The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (15 page)

“That was a bad business,” Wavell said quietly, so he might have been one of those wondering people. He studied Walsh. “So you’re in with that lot,
are you? No, they’re not pinks, no doubt of that.”

“I am, sir. It seems the best way to honor Churchill’s memory—and, to my mind, he was dead right about the Nazis.” Walsh hadn’t used the phrase with malice aforethought. But he quite fancied it once it was out of his mouth. “Dead right,” he repeated.

“I can’t imagine what you or your friends expect me to do about it, though,” Wavell said. “This
isn’t Argentina or Brazil or one of those places. The army doesn’t interfere in politics here. It would be unthinkable.”

Walsh just sat there and waited. If General Wavell was talking about it, he was thinking about it. What he was thinking about it … Walsh would discover in due course.

The general glanced at his wristwatch. “Well,” he said with forced briskness, “I’m afraid I’ve given you all
the time I can spare at present. There
is
a war on, you know, and someone does have to run it, or at any rate to try.”

“Certainly, sir.” Walsh got to his feet. “Is there anything you’d particularly like me to tell my friends?”

“Tell them … Tell them they don’t know what they’re playing at, dammit.”

“I think they do, sir. I think it’s the Prime Minister and his lot who’ve gone off the rails,
not these other fellows.”

“You can say that. You’ve taken off the uniform. No, I don’t hold it against you—no denying you had your reasons,” Wavell said. “But I still wear it. If I were to speak in the same fashion, or to act in addition to speaking, it would be treason, nothing less.”

“General, I don’t know anything about that,” said Walsh, who knew far more about it than he’d dreamt he would
before he watched that lone parachutist descend on the Scottish field. Taking a deep breath, he continued, “I do know we can’t go on the way we’re going. It would ruin the country forever. Anything would be better, anything at all. Or do you think I’m wrong?”

“I think—” Wavell broke off, shaking his head like a horse pestered by gnats. “I think you’d best go, Walsh, is what I think. And deliver
my message to your associates.”

Walsh did, at a pub not far from Parliament. They kept no favorite table: that would have made it too easy for Scotland Yard, or perhaps the PM’s less savory associates, to arrange to listen in. Walsh didn’t think they could bug every table in the place. The noise from the rest of the crowd—more politicos, solicitors, newspapermen, and other such riffraff—drowned
out the conspirators’ conversations. He hoped like blazes it did, anyhow.

Ronald Cartland slammed his pint mug down on the tabletop in disgust when Walsh finished. It wasn’t empty; some best bitter slashed out. “Good Lord!” the MP exclaimed. “The man has no more spine than an eclair! One of you, Walsh, is worth a thousand of him.”

Cartland had volunteered for service when the war broke out,
and fought in France as a subaltern. That, to Walsh’s mind, gave his opinions weight and made his praise doubly warming. But Walsh thought his dismissal of General Wavell was premature. “I don’t know about that, sir,” he said. “He didn’t have the military police arrest me for treason, the way he might have done. He didn’t even chuck me out of his office. He listened to me. He may not be ready to move
yet, but he doesn’t half fancy the way things are heading.”

“Who in his right mind would?” said Bobbity Cranford, another leader of the anti-alliance crowd. “But if he listened to you, old man, he’d better watch out for Bentleys the next time he crosses the road.”

That produced a considerable silence around the table. Walsh broke it by loudly calling to a barmaid to fill up his pint again. He
needed the fresh mug. Cranford had reminded him they weren’t playing a game here, nor was the government. If it felt itself seriously threatened, it would lash out. Anyone who didn’t believe that had only to remember Winston Churchill.

LUC HARCOURT UNSLUNG
his rifle and carried it instead of leaving it on his shoulder. His regiment was heading up to the front again, and he wanted to be ready
if they ran into any Russians. Besides, fronts here
were far more porous than they’d been in France. Some enemy soldiers were bound to have leaked through what was supposed to be the line.

