Hitler's War (42 page)

“Merci. Merci,”
Willi said. It didn’t seem enough, but it was the best he could do.

They finished the free drinks and left. After they got outside and closed the door behind them again, Wolfgang said, “If she
really
wanted
to thank us, she could have taken us into that back room while Papa looked the other way.”

“She’s not that kind of girl,” Willi said.

“Yeah. Ain’t it a shame?” Wolfgang’s breath smoked even though he didn’t have a cigarette in his mouth. After a couple of steps, he brightened. “Could be worse, you know? Old Arno sure got his.”

“Boy, did he ever!” Willi agreed enthusiastically. They walked on through the snow, toward the house where they were quartered.

FRENCH VILLAGERS STARED FEARFULLY AT
Vaclav Jezek and the rest of the Czechs in his outfit. Vaclav knew why, too. Their uniforms weren’t quite the right color, their helmets were the wrong shape, and they spoke some funny foreign language. To people who didn’t know any better, that was plenty to turn them into Germans.

And, just to make things worse, they were coming from the east. If they were Germans, they would have smashed all the defenders ahead of them, but you couldn’t expect civilians to think of things like that.

One of the locals came out with something. Vaclav had picked up a handful of French words, but not nearly enough to let him follow. “What did he say?” he asked the guy along as an interpreter.

Benjamin Halévy looked even less happy than he had before he heard the Frenchman’s news. The Jewish sergeant pointed north and west. “Old geezer claims the Germans are already over there.”

“Shit,” Vaclav said. If that was true, they were in danger of getting cut off and surrounded. If…“Does he know his ass from a hole in the ground?”

He eyed the Frenchman. The guy was around fifty, and had some ugly scars on his jaw and left cheek. Maybe those weren’t war wounds, but they sure looked like them. If this fellow had gone through the mill before, he wouldn’t see a cow and imagine it was a German armored division.

Halévy went back and forth with him. After a last
“Merci,”
the sergeant returned to Czech: “Sure sounds like he does. They pushed through the woods over there. This guy says he saw a couple of armored cars, but no tanks.”

“Bad enough,” Vaclav muttered. Several of his countrymen nodded. He went on, “Where are our tanks? Where are our armored cars?” Nobody answered him. The Germans always seemed to have armor when they broke through. They used their armor
to
break through. The French scattered it up and down the line, which meant they never had enough where they needed it most. That was one reason they were falling back and the Nazis moving up.

Halévy gave Vaclav a crooked grin. “Hey, pal, that’s why you’ve got your antitank rifle, right?”

Vaclav told him where he could put the antitank rifle. Halévy would have walked very straight if he’d tried. You could get your behind in a sling for telling off a noncom, but Vaclav’s behind was already in a sling because he was up at the front, so what did he care?

He would have expected a Jew to get stuffy about that kind of thing, maybe to threaten him with official regulations. But Sergeant Halévy just laughed and said something about his mother and troopships. From another guy, or under different circumstances, Vaclav would have tried to rearrange his face. He laughed now, too. They’d been through it together. They’d earned the right to zing each other.

“Seriously, we ought to head up that way,” Halévy said. “If your rifle can take out those cars, it’ll do us some good.”

Vaclav was no more enthusiastic about putting his dick on the chopping block than any other soldier in his right mind would have been. But he could see the need. “I’ll try it,” he said.

“Attaboy,” Halévy told him. He clapped another Czech soldier on the back. “Dominik, take point.”

“Right, Sergeant.” Dominik didn’t sound thrilled, but he never did.
He was little and skinny and nervous as a cat in a room full of Rottweilers—all of which made him a goddamn good point man. He carried a captured German submachine gun. If he ran into trouble, he could spray a lot of lead at it.

“Let’s go,” the sergeant said. He moved right behind Dominik. He didn’t believe in staying away from trouble. None of the people who said Jews were a bunch of cowards had seen him in action. David had stayed right up there with everybody else, too, till he stopped one. And they both hated Nazis even more than Vaclav did, which he wouldn’t have believed if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes.

“Bonne chance,”
called the Frenchman who’d warned them about Germans.
Luck
, that meant, or something like it. Vaclav waved to the guy without looking back.

