The War That Came Early: West and East (48 page)

If that was where they were, that was where Peggy had to go. She wished Hitler had issued her a letter instead of calling her on the phone to let her know she could go from Germany to Denmark. (And had he been laughing up his sleeve when he gave her that permission? Sure he had! He must have known his own army would be only a few days behind her.)

No big swastika flag flew over or in front of the German headquarters. The
Wehrmacht
wasn’t going out of its way to be hated … unless you counted invading Denmark to begin with, of course. Peggy would have bet the Germans didn’t. She had no doubt whatsoever that the Danes damn well did, and always would.

She displayed her American passport and told one of the sentries, “I want to see General Kaupitsch.
Sofort, bitte.” Sofort
sounded a lot more immediate than
immediately
.

“Why?” one of the Germans asked. Under the beetling brow of his helmet, his features were blank.

“Because the
Führer
said I could come to Denmark so I could go on to the States, and this invasion has screwed things up. That’s why,” Peggy answered. “Do you understand that?”
Or shall I bounce a rock off your goddamn
Stahlhelm
and wise you up?

Both sentries’ eyes widened. One set was blue, the other brown.
You’re a crappy Aryan, kid
, Peggy thought, feeling how far out on the ragged edge she was. “Please wait,” the one with the blue eyes said. He disappeared into the office building.

If he didn’t come out pretty damn quick, Peggy was going to lay into his buddy with both barrels. But he did. He conferred with Brown Eyes, who spoke up: “I will take you to Major von Rehfeld.”

“Oh, yeah? How come not to the general?”

“I am ordered to take you to Major von Rehfeld.” For a German, nothing else needed saying. “You will please come with me.”

Peggy please came with him. Major von Rehfeld proved to be a tall, handsome man of about thirty-five who was missing the lower half of his
left ear. That and a wound badge said he’d seen real fighting somewhere. “So you are the notorious Mrs. Druce,” he said in excellent English.

“That’s right, buster. Who in blazes are you?” Peggy snapped.

“Among other things, I am the man assigned to get you to Stockholm,” the German officer answered. “Believe me: we do respect the
Führer’
s order to give you all the help we can. Once you reach Sweden, you are on your own, however. I do not know how soon you will be able to travel from there to England and on to the United States. It is a pity, but Norway remains a war zone.”

“And whose fault is that?” Peggy said.

The major shrugged. “I would say it is the fault of France and England, but I am sure you would call me a lying Nazi if I did. So I will not say anything about that. Never mind whose fault it is. It
is
a war zone. Nothing travels through it without grave risk of being attacked by both the two sides. Is this so, or is it not so?”

It was so. Of that Peggy had no doubt whatever. Nobody in her right mind could. “How long do you think I’ll have to stay in Stockholm?” she asked.

“This I cannot say.” The major spread his hands, doing his best to look and sound as reasonable as he could. “It is not up to the
Reich
alone, you know. The enemy has also something to say about it. I can tell you that we are making much better progress in Norway than we were only a few days ago. We prove that air power is stronger than sea power. The Royal Navy is sorry to learn this, but learn it they do.”

Maybe that was so, too. Or maybe he was parroting Goebbels’ propaganda line as if it were
Polly wants a cracker!
Peggy couldn’t tell. Since she couldn’t, she asked, “How do I get to Stockholm?”

“The usual ferry is sailing again. Tickets are easy to come by. You will have no trouble with an exit visa—I promise you that,” Major von Rehfeld replied.

“Will you have German soldiers on the ferry, the way you did on the ships in Copenhagen harbor?” Peggy gibed.

To her astonishment, the major blushed scarlet. “We saved needless bloodshed,” he said, but he sounded none too proud of it. A moment
later, he added, “It was a legitimate ruse of war,” but that didn’t seem to convince him, either.

If he meant what he said about getting her to Stockholm, Peggy wasn’t inclined to be fussy. “How soon can I go?” she asked.

“As soon as you have your ticket, come back. I will provide you with an exit visa. No one will stand in your way,” von Rehfeld said.

“You aren’t planning to, uh, protect Sweden as soon as I get there, are you?”

“Why would we? With Denmark and Norway safe from English interference, iron ore can travel from Sweden to the
Reich
without risk of interruption.”

