Last Orders: The War That Came Early (26 page)

“That’s the wrong question, dear,” her mother said. “The right question is, why would anybody want to do that once?”

“You will never have a closer comrade than the man who saved your neck during a trench raid.” Father seemed to think he was explaining something. If he was, it was something that only made sense—that could only make sense—to someone else who’d been through what he had.

Sarah’s reflections were interrupted when another rifle shot rang out. A bullet spanged off the bricks of the front wall a split second later.
“Gevalt!”
Mother said. Sarah couldn’t have put it better herself.

“Hel-lo!” Father said. He wasn’t horrified. On the contrary—he looked and sounded extremely alert. He also looked as if he wished he had a Mauser in his hands. The laborer, the professor, even the Jew dropped away, leaving only the old
Frontschwein
.

Whoever had the Schmeisser fired back in a long, stuttering burst. Then the rifle spoke again. Somebody let out a horrible shriek. It went on and on. Sarah wanted to stick her index fingers in her ears to blot it out. You weren’t supposed to hear noises like that. Human beings weren’t supposed to make noises like that.

Father bit his lip. He would have heard such cries before. He would have a better idea than Sarah about what would have to happen to somebody to force such cries from his throat.

After a while, the shriek became something more like a gurgle. Then silence fell again. “Poor devil,” Father said. “Believe it or not, I wouldn’t wish that on even an SS man. Well, he’s not worrying about anything now.” He began to roll another cigarette.

“Keep in good order, you lunkheads!” Arno Baatz shouted as the men he led got into the train. They were lucky—this was a passenger car, even if it was one with hard seats. They wouldn’t have to sprawl on the floor of a freight car that stank of horseshit from its previous occupants.

For once, the
Landsers
didn’t grumble at him. One of them said, “Back to the
Vaterland
!” He might have been announcing miracles. They’d been fighting the Ivans for a long time. Being sent back to Germany probably felt like a miracle to them. It felt like something of a miracle to Baatz.

It was also a source of pride. “They figured we were reliable enough to help them clean out a nest of traitors,” the
Unteroffizier
said importantly. “Our regiment, our company, our squad. We’re not going to let them down, are we? Not when they’re counting on us, we’re not!”

He scowled at Adam Pfaff. The
Obergefreiter
looked back with an expression surely more innocent than the man who owned it. If Pfaff had thought he could get away with it, he would have sassed Arno
about answering his own question. But he was cunning and sneaky enough to see he couldn’t get away with it. So he acted all meek and mild instead.

He can’t fool me, though
, Baatz thought. Given half a chance, Pfaff turned into a barrack lawyer or a shirker. He was good enough against the Ivans. Even Baatz couldn’t deny that. Politically reliable, though? Not likely! Not even a little bit likely.

Muttering, Arno took his own seat. His ass would be petrified by the time they got back to the
Reich
. No help for it, though, not unless he wanted to clamber up to the luggage rack about the windows and pretend to be a haversack all the way west.

With a series of jerks, the train began to roll.
“Dos vidanya, Rodina!”
somebody said—Russian for
So long, Motherland!
He didn’t sound sorry to be heading out of the Soviet Union. Who would?

“Yob tvoyu mat’!”
somebody else added. That was also Russian, and filthy. They’d all picked up little bits of the language: a phrase here, an obscenity there. Baatz hoped he never saw this place again. Then he could drop what he’d picked up.

Adam Pfaff was thinking along not altogether different lines: “Here’s hoping the weather stays lousy. Then the
Sturmoviks
will leave us alone.”

“Don’t even talk about those bastards! You’ll jinx us,” Baatz said. Like any German soldier, he hated and feared the Red Air Force’s ground-attack planes. The damned things were like flying panzers, so heavily armored they were hard to shoot down. They scooted along at treetop height, and pasted anything the pilot saw with cannon shells and machine-gun bullets.

They had been known to do horrible things to trains. In here, Baatz couldn’t spot them and dive for a foxhole. He couldn’t even shoot back. All he could do was add his hope to Pfaff’s.

On the train rolled. He drank from his canteen and ate black bread and sausage he’d scrounged at the last village they’d camped in. He tried to sleep. After a while, he did. Hard seat with a straight back? So what? He could have slept hanging by his knees like a bat.

He knew exactly when they passed out of Byelorussia and into Poland.
All of a sudden, he could read the lettering on the signs. The words still looked like something off an eye chart—they were in Polish. But he could try to sound them out.

The other thing that made Poland look different from the USSR was that it hadn’t been fought over so much or so recently. The farther west they went, the better the countryside looked. The landscape was flat and boring and the trees had shed their leaves, but they were intact. So were farmhouses and villages. The people who stared at the train as it rattled past looked and dressed like Western Europeans, not like dirty Russian peasants out of a novel from the last century.

Warsaw was a real city. It had taken some bomb damage, but not much. Women in overalls worked alongside old men on repairs. Most of the young men wore Poland’s dark, greenish khaki and fought the Ivans along with the
Wehrmacht
.

Excitement in the car built as the train neared the German frontier. At the border, Polish guards waved good-bye bare moments before German railway workers waved hello. Some of the soldiers waved back. Arno didn’t. He would have for a pretty girl, but didn’t waste his time on friendship for men in uniforms that weren’t military.

They rolled through Breslau, the center of the recruiting district from which almost everybody in the regiment had come. Baatz posted men to make sure no one tried to jump off the train and sneak home.

Catching his eye, Pfaff said, “Good thing they didn’t stop us on a siding here. We would’ve lost half the guys.”

“Well, we might have,” Baatz allowed.

