The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (7 page)

“Who’s got some tobacco he can spare?” Corporal Arno Baatz asked.

Willi had a nice little sack of
makhorka
—Russian tobacco, cheap and nasty but strong—in a trouser pocket. He would have bet Adam Pfaff had a similar stash. Adam knew what was what about keeping himself supplied. Neither
Gefreiter
said a word. Willi had had to put up with Awful Arno since the war started. Adam was much
newer to the regiment, but he’d rapidly learned the
Unteroffizier
made a piss-poor substitute for a human being.

“Here you go, Corporal.” A private named Sigi Herzog gave Baatz a cigarette. Willi had already pegged him for a suckup. One more suspicion confirmed.

“Good.” Awful Arno didn’t bother thanking Sigi. He took such tribute as no less than his due. Another reason to despise him, as far
as Willi was concerned: one more to add to a long list. Were Baatz a gutless wonder, everything would have been perfect—and the company would have had a perfectly good excuse for shipping him back behind the lines where he could annoy people without risking lives. But he actually made a decent combat soldier. It was everything else about him that Willi—and anyone else who got stuck serving under
him—couldn’t stand.

He lit the cigarette and sucked in smoke. His plump cheeks hollowed. How any German on the Eastern Front stayed plump was beyond Willi, but Awful Arno managed. He shaved more often than most
Landsers
bothered to, but he was still plenty whiskery right this minute.

After blowing out a stream of smoke and fog, he let loose with a blast of hot air, straight from the Propaganda
Ministry: “As soon as the weather gets even a little better, we’ll roll up the Ivans like a pair of socks.”

That he believed—and, worse, parroted—such bullshit was also on the list of reasons why he’d got his nickname. Willi rolled his eyes. Adam Pfaff rounded on Sigi. “What did you put in that smoke you gave him, man? Has to be better than tobacco, that’s for sure. If you’ve got more, give me
some, too.”

Baatz sent him an unfriendly look: about the only kind the corporal kept in stock. “So what are you saying, Pfaff? Are you saying we
won’t
roll up the Reds?” he asked. “That sounds like defeatism to me.”

Defeatism could get you tangled up with the SS, the last thing anybody in his right mind wanted. Pfaff shook his head. “Don’t talk more like a jackass than you can help, Corporal.
Anybody who’s seen me in action knows I’m no defeatist. Is that so or isn’t it?”

“If you make other soldiers not want to fight their hardest, that’s defeatism, too,” Baatz said stubbornly. “And you’d better remember I’m not too big a jackass to know it.”

Pfaff didn’t back down. “Nobody here’s gonna run home to
Mutti
on account of anything I come out with. And we all know we’d better fight hard,
or else the Russians’ll cut off our cocks and shove ’em in our mouths.”

“Do they really do that shit?” asked a kid who’d come up to the front only a few days earlier. His uniform wasn’t so patched and faded as the ones the other
Landsers
wore. But for that, there wasn’t much to choose between him and the rest.

“They sure do,” Pfaff replied. Awful Arno nodded—they agreed on that much, anyhow.

Willi nodded, too. He’d seen it for himself, however much he wished he hadn’t. “You don’t want to let the Ivans take you prisoner,” he said. “Save a last round for yourself. Maybe the guys they do that to are already dead, but you don’t want to find out for yourself, do you?”

“So what do we do with the Russians we capture?” the new fish asked.

The veterans squatting by the fire eyed one another.
Nobody said
anything for a little while. At last, Willi answered, “Well, sometimes we send ’em back to a camp like good little boys, the way we would have in the West.”
We would have most of the time in the West, anyway
, he thought. The French and English weren’t perfect about sticking to the Geneva Convention, either. Aloud, he went on, “Sometimes, though …” He shrugged. “It’s a rough old war.
I don’t know what else to tell you.”

“If we catch commissars or Jews, we do for them right away,” Awful Arno said. “Pigdogs like that don’t deserve to live.”

Not every commissar or Jewish Red Army man died right away. The
Wehrmacht
kept some alive for questioning. The ones who did live for a while probably wound up envying their comrades who perished on the spot. German interrogators weren’t
likely to be gentler than their Soviet opposite numbers.

The kid chewed on that for a few seconds. Then he asked, “If we treat them rough, doesn’t that give them an excuse to do the same to us?”

