The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (22 page)

“But I’m only
a corporal,” Vaclav answered, also in German.

“People from European armies, we promote one grade,” the Spaniard said. “You have combat experience soldiers from Spain do not.” His face clouded. “The Fascists, they also this do with the men of the Legion Kondor.”

“Oh, terrific,” Vaclav said, fortunately in Czech. Gaining a privilege because a pack of Nazis also enjoyed it was the last thing he
wanted. But he damn well
did
have combat experience the locals lacked. And, if his pay went up to match the Spanish rank, he’d get more money even if they stiffed him now and then. So he managed to compose himself when he returned to German:
“Danke schön.”

“Bitte,”
the Spaniard answered, and showed himself a true student
of
Kultur
by clicking his heels German-style. Vaclav didn’t tell him any
Czech despised that nonsense as a reminder of the not-quite-dead-enough Austro-Hungarian past. The fellow doubtless meant well. Then again, when you thought about which road was paved with good intentions …

Because Benjamin Halévy was already a sergeant, the Spaniards made him into a second lieutenant. He took it for a joke, which made Vaclav think better of him. “I sure as hell never would have
turned into an officer if I’d stayed in France!” the Jew exclaimed.

“Maybe if you’d gone to Russia and done something brave, the Germans would have given you a battlefield promotion,” Vaclav suggested with a sly grin.

Halévy told him what he could do with any battlefield promotion won from the Nazis. It sounded uncomfortable, especially if Vaclav tried to do it sideways, as the other man urged.
When the Czech said so, he found Halévy remarkably unsympathetic.

By the time the Spaniards got through, none of the Czechs had a grade lower than PFC, and most of them were at least corporals. It might matter when they dealt with the locals. Their relative ranks remained unchanged, so for their own purposes the promotions gave some merriment but otherwise might as well not have happened.

More
serious business for Vaclav was picking off any of Marshal Sanjurjo’s officers who came within range of his elephant gun. The Nationalists made his murderous work easier by prominently displaying their rank badges and medals. “Stupid,” he said, after potting a fellow he thought was a colonel. “They’d be a lot safer if they showed off less.”

“But they’d be less
macho
,” Halévy told him.

“Less
what?” Vaclav hadn’t run into the Spanish word before.

“
Macho
. It means being tough for the sake of being tough. It means, if you’ve got a big cock, you wear a codpiece so it looks even bigger. It’s like elk growing antlers every spring so they can bang heads with other elk.”

“Elk can’t help growing antlers every spring,” Vaclav protested.

“Spaniards, or a lot of Spaniards, can’t help showing
how
macho
they are,” Halévy said with a shrug.

“If they had any brains, they could,” Jezek said. “That colonel would
still be breathing if he’d worn a private’s tunic and kept his medals in the boxes they came in. The way he was strutting around with all those gold stars and ribbons, he might as well have written
SHOOT ME
! across his chest in big red letters.”

“If they had any brains, Vaclav,
how many of them would be officers in a Fascist army?” Benjamin Halévy asked.

Vaclav pondered that. “Well, you’ve got something there,” he admitted.

The next day, the Spanish papers that came out from Madrid had big headlines. The only problem was, Vaclav had no idea what those headlines said. Spanish was even more a closed book to him than French had been.

Halévy, who read French like the
native he was, could make a stab at written Spanish, just as a native Czech speaker would recognize some written Polish words and might be able to extract sense from a Polish newspaper story. “Something’s going on in England,” the Jew reported. “Somebody—the army, I think—doesn’t like the way the government’s jumped into bed with the Nazis, and they’re trying to do something about it.”

“And?”
Vaclav said. “Don’t cocktease, goddammit! Are they winning? Are they losing? Will England tell Hitler where to head in? That’d be something, wouldn’t it?” He imagined the Royal Navy and the RAF pounding the hell out of German-held Europe again.

“I don’t know ‘and,’ ” Halévy replied in an unwontedly small voice. “Either the paper doesn’t say or my Spanish is too crappy for me to figure it out.
Maybe they’re hanging traitors from lampposts. Or maybe the traitors are still running things and they’re translating
‘Deutschland über Alles’
into English right now.”

“Give me that goddamn thing.” Jezek snatched the newspaper out of Halévy’s hand. As usual, the Czechs and the men from the International Brigade held adjoining stretches of the Republican line. The Republic naturally grouped its
best fighters together. And the Czech didn’t take long to find somebody who could read Spanish and speak German.

