The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (6 page)

They appreciated the antitank rifle and what he could do with it. “We have a few of those ourselves, but we never thought of using them for sniping,” said a fellow
who called himself Spartacus. It was a
nom de guerre;
he spoke German with a throaty Hungarian accent.

Vaclav loved Magyars hardly more than Germans. He had to remind himself he and Spartacus were on the same side. “It works,” he said. He wasn’t about to let anybody take the man-tall monster away from him.

But that wasn’t what Spartacus had in mind. “I bet it does. That’s the idea,” he said.
“Why don’t you start thinning the herd of Fascist officers?” His thin, dark mustache made his smile even nastier than it would have been otherwise.

“I can do that. As a matter of fact, I’ve been doing it, in France and here,” Vaclav said. No one here would have paid much attention to what he’d been up to. That was what you got for being a newcomer, especially if you had language troubles.

“All
right. Good. Very good.” The Hungarian International seemed on the stupid side to Vaclav, to say nothing of overbearing. Most Magyars
seemed that way to most Czechs. Magyars weren’t as bad as Germans, but they were a devil of a long way from good … if you eyed them from a Czech’s perspective, anyhow.

How Czechs seemed to Magyars was another question altogether—not one Vaclav had ever thought
to ask himself, and not one he was likely to ask himself, either.

His biggest complaint was one he hadn’t expected to have in sunny Spain: the trenches northwest of Madrid got as cold as a German tax collector’s heart. Sunny Spain was, even in wintertime. But the central plateau lay some distance above sea level, and the winds seemed to blow straight through him. He’d been warmer up near the
Franco-Belgian border.

As long as he didn’t shiver while he pulled the trigger, though, he could do his job. If anything, it was easier here than it had been in France. However much he despised the Germans, he couldn’t deny that they made sensible soldiers. Officers didn’t look much different from their men. Sometimes they’d even turn their shoulder straps upside down to make it harder for a
sniper to spy their rank badges.

Marshal Sanjurjo’s soldiers weren’t like that. A man in those ranks who was somebody wanted to show that he was somebody. He prominently displayed the gold stars that set him off from the common, vulgar mob. And he often wore a uniform of newer, finer cloth and better cut than the ragged, faded yellowish khaki the ordinary Fascist soldiers had to put up with.

All of which made it much easier for Vaclav to spot enemy officers. An aristocrat in a neatly pressed uniform, his stars of rank glittering under the bright Spanish sun, sometimes had a moment to look absurdly amazed when he made the acquaintance of one of the antitank rifle’s fat slugs.

More often, the Fascist bastard just fell over. Vaclav wasn’t fussy; nobody gave out style points.

Chapter 3

S
ergeant Luc Harcourt shivered as he led his squad into the Russian village. That wasn’t fear; the village lay several hundred kilometers behind the line, and was unlikely to have holdouts in it. No, Luc was just cold. French greatcoats and other winter gear weren’t made for weather like this.

If not for
the felt boots he wore over his own clodhoppers, he would have been colder yet. He’d stripped them off a dead Russian, and they were lifesavers. The Ivans had to deal with this crap every year, poor bastards, and they knew how.

He’d noticed that German soldiers wore
valenki
whenever they could get hold of them, too. That left him obscurely amused. So the Master Race didn’t know everything there
was to know about winter warfare, either? Well, good!

Daladier might declare that France and Germany were allies against the Bolsheviks now. Luc might have taken a train trip through the
Reich
so he could get at the Red Army. But before that he’d spent two years shooting at the Nazis and trying like hell to hide when they shot back. Some
Boche
had shot his father during the last war. No matter
what
fucking Daladier declared, Luc didn’t love the Germans. No, sir, not even close.

A lot of Russian villages the Germans and their allies had overrun were empty. The locals had cleared out instead of sticking around to see what occupation would be like. Luc sympathized. Plenty of Frenchmen and -women had fled when the Germans invaded, too. And there were lots of Jews in these parts. If he
were a Jew, he wouldn’t have stayed under German rule for anything.

