Hitler's War (10 page)

“I will, sir, but what for?” Ludwig asked.

“I have come to arrange the surrender of Prague.” No matter how sugary his accent, the Czech sounded infinitely bitter. “You’ve murdered enough innocent civilians. We can’t stand it any more. I hope you’re satisfied.”

“I just want to get out of this in one piece,” Ludwig said.

The Czech looked at him. “
Ja
, you go where they tell you and do what they tell you. You’re nothing but a little cog in the machine—but it’s a big machine, and it’s slaughtered us. Will you give me a ride?”

“Of course, sir, if you can clamber on up. Not much room inside here, but you can ride on top of the turret. I’ll take you back to Regimental HQ, and they’ll know what to do with you.…Theo!”

“What is it?” the radioman asked.

“Get on the horn with the regiment. Tell ‘em I’m bringing back a Czech colonel—I think he’s a colonel—with a surrender offer for Prague. Tell ‘em it looks like we’ve got a cease-fire up here for the time being, too.”

“Nobody tells me anything,” Theo grumbled. Sitting there at the back of the fighting compartment, he was the last to know, all right.

“I’m telling you now,” Ludwig said.

He gave the Czech officer a hand. The man might not be young, but he was spry—he didn’t really need the help. He might—he undoubtedly did—hate everything the German stood for, but he stayed polite about it. What did the diplomats call that? Correct—that was the word. Ludwig held out a pack of cigarettes. The Czech took one. “Thank you,” he said again. “Have you also got a blindfold for me?”

The accent that made Ludwig think of strudel didn’t go well with the cynical question. Trying to stay polite himself, the panzer commander said, “Your men fought well.”

“We are still fighting well,” the Czech said proudly. “This surrender offer is for Prague, perhaps for Bohemia, but not for all of Czechoslovakia. The war goes on in the east.”

Ludwig didn’t think his superiors would like that. He shrugged. He was only a sergeant. It wasn’t his worry. From the bowels of the panzer, Theo said, “Regiment says to bring him in. And they say the truce here can hold, as far as they’re concerned.”

“In the last war, we did not have communications like these,” the Czech officer said. “Do all of your panzers have radio sets?”

He sounded casual—so casual, he made Ludwig wary. “Sir, I’d better not talk about that. Security, you know,” the German said. He spoke into the tube that let him talk to the driver: “Back to HQ, Fritz.”

“Right, Sergeant.” The Panzer II turned nimbly and headed back toward the east. The Czech officer seemed to be taking mental notes. If he was coming in to surrender, it might not matter. Ludwig sure hoped it wouldn’t.

FIGHTERS DUELED OVER THE EBRO.
Chaim Weinberg watched the new French machines mixing it up with the 109s. Now that France and Germany
were at war, the supply spigot to Spain finally got turned on. The Republic had seen more new equipment the past two weeks than in the two years before.

Just because it was new didn’t mean it was good. A French fighter spun out of control, trailing smoke. The Messerschmitt that downed it sought fresh prey.

Chaim wasn’t the only guy from the International Brigades who swore. In how many tongues did those curses rise? He’d thought—everybody’d thought—enough stuff would come from France to let the Republic settle the Nationalists’ hash in nothing flat. There was more, but there wasn’t
that
much more. And Sanjurjo’s bastards still seemed to be getting stuff from Germany and Italy. That shouldn’t have happened, either.

England had the biggest navy in the world, didn’t she? And the French had lots of ships, too. So why weren’t they doing a better job of closing down Sanjurjo’s supply lines? The only answer he could think of was that they didn’t give a damn.

Then he stopped worrying about their strategic options. A couple of those Messerschmitts dove for the deck. They weren’t running from the French planes. They were going to shoot up the Republican trenches.

Bullets kicked up spurts of dust, closer and closer. Chaim was too far from a dugout to dive into one. He folded himself into a ball to make as small a target as he could. The roar of the powerful engine and the hammering guns filled his world.

The 109 was overhead, so low that he imagined he felt the wind of its passage—or maybe it wasn’t his imagination. Then the plane was gone. But even if the wind was imagination, he didn’t want to unfold. He had to will himself into doing it.