Way off in the east of the
Reich
, Breslau hadn’t been hit hard by either Russian or English bombers. When they got to Berlin a few hours later, Arno saw a city that had been bombed. Before the war started, Göring said you could call him Meyer if even a single bomb ever fell on the capital. These days, the
Luftwaffe
chief had to be used to his new Jewish name.

Things didn’t improve when the train steamed west out of Berlin. The RAF and the
Armée de l’Air
seemed to have hit every ten-pfennig town along the tracks. Here a train station lay in ruins, there a block of flats or a factory was nothing but charred beams and broken bricks.

The soldiers talked among themselves in low voices as they got a good look at the destruction. Arno would have liked to hear what they were saying, but no one said anything in that tone of voice close enough for him to make out the words. That in itself fanned the flames of his suspicions. If talk wasn’t defeatist, you didn’t care who heard it.

People from units conscripted from this part of the
Reich
said that letters from their loved ones let them know things weren’t so good at home. Baatz had thought those letters were bound to be tinged with treason. Now, seeing the beating this part of the country had taken, he didn’t find it so easy to make such flip judgments.

A few kilometers outside of Münster, bandits in the bushes fired at the train as it passed. A window in the car blew in, spattering soldiers with broken glass. The bullet broke a window on the other side going out. Only dumb luck it didn’t hit anybody.

“Nice to know we’re loved and welcomed,” Adam Pfaff remarked.

“We’re here
because
they’re traitors to the
Führer
,” Arno answered. “We’re going to whip them into shape, and we’re going to whip them into line.” He looked forward to it. If whipping people into line wasn’t what an
Unteroffizier
was for, what would be?

But the whipping had to wait, because the train stopped at the edge of town instead of going on to the station. Word filtered back that somebody had messed with the switches. If an alert policeman hadn’t spotted it, they might have derailed.

Little boys in short pants scampered by the track, yelling things at the soldiers. Baatz couldn’t make out what they were saying with his window closed. He opened his, even though that let in the outside chill. It helped less than he’d hoped. The local dialect was so far from his, it hardly sounded like German to him. But then one of the kids shouted
“Arschloch!”
at him and held up his right hand with thumb and forefinger making a circle and the other three fingers raised. The curse and the gesture that went with it would have been perfectly clear from Munich all the way to Königsberg.

He almost shouted back something about the little bastard’s mother, but decided that was beneath a noncom’s dignity. But he did take a good, long look at the punk. If he ever saw him again, he’d make him sorry, twelve years old or not.

With a wheeze and a groan and a series of jerks, the train got moving again. And that was their welcome to Münster.

Chaim Weinberg moved forward cautiously. That was partly because, with only a hand and a half, he wasn’t as quick with his rifle as some of the bastards he might run into. And it was partly because, having fought in Spain since 1936, he had caution ingrained in him by now. That line about old soldiers and bold soldiers held all too much truth.

But it looked as if the Nationalists really were on the ropes. Or rather, they were too busy fighting one another like the Kilkenny cats for the ever more worthless top spot in their territory to care a great deal that the Republicans were taking it away from them, more of it by the day.

Somewhere not far from here, Vaclav Jezek had blown out Marshal Sanjurjo’s brains. From what Chaim had heard, the Czech had blown off most of the
Caudillo
’s head. The Fascists had had to bury him in a closed coffin because nobody in the funeral business could make him look even as much like a human being as he had before he got killed.

The Nationalists had pulled out of these trenches so they could go after other Nationalists who fancied a different general. Most of them had, anyhow. A few diehards still figured they wouldn’t be fighting over anything before long if the Republicans overran their positions.

Muddy, smelly, full of trash, the Nationalists’ trenches looked even worse than the ones from which the Abe Lincolns and their International brethren had emerged. The Nationalists were retreating. And they were sloppy Spaniards. Chaim had seen some of the trenches the Spanish Republicans fought from. They were no tidier than this mess.

Up ahead and to the left, a brief firefight broke out: rifles and a Tommy gun or two. Chaim trotted toward it. If cleaning up the Fascists and cleaning them out was easier than it had been, he wanted all the more to get in on it. But the shooting had stopped by the time he drew near.

A Republican with one of those Tommy guns led three gloomy Nationalists toward the rear. Their hands stayed high. The Republican
grinned at Weinberg. “We’ll reeducate these
putos
,” he said. “Or I’ll finish them now if they want to run.”

“Bueno,”
Chaim answered, and gave a thumbs-up. It wouldn’t be so good for the captured Fascists, though. Republican reeducation camps owed a lot to their models in the USSR. The only thing the Spaniards couldn’t duplicate was Siberian weather. Up in the mountains, they even came within screaming distance of that.

He scurried along a communications trench toward the rear. It wasn’t straight—nobody in his right mind left a long, straight stretch of trench waiting to be raked by small-arms fire or lethal fragments from a shellburst—but it didn’t have enough bends to make him happy. He hoped nobody from the other side would lob any artillery this way. He hadn’t heard the Nationalists’ big guns at all today. He didn’t miss them a bit.

The ground at the far end of the trench was as full of shell holes as a sixteen-year-old’s face was full of pimples. A sixteen-year-old’s face, however, didn’t present the spectacle of a burnt-out truck that had taken a direct hit. It didn’t have bushes growing on it, either, only peach fuzz that was trying to turn into whiskers.

One of the other Abe Lincolns waved to him. Chaim waved back. “Hey, Luis!” he called. Luis was from Madrid. He was a pretty good guy. He’d joined the Americans a couple of years ago now, and had picked up a lot of English.

“We’ve got the fuckers by the short hairs,” he said now. When you learned English from soldiers, that was the kind of English you learned.

“Bet your ass we do,” Chaim said. “Now we twist.” He illustrated with a graphic gesture. Luis laughed. So did Chaim, but only for a moment. Then his face clouded. “I wish like hell Mike woulda lived to see the day.”