The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (23 page)

Nothing much was happening in the west. In what was happening there, the front line was moving toward the German border, not away from it. Unless you listened with an atlas in hand, you’d never know it from what the newsreader said. By the way he made things sound, panzers would roll through Paris any minute now—maybe even ahead of the ones rolling through Moscow.

He claimed enormous numbers of English and French terror
bombers—they were always terror bombers—shot down the day before. No alarms had sounded over Münster. Had the other side’s bombers not come here? Or was the newsreader making things up? How could you tell? You couldn’t. He went on to claim even more enormous numbers of Russian terror bombers destroyed in the east. And he gloated about the dreadful things German bombers were doing to military targets—only to military targets, of course—in London and Paris and half a dozen Russian cities, some of which he had trouble pronouncing.

Wasn’t he trying to have things both ways? It seemed so to Sarah. By her father’s ironic eyebrow, it seemed so to him, too.

The announcer also bragged about Japanese raids in Siberia, and about the signing of a new German-Swedish economic agreement. “Thus we preserve Sweden’s neutrality, as we preserved Denmark’s and Norway’s,” he declared. He sounded perfectly serious about it. Father’s eyebrow quirked again anyhow.

Then the fellow went on to condemn an economic agreement between France and the United States. The enemy sought to drag America into their unjust war—at least if you listened to him. Sarah thought her father’s eyebrow would jump right off his forehead. It was only radio, so she couldn’t see the newsreader’s face. How could he possibly hold it straight? But even if he was grinning, he sounded as if he meant what he said.

“I now turn to the occupied regions of Bohemia and Moravia,” he went on in portentous tones. That was what German authorities were calling the conquered part of Czechoslovakia, the part that hadn’t turned into the puppet state of Slovakia. “Despite all warnings, Jews in these regions have continued in their anti-German activities. As a result of their vicious folly, the
Führer
and the
Reichsführer
-SS see that they have no choice but to implement appropriate countermeasures.”

Sarah and her father and mother all stared straight at the radio. What did that mean? Whatever it meant, it didn’t sound good. What
had
Hitler and Himmler come up with?

The newsreader proceeded to spell things out: “The Jewish bacillus in the occupied territories of Bohemia and Moravia must be quarantined. Accordingly, the
Führer
has ordered all Jews in the aforementioned
occupied territories to be transferred to the town of Teriesenstadt, where they may be concentrated, observed, and guarded against. Personnel under the command of the
Reichsführer
-SS will facilitate the transfer and supervise the just distribution of any property abandoned in the process.”

Father’s eyebrow didn’t quirk this time. Both brows came down and together in a frown that might have suited Jove’s awesome visage. “It’s a ghetto, that’s what it is,” he said heavily. “A hundred years after we got out of them, they’re shoving us back in again. Western civilization!” He made the words into a curse.

“He talked about abandoned property,” Mother added. “What do they give the Jews? One suitcase apiece?”

“Or maybe just the clothes on their backs,” Father said.

“How many Jews in Czechoslovakia?” Sarah asked.

Her mother and father looked at each other. She shrugged. He spread his hands. “Not as many as there are in Poland—that’s all I can tell you for sure,” he said. “The ones there are lucky their government is on the Nazis’ side, or they’d get the same or worse.”

“Some luck,” Sarah said.

“It is,” Father insisted. “Poland has millions of Jews—I know that. I’ve never had much use for
Ostjuden
. Sometimes they seem almost as backward and barbarous to me as they do to Hitler. They’d sooner pray than think, if you know what I mean. But when push comes to shove, they’re my people. The Nazis have said so all along, and they’ve finally convinced me they’re right.”

“What can we do to help the Czech Jews?” Sarah asked.

Her father spread his hands again. “Nothing I can think of, not unless you want the SS visiting us again. We can hope the Germans don’t decide to throw
us
into ghettos, too.” He hesitated. When he spoke again, he sounded surprised at himself: “We can
pray
they don’t decide to do that. I always thought the
Ostjuden
prayed too much. Could it be we don’t pray enough?” Hearing that from such a secular man as Father told Sarah more clearly than anything else how much the times had changed.

s a Welshman, Alistair Walsh did not have a high opinion of eastern Scotland. The terrain was low and flat and full of Scots. Dundee couldn’t have been duller if it rehearsed. Walsh said so in several pubs. He couldn’t even get into a good fight. Too many of the other soldiers stranded in those parts agreed with him.

But, all things considered, he could have been worse off. The Germans might have sunk the ship that plucked him out of Namsos. He might not have got out, in which case he would be languishing inside barbed wire in a POW camp. Yes, there were all kinds of interesting and unpleasant possibilities.

And he was on leave, while the great military bureaucracy tried to figure out what to do with him and his fellow survivors. He tried to pick up barmaids. The Scots girls were pretty, but they seemed depressingly chaste. He hired a bicycle and rode out into the countryside. Going someplace where no one was trying to kill you or even give you orders had its points.

The only thing better than traveling in a place like this by himself would have been traveling in the company of a friendly young lady.
Since he wasn’t having much luck on that score, he went alone. Soldiers he saw too often anyhow. Getting away from them was more fun than going out with them would have been.