Not everyone had run away from this place, though. A few men and women came out of their battered shacks to eye the soldiers trudging down the main street—an unpaved track with some of the dirty snow trampled into the frozen ground. All the Russians, regardless of sex, had
valenki
. Luc thought they were foolish to put the overboots
on display. Some of his men were liable to steal them right off their feet.

A fellow with a graying, stubbly beard wore a wool scarf, a sheepskin cap and jacket, and baggy wool pants stuffed into the tops of his
valenki
. He surprised Luc by asking, “You’re Frenchmen, aren’t you?” in fluent French.

“That’s right,” the sergeant answered. “Where did you learn our language?”

The Ivan smiled a sweet,
sad smile. “Once upon a time, I studied medicine. I learned French then. I learned German, too.” The smile got sadder still. “I used to think I was a cultured fellow.”

“Well, what the devil are you doing here?” Luc asked. This miserable village was as far from culture as anything could get.

“Tending my garden,” the Russian said, as Candide might have done. He went on, “What I grow in my own
plot, I get to keep and sell. The state takes what we grow on our collective lands, of course. And I still do what I can when someone gets hurt or comes down sick.”

“Why aren’t you a doctor in some big city?” Luc inquired.

“The council of workers and peasants was going to send me to a labor camp for being an intellectual,” the Russian answered, as calmly as if he were talking about someone else.
“But they decided I could work out my antiproletarian prejudices here on the
kolkhoz
instead. I’ve been here since 1922.”

“Well, now we’ve come to set you free.” Luc trotted out the propaganda
line the Germans had fed their new allies to see what this cultured Russian would make of it.

By the way the fellow looked at him, he might have pissed in the baptismal font—except the building that had
been a church before the Revolution was currently a barn. “If you’d come here in 1923, I would have welcomed you with open arms,” the Russian said. “So would almost everyone else. But now? No. We’ve spent a generation building up and getting used to the new ways of doing things. You want to tear down everything we’ve managed to do and tell us to start over one more time. We would rather fight for
General Secretary Stalin than go through that again.”

He didn’t make fighting for Stalin sound like a good choice—only like a better choice than starting from scratch. Chuckling, Luc said, “Maybe I ought to shoot you now, then, to keep you from making trouble later on.”

“It could be that you should.” The Russian wasn’t joking. “I see that, because you are French, some shreds of civilization
still cling to you. The Nazis would not talk like that. They would just start shooting and burning. It has happened here in the Soviet Union many times already. No doubt it will happen many more.”

Luc wanted to tell him that was all a pack of lies: nothing but garbage served up by the propaganda cooks in Moscow. He wanted to, yes, but the words stuck in his throat. After all, the Germans had
invaded his country twice since 1914. They weren’t gentle occupiers either time. From all he’d heard, they were more brutal now than they had been a generation earlier. Why would he expect them to be gentle here in the East, then?

Uneasily, he said, “International law gives them the right to be hard on
francs-tireurs
.” If you picked up a rifle without being a soldier, any army in the world that
caught you would give you a blindfold and—if you were lucky—a cigarette and then fill you full of holes.

Of course, the Germans took hostages if
francs-tireurs
troubled them. They murdered them by dozens or scores to remind the people they were fighting not to get frisky. Here in the East, they probably executed hostages by the hundreds. Would such frightfulness intimidate the Russians or only
make them hate harder?

Looking into the doctor-turned-peasant’s pale eyes, Luc didn’t like the answer he thought he saw. “Keep your nose clean, or you’ll be sorry,” he said, his voice rougher than he’d intended.

“Oh, but of course,
Monsieur
,” the Russian said, his tone so transparently false that Luc wondered whether he should plug him right there.

A Nazi would have. The Ivan understood as
much. So did Luc. It was the biggest part of what stayed his hand. He didn’t have his men camp inside the village, as he’d intended when they approached it. Instead, he led them on for another kilometer. They were grumbling by the time he finally let them stop.

