The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (2 page)

“What did I do to deserve getting asked to think like a German all the time?” The sergeant seemed to aim the question more at God than at Vaclav Jezek. That was good: God might have an answer, and Vaclav sure didn’t. After screwing up his features, Halévy went on, “I think maybe it’s all right. Maybe.”

“Yeah, me, too. C’mon. Let’s try it.” Vaclav scrambled to his feet. Snow clung to the front of his greatcoat. He didn’t try to brush it off. If it made him harder for the poor, shivering bastards in snow-spotted
Feldgrau
to spot, so much the better. Halévy followed his lead. So did the rest of the Czechs. They moved with no great enthusiasm, but they moved.

Stretcher-bearers carried the wounded man back towards a dressing station. Some of the other guys eyed them enviously: they were out of danger, or at least in less of it, for a while.

The German guns growled again. Jezek tensed, but these shells headed somewhere else. He nodded to himself. The artillerymen had a prescribed firing pattern, and by God they’d stick to it. Of course they would. They were Germans, weren’t they?

A stretch of snow-covered open ground several hundred meters wide lay ahead, with woods beyond. Vaclav eyed it sourly. He turned to Halévy. “What do you want to bet the Nazis have a machine-gun nest in amongst the trees?”

“I won’t touch that,” the Jew answered. “And there’ll be two more farther back covering it, so when we take it out it won’t do us much good.” He seemed no happier than Vaclav, and with reason. “Be expensive even getting close enough
to
take it out.”

Vaclav unslung the antitank rifle, which made his shoulder smile happily. “If we send a few guys forward to draw their fire, maybe I can do something about it at long range. Worth a try, anyhow.”

“Suits,” Halévy said at once. He told off half a squad of Czechs to serve as lures. They looked as miserable as Jezek would have in their boots. The rest of the men looked relieved. A well-sited MG-34 could have slaughtered half of them, maybe more.

Flopping down into the snow again, Vaclav steadied the monster on its bipod. He aimed where he would have put the gun if he were on the other side. Even with a telescopic sight, he couldn’t see anything funny. But nothing could hide a machine-gun muzzle when it started spitting fire. And maybe—he hoped—he’d spot motion when the crew served the gun.

Like sacrificial pawns, the handful of Czechs started crossing the field. They hadn’t gone far before the machine gun opened up on them. That was German arrogance. Letting them come farther might have drawn more after them. But the Nazis were saying,
Thus far and no farther. This is our ground
.

They could think so. Vaclav shifted the rifle a few millimeters—he’d guessed well.
Blam!
He winced even as he chambered a fresh round. Muzzle brake or not, padded stock or not, shooting that mother hurt every goddamn time. His right ear would never be the same again, either.

Blam!
This time, the scope let him see a German reel away with his head nothing but a red ruin. Another one stepped up. They wouldn’t have caused so much trouble if they weren’t brave.
Blam!
He killed that one, too, and then another one a few seconds later. “Forward!” Halévy shouted. “Everybody forward!”

Forward the Czechs went. More Germans ran over to keep the machine gun firing. Vaclav methodically shot them. Before long, his side had a lodgement in the woods. The MG-34 fell silent. Maybe they’d captured it, or maybe the guys on the other side had pulled it back.

Either way, he could go forward himself now. Another few hundred meters reclaimed. Sooner or later, the rest of France. Later—how much later?—Czechoslovakia. It would take a while. Oh, yes. The antitank rifle seemed to weigh a tonne.

THEO HOSSBACH STOOD
in front of the goal of what had to be the worst football pitch he’d ever seen. The Polish field was frozen and lumpy. The
ball could have used more air, but nobody could find a valve that fit its air inlet. Nobody much cared, either. The German soldiers were back of the line for a while. The Ivans weren’t shooting at them, so they were letting off some steam.

The match was panzer black against infantry
Feldgrau
. Theo was the radio operator in a Panzer II. His black coverall wasn’t warm enough. His teammates heated themselves up running and falling and bumping into one another—and into the
Landsers
on the other side. A goalkeeper just stood there, waiting for something horrible to happen … and freezing while he waited. Theo didn’t complain. He never did. Come to that, he rarely said anything at all. He lived as much of his life as he could inside his own head.

