The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (36 page)

“You don’t want to fight alongside ’em, either, do you?” Demange said.

“No more than you do,” Luc answered. “I don’t mind shooting Russians. Plenty of Russians nobody’d miss for a minute, I bet. But son of a bitch, Lieutenant! Marching with the fucking Nazis?”

“It’s like you said to your privates—if they tell us, ‘Do it,’ we’ve got to do it,” Demange said. “Will I jump up and down about it? Not a goddamn prayer I will. But maybe it’ll turn out for the best—I dunno.”

“Fat chance … sir,” Luc said.

“Sorry, kid. I don’t know what else to tell you,” the older man said. “This is what they’ve cooked for us, and we’ve got to eat it.”

“Even if it tastes like shit?”

“Even then.” Demange sounded disgusted, but he nodded. “No matter how crappy it tastes, mutiny’d taste worse. They’d beat on you for causing trouble, and then they’d make you do what you mutinied to try and get out of.”

That struck Luc as much too likely. All the same, he said, “Not if the mutineers won.”

Demange laughed in his face. “Good fucking luck!”

“It happened in 1789,” Luc said stubbornly.

Demange laughed some more. “And what did they end up with? The Revolution, and the Terror, and Napoleon. And Napoleon, he was the Hitler of his day, by God! He marched ’em all over everywhere, and they got their balls shot off while they were yelling,
‘Vive l’Empereur!’
Pretty fucking lucky, right?”

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Luc said. Demange raised a questioning—or more likely a challenging—eyebrow. Luc explained: “Whenever I feel lousy, you can always find a reason I should feel worse.”

Demange’s brief grin showed irregular, smoke-yellowed teeth. He took off his helmet and bowed with a flourish, as if he were a nineteenth-century musketeer doffing a plumed, beribboned broad-brimmed hat. “At your service,
mon petit ami.
”

Luc made gagging noises. The lieutenant chuckled, coughed, and chuckled again. “You’re stuck with it. You may as well enjoy it as much as you can.”

“That’s what you told her, right?”

This time, Demange laughed out loud. Luc was proud of himself; he could count on the fingers of one hand the times he’d really amused the
veteran. That thought swung him in a new direction. He was a veteran himself, and had been for a while now. And what had it got him? More worries—that was all he could see.

THE DIVISION TRAMPED EAST
,
back toward the German border. The men went proudly—it wasn’t as if they were defeated troops. Out in front of each regiment, bandsmen with swallow’s nests on their shoulders played marching tunes with tubas and trumpets and drums. Some of the men sang as they marched.

Willi Dernen remembered his father talking about the endless singing as the Kaiser’s army headed for the last war. Those poor bastards hadn’t known what they were getting into, though they found out pretty damn quick. Willi had already been through the mill. He didn’t feel like making noise.

Besides, Awful Arno made enough racket for the whole squad, maybe for the whole platoon. Baatz couldn’t carry a tune in a wheelbarrow, but he loudly insisted on trying. He was trying, all right—trying to everybody who had to listen to his godawful noise. Short of taping Baatz’s mouth or his own ears shut, Willi didn’t know what to do about that.

They marched and sang their way through a French village. No one came out to bid them farewell. Willi didn’t care. He was as glad to see the last of the place as the villagers were to see him gone. As long as nobody opened up on the departing Germans with a long-hidden varmint rifle, he was happy.

Under the singing, he remarked on that to the fellow marching beside him. The other
Landser
nodded. But sure as hell Arno Baatz owned a pair of rabbit ears. Despite everyone’s singing—including his own raucous efforts—Awful Arno heard the low-voiced remark. He stopped caterwauling the tune to speak in pompous tones: “Don’t be silly, Dernen. Security forces confiscated all the French firearms. Lists of registered weapons at the police stations made it easy.” Without waiting for an answer, he started abusing the music again.

Willi wouldn’t have answered him anyway, except perhaps with a snort of derision. The
Gestapo
might have got most of the registered
weapons, but what about the ones that weren’t? There were bound to be some, and probably lots. Weren’t the froggies people like everybody else? There’d be guns they wanted to keep quiet about, either because they didn’t feel like dealing with the police or because they used those guns in ways the
flics
wouldn’t fancy.

