The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (54 page)

Serving in the
Luftwaffe
had got Hans-Ulrich past stewing when other people swore, the way a pastor’s son might have. That was between Dieselhorst and God, not between the sergeant and Rudel. So Hans-Ulrich only said “Good” before asking, “Did you see any more panzers in there?”

“Yeah, there was another one, south of the two you blasted,” Dieselhorst answered.

That wasn’t what the pilot wanted to hear—not even slightly. But he said what needed saying: “Well, let’s go get it, then.”

He half hoped—more than half hoped—Dieselhorst would try to talk him out of it. The rear gunner might not have had too hard a time. But Dieselhorst just repeated, “You’re the boss.” He still sounded as if he wondered whether Hans-Ulrich had all his oars in the water, but he sounded that way too often for Hans-Ulrich to worry about it now.

Hans-Ulrich did worry when a pair of flat-nosed Polikarpov fighters rushed straight at his climbing Stuka from out of the east. They were monoplanes, yes, but old-fashioned next to a Bf-109 … which did him
not a bit of good. The Ju-87 was hideously vulnerable to fighters any old time—and all the more so when it lugged the pair of antipanzer cannon.

Running was pointless. They had 150 kilometers an hour on him. And so he tried what he’d done once in the west: he opened up on them at long range with the 37mm guns. And either he was a better shot than he gave himself credit for or he got lucky. One of those big shells tore the wing off the lead Ivan. A round designed to smash through a panzer’s armor did horrible things to a fighter plane. The Polikarpov plummeted to the ground, flame licking along the fuselage. Hans-Ulrich didn’t see a parachute.
Tough luck, fellow
, he thought.

After seeing what happened to his buddy, the other Russian decided he wanted nothing to do with the Stuka. He whipped his plane into an improbably tight turn and got the devil out of there. Rudel fired at him, too, but missed.

“What’s going on?” Dieselhorst asked. Hans-Ulrich explained. “Well, shit,” the rear-facing gunner said. “You’ll be a fucking ace by the time the goddamn war’s done. A Stuka ace! Who would’ve figured that?”

“That’s not what they need me to do,” Hans-Ulrich said. “It’s just to stay alive.”

“I like staying alive,” the sergeant said plaintively.

“Well, now that you mention it, so do I,” Rudel answered. “But I’m still going to take care of that other panzer.”

Only he didn’t. The Russians holding the village set as many fires as they could. By the way some of them smoked, the Ivans threw motor oil on them. He couldn’t find the remaining panzer through those gray and black plumes, and neither could Dieselhorst. Bombs would still hurt the Red Army foot soldiers, but he didn’t have any. Dieselhorst reported the situation by radio as they flew away.

One more mission
, Hans-Ulrich thought. He’d done his job, and the Polikarpov made a nice bonus.

VACLAV JEZEK DIDN’T
know what he’d expected when he agreed to go to Spain. He’d expected not to get handed over to the Nazis after France went and crapped out on him. He’d got that much, anyhow.

As a matter of fact, the Spaniards made a big fuss over the survivors
of the Czech regiment. The mayor of some town along their route did some speechifying that would have sent a stolid Czech audience into gales of helpless laughter. He shouted. He wailed. He wept. He beat his breast. He used more, and more melodramatic, gestures than Hitler. And the Spaniards ate it up.

Of course, Vaclav understood not a word of the local language. As Benjamin Halévy had already shown, he could follow it after a fashion. “So what’s he going on about?” Vaclav whispered.

“He’s thanking us for not despairing of the Republic,” Halévy whispered back.

“I should hope not!” Vaclav said. “It’s the only country this side of Russia that doesn’t want to shoot us on sight.”

“It’s a quotation. It goes back to ancient Rome,” the Jew told him.

“If you say so.” Vaclav had been on the vocational track in his school days. German … You couldn’t escape German, not in a Czechoslovakia where one person in four was a Fritz. But only greasy grinds had anything to do with Latin.

German attitudes had rubbed off on Vaclav, or been drilled into him, in ways he didn’t even notice. He’d often thought the French were less efficient than they might have been. They kept trying to muddle through and improvise instead of planning beforehand, the way anyone with a gram of sense would have. So it seemed to someone whose country had been ruled for centuries by Germans, anyhow (even if they were Germans from Vienna and not Prussians).

But the French had at least heard of planning, whether they bothered to do any or not. With Spaniards, there was nothing
but
muddling through and improvising. The Republic must have known ahead of time that the Czechs were on their way. Vaclav would have thought one official or another would have decided where the new force was to go and what it would do after it got there.

No matter what he would have thought, nothing like that had happened. Along with a bunch of his buddies, he got off the train in Sagunto—another town that Halévy said went back to Roman days—to take a leak. He’d already discovered that Spanish
pissoirs
were even nastier than French ones, but when you had to go, you damn well had to go. He tried not to breathe while tending to his business.

He came out blinking away ammonia fumes … and discovered, on the platform, a Spanish officer and a civilian official shouting and screaming and gesticulating as if their next step would be pistols at dawn tomorrow. Both of them pointed a lot at the train and at the Czech soldiers getting on and off.

Vaclav could no more follow them than if they were speaking Tibetan. He looked around to see if Halévy was anywhere close by. Sure as hell, the redheaded Jew (
just like Judas
ran through Jezek’s mind) was just emerging from the odorous latrine. “What are they going on about?” Vaclav asked.

Halévy cocked his head to one side, listening. “Where the train’s supposed to take us,” he said.

“They don’t know?” Vaclav said in dismay.