Had the major claimed that Germany would never do such a wicked thing, Peggy wouldn’t have believed him for a minute. When he talked about national self-interest, he was much more persuasive. That didn’t mean he was telling the truth. It also didn’t mean Peggy would be able to get out of Sweden once she got in. But she was willing to try it.
What can go wrong now?
she asked herself. But the question had a simple, obvious answer. Damn near anything could.

SERGEANT HERMANN WITT MADE
a panzer commander very different from Heinz Naumann. Theo Hossbach noted the differences with nothing but relief. Most important, Witt could laugh at himself. He didn’t have to feel he was better and tougher than everyone else in the panzer to give orders. He didn’t go out of his way to give people a hard time to show he was tougher than they were.

If that came as a relief to Theo, it had to be something close to heaven for Adalbert Stoss. Witt hadn’t taken long to realize the driver was missing something most German men had. Imagining three men living closer together than they did in a Panzer II was next to impossible. Theo sure didn’t want to think about it, anyhow. Only bedbugs and lice lived closer to him than his crewmates did.

Naumann hadn’t been able to quit riding Adi Stoss about his circumcision. No wonder they hadn’t got along. Theo wouldn’t have wanted anybody razzing him about his dick, either. A couple of days after taking
charge of the panzer, Witt looked up from the skinny little chicken he was roasting and said, “Ask you something, Adi?”

“Sure, Sarge. What’s up?” Stoss answered—about how Theo would have responded to a casual question.

“When they drafted you—”

“They didn’t, Sarge. I volunteered.”

“Did you? Well, all right. Good for you. When you did, you filled out about a million forms, right?” Witt said.

Adi nodded and made a face. “Sure. Pain in the ass, but you’ve got to do it.”

“Yeah. You do. You gave all the right answers on the one about your ancestors, didn’t you?” the new panzer commander said.

Stoss didn’t even try not to understand him. “You bet I did—in spite of the operation, if you know what I mean.”

“I expect I do,” Sergeant Witt replied. “That’s what I needed to know.” He turned the chicken’s carcass on the branch that did duty for a spit. “And I think this bird’s about ready to eat. White meat or dark?”

As Theo gnawed the meat off a drumstick and thigh, he belatedly realized Witt hadn’t asked Adi if he was a Jew. He’d only asked if the driver had given the right answers on the military paperwork. Of course Adi had. They wouldn’t have let him into the
Wehrmacht
if he hadn’t. But the question covered the sergeant’s ass. If by some chance Stoss did turn out to be Jewish, Witt could say the driver had denied it.

Theo’d wondered himself. Yes, some gentiles did have a medical need to part with their foreskin. But if you ran into somebody without his, what would you think first? You’d think the guy was a Jew, that was what.

The idea made Theo want to giggle. A Jew in the
Wehrmacht
was like a chameleon on a green rug. You wouldn’t look for one on the rug to begin with, so of course you wouldn’t notice it if it happened to be there. Theo wouldn’t have said anything about his wonderings, even if the
Gestapo
decided to interrogate him. He never said much about anything. And he had his reasons not to. When you didn’t love the regime under which you lived, keeping your mouth shut was the smartest thing you could do.

Besides, if Adi really was Jewish, wasn’t that about the richest joke anyone could play on the Nazis? Theo might have thought otherwise if Stoss
were a bad soldier, or a gutless one. He wasn’t. He did fine. As long as he made a good
Kamerad
, who gave a rat’s ass about the other crap?

With sizable help from the Polish infantry—which seemed to view retreat as a worse affront than treason—it looked as if they’d be able to hold the Red Army outside of Warsaw. The Poles had managed that after the last war, too. If they hadn’t, Germany and Russia might not be quarreling on Polish soil right now. They’d be at each other’s throats, the way they had been in 1914.

Quite a few Polish foot soldiers were obviously Jews. What did they think of fighting on the same side as the German National Socialists? Theo was tempted to ask some of them. A German who put some effort into it could make sense of Yiddish. In the end, though, the radioman kept his mouth shut. That was what he usually did, so it wasn’t hard for him. And his sense of self-preservation warned him his fellow soldiers would give him funny looks if he all of a sudden started chatting up Jews.

