The War That Came Early: The Big Switch

by Harry Turtledove

  His latest target was a new Gefreiter named Adam Pfaff. The fellow was new to the company, that is; a wound badge and a slightly gimpy left leg showed he’d been around the block before. He seemed a good soldier. Normally, even Awful Arno would have had trouble finding something for which he could pick on him.

  Normally. But, for reasons of his own, Pfaff had painted his rifle dark gray. The job couldn’t have been neater. But Arno Baatz had never before seen anybody who carried a dark gray rifle. Like any other monkey, he made fun of the unfamiliar without even thinking about whether he ought to. He gaped and pointed and growled, “What the hell are you doing with that stupid thing? You aim to paint polka dots on it next?”

  “No, Corporal.” The calm way Pfaff answered made Willi guess he’d got grief from noncoms before. He patted the Feldgrau sleeve of his uniform tunic. “They make our clothes this color on account of it’s hard to see. I figured I’d fix my Mauser up to match. It doesn’t do any harm.”

  “It looks stupid,” Awful Arno said, by which he meant It had better not still be gray the next time I see it.

  “It doesn’t do any harm,” Pfaff repeated, by which he meant Fuck you.

  There were plenty of things Arno Baatz didn’t understand, but he got that, all right. His plump cheeks turned the color of iron in a blacksmith’s forge. “Oh, yeah?” he ground out. “Well, let’s just see what Major Schmitz has to say about that.” He deployed the heavy artillery. Major Heinrich Schmitz commanded not just the company but the whole battalion.

  But the barrage failed to obliterate Pfaff. “Fine with me,” he answered easily. “He’s already seen it. He told me he thought it was a pretty good idea.”

  “Whaaat?” Baatz stretched the word out to unnatural length. “You expect me to believe that shit? I’m gonna go talk to him right this minute, and if I find out you’re lying—no, when I find out you’re lying—your sorry ass is mine.” Off he stormed, gloating anticipation splashed all over his face.

  Pfaff lit a cigarette. “Boy, that was fun,” he said to no one in particular. Then, catching Willi’s eye, he asked, “Is that arselick always that bad?”

  “Nah.” Willi shook his head.

  “That’s good,” the other Gefreiter said. “Must be on the rag or something, huh?”

  Willi shook his head again. He hadn’t finished yet. Now he did: “A lot of the time, Awful Arno’s worse.”

  “About the third time I’ve heard people call him that,” Pfaff said with a thin chuckle. “Everybody must love him to death.”

  “To death is right,” Willi answered, rolling his eyes. “He’s not yellow or anything like that, I will say. When the shooting starts, he’s all right to have at your elbow. Any other time … It’s like you said. He’s the biggest asshole left unwiped.”

  He wanted to ask Pfaff whether he’d been bullshitting when he told Baatz Major Schmitz had given his imprimatur to the gray rifle. But he held his peace. As far as he was concerned, it was everybody in the world against Awful Arno. You didn’t want to let on that you had doubts about someone on your own side. Not only that, but he’d also find out for himself, one way or the other, pretty damn soon.

  When Baatz came back about twenty minutes later, he might have had a thunderstorm hanging from his wobbly jowls. He didn’t come up to Adam Pfaff and admit that the new Gefreiter told the truth. That would have been the gentlemanly thing to do, which meant it was as far beyond Baatz’s ken as the mountains on the back side of the moon.

  Since the corporal couldn’t take it out on the man who’d made him embarrass himself, he took it out on everybody else. He screamed at Willi, who’d heard him call Pfaff a liar when the replacement wasn’t. Because Willi had heard all that, he endured the Sturm und Drang with a smile on his face. That only pissed Awful Arno off worse. He couldn’t stick Willi with extra fatigues: the privilege the pip on Willi’s left sleeve gave him. And so Baatz screamed some more. Anybody who could draw extra duty did. Willi’s smile got wider.

  “You have that fat clown’s number, by God,” Pfaff said, nothing but admiration in his voice, when Awful Arno finally went away. “How long have you been stuck under him?”

  “Since before the shooting started,” Willi answered mournfully.