Arno Baatz laughed at him. “You want to spout the Golden Rule, sonny, you should put on a chaplain’s frock coat before you start.”

He waited for the other men who’d been through the mill to laugh with
him. Sigi Herzog did, but he was the only one. Awful Arno scowled at the others. Willi stonily stared back at him. The kid had a point of sorts.

But only of sorts. “Look, when this fight is over, either we’ll be left standing or the damn Russians will,” Willi said. “You fight a war like that, and who has room to be a gentleman?”

“Isn’t that what the Geneva Convention’s for?” the new fish asked.
“To keep things clean on both sides, I mean?”

Awful Arno laughed some more—a mean, nasty laugh. “Didn’t they tell you anything before they shipped your sorry ass up here? Yeah, that’s what the Geneva Convention’s all about. When we fought the Tommies and the frogs, we played by the rules, and so did they. But you know what?
The fucking Bolsheviks never signed the fucking Convention!
”

“Oh,” the
kid said in a small voice. And that was about the size of it. There were no formal rules in the fight between the Third
Reich
and the Soviet Union. They could go at it however they pleased. They could, and they did. The kid made one more try: “If we told Stalin we’d follow
the Convention whether we have to or not, wouldn’t he almost have to do the same?”

Baatz laughed one more time. However little
Willi wanted to, he found himself laughing along. It was either laugh or weep, and laughing hurt—a little—less. “Stalin doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to do,” Awful Arno said. “What he wants to do now is kill all the Germans he can.”

He was right about that. Of course, Hitler didn’t have to do anything he didn’t want to, either, and what he wanted to do was kill carload lots of Russians.
Which left the soldiers in
Feldgrau
or khaki stuck in the middle between them in one hell of a rough spot.

Like I didn’t know that already
, Willi thought. His bayonet got most of its use as a belt knife. He hacked off another hunk of horsemeat with it. Then he skewered the meat and held it over the fire. At least his belly would be full, anyhow.

CHAIM WEINBERG LIKED
having the Czech holdouts
around. They might not be Marxist-Leninists the way he and most of the Internationals were, but they were good, solid men. The American Jew had nothing against Spaniards. He wouldn’t have come to Spain to fight for the Republic if he had.

Spaniards—Spaniards on both sides, dammit—were extravagantly brave. They put up with shortages and fuckups with good humor he could only admire, because he
sure couldn’t imitate it. But they were flighty. They were temperamental. They could be cruel for the fun of it (he’d never got used to bullfighting). And they liked to talk. Jesus H. Christ, did they ever!

It wasn’t as if he didn’t enjoy the sound of his own voice. He did. He argued and converted and preached the Red faith with as much zeal as any friar taking on the latest jungle tribe who
knew not the word of God. But when it came to passion, Chaim had to admit the Spaniards had him beat.

He’d fallen hard for La Martellita, a Party organizer in battered Madrid. He would have said (hell, he did say, to anyone who would listen) he’d fallen in love with her. The emotion involved, though, sprang from
an organ south of his heart. She was tiny. She was stacked. She was gorgeous, in
the blue-black-haired, high-cheekboned, flashing-eyed Spanish way. She had what he couldn’t help thinking of as a blowjob mouth. And the way she painted it said she knew as much, too.

She wouldn’t look at him for the longest time. It wasn’t that he was no movie star himself, even if he
was
no movie star himself. He was not too tall, kind of dumpy, and looked as Jewish as he was. But what really
bothered her was that he wasn’t ideologically pure enough. He had the American gift, or curse, of thinking for himself, not blindly swallowing the latest twist in the Party line out of Moscow.

He got into her bed by the oldest, most time-tested method in the world: he waited till she got smashed, went back to her place with her, and had his fun while she was too loaded to care—almost too loaded
to notice. She was anything but delighted to discover him next to her the next morning, and her lethal hangover had only a little to do with it. But he’d tended to the hangover and sweet-talked her till she let him back in bed fully conscious; he owned the memory forever.

Then she found out she was pregnant.

She could have got rid of it easily enough. The Republic had probably the most progressive
social policies in the world. But she didn’t want to. Maybe a strict Catholic upbringing still lurked in the unexamined basement of her soul. No, she wanted her little surprise to carry a proper surname.