“It just says there’s unrest in England,” the International told him. By the way the man pronounced his r’s, Vaclav guessed he was a Magyar. Had they met anywhere but in Spain, they probably would have
quarreled—Hungary had sat on Slovakia for centuries, and mistrusted Czechs for wanting
to help Slovaks. Here, they both had bigger things to worry about.

“Who’s winning?” Vaclav asked, as he had with Halévy.

The Magyar spread his hands. “We’ll have to wait and see,” he said. “The guy who wrote this doesn’t know. He’s trying to hide that so he won’t look dumb, but he doesn’t.”

Vaclav made a disgusted noise down deep in his throat. “Sounds like a newspaperman, all right.”

“It
sure does.” The Magyar studied him. The fellow had green eyes, high cheekbones, and an arrogant blade of a nose. He looked the way Vaclav would have expected a Magyar to look, in other words. And he sounded faintly surprised when he added, “You’re not such a fool, are you?”

For a Czech
, he might have meant. To Magyars, Slovaks were nothing but bumpkins, and Czechs were a lot like Slovaks, so
 … Vaclav thought Slovaks were bumpkins, too, and Fascist-loving bumpkins at that, but he knew Magyars were dead wrong about Czechs. How did he know? By being a Czech himself, of course.

“Well, I try,” he said dryly.

“Heh,” the Magyar said. He tapped the paper with his left hand. The little finger was missing its last joint. “Thanks for bringing this. I hadn’t seen it yet. If England really is
having second thoughts, that could be big.”

“What do you think the odds are?”

“Either she’ll change her mind or she won’t. Right now, you can toss a coin,” the Magyar answered. Grimacing, Vaclav nodded. If you tried to guess when you didn’t know enough, you were bound to end up looking like an idiot. The Magyar declined that dubious honor. Declining made sense. Vaclav still knew what he hoped.

THEO HOSSBACH DIDN’T LIKE
any SS men, as a general working rule. He disliked the
Waffen
-SS less than the other branches, though. Men who joined the SS intending to fight foreign foes took more risks than the ones who joined to hit prisoners who couldn’t fight back.

These bastards were still bastards. Unlike their comrades in the Black Corps, they were brave bastards. He’d seen that in France.
Waffen-
SS units there went straight at obstacles the
Wehrmacht
would have tried to outflank or would have ignored altogether. Sometimes taking a position was more expensive than it was worth.

So it seemed to the
Wehrmacht
, anyhow. So it certainly seemed to Theo. The SS men looked at things differently. Sometimes they bulled through where the
Wehrmacht
would have hesitated, perhaps not least because
the enemy often thought they wouldn’t be crazy enough to attack
here
. Sometimes they got slaughtered for their trouble.

Not that Theo necessarily thought slaughtering SS men a bad idea … He did disapprove of waste, though. Even when the SS broke through, its butcher’s bill was higher than the
Wehrmacht
’s would have been.

Right now, Theo and Adi Stoss and Hermann Witt were messing with their
Panzer III’s transmission, trying to figure out which gear in the train didn’t want to mesh and whether they had or could get their hands on a replacement. “The Ivans don’t worry about shit like this,” Adi said. “Their drivers have a mallet next to their seat. When a gear doesn’t want to engage, they give the stick a good whack. That makes the son of a bitch behave.”

“You’re making that up,”
Sergeant Witt said. “I know the Russians can be rude and crude with their equipment, but that’s over the line even for them.”

Lothar Eckhardt, the panzer’s gunner, and Kurt Poske, the loader, watched without saying much. They were both new men, much less experienced than the three veterans. Theo wished it were a new Panzer III, but no. Somebody else got the new machines. This one was a hand-me-down,
not so old and beat-up as the Panzer II that was now being cannibalized for spare parts if its carcass had been brought in and quietly rusting if it hadn’t.

Adi raised his right hand with the first two fingers raised and crooked, as if he were swearing an oath in court. “Honest to God, Sergeant. I’ve seen the damn things with my own eyes.”

“Me, too.” Theo rarely contributed to the conversation,
but a fact was a fact—and this one cost him only a couple of words.

“Well, fuck me,” Witt said mildly. Heinz Naumann wouldn’t have let his juniors get away with disagreeing with him, even when they were right—maybe especially when they were. Theo missed Naumann not a bit, and suspected Adi missed him even less than that. Seeing that a fact was a fact even when it wasn’t
his
fact was one of the
many things that made Witt a better panzer commander than Naumann had ever dreamt of being.