If he had been moved to complain, he would have bitched about the quality of the match in front of him. Both sides would have been booed off the pitch if they’d had the gall to try to charge admission to an exhibition like this. He wasn’t the best ’keeper himself, but he liked to watch well-played football. This was more like a mob of little kids running and yelling and booting the ball any which way.

One of the guys in black missed a pass he should have been able to field blindfolded. A fellow in field-gray seized control of the ball. The mob thundered toward Theo. He tensed. A good defense would have stopped the attack before it got anywhere near him. Unfortunately, a good defense was nowhere to be found, not here.

He also tensed because there was liable to be an argument if one got past him. He hated arguments. And the makeshift goals were made for them. A couple of sticks pounded into the ground marked each one’s edges; a string ran from the top of one stick to the top of the other at more or less the right height. No net to stop the ball. Did somebody score or not? There’d already been two or three shouting matches.

But he didn’t have to worry, not this time. A tall man in black headed the ball away from danger before the incoming infantry could launch it at Theo. “Way to go, Adi!” one of the other panzer crewmen yelled. Theo couldn’t have put it better himself.

Adalbert Stoss took the praise in stride—literally. He ran the ball down, took it on the side of his foot, and expertly steered it up the field.
Theo watched his back with proprietary admiration. Adi drove the panzer on which he himself ran the radio.

Smooth and precise as an English pro, Adi sent a pass to the right wing, then dashed into position in front of the other side’s goal. For a wonder, the guy to whom he sent the pass didn’t let it roll past the touchline. For a bigger wonder, he sent back a halfway decent centering pass. And Adi booted it past two defenders and the infantry’s ’keeper.

“Goal!” the panzer men yelled, pumping their fists in the air. The soldiers in
Feldgrau
couldn’t argue, not about that one.

Glumly, the infantrymen started from the halfway line. Before they’d done much, Adi Stoss swooped in and commandeered the ball. He charged up the pitch with it, sliding past
Landsers
as if they were nailed to the dirt. Only a wild, desperate lunge from the enemy ’keeper kept him from scoring again.

“No fair,” a panting foot soldier—right now a footsore foot soldier—complained. “You fuckers snuck a ringer in on us.”

“Like hell we did.” The closest panzer man pointed back toward Theo. “He’s in the same crew as our goalkeeper.”

“Scheisse,”
the
Landser
said. “You ought to take him out anyway. He’s too damn good.”

“I didn’t know, that wasn’t in the rules,” the panzer man replied.

“Well, it ought to be,” the foot soldier said, bending over and setting his hands on his knees so he could catch his breath. “Playing against him is like going up against a machine gun with water pistols.” He looked up. “Christ, here he comes again.” Shaking his head, he clumped off.

Theo had known Adi Stoss was uncommonly fast and strong, even among the extraordinarily fit men of the
Wehrmacht
. He’d never seen him play football before. He was even more impressed than he’d thought he might be. If Adi wasn’t good enough to make his living in short pants, Theo couldn’t imagine anybody who would be.

Thanks largely to his efforts, the panzer side beat the infantrymen, 7–4. Soldiers in black passed bottles of the distilled lightning the Poles brewed from potatoes to soldiers in field-gray. Theo was glad to get outside some of the vodka. He wasn’t normally much of a drinking man,
but in weather like this he figured he needed antifreeze as much as his panzer did.

Sergeant Hermann Witt, the commander of Adi and Theo’s machine, had run up and down the rutted field. He put an arm around Adi’s shoulder. “Man, I didn’t know you could play like that,” he said expansively—his other hand clutched a bottle.

“Fat lot of good it does me.” Adi sounded surprisingly bitter.

“You just made those ground pounders look like a bunch of jerks,” Witt said. “Nothing wrong with that. They think we’re out of shape because we don’t tramp like horses all day long. I guess you showed ’em different.”

“I like to play. That’s all there is to it.” Adi shook himself free of the sergeant.

Witt turned to Theo. “What’s eating him?”

“Beats me.” Theo had an opinion, which he kept to himself. As far as he was concerned, opinions were like assholes: necessary, but not meant for display.

The panzer commander frowned, lit a cigarette, and coughed. “I didn’t mean to piss him off—he was great. But the way he acts, I could have told him he stinks.”