He didn’t feel like listening to them. “Put a sock in it, you clowns,” he said. “We go to sleep in one of those houses, we’ll wake up
with our throats cut.”

“We’ll freeze here in the middle of nowhere,” one of the
poilus
retorted. “Is that so much better?”

“We won’t freeze. We’ll just be cold. There’s a difference,” Luc said. He knew what the men would be saying about him—that he wouldn’t feel it because his heart was already cold. He’d said the same kind of thing about his sergeant back in the days before he wore any hash
marks on his sleeve.

Sergeant Demange was Second Lieutenant Demange now. A veteran noncom from the last war, Demange didn’t want to be an officer. But the know-it-alls above him kept getting shot, and he finally won a promotion whether he liked it or not. The way he chain-smoked Gitanes said he didn’t. Or maybe not—he’d smoked like a chimney as a sergeant, too.

Luc told him about the French-speaking
Russian back in the village. “You
should
have scragged the asshole,” said Demange, who had very little use for his fellow man. “It would’ve given the rest of the shitheads back there something to stew on.”

“The
Gestapo
would be proud of you, sir.” More than two years of serving Demange had earned Luc the right to speak his mind.

Up to a point. “Fuck you,” Demange answered evenly. “Fuck the Ivans,
too. You want to make sure they don’t cause trouble, you’ve got to
boot ’em in the balls. Oh, yeah—and fuck the
Gestapo
. Fuck ’em up the ass, except the ones who like it that way.”

“Merde alors!”
Admiration filled Luc’s voice. “You hate everybody, don’t you?”

“Close enough,” Demange said. “With most of the bastards you run into, it just saves time.” He was looking at—looking through—Luc right
then.

If that wasn’t a hint, Luc had never run into one. “Don’t worry, sir. Everybody loves you, too,” he said. Sketching a salute, he went back to his squad. Behind him, the reluctant officer chuckled.

In the middle of the night, the Russians dropped a swarm of mortar bombs on the village … and on the
poilus
who’d paused there for the night. Several soldiers got hurt. Luc’s squad was far enough
from the buildings that nothing came down on them.

He didn’t point that out to the men he led. If he had, they would have figured he was blowing his own horn. If they figured it out for themselves, though, they’d see what a clever fellow he really was. Back in his days as a sergeant, Demange would have played it the same way. Luc had learned more from him than he would ever admit, even—maybe
especially—to himself.

THE HACKED-UP BOARDS
the
Landsers
fed into the fire came from a house a Russian shell had knocked flat. The gobbets of meat they toasted over the flames came from a horse that had hauled a 105mm howitzer till another shell broke its leg. Willi Dernen had shot it to put it out of its misery. He’d long since lost track of how many enemy soldiers he’d killed or wounded, but
he couldn’t stand to see or listen to an animal suffer.

He took a bite. The meat was half charred, half raw. It was also gluey and gamy. It was horsemeat, in other words. It wasn’t the first time he’d had it, and he was sure it wouldn’t be the last. He turned to his fellow
Gefreiter
—senior private—and said, “I’ve probably eaten enough horse to let them enter me in next year’s Berlin steeplechase.”

Adam Pfaff shook his head. “Not fucking likely, Willi. I’ve eaten
plenty of pussy, but nobody’s gonna put me in a goddamn cat show.” While Willi was still digesting that, so to speak, his buddy added, “Besides, have you taken a look at yourself lately? You’re no three-year-old, believe me, and no thoroughbred, either.”

“Oh, yeah? And you are?” Willi said. They grinned at each other. Like the
rest of the men in their section—like the rest of the German
Frontschweine
in Russia—they were scrawny and filthy and badly shaven. A crawly itch under Willi’s whitewashed
Stahlhelm
said he was lousy again, too. One of these days, he’d get deloused. And he’d stay clean till the next time he went through a Russian village. Say, half an hour after he left the delousing station. Then he’d have company
once more.