His boots squelched as he tramped up the road, but only a little. The mud didn’t try to pull off his footgear, as it would have a couple of weeks earlier. Pretty soon, both sides would be able to start moving
again. There were prospects Luc relished more.

Up ahead, Lieutenant Demange was singing obscene lyrics to the tune of a peasant song about spring. Luc had known Demange since before the shooting started. Not many others from the old company survived, and even fewer in one piece. Knowing Demange as he did, Luc also knew those foul verses were a way for the reluctantly promoted officer to hide
his own nerves about what lay ahead.

Anyone who didn’t know Demange so well would assume he owned no nerves. Luc had, for a long time. But underneath the chrome-steel
salaud
lay a human being.
A nasty human being, but even so
, Luc thought.

One thing Demange didn’t believe in was taking needless chances; a soldier had to take too many that were necessary. He carried a rifle instead of the more
usual and less useful officer’s pistol. And he
carried
it, like Luc. He was ready for anything. And things needed to be ready for him.

“Halt! Who goes there?” a sentry called in nervous, German-accented French. “Give the countersign!”

“Your mother on a pogo stick,” Demange snarled. He might be here, but he still despised the
Boches
.

“Qu’est-ce-que vous dites?”
the sentry said: a reasonable
enough question. He added, “Give the countersign, or I fire!”

Demange did, which confirmed Luc’s thought about not taking chances he didn’t have to. The German passed him and the men he led. Well, why not? They were doing some of Hitler’s work so the rest of the Fritzes wouldn’t have to.

The trench system was well enough organized and shored up to show the lines hadn’t moved much for a while.
What with the way Russia turned to mud soup as the snow melted, the lines couldn’t very well move.

Which didn’t mean the Reds were asleep behind their rusting barbed wire. The regiment hadn’t been in place for half an hour before an Ivan
with a megaphone shouted at them in much better French than the German sentry spoke: “Here they are again—Colonel Eluard’s little darlings.”

How did the bastard
know? Luc wouldn’t have thought any of the handful of Russian peasants he’d seen had paid the least attention to the Frenchmen tramping up to the front. He really wouldn’t have thought they could tell one regiment from another. And he
really
wouldn’t have thought that, even if they could, they’d be able to pass the word on to their countrymen so fast.

That only went to show how much he knew.
With noxious good cheer, the French-speaking Russian went on, “Now that you’re back, we should welcome you the way you deserve!”

“Jump for the bombproofs, boys!” Demange shouted, a good twenty seconds before mortar bombs started raining down on the trenches.

His instincts saved lives. Luc had already curled up in a place where fragments couldn’t get him when the shooting started. But not everybody
was so lucky. Machine guns and German artillery kept the Russians at bay. Stretcher-bearers hauled off the wounded Frenchmen.

“Those fucking stovepipes are bad news,” Demange said, lighting one more in his endless chain of Gitanes.

“How did the Russians know who we were?” Luc asked.

“How doesn’t matter. But they knew, all right. That jeering prick … He sounded just like a captain I served under
in the last war. That asshole stopped a 77—or maybe it was a 105—with his face. Hardly enough left of him to bury. I hope the same thing happens to this son of a bitch, too.”

“He was just the mouthpiece,” Luc said. “It’s the ones who told him what to say who need killing.”

“They all need killing,” Demange said. “And they think we all need killing. And if everybody gets his way, nobody’ll be
left when this stupid war’s done, and you know what? The world’ll be a better place after that. For a little while, till the cats or the rats learn how to lie.”

“Heh,” Luc said uneasily, not at all sure the older man was kidding. He decided to change the subject: “What are we going to do now?”

“I don’t know about you, but I’m going to shore up these works the best way I know how.” Demange stopped,
an evil smile lighting up his
face. He shook his head. “No. Fuck that. I’m an officer now, right? I’m going to have a bunch of sorry-ass privates shore this shit up for me.”

“Sounds good, Lieutenant.” Luc grinned. With a sergeant’s hash marks on his sleeve, he wouldn’t have to thicken up the calluses on his palm with an entrenching tool so much, either.