He’d had almost two decades of peacetime service between the wars. A year and a half of the genuine article was enough—no, far more than enough—to make all that seem to belong to another, and very distant, lifetime. The hired bicycle creaked and squeaked under him. He didn’t care. All he heard except for the bike were the wind, an occasional crow’s caw, and the even more occasional rattle of a passing auto. Not many motorcars were on the roads, not with petrol so savagely rationed.

His ears drank in the quiet. You didn’t realize how badly war abused them till you got away from the racket of gunfire and explosions for a while. He suspected he’d be deaf as a stump when he got older. The prospect bothered him less than it might have. The way things were going, living long enough to grow old and deaf didn’t seem half bad.

A farmer out in the middle of an emerald field of new-sprouted barley waved to Walsh as he pedaled past. Cautiously—he hadn’t been on a bicycle in a while, and the road was bumpy—the sergeant lifted a hand from the handlebars and waved back.

He rode on. Another farmer came up the road perched on a wagon pulled by two mismatched horses. Did he have a motorcar he couldn’t drive because he couldn’t get fuel for it? Walsh wouldn’t have been surprised. You made do with what you had. He’d seen as much on the Continent. He wasn’t surprised to see it in Britain, too. This time, he waved first. The farmer gravely returned the courtesy.

When Walsh first heard the buzz of airplane engines, he thought his ears were ringing because they weren’t used to so much silence all around. Before long, though, he decided the sound was real. Then, for a few seconds, he believed it was coming from an RAF plane. But that wasn’t right, either. The engines sounded a different note, one that made the short hair at the nape of his neck prickle up.

“Bugger me blind if that’s not a German,” he muttered as he pulled to a stop on the grass at the edge of the road. He peered up at the sky, shielding his eyes against the sun. “What the bleeding hell is Fritz doing here?”

A bombing raid on Dundee from Norway? A
daylight
bombing raid?
Was Fritz that stupid? Walsh didn’t think so. And the noise in the sky didn’t sound like squadron after squadron of bombers.
One
plane was up there, no more. Walsh’s ears had been abused, but he was sure of that.

Then he spotted it. He recognized it right away. German planes mostly had sharper angles than their RAF counterparts. This one was … “A 110!” Walsh had no doubt. He’d been strafed several times by the two-engined fighters roaring along at just above treetop height. This Bf-110 flew quite a bit higher, but its shape was unmistakable.

He scratched his head. He wasn’t lousy any more—that was something. But why on earth would a lone 110 fly over Scotland? Had some Nazi pilot poured down too much schnapps and taken off on a bet, or full of drunken bravado? That was madness, but so was everything else Walsh could think of.

Then the madness got even crazier. A parachute popped open. Whoever’d been flying that plane was coming to earth apart from it. Why, in the name of heaven? Walsh didn’t think anything was wrong with the airplane. Even after the fellow inside bailed out, the 110 flew on as if nothing had happened. The engine note never changed. It hadn’t changed before the flyer hit the silk, either.

Walsh got a crick in his neck. The descending ’chute was almost overhead. Walsh started to duck, imagining himself getting clopped by the German’s boots. But the breeze carried the fellow a few hundred yards into the field through which the road ran.

Walsh trotted toward him. He’d closed about half the gap before he wondered how smart he was. German pilots commonly carried pistols, while he was unarmed. But he was in his own country, for Christ’s sake. The German would have to be daft to plug him. Of course, the German had to be daft to come here like this in the first place, so what did that prove?

“Hands up!” Walsh yelled.
“Hände hoch!”
He spoke little German, but most British soldiers learned that one.

The flyer had a knife. He used it to cut himself free of the parachute shrouds. The canopy tumbled off across the field. The man slowly got to his feet. He favored one ankle a little. Walsh shouted at him again. With a smile, he let the knife drop to the ground and raised his hands. He was
in his mid-forties—very old for a pilot—with bushy black eyebrows and a chin that stuck out. He looked oddly familiar.

“Do not fear me,” he said in good English. “I come in peace.”

“In a Messerschmitt-110? Sure you do, mate,” Walsh retorted.

“I am Rudolf Hess,” the man said.

And damned if he wasn’t. No wonder he looked familiar. In how many photographs had Walsh seen him at Hitler’s elbow? Half the time, his hand would be upraised in the stupid Nazi salute. To save his hide, Walsh couldn’t remember exactly what Hess’ title was. He was one of the biggest of the Party big shots, though. So what the bleeding hell was he doing in the middle of a Scottish field, still wearing a parachute harness? Walsh asked him, in lieu of standing there with his mouth hanging open like a stupid clot.

“I am come to confer with your government,” Hess answered, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Maybe he saw that Walsh wondered whether he was out of his skull, because he added, “Unofficially, of course.”

“Oh, of course,” Walsh said. “Confer about what?”

He guessed Hess would tell him it was none of his damned business. But Hess didn’t. “Why, about ways to end this unfortunate war between Germany and England and France,
natürlich.
”

“Natürlich,”
Walsh echoed in a hollow voice. “You could start by telling your soldiers to quit trying to kill me.”

“This I wish to do. We waste our time fighting one another,” Hess said seriously. “Better we should all fight the Russians together. So I feel. So feels the
Führer
also.”

All of a sudden, Walsh stopped wondering if Hess was a nutter. The staff sergeant had no idea whether Neville Chamberlain’s government would make a deal like that, or whether France would go along if it did. But the government might. It might. The breeze felt chillier—or did the cold come from inside him? He had to force words out one by one: “I’d better take you back into Dundee.”