And so Chaim found himself a married man. He felt like Brer Rabbit in the briar patch. La Martellita—her revolutionary name meant The Little Hammer, and suited her all too well—promised she’d
divorce him after the baby was born. Divorce was even easier here than abortion. And, unlike abortion, it didn’t trouble her tender conscience.

In the meantime … It could have been a white marriage, like one between a fairy and a dyke wearing masks for the sake of the world’s good opinion. La Martellita, though, was as thorough in marriage as she was in everything else. And she had discovered
that Chaim wasn’t half bad in the sack. It surprised her, as it had quite a few other women before her.

“I may not be pretty, but by God I can screw,” he said, not without pride.

“You may be able to screw, but by God you’re not pretty,” La Martellita answered, not without truth.

Despite such devastating candor from his more-or-less beloved, he went back into Madrid from the front as often as
he could. And he returned to the front less and less worried that she hoped he would stop something up there so she could give the baby a name as a respectable widow and not have to go on worrying about the messy details that went into marriage.

Little by little, the Republicans were driving the Nationalists back from the northwestern edge of Madrid. There’d been months of bitter fighting over
the corpse of the university. Now those battered buildings lay several kilometers behind the line. Pretty soon, most of Madrid would be out of artillery range for Marshal Sanjurjo’s thugs.

Mike Carroll had served in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion for as long as Chaim had. Mike was tall and fair and lean and handsome. Chaim should have hated him on sight. Instead, they’d been buddies since the
moment they met. Like so many buddies, they sassed each other all the time.

“You’re the only Abe Lincoln who doesn’t want us to advance any more,” Mike said one chilly morning, a certain gleam in his eye.

“My ass!” Chaim retorted. “The fuck that supposed to mean?”

“Means the farther the front goes from the city, the tougher the time you have getting back there and getting your end wet,” Carroll
answered.

Chaim suggested that one way he could achieve such an objective was by having his comrade-in-arms perform an unnatural act on him. Said comrade-in-arms made reference to his mother, and also to the possibly relevant body parts of a ewe. Chaim surmised that the ewe might be diseased due to earlier intimate acquaintance with said comrade-in-arms. If they both hadn’t been laughing their
heads off, they would have tried to murder each other.

After the filthy jokes ran thin, Chaim said, “Seriously, man, we better push the Fascists back as far as we can. I’ve got the bad feeling this summer won’t be a hell of a lot of fun.”

“Amazing, Sherlock!” Mike said. “What leads you to this deduction?”

“Ah, cut the crap. You know as well as I do,” Chaim answered.

“We aren’t licked yet,”
Mike said, which wasn’t a ringing denial.

Everybody on the Republican side knew what was wrong. As in a sickroom where the patient still seemed strong but was plainly sinking, no one wanted to talk about it. Now that England and France were backing Hitler’s push against Stalin, Republican Spain was definitely the girl they’d left behind. The Republic was lucky to have got those Czechs, and the
handful of French Jews who’d come with them. Not many more soldiers would make it over the Pyrenees.

Not many more supplies would, either. France and England didn’t want to sell to the Republic any more. Stalin did, but he had his own war to worry about and a swarm of enemies between him and Spain. Meanwhile, nobody was stopping the
Führer
and the
Duce
from shipping Marshal Sanjurjo all kinds
of goodies.

“Maybe FDR will come through,” Mike said.

“And rain makes applesauce,” Chaim returned. “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

America was at war with Japan, not with Germany. Roosevelt hadn’t even tried to get a declaration of war against Germany through Congress. Had he tried, he would have failed. The USA had been selling billions in weapons to the so-called Western democracies …
 till the big switch. After that, FDR pulled the plug. The munitions makers might have found a market in Spain to take up some of the slack—if the new war against Japan hadn’t got them going full speed ahead again.

Chaim paused to scratch. Why wasn’t it too cold for bugs in the trenches? Because they lived on nice, warm people—that was why. “Even if we are fucked, we’ve lasted three years longer
than anybody thought we could,” he said. “The government was going to take the Internationals out of the line, remember, ’cause we’d done all we could do. Or we thought so, anyway, till Hitler jumped on the Czechs and all of a sudden England and France liked the Republic again.”