Trees and bushes and rocks. The western part of the Ardennes was as wild and rugged as anything in Czechoslovakia. Vaclav would have bet the Germans couldn’t get any armor through here, but he would have lost if he had. He’d already escaped from tanks in these parts: Panzer Is and IIs, and also some captured Czech T-35s. Those infuriated him. Yes, everybody grabbed whatever he could get his hands on—his own antitank rifle and Dominik’s machine pistol showed as much. But seeing Czech tanks fight against Czech soldiers made him want to cry.

Dominik waved urgently. Vaclav dove behind the closest bush. He didn’t know what was up ahead, and he didn’t want to find out the hard way. Sergeant Halévy twiddled fingers at him. Ever so cautiously, Vaclav slithered forward. He swore under his breath every time a knee or an elbow broke a twig.

Then he froze—German voices up ahead. The breeze swung, and he got a whiff of cigarette smoke. “God in heaven, I’m tired,” one of the Fritzes said. “I could sleep for a month.”

“Just a little going on, Klaus.” If those dry tones didn’t come from a sergeant, Vaclav would eat his boots.

“Ja,”
Klaus said, and then, “What the hell was that?”

That
was Vaclav’s antitank rifle scraping through some dry bushes. The goddamn thing was more than a meter and a half long—almost as long as he was tall. It wasn’t just heavy; it was also unwieldy as all get-out. Jezek froze.

“I didn’t hear anything,” the noncom said.

“I sure thought I did,” Klaus replied.

“Want to check it out?”

“Nah. I just want to sit here and grab a smoke.”

“Sounds good to me. Let me bum one off you,” the sergeant said.

Even more warily than before, Vaclav crawled forward. He spotted an armored car between a couple of chestnuts. Hoping the noise wouldn’t give him away, he chambered a round. The Germans didn’t have kittens, so he got away with it. A couple of those long, fat rounds through the engine compartment and that armored car wouldn’t go anywhere for a while.

He waggled the fingers on his left hand to let Sergeant Halévy know he was in position. The rest of the Czechs opened up on the Germans. His noise covered by theirs, he punched one through the armored car’s thin steel side and into the engine.

He was about to shoot at it again when a German with a submachine gun popped up out of nowhere. Vaclav shot him instead. A round designed to pierce armor did horrible things to flesh. It seemed to blow out half the German’s insides. The poor bastard fell over with a grunt and never stirred after that. It was over fast for him, anyhow.

Shoulder aching—even with muzzle brake and padded stock, the antitank rifle kicked harder than a kangaroo—Vaclav reloaded. Here came the other armored car. He fired at where the driver would sit, once, twice. The car slid to the left and slammed into a tree.

That seemed to take the vinegar out of these Germans. They either ran off or gave up. “Good job!” Sergeant Halévy called to Vaclav. “Don’t you wish it was this easy all the goddamn time?”

“Jesus!” Vaclav exclaimed. “I’m just glad it was this easy once.” Halévy laughed, for all the world as if he were joking.

LIEUTENANT JULIUS LEMP STOOD AT
stiff attention. When a rear admiral reamed you out, you had to stand there and take it and pretend it didn’t hurt. The process was a lot like picking up dueling scars, except you had no sword of your own.

“You thick-skinned idiot!” Karl Dönitz didn’t raise his voice, which only made things worse. “Did you
want
to drag the United States into this war?”

“No, sir,” Lemp replied woodenly He stared straight at a spot three centimeters in front of Dönitz’s nose.

The round-faced chief of U-boat operations was not a man who stood out in a crowd. Dönitz was supposed to be a pretty good guy, too. He had a reputation for sticking up for his captains. But nobody would stick up for you when you screwed up the way Lemp had.

“U-boats brought the Americans in the last time,” Dönitz said. “We try not to make the same mistakes twice, you know.” He waited.

“Yes, sir.” Again, something mechanical might have spoken through Lemp.

“I’ve had to calm down Goebbels and von Ribbentrop and the
Führer,”
Dönitz said. “They all wanted your scalp.” He waited.

What am I supposed to say now?
Lemp wondered. He tried, “I’m honored, sir.” In a way, he was. If the Propaganda Minister and the Foreign Minister and Hitler himself noticed you, you’d done something out of the ordinary, no doubt about it.

Rear Admiral Dönitz’s pale eyes grew cold as the seas off Greenland. “I wouldn’t be, if I were you,” he said, and his voice was as icy as his face. “Dr. Goebbels had to put together a whole propaganda campaign to shift the blame away from us. Now there’s some doubt about who sank the
Athenia
—but not among us, eh?”