  “Oh, you poor, miserable son of a bitch,” Pfaff said. Willi nodded; he thought of himself the same way. The other Gefreiter went on, “I bet he doesn’t like your rifle, either.”

  Willi carried an ancient, beat-up Mauser. It shot pretty well, but it was ugly as Siamese-twin hippos. He’d had the fine sniper’s rifle, but …“I was going to get out from under him. Swear to Jesus, I was. Then the sharpshooter who was training me got his head blown off, and I went back to ordinary duty. Arno made sure of that, and that I didn’t get to keep my nice piece. He said it would shoot too slow with the downturned bolt, y’know? Thank you very much, Corporal Baatz.”

  “I’m glad you said he was good in the field. Otherwise …” Pfaff stopped right there. One more word could have landed him in trouble. Willi’d had those thoughts about Baatz himself. He’d never quite done anything about them—Awful Arno wouldn’t be here for Pfaff to discover and admire if he had. But he’d had them. Oh, yes. He would have bet a year’s pay against a sack of sheepshit there wasn’t one single guy in the whole goddamn company who hadn’t.

  einberg! Hey, Weinberg!” The call was urgent, even imperative.

  “Yeah? Nu? What’s up? ¿Qué pasó?” Chaim answered, wondering who the hell needed him and for what. He thought he knew the voice of every Yank and Spaniard in the Abe Lincoln Battalion. Whoever was taking his name in vain, he’d never met the guy before.

  And he found out, because the fellow (a Spaniard) said, “You’re wanted in Madrid. Pronto.” Chaim might know all the Abe Lincolns, but he damn well didn’t know every one of the couple of million people left in Madrid.

  “Wanted? By who?”

  “The cops,” put in one of the guys he did know.

  “Funny, Hank, funny like a dose of the clap. Har-de-har-har. See? I’m laughing my ass off.” Chaim switched from English to Spanish to ask his question again: “Who wants me?”

  “Why, the Party, of course.” The messenger seemed amazed he would need to ask about anything that obvious.

  Patiently, he tried again: “The whole Party, or somebody in particular?”

  Maybe he screwed up the grammar worse than usual, so the messenger didn’t get it. Or maybe he owned more patience than the Madrileño, because the man just repeated, “Pronto.”

  “All right, already. I’m coming,” Chaim said with no great enthusiasm. He wanted to stay with his buddies. The Communist Party cared no more for what he wanted than for any other individual’s desires. But he wasn’t exactly brokenhearted about going back to the capital. With a little luck, he’d be able to see La Martellita after the apparatchik who’d pulled his card out of a box got done with him.

  His blunt, pudgy features softened. “Magdalena,” he whispered under his breath. That was her real name, Magdalena Flores. She’d been desperately hung over the next morning. She barely remembered making love with him while she was drunk. But he tended to her so well—aspirins, strong coffee, the hair of the dog, a very little mild but greasy food—that he convinced her he cared about her along with wanting her sweetly curved body. It wasn’t quite that the road to her heart ran through her stomach, but it also wasn’t very far removed from that. She’d let him back into her bed when she was sober. What more could any man not a fairy want?

  And so he followed the messenger south through the zigzagging communications trenches. By the time they came out into the open, they were too far behind the line to need to worry about snipers. The messenger took charge of his own bicycle and another one reserved for Chaim. They pedaled into Madrid. No mañana here; pronto meant what it said.

  To call Chaim’s bike a piece of junk would have given it too much credit. “If this were a horse, I’d shoot it,” he said.

  “You can walk if you w
ant to. Still a few kilometers to go, though,” the messenger answered. Chaim shut up.

  People on foot, people on other bikes, people on donkeys and horses, people on animal-drawn wagons and carriages, even a few people in cars: afternoon traffic in Madrid. Everyone who had a horn blew it. Everyone who didn’t shouted or whistled instead. It made New York City seem not just sedate but sedated. Foul language and obscene gestures were all part of the show.

  Chaim wasn’t much surprised when the messenger led him to the building where La Martellita worked. He was summoned on Party business, and this was Party headquarters. But when the fellow said, “Report to room 371,” he blinked. That was her office.

