The War That Came Early: West and East (43 page)

But the Nazis did as they pleased with and to Germany’s Jews. Plenty of Germans were decent, even kind—as individuals. Did they protest the government’s laws and policies? Sarah’s mouth twisted again. Anyone rash enough to try found out for himself what Dachau was like.

A tram rattled past. Not so long ago, she’d ridden it when she needed to get around Münster. No more. It was
verboten
for Jews. If you had to walk home with a heavy sack weighing you down, that was your hard luck for picking the wrong grandparents. Sarah snorted softly. Even converts, people as Christian as their Aryan neighbors, got it in the neck. As far as the Nazis were concerned, people like that remained Jews even if they went to church. A lot of them had converted to escape such harassment. Well, much good that did them.

She walked on. A car went by. The man driving it wore a black suit and a homburg, so he was probably a doctor. Doctors were about the only civilians who could still get gasoline. The authorities had harvested the tires and batteries from most cars. She didn’t know where those batteries and that rubber had gone, but straight into the military was a pretty good guess.

A crew of men in the uniforms of the
Organization Todt
were going through the ruins of a building mashed by a British bomb. One of them
pulled out a copper pot and a length of lead pipe. His comrades pounded his back as if he’d just taken a pillbox on the Western front. Scrap metal was precious these days.

How are we supposed to fight a war if we have to scrounge like this?
Sarah wondered. Then she wondered why she still thought of Germany and Germans as
we
. They didn’t think of her like that. If they had, she would have been worrying about her father at the front along with her brother.

Well, Samuel Goldman had been a genuine German patriot. He’d proved as much with his blood during the last war. And that helped him now … maybe a little more than converting to Catholicism had helped the Christians of Jewish ancestry. The discrimination laws didn’t come down quite so hard on the families of wounded and decorated veterans as they did on the rest of Jewry. That, Sarah had heard, was one of Hindenburg’s last protests after Hitler became Chancellor.

Here was the grocery. She checked her handbag to make sure she had the ration coupons. They’d tightened up on everything since the two-front war got serious. Even potatoes and turnips were on the list these days. When Germany ran short of potatoes … she was fighting a two-front war. The stories older people told about what things were like at home from 1914 to 1918 made her glad she hadn’t lived through those times herself.

The grocery store had garbage. It didn’t have much garbage, either; Aryan shoppers had already picked over whatever was there earlier. Sarah only sighed. It wasn’t as if she’d expected anything different. This was what life for Jews was like in the Third
Reich
. She filled her stringbag with what she could, then waited for the grocer to finish with a couple of customers who didn’t wear the yellow star. Another German woman came in while she was shopping. This one saw her star and pushed ahead, as the law said Aryans were entitled to do. Sarah said nothing. If she fumed, she tried not to let it show. Some Germans could be personally kind to Jews. Not all, though. There wouldn’t have been laws like these if all Germans felt kindly toward Jews.

She parted with Reichsmarks and ration coupons, then went across the street to the baker’s. Isidor Bruck stood behind the counter. The bakery,
being a Jewish-owned enterprise, had even less than the grocer’s shop. But Isidor’s smile lit up the bare little room. “Sarah!” he said. “How are you?”

“Still here,” she answered. She wanted to tell him that all the Nazis and at least half the German people could go straight to the devil. She wanted to, but she didn’t. Even though they’d gone walking together, he might sell her down the river to the
Gestapo
if she left herself open like that.

She didn’t care for thinking such thoughts about someone who, she was sure, liked her. Care for it or not, think them she did. That was one of the
Reich
’s worst evils, as far as she was concerned. It made you suspect everyone, because that was the only chance you had to keep yourself safe.

Which only made her feel the more ashamed when he reached under the counter and took out a fine loaf of war bread. It was still black, but it was nice and plump. “I saved this for you,” he said. “I was hoping you’d come in today.”

“You shouldn’t have, Isidor!” she exclaimed, meaning not a word of it.

“I only wish I didn’t have to take coupons for it. But—” He spread his hands, as if to say
What can you do?
“You know how things are. They watch us double close because we’re Jews. If the flour we use doesn’t match up with the ration coupons we take in, well …” He spread his hands again, wider this time. “It wouldn’t be so good, that’s all.”

