The War That Came Early: West and East (50 page)

Then he stopped worrying about it. He had bigger things to worry about: they’d reached Warsaw’s outskirts, and, sure as hell, the Poles were shooting at them from the ground. The formation loosened as all the pilots started jinking. They sped up; they slowed down. They swung left; they swung right. They climbed a little; they descended. The more trouble the Poles—the Germans?—had aiming at them, the more likely they’d make it back to base.

Jinking or not, if your number was up, it was up. A direct hit tore off half an SB-2’s right wing. The stricken bomber tumbled toward the ground. Sergei flew past it before he could see whether any parachutes blossomed.
That could have been me
, he thought, and shuddered.

There lay the Vistula, shining in the sun. Everything built up on the other side was Warsaw proper. “Ready, Ivan?” Sergei called.

“Bet your stinking pussy,” Kuchkov answered.

“Now!” Sergei said. If they had no orders to aim at anything in particular, he wasn’t about to make a fancy straight bombing run. Why let the gunners get a good shot at him?

As soon as the bombs fell away, he hauled the SB-2’s nose around and gunned it back to the east. A few more shell bursts made the plane buck in the air, but he heard—and felt—no fragments biting. And if enemy fighters were in the air, they were going after other Red Air Force formations.

“One more under our belts,” Anastas Mouradian said.

“Da.”
Sergei nodded. Along with rubber and oil and gasoline, he could smell his own fear—and maybe Mouradian’s with it. How could you go on doing this, day after day, month after month? But what they’d do to you if you tried to refuse … Yes, not flying missions was even scarier than flying them.

Chapter 21

F
og shrouded the airstrip in northeastern France. Nobody was going anywhere this morning. Chances were, nobody was going anywhere all day. The idled
Luftwaffe
flyers did what idled flyers had been doing since the first biplanes took off with pilots carrying pistols and hand grenades: they sat around and shot the shit and passed flasks of applejack and cognac.

Hans-Ulrich Rudel was happy enough to join the bull session. When one of the flasks came to him, he passed it on without drinking.
“Danke schön,”
said the pilot to his left. “More for the rest of us.”

“Nobody got out any milk for him,” another flyer said.

Everybody in the battered farmhouse that did duty for an officers’ club laughed. But the laughter sounded different from the way it would have not too long before. Then it would have been aimed at him, deadly as the bullets from a Hurricane’s machine guns. Now he was an
Oberleutnant
with the
Ritterkreuz
at his throat. His comrades might not love him, but he’d earned their respect.

“Coffee will do,” he said mildly, and got another laugh.

“Coffee’s harder to come by than booze these days. Coffee worth drinking is, anyhow,” said the pilot next to him. “The footwash they issue with our rations …” The other flyer made a horrible face.

“Frenchies don’t have much of the good stuff left these days, either,” another pilot complained. “Or if they do, they’re hiding it better than they used to.”

“I don’t think they’ve got it,” a third flyer said. “We’ve been in France since last year, and here it is, just about autumn come round again. You can only scrounge so much. After that, there’s nothing left to scrounge.”

“There’d be plenty if we’d got into Paris the way we thought we would,” someone else said. Rudel couldn’t see who it was; the farmhouse was twistier than a fighter pilot’s mind. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the French family who’d lived in it before fleeing in the early days of the war had unrolled balls of thread of different colors to guide them as they navigated from one room to another. What was left of the upstairs seemed even worse.

A long silence followed the flyer’s remark. Anything that touched on politics was dangerous these days. Yes, the squadron was a band of brothers. But brothers could turn on one another, too—look what happened to Joseph. Some people feared that the
Gestapo
got word of any even possibly disloyal remarks. Others—Hans-Ulrich among them—hoped the security service did. He didn’t want to inform on anyone else himself, but he also didn’t want to fly alongside people whose hearts weren’t in the fight.

“We’ll get there yet,” he said.

“Sure we will,” said another voice he couldn’t easily match with a face. “But when, and what will it cost? Will we get to Moscow first?”

Someone else whistled softly. Hans-Ulrich knew the two-front war wasn’t popular with his comrades. Maybe it was even less popular than he’d thought. Again, no one seemed to care to take that particular bull by the horns. At last, the pilot sitting next to Rudel said, “I’d rather have the Poles on our side than against us.”

“They aren’t on our side.” To Hans-Ulrich’s dismay, that was Colonel Steinbrenner. The squadron commander went on, “Right this minute,
Stalin scares them worse than the
Führer
does. There’s a difference. You’d better believe there is, my friends.”

“Jawohl, Herr Oberst,”
Rudel said. “But it makes an army of a million men march against the Bolsheviks side by side with us. We ought to get the French and the English to do the same thing—a crusade to rid the world of something that never should have been born.”

A different kind of silence descended on the farmhouse: one rather like the aftermath of a thousand-kilogram bomb. At last, the fellow next to Hans-Ulrich said, “You’ve always been an optimist, haven’t you?”

“When it comes to Germany, of course I have,” he answered proudly.

“We’re all optimists about the
Vaterland
.” Colonel Steinbrenner spoke as if challenging anyone there to argue with him. When nobody did, he continued, “But there is also a difference between optimism and blind optimism.”

“Are you saying that’s what I show, sir?” Rudel asked.

“No, no. You’re a good German patriot,” Steinbrenner replied. Rudel would have thought hard about reporting him had he said anything else. After all, he’d been brought in here to replace an officer in whom the fires of zeal didn’t burn bright enough—or so the
Gestapo
had concluded, at any rate.