Theo only shrugged. The less he said, the less he’d have to be sorry for later. At least Witt was interested in keeping Adi happy. That was more than Heinz Naumann, the previous panzer commander, had been. There would have been trouble between the two of them if Naumann hadn’t stopped a bullet. Theo didn’t like trouble, which meant he could have picked a better time to be born.

An infantryman came up to him. “You’re in the same crew as that maniac?” the fellow asked.

“That’s right,” Theo said. “What about it?”

“If he drives like he plays, you’re screwed,” the foot soldier said. He swiped his sleeve across his forehead. Despite the cold, sweat stained his tunic under the arms. “He’ll send you right into the Russian panzers, and they’ll blow you to hell and gone. He doesn’t know how to go backwards.”

“We’re still here so far.” Theo looked to the touchline. His greatcoat lay over there. As soon as this mouthy guy—Theo saw anyone who
talked to him as a mouthy guy—went away, he could find it and put it on.

“Don’t get me wrong. He plays good,” the infantryman went on. After a moment, he added, “You weren’t bad yourself, dammit. I thought a couple of the shots you stopped’d go in for sure.”

“Thanks,” Theo said in surprise. He didn’t think he was anything out of the ordinary. You did your best to keep the ball from getting past you. Sometimes you did. Sometimes you couldn’t. Even if you couldn’t always, you tried not to look like too much of a buffoon out there.

“Well …” More slowly than he might have, the man in field-gray figured out Theo wasn’t the world’s hottest conversationalist. “See you. Try and stay in one piece,” he said, and walked off.

It was good advice. Theo hoped he could follow it. He was relieved when he found his greatcoat. Nobody who’d lost his own had walked off with it. If he found himself missing his, he might have done that. You didn’t screw your buddies when you were in the field. People you didn’t know could damn well look out for themselves.

There it was: the essence of war. You stuck with your friends and gave it to the swine on the other side as hard as you could. Theo knew who his friends were—the guys who helped him stay alive. He had nothing in particular against Russians, any more than he’d had before against Frenchmen or Englishmen or Czechs. But if they were trying to kill his pals and him, he’d do his best to do them in first.

The greatcoat fought winter not quite to a draw. The
Wehrmacht
needed better cold-weather gear. Boots, for instance: the Russians’ felt ones far outclassed anything Germany made. Well, there was more a ground pounder’s worry than a panzer man’s. Theo snorted. It wasn’t as if he had no worries of his own.

OUT IN THE
North Sea again. Lieutenant Julius Lemp felt the change in the U-30’s motion right away. The Baltic was pretty calm. As soon as you passed out of the Kiel Canal, you got reminded what real seas were like. And a U-boat would roll in a bathtub.

A rating up on the conning tower with the skipper said, “Somebody down below’s going to give it back—you wait and see.”

“Not like it’s never happened before,” Lemp answered resignedly. Once something got into the bilge water, it was part of a U-boat’s atmosphere for good. All the cleaning in the world couldn’t get rid of a stink. Overflowing heads, spilled honey buckets, puke, stale food, the fug of men who didn’t wash often enough, diesel fumes … Going below after the freshest of fresh air was always like a slap in the face from a filthy towel.

He went back to scanning horizon and sky with his Zeiss binoculars. Looking overhead was purely force of habit. Clouds scudded by not far above the gray-green sea. The RAF wasn’t likely to put in an appearance. But nobody who wanted to live through the war believed in taking dumb chances.

“Skipper …?” The rating let it hang there.

Lemp’s antennae that warned of danger were at least as sensitive as the metal ones on the boat that caught radio waves. Something was on the sailor’s mind, something he wasn’t easy talking about. The way things were these days, Lemp could make a good guess about what it was, too. All the same, the only thing he could do was ask, “What’s eating you, Ignaz?”

“Well …” Ignaz paused again. Then he seemed to find a way to say what he wanted: “It’s mighty good to be at sea again, isn’t it?”

“Now that you mention it,” Lemp answered dryly, “yes.”

Thus encouraged, Ignaz went on, “The only thing we’ve got to worry about out here is the goddamn enemy. That’s a good thing,
nicht wahr
?”

“Oh, you’d best believe it is,” Lemp said, and nothing more. Somebody on the U-boat was probably reporting every word even vaguely political from him to the
Sicherheitsdienst
. Probably every even vaguely political word from the whole crew. That was how things worked right now.