Somebody not far away was groaning. That got him moving. You did for a buddy, because you wanted to be sure a buddy would do for you, too.

That big blond guy wasn’t an American. Chaim thought Gyula was
from Hungary. Gyula spoke several languages, including English. In every damn one of them, he sounded like the guy who played Dracula. What he said now wasn’t in any language Chaim knew. It sounded impressive as hell, though.

“Wow,” he said. “What’s that mean?”

Gyula looked at him. The Hungarian had a mashed foot—no wonder he was groaning. He’d be lucky to keep it. “A horse’s cock up your ass,” he said in English.

For a second, Chaim thought the other guy was cussing at him. Then he realized Gyula was just answering his question. “Let me bandage you up,” Chaim said. He yelled for stretcher-bearers in English and Spanish. His own accent was god-awful, but people would understand that.

“You better cut my shoe off,” Gyula said. “Don’t try to yank it over the wound. I kill you if you do that.”

With that damn Bela Lugosi voice, he should have sounded silly. He should have—and no doubt he would have, if he didn’t so obviously mean it. Clumsily, Chaim took the bayonet off his rifle. At least it had a blade; it wasn’t one of the damn spears the French liked.

Gyula’s boot was falling apart anyway. That made things easier. Chaim winced when he got a good look at the wound. The Hungarian’s instep was smashed all to hell. Yeah, he’d lose most of the foot if not all of it.

He saw the same thing. As Chaim wrapped a puttee around the wound to slow the bleeding, he said, “I can go home now. Admiral Horthy won’t draft me.”

“Mazel tov,”
Chaim said dryly. “He’ll shoot you instead, and not in the foot.” Gyula was close to forty. He’d fought in the last war, and for Bela Kun in Hungary’s short-lived Communist revolution. If he went back to Budapest, he’d be about as welcome as the smallpox.

“Right now, I wouldn’t mind. Hurts like a motherfucker,” Gyula said. “Got any morphine?”

Chaim shook his head. “Sorry. Wish I did.” He meant that. He could have got nailed as easily as Gyula. Dumb luck, one way or the other.

The stretcher-bearers showed up then. They were Internationals, too. That was good—or Chaim thought so. They’d be gentler with Gyula as they took him away. Spaniards faced their own pain with stolid indifference…and they were even more indifferent when somebody else got hurt.

Away they went. They wore Red Cross smocks and armbands. That might keep the Nationalists from shooting at them. On the other hand, it might not. This was a rough old war. You
really
didn’t want to let the other side capture you, no matter which side you were on.

Cautiously, Chaim straightened up till he could peer over the lip of the trench. He wanted to make sure Sanjurjo’s bastards weren’t swarming forward. As soon as he did, he ducked down again. He wouldn’t come up again in the same spot. He knew better than that. Why give the snipers a free shot at you? Guys who did that ended up with a new hole in the head.

He took a swig from his water bottle. It wasn’t water, but sour white wine—horse piss, really. But it was less likely to give you the galloping shits than Ebro water was. He’d had dysentery once, and was glad he’d got over it. He sure as hell didn’t want it again.

When he looked again, ten or fifteen yards down the trench from the place where he’d last popped up, he spied two or three Nationalists looking out of their trenches a couple of hundred yards away and toward him. As he ducked, he saw them ducking at the same time.

They’re scared of me
, he thought, not without pride. They even looked like Fascist assholes. Like most of Sanjurjo’s better troops, they wore German-style helmets. But they were scared of a dumb Jew from New York City. If that wasn’t a kick in the nuts, he didn’t know what would be.

If you had a rifle in your hands, you were dangerous. It was as simple
as that. The thing you had to remember, though, was that the other son of a bitch was dangerous as long as he had a rifle, too.

VACLAV JEZEK STUMBLED OVER THE
border. Behind him, Slovakia was going to hell in a handbasket. The Germans were breaking in from the west. The Hungarians, not about to miss a chance to seize again what they’d ruled for centuries, were breaking in from the south. The Slovaks were up in arms—German-supplied arms—against what was left of Czechoslovakian authority.
Ingrate bastards
, Jezek thought, not that anybody gave a damn about his opinion.