“And then,” Demange went on, “and then,
what I’m going to do is sit right here on my ass and not move a centimeter forward till some cocksucker in a fancy kepi makes me do it.”

“That sounds good, too,” Luc agreed. “But what about the crusade against Bolshevism?”

“What afuckingbout it?” Demange retorted. “I’m here, aren’t I? You’re here, aren’t you? As much as you’re ever anywhere, I mean.”

“I love you, too, sir,” Luc put in.

Demange
ignored him, not for the first time and no doubt not for the last. The veteran went on, “We’ve both shot Russians. If they come at us again—no, when they do—we’ll shoot some more of them so they don’t shoot us. I’ll do whatever I’ve got to do to stay alive. But if you think I’m enough of a jackass to give a fart about any of that political horseshit, you’re even dumber than I give you credit
for.”

“Mmp.” Luc left that right there. He looked up and down the trenches. No one was paying special attention to him and Demange, except perhaps to see what kind of nasty orders the lieutenant and sergeant doled out next and who’d get stuck with them. Lowering his voice, Luc continued, “Some of the guys in the ranks are still Reds, you know. They didn’t come close to weeding all of ’em out
before they sent us east.”

“Oh, sure.” Lieutenant Demange nodded. “But so what? Most of ’em’ll shoot Ivans to keep from getting killed themselves, and that’s all they’ve really got to do. A few of ’em’ll desert.”

“A few of them have already deserted,” Luc pointed out.

“Uh-huh.” Demange nodded again. “And you know what? I bet the fucking Russians ate ’em without salt. We’re only here because
Daladier’s got his head up his ass. Those miserable Russkis, they’re here on account of the Nazis and Poles and us, we’re in their country. It makes all the fucking difference in the world. Even a sorry turd like you didn’t fight too bad when the Fritzes invaded France.”

“That’s the nicest thing you ever said about me.” Luc tried to sound sarcastic. He did less well than he would have liked,
mostly because he meant it. That
was
about the nicest thing Demange had ever said about him.

“Yeah, well, you didn’t know your ass from your elbow when you started out. But you were luckier than most of the other poor stupid new fish: the Nazis didn’t nail you or blow you up right away, so you got the chance to learn,” Demange said. “By now, you know what you’re doing. One more time, you’d be
even dumber than I figure you for if you didn’t.”

“Thanks a bunch,” Luc said, deflated. He’d been cut and scratched and bruised, but he never did get badly hurt. Was that all it took to make a good soldier? Staying in one piece long enough to learn the ropes? The more he thought about it, the likelier it seemed.

Even a good soldier, though, had to stay lucky all the time. Things had to keep
missing him. Superiors had to steer clear of idiotic orders that put him in a place where things couldn’t help hitting. Otherwise, he’d go down and thrash and scream just as loud as any clodhopper fresh out of training. He knew that, too.

Chapter 7

C
olonel Otto Griehl commanded the panzer regiment of which Theo Hossbach was a small and none too vital part. Theo didn’t think the regimental commander was such a bad guy. Had the colonel known as much, that doubtless would have warmed the cockles of his heart, whatever the hell those were. But even if
Griehl wasn’t such a bad guy, he did like to hear himself talk.

“Men, we’ve been stuck in the mud too damn long,” he declared to the troopers in black coveralls with the silver panzer
Totenkopf
on their collar patches. “Now we can move around again, so we’re going to go out and give the Ivans what-for.”

Some of the assembled panzer troopers clapped their hands. Adi Stoss leaned close to Theo
and muttered, “Who’s this
we
he keeps going on about? Him and his tapeworm?”

Theo snickered. He might not think Griehl was a bad guy, but that didn’t mean he took authority any more seriously than he had to. Contemplating the exalted colonel’s equally exalted tapeworm was as good a cure for that as he could imagine, and better than most.

Hermann Witt clucked in reproof—mild reproof, but reproof
even so. “Griehl comes forward with the rest of us,” he said.