  Why had she pulled him out of the line? Was she going to put him back on propaganda duty with Nationalist prisoners? He thought—in fact, he was sure—she didn’t believe his ideology was pure enough to let him do that. Maybe one of her bosses had overruled her, and she was going to read him the riot act before she let him tell the POWs what a gang of fat, exploiting slobs their former bosses were.

  That made more sense than anything else he could come up with. Which didn’t mean it was right, of course. One way or another, he’d find out in a couple of minutes.

  He climbed the stairs to the third floor (which would have been reckoned the fourth floor in the USA). The building had an elevator, and it worked. No one used it. It required an operator, and the Party had decided positions like that demeaned the proletarians who had to fill them.

  La Martellita looked up from her paperwork when he walked into her cramped little room. Emotions chased one another across her face too fast to let him sort them out. All she said was, “Close the door, por favor.”

  Close it he did. Had she summoned him so she could fool around right here, and on company time? The mere idea was enough to heat his blood. “What is it, my pretty one, my sweet one, my little dove?” he asked as he stepped toward her. Compliments sounded so much more, well, complimentary in Spanish.

  Then he stopped in his tracks, as he would have when he saw a sign with skull and crossbones that warned of a minefield ahead. He recognized her expression now, all right: raw, red rage. “You goddamn stinking son of a bitch, I’m going to have a baby!” she screeched. So much for the closed door.

  “Oof!” he said, as if someone had punched him in the pit of the stomach. Whatever he’d been expecting, that wasn’t it. He wondered why not. The next time they used a safe would be the first. Condoms were hard to get here; despite the Republic’s progressive social policies, Spain remained a Catholic country.

  “What are you going to do about it?” La Martellita demanded.

  “Seems to me I already did what I do,” Chaim said. If looks could kill, they would have dragged him out of the little office by his feet after the one she gave him. Helplessly, he spread his hands. “Babies are a chance you take, you know.” He made pregnancy sound like a social disease. Well, wasn’t it the ultimate social disease? Without it, there wouldn’t be any society.

  La Martellita’s glare did not abate. “You aren’t helping,” she said pointedly.

  “What am I supposed to say?” he asked in what he thought of as reasonable tones. Odds were La Martellita thought he was hectoring her. Hectoring or not, he went on, “If you want me to marry you, I will.”

  Did that just come out of my mouth? he wondered dizzily. Damned if it didn’t. He knew damn well it was dumb luck he’d ever got to sleep with her in the first place. She’d drunk herself sad—hell, she’d drunk herself tragic—and he happened to be in the right place at the right time. There’d never been a dull moment in the sack with her, whether she was drunk or sober. All the same, he’d always figured himself for the cat that fell into the cream pitcher. Before long, it would have to scramble out and lick its fur dry, and then it would have a memory to last forever.

  But if he could keep right on bedding down with her … If he could see if he might make a go of it with this fierce, beautiful, eminently kissable creature … That would be joy beyond his wildest dreams—at least till she decided she’d rather murder him than live with him any more.

  “Well!” she said, nodding slowly. “You are a gentleman after all. Yes, let’s do that. It will give the child a name—and I can divorce you as soon as it’s born.” She sounded as if she eagerly looked forward to it, too.

  She probably did. Divorce was easy in the Spanish Republic: easier than in the States, even in Nevada. Where Marshal Sanjurjo ruled, it was impossible. He and his followers took their religion seriously, or at least legislated as if they did.

  Chaim took the bull by the horns. “Let’s go find a judge,” he said. If he was going to be married, he hoped to enjoy the privileges of matrimony for as long as he could.

  La Martellita kept right on glaring. She didn’t have to be Einstein or Freud to know what was in his beady little mind. “You only want to keep screwing me.”

  “Not only, my sweet,” Chaim answered with such dignity as he could muster. “But a man has to be a maricón not to want to screw you. Even if he is a maricón, he’ll think about it.”

  You never could tell what she’d like and what would piss her off. That, she seemed to like. She even laughed a little. “You’re crazy,” she said, not without admiration.

