Last Orders: The War That Came Early (22 page)

Sanjurjo’s men would have been furious to know how he saw them. They were all heroes in their own minds. A lot of them truly were heroes. Spaniards didn’t even worry about chances no sane German or Czech would take. They were the small change of war even so.

He swung his binoculars a few centimeters to the right and squinted through them again. He suddenly paid close attention to what he saw there: a fellow with binoculars of his own was looking back at him. Jezek didn’t care for that, not even a little bit. He muscled his rifle over to bear on the Spaniard. Of itself, his right hand slid toward the trigger.

It wasn’t just that the bastard might be searching for him. Anybody with binoculars was likely to be an officer. An officer might be worth killing. And an officer looking out from the forward trench would be easy to kill, too. From here, Vaclav figured he wouldn’t have much trouble killing somebody over there with a Mauser.

Nationalist officers often painted their rank badge in gold on the front of their helmets. Part of the point of being a Nationalist officer was showing that you were. They were as aggressively boastful as Spanish Republicans were aggressively egalitarian.

He had trouble making out how big a wheel this brave fool was. The rain obscured whatever emblem he had above the outthrust brim
of his German-style headgear. It did seem to have a lot of gold, though. That seemed promising, at least if you were a sniper.

The Nationalist lowered the field glasses and turned to say something to someone Vaclav couldn’t see. He could see the man’s round face and heavy jowls, his gray mustache, and the pouches under his eyes.

“Fuck me,” the Czech whispered as he quickly centered the crosshairs on the target’s head. He didn’t
know
that was who he thought it was. He didn’t know, no, but the shot was worth taking anyhow.

Stay in routine
, he told himself, and he did. Target lined up? Yes. A couple of deep breaths, in and out. Don’t hurry. Don’t worry. If you hurry and worry, you’ll miss. Don’t think about who it might be. Don’t think at all. Just aim and … shoot.

He didn’t jerk the trigger. He brought his right index finger back hard enough to take up the slack, and then to fire the piece. The antitank rifle bellowed. Recoil slammed against his shoulder. Yes, he’d added to his collection of bruises. No, he hadn’t done anything stupid like breaking his collarbone.

He hadn’t done anything stupid like missing, either. If you dropped a boulder on a watermelon from the top of a five-story building, you might get an explosion of red mist and gunk like the one a fat, highvelocity, armor-piercing slug produced when it slammed into some luckless soldier’s temple. Down went the Nationalist officer. He’d twitch for a minute or two, but he was already dead just the same.

Now—had the assholes in the trenches over there spotted the flash through the rain? Did they know where it came from? If they did, how excited would they get about it?

He didn’t need long to realize it hadn’t been some overage, overweight major of artillery. The Nationalists started running every which way. Through his field glasses, he saw that they started pointing every which way, too. He breathed a little easier then. No, they didn’t know which hole he was hiding in. They wouldn’t start throwing mortar bombs this way or send out a couple of squads of pissed-off soldiers after him.

Rifle fire from the Nationalists’ trenches picked up. Machine guns
started their malevolent snarl. The enemy artillery bombarded the Republican lines. Wet and chilly in his shell hole, Vaclav lay without moving and began to think he really might have done it.

Peggy Druce fixed coffee and oatmeal for herself. While the coffee perked, she turned on the radio. It was eight o’clock straight up. She could catch the morning news while she got breakfast ready.

Well, she could after they tried to sell her soap and toothpaste and canned pork and beans. “A little bit less pork for the duration,” the announcer said, “but just as much delicious goodness!” Undoubtedly just as much per can, too. They wouldn’t lower the price because they’d cheapened the mix. That would be un-American.

NBC’s three familiar chimes rang out. “Here is the news,” a different announcer said. “American bombers gave Midway Island another pasting last night. Three planes are reported missing. One ditched in the Pacific, and most of the crew have been rescued.”

Three planes were reported missing. That was what he said. Most people would take it to mean the United States had lost only three planes. If Peggy hadn’t got stuck in war-torn Europe, she would have taken it the same way. But all the warring countries over there told as many lies as they thought they could get away with, and then another one for luck. Three planes reported lost could mean any number down in flames.