“They’re Spaniards. What can you expect?” Halévy answered. So the men of the Republic looked sloppy even to someone used to French ways, did they? That was interesting—not reassuring, maybe, but interesting. And sure enough, Halévy went on, “It’s a good thing the assholes on the other side are Spaniards, too, or this war would’ve been over a long time ago. God, I bet the Nationalists drive the fucking Nazis crazy. Serves the Germans right, you ask me.”

“If the Germans went straight to hell and roasted for a million years on red-hot griddles with devils turning ’em every ten minutes with pitchforks, that might start to serve them right.” Vaclav spoke with deep conviction. “A bunch of fucked-up Spaniards? Nah. They don’t begin to cut it.”

Halévy’s smile reached his mouth but not his eyes. “When you put it that way, you’re right.”

The train ended up taking the Czechs through the heart of Spain to Madrid. Vaclav eyed the city with surprised respect. This side of China, it was one of the few places that had been bombed before Prague. All the others were in Spain, too. This was where the Nazis, and even the Italians, had learned their tricks. Mussolini hadn’t done much with what he’d learned. Hitler, on the other hand …

An officer in a very plain uniform stood waiting for them on the platform. He wasn’t a Spaniard—he was from the International
Brigades. “I am Brigadier Kossuth. I am sorry, but I do not speak Czech. Will you follow me if I use Russian?” he said in that language.

Vaclav could
almost
follow him, not least because he spoke slowly. Russian wasn’t Kossuth’s native tongue. The name he used and his accent both proclaimed him a Magyar. Vaclav had no use for Hungarians. They weren’t as bad as Germans, but they weren’t friendly neighbors, either. And so he wasn’t sorry to shake his head and spread his hands. He wasn’t about to oblige this fellow by stretching to try to understand Russian.

Most of his countrymen seemed to feel the same way. Brigadier Kossuth’s stooped shoulders went up and down in a shrug. He switched languages as easily as he might change his cap: “All right. Do you understand me now?” he asked in German.

He still kept that fierce accent, but Vaclav had no trouble making out what he said. Neither did most of the other Czechs. The older men would have had German pounded into them when they went to school back in Austro-Hungarian days. Czechs Vaclav’s age still learned it—it was their window on a wider world. The same evidently held true for Magyars.

“Sehr gut,”
Kossuth said. No German had ever pronounced an
r
like that, but Vaclav knew what it was. The officer went on, “You will serve alongside the International Brigades. It was judged best to put you with men with whom you might be able to talk.” He gave a thin smile: the only kind his weathered face seemed to have room for. “Sometimes this is an advantage.”

Sometimes it wasn’t, too, or so Vaclav had found in France. More than once, a blank stare and a mumble had probably kept him from getting killed—or from killing some half-smart French lieutenant.

Kossuth studied the Czechs with shrewd, experienced eyes. One eyebrow rose a millimeter or two when he noticed the antitank rifle slung on Jezek’s back. He ambled up to Vaclav. “So, Corporal, do you use that against German panzers?”

“I have … 
mein Herr.
” Vaclav wasn’t surprised Kossuth could read Czech rank badges. He spoke the honorific grudgingly, but speak it he did. He added, “It is also an excellent sharpshooting piece.”

“He’s killed men out to two kilometers with it,” Sergeant Halévy said helpfully.

The brigadier classified him with a single sharp glance.
“Wilkommen,”
he said, and then, “
Bienvenu
. You will find we already have a good many mouthy Jews among the Internationals.” Then he said what was probably the same thing in French.

Vaclav wouldn’t have been surprised if Halévy came back in Magyar; the French Jew was a man of parts. But if he knew any of Brigadier Kossuth’s birthspeech, he didn’t let on. He replied in Yiddish-tinged German so Vaclav could understand: “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised, sir. I hope you don’t hold it too much against us.”

“Not … too much,” Kossuth said slowly. If most Czechs didn’t like Jews, most Hungarians
really
didn’t like Jews. After a visible pause for thought, the brigadier went on, “The ones I resent are the ones who stayed home. Those who came here have shown they can fight. This is what the struggle demands.”

“We agree there,” Halévy said. By his tone, there would be plenty of other places where they didn’t. Also by his tone, he wanted Kossuth to know that, even if he was just a sergeant and the other man a brigadier.

Something sparked in Kossuth’s deep-set eyes. A beat slower than he might have, Vaclav recognized it as amusement. “You are another troublemaker,” Kossuth said. “I might have known.”

“Would I have come here if I weren’t, sir?” Halévy said, and then, “Would you have come here if you weren’t?” To Vaclav’s amazement, Brigadier Kossuth proved he could laugh out loud.

his is the BBC news.” Those plummy tones coming from the radio seemed out of place in a military hospital in Manila. Pete McGill was disgusted with the limeys for coming to terms with Hitler. He would have bet most of the British Marines he’d known and drunk with and sometimes brawled with in Peking and Shanghai were just as disgusted. But he was glad to listen to the BBC any which way. It gave more news and less bullshit than any American station.

He was also glad he wasn’t the only one in the war who wanted to know what the Beeb had to say. Even Army files could figure out that what happened in the wider world had a lot to do with the way they did business. You didn’t have to be a leatherneck to see that—but it probably helped.

“Sir Horace Wilson’s government easily defeated a motion of no confidence in the House of Commons yesterday,” the newsreader said. “Only a handful of Tories joined Labour and Liberal MPs in opposing the Prime Minister. Even abstentions were fewer than many had anticipated.”