  “El narigón loco, that’s me,” he agreed, not without pride. The crazy kike: a nickname he’d acquired by brawling in bars like a man who didn’t care if he lived or died. Well, if marrying La Martellita wasn’t a good reason to go on living, he couldn’t imagine what would be.

  And if she was going to have a baby, so was he. He hadn’t left a wife and kids behind to come fight in Spain, the way some Abe Lincolns and a lot of other Internationals had. This would be his first time as a father. He liked that idea, too—maybe not so much as jumping on La Martellita’s elegant bones whenever he felt like it, but he did.

  “MOSCOW SPEAKING.”

  Along with the other officers in his squadron, Anastas Mouradian listened to the hourly news. When you were fighting a war, you only know how your own little piece of it was going. Often enough, you weren’t even sure about that. If you were going to see the bigger picture, you’d see it through the radio and the newspapers.

  “There is fierce fighting against the Fascist invaders near the border between the Byelorussian SSR and the Russian Federated SSR,” the newsreader went on. Stas heard him rustle the papers from which he was reading. “And heavy fighting continues in the northwestern Ukrainian SSR.”

  Fierce fighting meant fierce fighting. Heavy fighting meant the Red Army was taking it on the chin. Nobody in the Soviet Union ever came right out and admitted things were going badly. You had to decode the news and read between the lines if you were even going to see through a glass, darkly.

  “Lieutenant General Andrei Andreyevich Vlasov continues to distinguish himself in combat against the Hitlerites,” the announcer said. “An entire German panzer division has been hurled back in confusion by his troops.”

  That was interesting. Except for Stalin and Marshal Zhukov, the news rarely mentioned generals by name. Maybe that was a hangover from a few years before, when so many of them got purged. Any which way, this Andrei Vlasov seemed to have evaded the restriction.

  “There is also an important announcement in the field of foreign relations,” the newsreader said. Mouradian tensed—and he wasn’t the only flyer listening to the news who did. What had gone wrong now? Had Finland declared war on the USSR? Had the United States? The one would be a misfortune; the other, a catastrophe. But, for once, it wasn’t that kind of announcement. The familiar voice continued, “Foreign Minister Litvinov will travel to Tokyo to confer with officials from the Empire of Japan about terms for ending the war in the Far East which Japan will find acceptable.”

  Mouradian and several other officers sighed on the identical note. Peace against Japan hadn’t come cheap in the early years of the century, and it would be even more expensive now. Vladivostok would go, and with it the Soviet Union’
s main Pacific port. The Trans-Siberian Railway wouldn’t go all the way across Siberia any more. The last war had cost Russia the southern half of Sakhalin Island north of Japan; this one would probably cost the USSR the rest of the place. And who could guess what else Japan would want to squeeze out of Litvinov?

  On the other hand, the USSR desperately needed peace on the distant frontier, because it had a much bigger, much more urgent war much closer to home. When it came, the country could pay full attention to the Nazis and everybody else coming out of the west. Stas only hoped that would prove good enough to save the Soviet Union. Frighten all your neighbors and make them hate you, and this was the kind of mess you wound up in.

  “President Franklin Roosevelt of the United States has offered to help mediate the dispute between the Soviet Union and Japan,” the announcer said. “His cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, was President of the USA during the Russo-Japanese War, and helped work out the terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth, which ended it. General Secretary Stalin immediately accepted the American proposal. The Japanese, however, refused it, declaring that they doubted America was truly committed to peace. This being so, Japan and the peace-loving Soviet Union will pursue their talks bilaterally.”

  Some of Mouradian’s colleagues scratched their heads, trying to work out what was going on there. He sighed inside his own mind; some people really shouldn’t have been allowed to run around loose. Japan thought the USA would sabotage the peace talks, not help them along. That was obvious to Stas, if not to his comrades. As long as Japan was busy fighting the Soviet Union, she wouldn’t also take on the United States—not if her leaders were in their right mind, she wouldn’t.

  But she was clearing the decks for the big fight, the important fight, no less than Stalin was. Knock America back on her heels and Japan was master of the Pacific. No one else could challenge her there. England and France were busy far closer to home. Holland, mistress of the resource-rich Dutch East Indies, lay under Nazi occupation. If Japan didn’t have to worry about the USA …