“President Roosevelt is delighted at industrial and agricultural production,” the newsman said. “At a White House dinner last night, he said, ‘We are getting the tools we need for victory, and when we have them we will finish the job.’ The dinner menu included fried chicken, baked potatoes, and peas.”

Peggy chuckled. That was the kind of plain food any American family might eat. FDR liked fancier recipes. When what he ate made the news, though, he kept it simple.

After what the President had for dinner came the foreign news. The Germans were denying a Russian breakthrough in front of Minsk. Goebbels claimed Stalin was obviously lying, because the ground in Russia was too muddy to let anyone break through. That sounded reasonable.
Of course, when you were talking about the two biggest liars in Europe—a prize for which the competition was steep—who could guess whether sounding reasonable meant anything?

“And, in the long-running civil war in Spain so closely tied to the wider European struggle, Nationalist radio has at last admitted the death of Marshal Sanjurjo,” the newsman went on. “A Nationalist statement says the marshal ‘died a martyr in the unending struggle against atheistic Bolshevism.’ No successor has been named. The Nationalists deny Republican reports of a power struggle among their generals.”

That they denied it didn’t mean it wasn’t true. Peggy lit her first cigarette of the morning. The Spaniards didn’t tell lies the size of the ones that came out of Berlin and Moscow, but it wasn’t for lack of effort.

“Hitler and Mussolini have both expressed their regret over the loss of the man they have often called the liberator of Spain,” the newsman said. “What will happen there now without him remains to be seen.”

If Hitler and Mussolini missed Sanjurjo, Peggy didn’t need to take out a slide rule to calculate that she didn’t. The Spanish general’s war had given the bigger Fascist dictators—and Stalin—the chance to test their weapons and let their soldiers earn some combat experience. They’d all gone on to bigger and worse things, too.

She left the radio on while she did the dishes. The sports news was that the Phillies had fired their manager. The A’s were just as lousy. But, since ancient Connie Mack not only managed but also owned the team, chances were he wouldn’t give himself the old heave-ho. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t wound up in the cellar plenty of other times.

Commercials followed the news, and then an interview show at a war plant. It was so stupid and saccharine, it soon made Peggy spin the dial. She felt embarrassed she’d listened to it for even a few minutes. Plenty of people must, she supposed, or they wouldn’t leave it on the air. But if
that
was popular, the country had to be going to the dogs … didn’t it?

She washed some clothes. She hung them out on the line behind the house. It wasn’t warm any more. The wind blowing out of the
north made the wet laundry flap. The clothes would dry fast, unless the wind brought rain with it.

When she went back in, she did some ironing, too. She thanked heaven for an iron you plugged into the wall, an iron that by God stayed hot. She’d learned to fight wrinkles with irons you had to heat on the stove, irons that cooled off to worthlessness by the time you carried them from the stove to the ironing board.

After the ironing, sweeping and dusting. Now that she had no one but herself for whom to keep the house neat, she did a better job of housekeeping than she had when Herb also lived here. She pictured him living in squalor in his apartment. She couldn’t make herself believe the picture, though. Even living alone, Herb wouldn’t be a slob. Any man who’d gone through the Army knew the basics of taking care of himself.

By the time she finished getting the place shipshape, it was almost noon. She stared at the clock on her nightstand as if it had done her wrong. And she felt it had. Didn’t she just finish breakfast? It seemed that way, but she was hungry for lunch.

She’d had ham for dinner the night before. Wax paper–wrapped leftovers sat in the icebox. She sliced some ham thin, put it on bread, added sweet pickles and mustard, and ate the sandwich. Another cup of coffee washed it down. That was heated up from the pot she’d made for breakfast, and on the bitter side. Next to what they called coffee in Europe, it was the nectar of the gods.

After lunch, she started an Agatha Christie mystery. It was pretty good, but the Englishwoman’s casual anti-Semitism grated in ways it wouldn’t have before Peggy saw how Hitler treated Jews in the countries he’d overrun—and in his own. She sighed and put the book down. She’d changed, all right.