Adi pounced with a wrench. Three minutes later, he held the culprit in the palm of his hand. “Will you look at that?” he said. “One tooth gone, and another one going. No wonder things were getting sticky.”

“No wonder at all,” Witt agreed. “Have we got a new one we can swap in?”

“I’m pretty sure we don’t,”
Adi said.

Witt nodded unhappily. “I’m pretty sure you’re right.” He tossed the toothed steel disk to Eckhardt. “Go on back to the maintenance section and get a replacement. Check it out before you take it, too. Don’t let ’em give you one that’s had new teeth welded on. They’ll tell you it’s just as good, but that’s a bunch of crap.”

The kid looked shocked. He was very fair, and couldn’t have
been above nineteen—he hardly needed to shave. “They’d try to dump defective stuff on us?”

“Listen to me.” Witt spoke with great conviction. “You know the Russians are the enemy, right? But your own side will screw you just as hard if you give ’em half a chance. Go on, now. Scoot.”

Theo wondered if Witt would ask Adi or him to go along with Eckhardt. But the sergeant didn’t. The new guys had
to learn the ropes. Whenever you had the chance, you broke them in a little at a time. Trouble was, a fast-moving campaign—which this one had become, now that the mud was dry—didn’t always give you chances like that.

Witt pulled out a pack of Junos and offered everybody else a smoke. “We may as well take ten,” he said. “We sure aren’t going anywhere till he comes back with that gear.”

New green
grass was pushing up through the dirt and through the gray-yellow dead growth from the year before. Theo sat down and sucked in smoke. Not far away, a skylark sang sweetly. The clear trilled
notes couldn’t drown out the distant rumble of artillery, though. Theo cocked his head to one side, listening to the guns.
Ours
, he decided, and relaxed fractionally.

Another panzer crew was working on their
machine at the far edge of the field. Resting infantrymen sprawled in clumps between the two panzers. They all wore SS runes on helmets and collar patches. They were eating or smoking or passing around water bottles that probably didn’t hold water. Some of them lay with their eyes closed, grabbing a little sleep while they could.

They were doing all the things
Wehrmacht
foot soldiers would have
done, in other words. Theo still looked at them differently. Anybody could end up in the Army. He had, for instance. So had Adi Stoss. You had to volunteer for the
Waffen
-SS, and you wouldn’t do that unless you were a convinced Nazi. They wouldn’t take you unless they were sure you were a convinced Nazi, either, so that worked both ways.

One of the guys propped up on an elbow maybe ten meters
away bummed a chunk of black bread from his buddy and squeezed butter onto it from a tinfoil tube. Theo’s stomach rumbled. He told it to shut up. It didn’t want to listen.

“Can you believe those stupid goddamn Frenchmen?” the trooper asked after he swallowed a heroic bite of bread.

“Jesus Christ, but that was chickenshit! For twenty pfennigs, I would’ve blown the fuckin’ froggies a new asshole
with my Schmeisser,” answered the other man from the
Waffen
-SS. Theo’s stomach rumbled again. Once more, he told it to keep quiet. It might not want to listen, but all of a sudden he did.

The first fellow who wore the runes couldn’t have looked more disgusted had he tried for a week. “Once we finish with the Ivans, we’re gonna have to do for the froggies, all right,” he said. “It’s a hell of
a note when we can’t give the Hebes what they deserve on account of our so-called friends don’t like it.” He spat in the dirt.

“Damn straight,” his friend agreed. “
Damn
straight. This whole stupid, stinking war, it’s about Reds and kikes. If the Frenchmen can’t see that, tough shit for them, that’s all I’ve got to say.”

“Amen!” the first trooper said, as if in church. “The
Führer
’s gonna
bring
things around to the way they’re supposed to be, even if he’s got to wipe out all the goddamn Jews to do it.” The other fellow with the SS collar tab nodded, then started cleaning his submachine gun.

Ever so casually, Theo’s gaze swung toward Adi Stoss. He wouldn’t have been surprised to find Adi hopping mad, or else sizzling inside and trying to pretend he wasn’t. But the panzer driver lay on
his back, his hands clasped behind his head, staring up at the clouds drifting across the watery blue sky. If he’d paid any attention to what the infantrymen were saying, he gave no sign.