Some of the villages they went through were full of them: men in beards, wide-brimmed hats, and black clothes straight out of the eighteenth century. One of the guys from another panzer in the company said, “Boy, you can sure see why the
Führer
wants to clean out the kikes, can’t you? They’re like something from Mars. Shame we can’t wipe these places up any which way.”

“Poles wouldn’t like it,” another crewman said.

“My ass,” the first fellow replied. “They don’t like Jews any better’n we do—less, maybe. I bet they’d cheer us on.”

“Maybe,” the other man said. “But then all the kikes would go over to the Reds. We need that like a hole in the head.”

“I guess,” the first man said unwillingly. “Their day’s coming, though. It’s gotta be. I mean, they’re like niggers or Chinamen or something, only they don’t even live a long piss away from us.”

Theo glanced over at Adi. The panzer driver kept his head down and shoveled stew into his face from his mess tin. That meant exactly nothing. Most of the Germans in black coveralls were doing exactly the same thing.

A sergeant with the ribbon for an Iron Cross Second Class and a
wound badge said, “The less people who want to shoot me or plant mines or pour sugar in my gas tank, the better I like it.”

No one seemed eager to quarrel with that. Theo knew damn well he wasn’t. He hadn’t liked it when the French shot at him. His own wound badge—and the half a finger he could still feel sometimes even if it wasn’t there any more—said he had good reason not to argue. The Czechs could have done the same to him, or even worse. The Russians might yet.

They got another chance the next morning. A Polish cavalryman rode back to warn the crew that enemy panzers lay ahead. The Poles called them
pancers
, pronouncing it the same way German did. To the Russians, they were
tanks;
they’d borrowed the word from English instead.

“Big pancers,” the horseman warned. The Poles used cavalry as if they’d never heard of machine guns. Their riders had more balls than they knew what to do with. To an outside observer, that often made them nutty as so many fruitcakes. Germans who’d been in Poland longer than Theo talked about horsemen in the square-topped caps called
czapkas
charging Russian panzers with lances. Maybe that was true, maybe not. That Theo could wonder spoke volumes about what Polish cavalry might be capable of.

“Well, let’s see how big they are,” Hermann Witt said. “Forward, Adi. Take it slow till we find out what we’re up against.”

“Will do,” Stoss said, and he did. Back in his own armored space, Theo might not find out how big the enemy panzers were till a shell hit the Panzer II and either did or didn’t smash the soft-skinned people inside and set the machine on fire. He wondered if getting surprised by death was worse than seeing someone take dead aim at you before you got it. Pretty bad both ways, as a matter of fact.

“Ha!” Sergeant Witt said, and then, “Those damned fast panzers, Theo. Report ’em to division.”

Theo did. His gut clenched. No way in hell the Panzer II’s armor could hold out a 45mm round. But this machine had teeth, too. Witt fired several short bursts from the 20mm gun. His shouts and whoops and curses said he was doing some good.

Adi’s voice came through the speaking tube: “They’re running away!”

A couple of other German panzers had come forward with theirs. All the same, Theo wasn’t sorry to hear Witt say, “I think I’m just going to let them go. You borrow trouble, half the time you’re sorry later on. More than half.”

Heinz Naumann would have charged after the Reds. Theo was sure of that. He was also sure Heinz was dead. They still hadn’t scrubbed all the former commander’s blood off the floor of the fighting compartment; it clung in cracks and crevices. Neither Theo nor Adi had said anything about that to Sergeant Witt. Theo knew he didn’t intend to. He didn’t know whether Adi Stoss had equal discretion. No, he didn’t know, but he thought so.

INSHORE WATERS
. Julius Lemp didn’t like them for beans. He didn’t need his Zeiss glasses to see the corrugated Norwegian coastline. The ocean deepened swiftly as you moved away from the outlets to the fjords, but not fast enough to suit him. If you had to dive in waters like these, you couldn’t dive deep enough to have good odds of staying safe—and you were liable to dive straight to the bottom. That wouldn’t be good, which was putting it mildly.

But this was where the fighting was, so this was where he had to be. The Royal Navy had nerve. Well, that was nothing he didn’t already know. The English were ready to take on the
Kriegsmarine
and the
Luftwaffe
both if that meant they could screw the German troops in Norway to the wall.