And so he wasn’t very surprised when a couple of
francs-tireurs
took potshots at the regiment in front of his from the woods off to one side of the road. The officers in charge of that outfit didn’t seem surprised, either, even if Awful Arno was. They sent a whole company into the woods to dig out the obstreperous Frenchmen.

When the Germans came back empty-handed, Willi also wasn’t very surprised. The Frenchies would have had a line of retreat worked out, or else a hiding place good enough for them to trust their lives to it. You didn’t open up on a regiment unless you figured you could get away with it.

Optimistic amateurs opened up on the soldiers twice more before they got to the border. The second time, the Germans did hunt down one of them. Two
Landsers
dragged his body out of the woods by the feet. They tied it, upside down, to a stout tree branch as a warning to others. If the French were on the Germans’ side now, they needed to act like it.

Willi didn’t breathe easy till his unit crossed back into Germany. It wasn’t far from where he and Wolfgang Storch had scouted out the hesitant French invaders going on two years ago now. He looked around for someone to tell that to. The only other man close by who’d been there then was Arno Baatz. Willi kept his mouth shut.

When they marched through a village in the
Reich
, schoolchildren waving swastika flags cheered from the sidewalk. Willi would rather have looked at older girls, but what could you do?

They took the
Landsers
to a barracks hall.
“Gott im Himmel!”
Willi said. “Everything’s so clean!”

“And so neat!” another soldier added.

Fresh white paint gleamed on the walls. It was a new coat; Willi could still smell it. The cots and footlockers were laid out as if they were part of a study in geometry and perspective. The cots’ iron frames had
got a fresh coat of black paint. Not a single light fixture held a burnt-out bulb.

It almost seemed wrong to have real, live soldiers—dirty, smelly men in grimy uniforms all torn and patched, foulmouthed lazy smokers and snuff dippers and spitters—profane a place as sterile as an operating theater. That didn’t keep them from claiming cots and plopping packs on the dark wool blankets.

They stripped off their uniforms and headed for the communal showers. Willi wrinkled his nose at the soldier next to him. “Are those your feet, Konrad, or did somebody die in your boots?”

“It’s your auntie’s twat, is what it is,” Konrad answered. Laughing, they went off to clean up.

The
Landsers
splashed one another and flicked towels at behinds like the boys they’d been not long before. But few boys came with the many and various scars the soldiers wore. Few boys came with the lines on their faces, either, or the eyes that seemed to look everywhere at once.

“What are they going to feed us?” somebody asked, and that was the next good question.

“Dead Russian,” somebody else said. The laughs that followed were nervous. It sounded like a joke, but not enough like one.

What they did end up getting was the usual army swill: potatoes and sauerkraut and smelly cheese and sardines. There was plenty of it; Willi patted his belly after he finished. But field kitchens scrounging off the French countryside turned out better chow. So did soldiers heating up rations and leftovers and whatever the hell for themselves. To the cooks, it was just another job. They cared about getting it over with, not about making it good.

As a
Gefreiter
, Willi didn’t have to worry about getting tapped for washing dishes or any of the other enjoyable duties doled out to lowly privates. He flopped down onto the cot and made the world go away simply by closing his eyes. One of the lights blazed right above his head. Other soldiers were playing cards and talking and generally making nuisances of themselves. He didn’t care. He was sound asleep less than two minutes after his head hit the pillow.

The regiment had four days’ furlough in the little village. Willi got
drunk at the
Bierstube
. The lager was weak, but that only meant you needed to drink more and piss more. He tried to pick up a blond barmaid. She laughed at him. Awful Arno was more direct: he grabbed her ass. She hauled off and slapped him hard enough to spin his head around. The soldiers packing the place clapped and cheered. Everybody loved the corporal.

Willi was nursing a headache when they marched away. One of the other soldiers said, “I wonder if the froggies’ll be using that hall now that we’re clearing out.”

“They’re welcome to it, as long as they come shoot Ivans with us,” Willi said. “I just wish I could hang around and watch one of ’em try to feel up that gal at the tavern.”