More high-octane liquor made the rounds. Several separate conversations started in place of the general one. That was safer: nobody could hear everything at once. Lickerish laughter said some of the flyers were talking about women—a topic more dangerous than politics, but in different ways. Hans-Ulrich might be a teetotaler, but he didn’t stay away from the French girls. His father wouldn’t have approved, but he didn’t worry about that. When he was with a girl, he didn’t worry about anything.
More precious than rubies
, the Bible said, and, as usual, it knew what it was talking about. The Biblical context might be different from the one Hans-Ulrich had in mind, but he didn’t worry about that, either.

“If we didn’t fuck up this stupid goddamn war—”

Rudel heard the words through all the other chatter, as one might hear a radio station through waves of static and competing signals. His ears pricked up. Treason would do that. You could say some things in some ways, but there were limits. This shot right past them.

He thought so, anyhow. He wondered how Sergeant Dieselhorst would feel about it. Dieselhorst was an older man and a veteran noncom. Both factors generated a broader view of mankind’s foibles than a young officer who was also a minister’s son was likely to have. Rudel suspected as much, but only in a vague way. He would not have been himself were he mentally equipped to grasp the full difference between how he thought and how Albert Dieselhorst did.

He didn’t enjoy being the only sober man in the middle of a drunken bash. Who in his right mind would? But this was nothing he hadn’t been through before. They’d think him a wet blanket if he stayed. They’d think him an even worse wet blanket if he got up and walked out. They’d think he thought he was better than they were. He did, too, but he’d learned that showing it only made things worse.

Somebody not far away was going on about the vastness of Russia, and about how a war against a country like that could have no sure ending. Sober or not, Hans-Ulrich got angry. “Once we smash the Reds, we’ll run the country for ourselves,” he said. “Russia is our
Lebensraum
. England and France have colonies all over the world. We’ll get ours the way the Americans did, by grabbing the lands right next door.”

“Yes, but the Americans only had to worry about Red Indians. We’ve got Red Ivans, and they’re tougher beasts.” The other flyer chuckled in not quite sober amusement at his wordplay.

Ignoring it, Hans-Ulrich said, “We can beat them. We will beat them. Or do you think the
Führer
’s wrong?”

The other fellow’s mouth twisted. He couldn’t say yes to a blunt question like that, and he plainly didn’t want to say no. What he did say was, “We all hope the
Führer
’s not wrong.”

That was probably safe. Rudel would have had to push to make something out of it. He didn’t want to push. He wanted his comrades to like him. The easiest way to do that would have been to act like them. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. Showing he was brave and skillful in combat was the next best thing. The others didn’t despise him any more, anyhow.

Progress. He could throw it away in a flash if he got too strident about
politics or about the way he thought the war ought to be going. He said, “Wherever we run into the enemy, we’ll whip him, that’s all.”

“That’s what the Kaiser’s General Staff told him, too,” the other flyer remarked.

“We beat the enemy,” Hans-Ulrich said. “It was the traitors inside Germany who made us lose.” He’d been two years old when the last war ended. He was parroting
Mein Kampf
, not speaking from experience.

The other flyer was probably younger than he was. “That’s not what my old man says,” he replied. “He was a lieutenant on the Western Front the last year and a half of the war. They had swarms of panzers by the end of 1918, and most of ours were retreads we captured from the Tommies. He says we got whupped.”

“What’s he doing now?” Rudel asked.

“He’s a lieutenant colonel in Poland. Why?”

“Never mind.” If the complainer was fighting, Rudel couldn’t call him a defeatist. Not out loud, he couldn’t. What he thought … he kept to himself. Little by little, he was learning.

CHAIM WEINBERG’S SPANISH
was still lousy. It would never be great. But it was a hell of a lot better than it had been, especially when he talked about the class struggle or dialectical materialism.

He hadn’t liked the political agitators who indoctrinated the Internationals so they would fight more ferociously. If they needed that kind of indoctrination, they wouldn’t have come to Spain to begin with. Or it looked that way to him. The leaders of the International Brigades, and the Soviet officers and apparatchiks who stood beside them, held a different opinion. Theirs was the one that counted.

Indoctrinating prisoners with the ideals of the Republic—and of the USSR—was different. Chaim told himself it was, at any rate. The hapless
campesinos
the Nationalists had dragooned into their army needed to understand that everything they’d believed in before they were taken prisoner was a big, steaming pile of
mierda
.

“They exploited you,” he told the tough, skinny, ragged men who came
to the edge of the barbed wire to listen to him. He didn’t fool himself into thinking he was all that fascinating. Time hung heavy for the POWs. Anything out of the ordinary seemed uncommonly interesting. “They were shameless, the way they exploited you.”
Sinverguenza
—he loved the Spanish word for
shameless
.

One of the captured Nationalists raised a hand. Chaim pointed to him. “Excuse me,
Señor,”
the fellow said apologetically, “but what does this word ‘exploited’ mean?”

Chaim blinked. He’d known these peasants were ignorant, but this took the cake. They literally had to learn a whole new language before they could understand what he was talking about. Before he answered the prisoner, he asked a question of his own: “How many others don’t know what ‘exploited’ means?”

Two or three other grimy hands went up. After some hesitation, a couple of more followed them. How many other Nationalists were holding back? Some, unless he missed his guess.

“Bueno,”
he said. “If you don’t know, ask. How can you understand if you don’t ask? When the priests and the landlords exploit you, they take advantage of you. You do the hard work. They have the money and the fancy houses and the fine clothes and the pretty girls who like those things. They take your crops, and they make most of the money from them.
¿Es verdad, o no?”

The POWs slowly nodded. That was how things worked in Spain—how they
had
worked before the Republic, and how they still worked where Marshal Sanjurjo and his lackeys governed. Joaquin Delgadillo raised his hand. Chaim nodded to him. He had a proprietary interest in Joaquin.