“I bet it wouldn’t,” Sarah said. “But couldn’t you tell them you burned some loaves and couldn’t sell them?”

“They’d say we had to unload them anyhow,” Isidor answered. “After all, we just sell to Jews. Why should Jews care if their bread tastes like charcoal? They should thank God they have any bread at all.”

He trusted her enough to speak his mind. Of course, someone trying to lure her into an indiscretion might do the same thing. If he
was
the
Gestapo
’s creature, he’d have a long leash. He might be hoping she’d say something about Saul and sink her whole family.

Or he might be a baker’s son who was sweet on her and trusted her further than she trusted him. If he was, that only made her more ashamed of her caution than she would have been otherwise.

She paid for the fine, fat loaf. She handed over the necessary coupons.
Isidor solemnly wrote her a receipt. Then he asked, “Shall we go walking at the zoo again one day before too long?”

“Sure,” Sarah answered. How could she say no when he’d set aside the bread like that? But she would have said yes even without such considerations. He might be a baker’s son, but he was nice enough, or more than nice enough. She would have turned up her nose at him in easier times because of what his father did. Well, times weren’t easy, and so she was getting to know him after all.

Now … If he could be trusted … If anyone she hadn’t known her whole life could be trusted …

She snatched up the bread and fled the bakery. Isidor probably wondered if she was losing her mind. Or maybe he understood all too well. And wouldn’t that be the worst thing of all?

“HARCOURT!”
That malignant rasp could come from only one smoke-cured throat.

“Yes, Sergeant?” Luc might be a corporal, but in front of Sergeant Demange he suddenly felt like a recruit fresh out of training again—and a recruit who feared he’d face a court-martial in the next few minutes.

Demange paused to stamp out a small butt and light a fresh Gitane, which took the place of the one he’d just extinguished. “How’d you like to do something different?”

“If my girlfriend said that, I might be interested,” Luc answered, which won him a snort from the sergeant. But he had to say more than that, no matter how little he wanted to. “What have you got in mind?”

“How’d you like to head up a machine-gun crew?” Demange asked. “Bordagaray came down venereal, the stupid slob. Maybe he knows your girlfriend, too.”

“Or your mother,” Luc suggested, which got him another snort. Then he paused thoughtfully. It was a better choice than Demange was in the habit of offering him. “You know, that might not be so bad. But who’ll take my squad?”

“Any jackass can run a squad. I mean,
you
do, for Christ’s sake,” Demange
said. Luc grinned crookedly; the sergeant loved to praise with faint damn, or sometimes not so faint. Demange took a deep drag, coughed, and went on, “So do you want it? It’s yours if you do.”

“Sure. I’ll take it,” Luc said. The army rule was not to volunteer, but this was different. He hoped so, anyhow. You could kill a lot of
Boches
with a machine gun. Of course, they also got especially interested in killing you. If they overran your position, you wouldn’t have much chance to surrender. But they hadn’t been interested in advancing lately, so that wouldn’t come into play … he hoped. “Bordagaray’s gun, you said?”

“That’s right.” Sergeant Demange nodded. “Joinville and Villehardouin are waiting for you like you’re the Second Coming.”

“I’d like a second coming right now. Or even a first one,” Luc said. Demange gave him an obscene gesture to speed him on his way. He walked down the trench to the sandbagged revetment that held the machine gun. The other two crewmen eyed him with the apprehensive curiosity veterans gave any newcomer. Joinville was a short, dark Gascon like the disgraced Bordagaray. Villehardouin, by contrast, came from Brittany. He was big and blond, and understood French better than he spoke the national language. Unless he thought about it ahead of time, Breton came out of his mouth more often than not.

Luc hadn’t had much to do with machine guns since training, but he remembered how to use one. It wasn’t heart surgery. You aimed it, you fired it, you tapped the side of the gun to traverse it, and you tried to use short bursts. His instructor—who would have reminded him of Demange if the fellow hadn’t been half again as big—had had some eloquent things to say about that.