“Silence in the ranks, Dernen!” Awful Arno shouted furiously. He hadn’t cared about anyone else talking in the ranks. And even the routine order didn’t satisfy him—he scowled at Willi and added, “Shut the fuck up!”

“Yes, Corporal,” Willi said. Sometimes the smartest thing you could do was exactly what they told you.

Along with everybody else, he climbed aboard a train. As far as he knew, this was the same route he’d taken when he went home on leave. Sure as hell, the train rolled through Breslau. Most of the men came from these parts. Some of them waved out the windows, not that it was likely anyone who’d recognized them would see.

This time, the train didn’t stop at his old stomping grounds. It kept going, up to the Polish border and beyond. At the border, one Polish soldier came aboard each car, as if to say
This is our country
. Poles were proud, touchy people. Willi’d seen that in Breslau; a lot of them lived there.

It might be their country, but more and more it was Germany’s fight. What would come of that?
A bunch of dead Germans
, Willi thought, and hoped like hell he wouldn’t end up one of them.

WINSTON CHURCHILL GOT
a hero’s funeral. That didn’t make Alistair Walsh any happier about the politician’s demise. If anything, it only threw petrol on his suspicions.

Assorted Conservative Party dignitaries walked behind the hearse and a riderless black horse with polished black boots reversed in the stirrups. At the politicians’ head strode Neville Chamberlain. The Prime Minister reminded Walsh of nothing so much as a gray heron with a black bowler and an umbrella. The day was sunny, but the umbrella seemed at least as much a part of him as, say, his small intestine.

Walsh shook his head. Everybody knew the PM always had his umbrella. Whether he had guts wasn’t nearly so obvious.

Why were the Tories laying on a memorial like this for a man most of them couldn’t stand? Come to that, how and why had Churchill walked in front of a speeding Bentley? Important people didn’t do such things … did they? Not very often—Walsh was bloody sure of that.

Guilty consciences
, he thought unhappily as the slow funeral procession passed him.
That’s what it smells like to me
.

He wondered if there wasn’t also a touch of guilt in the way the authorities hemmed and hawed about returning him to duty. He wouldn’t have stayed in London to watch the funeral procession if they’d been sure what to do with him.
Why the devil did I have to be the one who saw Rudolf Hess come down? Somebody had to, but why me?

Quite a few men in Army khaki, Royal Navy deep blue, and RAF blue-gray lined the route of the procession. Like Walsh, many of them doffed their caps in silent tribute when the hearse rolled by. They weren’t so silent when Chamberlain followed. Several hisses floated through the warm, damp summer air. So did calls of “Shame!”

Chamberlain might have been oblivious. His small head, set atop a long neck and tall, thin, angular frame, only made him seem the more birdlike. Had he suddenly thrust forward and straightened up again with a wriggling fish clenched in his jaws, Walsh wouldn’t have been surprised.

But no. The Prime Minister passed close enough to let Walsh see a small muscle under his left eye twitch. Walsh wouldn’t have believed Chamberlain had been issued a conscience at birth, but he might have been wrong.

Behind the PM walked Lord Halifax. If Chamberlain looked like a heron, Halifax resembled a walking thermometer. He was tall—even taller than the Prime Minister—and lean, with a big bald head that
looked like a rugby ball standing on end. He smiled at something the man next to him said. Assuming he’d ever come equipped with a conscience, it wasn’t troubling him now.

Not all the spectators were military men—not even close. There were many ordinary civilians: housewives and greengrocers and shop-girls and chemists and secretaries and clerks. Almost all of them wore somber black to pay their respects to the dead man. Some of the women dabbed at tears behind dark veils. Churchill had always been more popular among the people than the gray men who held the reins of power. Unlike them, he was a recognizable human being. Having met him, Walsh knew how very human he was.

And, because he was a recognizable human being, he roused dislike as well as admiration. A furlong or so down the street from Walsh stood a knot of Silver Shirts, supporters of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. They were in uniform, something Walsh hadn’t seen since war was declared. He thought there was a law against it, but he wasn’t sure. If there was, the authorities were looking the other way.

The Silver Shirts bawled organized abuse as Churchill’s body rolled past them. The man standing to Walsh’s right nodded. “That’s telling the daft old bugger,” he declared.