d taste worse. They’d beat on you for causing trouble, and then they’d make you do what you mutinied to try and get out of.”

  That struck Luc as much too likely. All the same, he said, “Not if the mutineers won.”

  Demange laughed in his face. “Good fucking luck!”

  “It happened in 1789,” Luc said stubbornly.

  Demange laughed some more. “And what did they end up with? The Revolution, and the Terror, and Napoleon. And Napoleon, he was the Hitler of his day, by God! He marched ’em all over everywhere, and they got their balls shot off while they were yelling, ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ Pretty fucking lucky, right?”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” Luc said. Demange raised a questioning—or more likely a challenging—eyebrow. Luc explained: “Whenever I feel lousy, you can always find a reason I should feel worse.”

  Demange’s brief grin showed irregular, smoke-yellowed teeth. He took off his helmet and bowed with a flourish, as if he were a nineteenth-century musketeer doffing a plumed, beribboned broad-brimmed hat. “At your service, mon petit ami.”

  Luc made gagging noises. The lieutenant chuckled, coughed, and chuckled again. “You’re stuck with it. You may as well enjoy it as much as you can.”

  “That’s what you told her, right?”

  This time, Demange laughed out loud. Luc was proud of himself; he could count on the fingers of one hand the times he’d really amused the veteran. That thought swung him in a new direction. He was a veteran himself, and had been for a while now. And what had it got him? More worries—that was all he could see.

  THE DIVISION TRAMPED EAST, back toward the German border. The men went proudly—it wasn’t as if they were defeated troops. Out in front of each regiment, bandsmen with swallow’s nests on their shoulders played marching tunes with tubas and trumpets and drums. Some of the men sang as they marched.

  Willi Dernen remembered his father talking about the endless singing as the Kaiser’s army headed for the last war. Those poor bastards hadn’t known what they were getting into, though they found out pretty damn quick. Willi had already been through the mill. He didn’t feel like making noise.

  Besides, Awful Arno made enough racket for the whole squad, maybe for the whole platoon. Baatz couldn’t carry a tune in a wheelbarrow, but he loudly insisted on trying. He was trying, all right—trying to everybody who had to listen to his godawful noise. Short of taping Baatz’s mouth or his own ears shut, Willi didn’t know what to do about that.

  They marched and sang their way through a French village. No one came out to bid them farewell. Willi didn’t care. He was as glad to see the last of the place as the villagers were to see him gone. As long as nobody opened up on the departing Germans with a long-hidden varmint rifle, he was happy.

  Under the singing, he remarked on that to the fellow marching beside him. The other Landser nodded. But sure as hell Arno Baatz owned a pair of rabbit ears. Despite everyone’s singing—including his own raucous efforts—Awful Arno heard the low-voiced remark. He stopped caterwauling the tune to speak in pompous tones: “Don’t be silly, Dernen. Security forces confiscated all the French firearms. Lists of registered weapons at the police stations made it easy.” Without waiting for an answer, he started abusing the music again.

  Willi wouldn’t have answered him anyway, except perhaps with a snort of derision. The Gestapo might have got most of the registered weapons, but what about the ones that weren’t? There were bound to be some, and probably lots. Weren’t the froggies people like everybody else? There’d be guns they wanted to keep quiet about, either because they didn’t feel like dealing with the police or because they used those guns in ways the flics wouldn’t fancy.

  And so he wasn’t very surprised when a couple of francs-tireurs took potshots at the regiment in front of his from the woods off to one side of the road. The officers in charge of that outfit didn’t seem surprised, either, even if Awful Arno was. They sent a whole company into the woods to dig out the obstreperous Frenchmen.

  When the Germans came back empty-handed, Willi also wasn’t very surprised. The Frenchies would have had a line of retreat worked out, or else a hiding place good enough for them to trust their lives to it. You didn’t open up on a regiment unless you figured you could get away with it.

  Optimistic amateurs opened up on the soldiers twice more before they got to the border. The second time, the Germans did hunt down one of them. Two Landsers dragged his body out of the woods by the feet. They tied it, upside down, to a stout tree branch as a warning to others. If the French were on the Germans’ side now, they needed to act like it.

  Willi didn’t breathe easy till his unit crossed back into Germany. It wasn’t far from where he and Wolfgang Storch had scouted out the hesitant French invaders going on two years ago now. He looked around for someone to tell that to. The only other man close by who’d been there then was Arno Baatz. Willi kept his mouth shut.

  When they marched through a village in the Reich, schoolchildren waving swastika flags cheered from the sidewalk. Willi would rather have looked at older girls, but what could you do?

  They took the Landsers to a barracks hall. “Gott im Himmel!” Willi said. “Everything’s so clean!”

  “And so neat!” another soldier added.

  Fresh white paint gleamed on the walls. It was a new coat; Willi could still smell it. The cots and footlockers were laid out as if they were part of a study in geometry and perspective. The cots’ iron frames had got a fresh coat of black paint. Not a single light fixture held a burnt-out bulb.

  It almost seemed wrong to have real, live soldiers—dirty, smelly men in grimy uniforms all torn and patched, foulmouthed lazy smokers and snuff dippers and spitters—profane a place as sterile as an operating theater. That didn’t keep them from claiming cots and plopping packs on the dark wool blankets.r />
  They stripped off their uniforms and headed for the communal showers. Willi wrinkled his nose at the soldier next to him. “Are those your feet, Konrad, or did somebody die in your boots?”

  “It’s your auntie’s twat, is what it is,” Konrad answered. Laughing, they went off to clean up.

  The Landsers splashed one another and flicked towels at behinds like the boys they’d been not long before. But few boys came with the many and various scars the soldiers wore. Few boys came with the lines on their faces, either, or the eyes that seemed to look everywhere at once.

  “What are they going to feed us?” somebody asked, and that was the next good question.

  “Dead Russian,” somebody else said. The laughs that followed were nervous. It sounded like a joke, but not enough like one.

  What they did end up getting was the usual army swill: potatoes and sauerkraut and smelly cheese and sardines. There was plenty of it; Willi patted his belly after he finished. But field kitchens scrounging off the French countryside turned out better chow. So did soldiers heating up rations and leftovers and whatever the hell for themselves. To the cooks, it was just another job. They cared about getting it over with, not about making it good.

  As a Gefreiter, Willi didn’t have to worry about getting tapped for washing dishes or any of the other enjoyable duties doled out to lowly privates. He flopped down onto the cot and made the world go away simply by closing his eyes. One of the lights blazed right above his head. Other soldiers were playing cards and talking and generally making nuisances of themselves. He didn’t care. He was sound asleep less than two minutes after his head hit the pillow.

  The regiment had four days’ furlough in the little village. Willi got drunk at the Bierstube. The lager was weak, but that only meant you needed to drink more and piss more. He tried to pick up a blond barmaid. She laughed at him. Awful Arno was more direct: he grabbed her ass. She hauled off and slapped him hard enough to spin his head around. The soldiers packing the place clapped and cheered. Everybody loved the corporal.