“No, sir. I did it, all right.” Lemp still didn’t change expression. Yeah, sometimes you had to stand there and take it. This was one of those times.

“I’d run you out of my office if you told me anything else,” Dönitz said. “If you screw up like this again, I won’t be able to help you. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, sir.” Men who served on U-boats weren’t normally long on military discipline. This was one of those occasions where formality was mandatory, though. You took your abuse by the numbers.

“A notation about your error will go into your service jacket,” Dönitz said, which meant Lemp would be a long time seeing another promotion.

“Yes, sir,” Lemp said one more time. He couldn’t get into more trouble as long as he kept saying that, and he was in plenty already.

“Next time we send you out, for God’s sake try not to sink anything flying the Stars and Stripes,” Dönitz said.

“I will, sir,” Lemp replied. But he couldn’t help adding, “You
are
going to send me out again?”

“Yes, yes.” The commander of the
Kriegsmarine’s
U-boat forces sounded impatient. “You’ve proved you can hit what you aim at. We need that in our skippers. I have to dress you down, because you aimed at the wrong ship. I have my orders, too, you understand.”

Did that mean he’d been going through the motions before? It sure sounded that way to Lemp. If he had, he could take his act on stage. He’d make more money with it than he ever could in a naval career. “I see,” the U-boat skipper said cautiously—one more phrase that stayed pretty safe.

Dönitz looked altogether different when he smiled. “All right, then,” he said. “Dismissed. And you can tell your crew we won’t send them to a camp.”

Lemp saluted. “Yes, sir. I’ll do that. Some of them have been worried about it.” Some of them had been scared shitless. You didn’t want to say
that to a rear admiral, though. Lemp didn’t like the idea of living in a place where making an honest mistake could land you in this much trouble. But, no matter what else the
Vaterland
was, it was the
Vaterland
.

“Go on, go on.” Dönitz had spent all the time with him he was going to. Stacks of papers smothered the admiral’s desk. It wasn’t as if he had nothing else going on.

After one more salute, Lemp made his escape. He was glad he’d worn his greatcoat. Germany had enough coal to keep furnaces going and heat buildings, but Wilhelmshaven was bloody cold outside. Screeching gulls wheeled overhead. The air smelled of the sea and, more faintly, of fuel oil—familiar odors to a U-boat skipper.

Dönitz’s office wasn’t far from the harbor, and from the seaside barracks that housed U-boat crewmen when they came in to port. Lemp made for the two-story red-brick building with dormer windows where the sailors from the U-30 were staying. A sailor wearing a
Stahlhelm
and carrying a rifle stood guard outside. He saluted Lemp. The skipper and his crew weren’t quite under arrest—but they weren’t quite
not
under arrest, either.

Returning the salute, Lemp said, “You can relax, Jochen. I think they’ll give you some other duty soon.”

“I wouldn’t mind,” Jochen said.

Lemp walked on in. The sailors crowded the wardroom, smoking and playing cards and reading newspapers. It wasn’t nearly so crowded as the long steel tube of the U-30 would have been, though. Everything stopped when the men saw Lemp. They searched his face as anxiously as they would have searched the horizon when Royal Navy destroyers were in the neighborhood.

“It’s over,” Lemp said. “The admiral read me the riot act, but they’ll let us put to sea again.”

The sailors cheered. They stamped their feet. A couple of them whistled shrilly. Only later did Lemp wonder why. As long as they stayed
in harbor, they were safe. Any time they went hunting, they laid their lives on the line. And they were glad to do it. If that wasn’t madness…

Of course it was. He had a case of the same disease. So did the British sailors who tried to bring merchantmen into their harbors, and the other sailors who set out to sink U-boats. So did the soldiers in German
Feldgrau
, and so did the bastards in assorted shades of khaki who tried their best to stop the
Wehrmacht
.

Without that kind of madness, you couldn’t have a war. Julius Lemp took it for granted. So did men far more important than he.

“What did Dönitz say?” asked a machinist’s mate.

“That we were bad boys for sinking an American liner. That we could have got the
Reich
into all kinds of trouble. But we didn’t,” Lemp answered. “He also said he needed people who could shoot straight.”