He didn’t know what the Poles would do with him—to him—either. Poland was also more or less at war with Czechoslovakia. By now, Tesin would be Cieszun, or however the hell the Poles spelled it. He doubted whether his own country tried very hard to defend the mining town. When a lion jumped you, you didn’t worry about the jackals.

The country was rough and broken. Most of the leaves were off the trees, though, which made people easier to spot. And, being off the trees, the leaves lay underfoot. Every time Vaclav took a step, they crunched underfoot. They might as well have shouted
Here I am!

But so what? He didn’t want to sit around in a Nazi POW camp till the war ended. Whatever the Poles did to him had to be better than that…didn’t it? Behind him, he could still hear bombs and shells bursting and machine guns going off. More Czech soldiers—the ones who could—were stumbling north, out of the fighting. They’d made the same calculation he had. Now…were the lot of them right?

Somebody up ahead shouted something. Vaclav
almost
understood it. Polish and Czech were closely related—not so closely as Czech and Slovak, but still.…A word here and there came through, even if each of them seemed to carry an extra syllable or two.

Vaclav stood still. He thought that was what the Pole was telling him to do. “I give up!” he shouted back. “You can intern me!”

The Pole came out from behind a tree. He wore a greenish uniform, not brown like Vaclav’s (not filthy and tattered like Vaclav’s, either) or German field-gray. The bayoneted rifle he carried looked extremely businesslike. Moving slowly and carefully, Vaclav unslung his own piece and laid it on the ground in front of his feet.

With a nod, the Pole advanced on him. They tried to talk. It was an exercise in near misses and frustration. Then the Pole—a big blond fellow—raised an ironic eyebrow and asked,
“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”

“Ja,”
Jezek said miserably. Two Slavs, having to go back and forth in German!

“Gut,”
the Pole said.
“Jetzt können wir wirklich einander verstehen.”
And they
could
really understand each other now, no matter how much Vaclav loathed the idea. Still in German, the Pole went on, “Give me your name and rank and unit.”

Dully, Vaclav did. “What will you do with me?” he asked.

“We have a camp a few kilometers to the north,” the Polish soldier answered. “Did you say you wanted to be interned before?”

“Ja,”
Vaclav said again.

“I thought so, but I wasn’t sure,” the Pole said. “Well, you will be. You are not a prisoner of war, not here. Poland and Czechoslovakia are not formally at war.”

“No. You just grabbed,” Jezek said bitterly.

With a shrug, the big man in the green uniform answered, “So did you Czechs, after the last war. Otherwise, the coal mines down there would have been ours all along. And then you act like your shit doesn’t stink.”

“Oh, mine does. I know that,” Vaclav said. “But if you are friends with Hitler, he will make you sorry.”

“Better him than Stalin and the damned Reds,” the Pole retorted.

“You find friends where you can. At least the Russians did something for us. More than France and England did,” Vaclav said.

“What did you expect? They’re full of Jews,” the Pole said. No wonder he liked Hitler better than Stalin. He stooped, picked up Vaclav’s rifle, and slung it over his own shoulder. Then he pointed north. “The camp is that way. Get moving, Corporal Jezek.”

Shoulders slumped in despair, Vaclav got moving.

T
he night was cool and damp. Most nights were, as October moved toward November. Willi Dernen peered at the Frenchmen who’d nipped off a few square kilometers of German soil.

They were warmer than he was. They’d started a fire and sat around it. From 300 meters, he could have potted them easily. Orders were not to piss them off, no matter what. If they wanted to sit on their asses as if they hadn’t crossed the border, they were welcome to.

If they’d really come loaded for bear…

Willi’s shiver had nothing to do with the weather. He was a blond, stolid watchmaker’s son from Breslau, all the way over on the other side of the
Reich
. He could hardly follow the German they spoke here, and the locals had trouble with his accent, too. But he’d been on the Westwall since France and England declared war. He knew what would have happened had the French put some muscle into a push instead of tiptoeing over the border.