It was a Hotchkiss, a serious machine gun, not the lighter Châtellerault. One man could carry a Châtellerault and move forward with an attack. One man could serve it, too, though a two-man crew worked better. The Hotchkiss gun had soldiered all the way through the last war, and looked to be good for this one and maybe the next one as well. The thick doughnut-shaped iron fins on the heavy barrel dissipated heat—sometimes they glowed red when the work got rough—and let you keep laying down death as long as you needed to.

There was a story about a Hotchkiss section at Verdun in 1916—a
place far worse than any Dante imagined—that fired 100,000 rounds at the
Boches
with nothing worse than a few minor jams. Somebody must have lived through it to let the story spread. Hundreds of thousands in old French horizon-blue and German field-gray hadn’t.

“How are we fixed for ammunition?” Luc asked.

Joinville—his Christian name was Pierre—nudged a couple of wooden crates with his foot. “Both full,” he said. He had a funny accent himself, though nowhere near so bad as Villehardouin’s. And his voice held a certain measured approval: Luc knew the right question to ask first.

He nodded now.
“C’est bon,”
he agreed. And good it was. You fed an aluminum strip full of cartridges into the gun, chambered the first round, fired till the strip ran dry, then put in another one. No, nothing to it … except that you were liable to get killed doing your job, of course. But, once they made you put on the uniform, that could happen to you all kinds of ways.

Luc took the canteen off his belt and tossed it to Joinville. “Have a knock of this,” he said. “Then pass it to Tiny.”

The Gascon sipped the non-regulation brandy. He whistled respectfully. “That’s high-octane, all right,” he said, and gave Villehardouin the canteen. The burly blond—tagged, as soldiers often were, on the system of opposites—also drank. He said something that wasn’t French but definitely was admiring. When he handed the canteen back to Luc, it felt lighter than it had before he turned it loose.

Cost of doing business
, Luc thought, not much put out. You wanted the guys you worked with to like you. You especially wanted them to like you when they could help keep you alive. Pierre might have thought he’d get to command the Hotchkiss gun himself now that Bordagaray was on the shelf. If he tried to undercut Luc, he might be able to pull it off yet.

“Anything I need to know about this particular gun?” Luc asked.

“If you ever get the chance, you ought to boresight it,” Joinville said. “Till you can, don’t trust the sights too far. If you do, you’ll end up missing to the right.”

“Got you. Thanks,” Luc said. The sights were less important than they were on a rifle, because the Hotchkiss gave you so many more chances.
Still, that was worth knowing. Another relevant question: “German snipers give you much trouble?” The
Boches
knew what was what. They’d knock off machine-gun crews in preference to ordinary rifleman. Who wouldn’t?

“We’re still here,” Joinville answered. He said something incomprehensible to Tiny. The Breton nodded vigorously. Luc scratched his head. Had Pierre picked up some of the big peasant’s language? That was interesting. Most Frenchmen, Luc among them, put Breton only a short step above the barking of dogs and the mooing of cows.

Well, he could wonder about it some other time. For now, he peered out through a gap between sandbags at the German lines a few hundred meters. Not much to see. Sure as hell, the Germans did know their business. They weren’t dumb enough to show themselves when they didn’t have to. He’d been worrying about
Boche
snipers. The boys in
Feldgrau
would worry about men peering through scope-sighted rifles from under the brims of Adrian helmets.

“I wouldn’t mind if it stays quiet,” Luc remarked.

Joinville eyed him. “You may turn out all right,” he said. “I was afraid you’d want to shoot at every sparrow you saw. Some new guys are like that, and it just brings shit down on our heads.”

“I may be a new guy on a machine gun, but I’ve been in since before the fighting started,” Luc said. “If I haven’t figured out the price of eggs by now, I’m pretty fucked up, eh?”

“You never can tell.” Joinville’s grin took most of the sting from the words.

And Tiny Villehardouin brightened. He’d heard a French word he understood. “Fuck your mother!” he said cheerfully.

“Yeah, well, same to you, buddy,” Luc replied. He didn’t
think
Tiny would try to murder him for that. When he turned out to be right, he breathed a small sigh of relief. You didn’t want to fight a guy that size without a lot of friends at your back.

Tiny threw back his head and laughed. Luc glanced over at Pierre Joinville. The Gascon gave back a small, discreet nod, as if to say Villehardouin was like that all the time. Luc shrugged with, he hoped, equal discretion.