Her life had turned inside out because she’d been stranded on the wrong side of the Atlantic when Europe went up in flames. Well, sure, so did millions of other lives. But it wasn’t even as if she’d got hurt. She’d just got stuck.

And, because she’d got stuck, she wasn’t married to Herb any more. Her politics and her whole outlook on the world had changed. Why? Because she hadn’t packed up and headed for home a week earlier.

How many other lives took turns just as big from causes just as trivial? It made you wonder. It really did. In some world where she
had
taken a train back to France and sailed for America, was another Peggy, one who still wore a wedding ring, rattling around this house right now? Was that Peggy wondering what things would have been like if she’d stayed in Czechoslovakia till the war broke out?

This Peggy’s mouth twisted. “Trust me, kiddo—you wouldn’t’ve had a whole lot of fun,” she told the imaginary one, and tried to dismiss her from her own mind.

But, once summoned, that still-married Peggy didn’t want to be dismissed. Neither did the idea that had spawned her, even if it seemed to belong to the lurid pulp magazines with the gaudy covers and the wildly titled stories. Because the real Peggy was sure she couldn’t be the only one who conjured imaginary selves from the vasty deep. Everybody had places in his life where he could have done one thing but had done the other. Had he chosen differently, he would have had a different life story from then on out. How could you
help
wondering about the way that other movie would have run?

Peggy lit a cigarette to help herself think. It wasn’t only people, was it? It was countries, too. What would Germany be like right now if Hitler had got killed in the last war? He could have, easily. He’d been a runner—from what Herb said, about as dangerous a duty as you could find. But he’d come through, and the
Reich
was what it was because he had. If you dug enough, history had to be full of crazy things like that. Peggy decided she didn’t want to dig after all. She fixed herself a bourbon on the rocks. It helped, but not enough.

Louis Mirouze didn’t look quite so miserable as a kitten you tossed into a puddle. But that was only because the young lieutenant’s helmet kept his hair from going every which way like a soaked kitten’s.

Aristide Demange was sure he looked every bit as soggy himself. He doubted he looked miserable, though. His guess was that he looked pissed off. It wasn’t a wild guess. He usually looked pissed off, because he usually was pissed off. If you couldn’t find something to get pissed off about while you were in the Army, you weren’t half trying.

“Stupid
cons
,” he muttered. Just then, a raindrop came down right on the coal of his Gitane. The cigarette quit drawing. He spat it out in disgust and fired up another one.

“Sir?” Mirouze said.

“Stupid
cons
,” Demange repeated. “The cretins and syphilitic imbeciles who left us stuck in the mud here.”

“Oh,” Mirouze said. That would have been heresy to him not long before. Now he just shrugged. “Fuck ’em all.”

“Alors!”
Demange said in surprise. “I couldn’t have put it better myself. You’re learning, kid.”

What showed in Mirouze’s eyes was something on the order of
Fuck you, too
. He didn’t come out with it. Demange might have laughed if he had. Or he might have coldcocked him, not because he outranked Mirouze but because only his friends could talk to him like that, and he counted his friends on the toes of both hands.

A German MG-42 spat a few short bursts over the French line, just to remind the
poilus
to keep their heads down. The Germans lived better in their trenches than the French did. The French seemed to think being miserable reminded you you were at war. The
Boches
made the best of things. In the last war, Demange had seen a deep German bunker with electric lights and with wallpaper over the timbers that shored it up. Except for being a good many meters underground, it could have been taken from an expensive flat.

“Here,” Demange said. “You’re a smart
cochon
, so I’ve got an arithmetic problem for you. If we advance ten meters every day, how long till we get to Berlin?”

“Long enough so I’m not holding my breath,” Mirouze answered, which was close enough to the right answer to make Demange nod. The second lieutenant went on, “If we can push the Fritzes back to their old border, I’ll be happy enough. As long as they don’t shoot me, I will.”

“Beats the crap out of
‘On les aura!,’
doesn’t it?” Demange agreed. “And it’s about as much as we can hope for on this side. Over in the East, the
Boches
have a little more on their plates.”

“They’ve got the Poles over there to keep the Russians off them,” Mirouze said. “Till the Poles turn their coats, anyhow.”