The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (48 page)

“Here,” he said at last. He signed his name for the final time—he hoped it was for the final time!—and shoved the sheaf of papers back across the counter at the personnel sergeant.

That worthy went through them to make sure Walsh had crossed every
i
and dotted every
t
. He didn’t find anything missing, which seemed to disappoint him. When he’d examined the last form, he asked, “Have you any idea what you’ll do after leaving his Majesty’s service?”

“Not the foggiest notion,” Walsh answered, more cheerfully than he felt. “Something will turn up before I land on the dole. I hope so, any road. If all else fails, maybe I’ll go to Spain. I hear the Republic is still taking on men who want to fight for her.”

The way the personnel sergeant curled his lip said what he thought of that. It also said he’d watched a lot of aristocratic officers and was doing his best to imitate them. It was the kind of sneer that tempted Walsh to say the hell with Spain and to go sign on with the Red Army instead. Any man who didn’t turn a bit Bolshie when he saw a sneer like that wasn’t worth the paper he was printed on.

“You’d sooner fight for a pack of wogs than your own country?” the personnel sergeant said. It was
that
kind of sneer. Oswald Mosley would have been proud of it—which was, in its own way, a measure of Mosley’s damnation.

“No, I’d sooner fight for my own country, all right,” Walsh said, wondering how long that punch in the nose could be delayed. “But I’m not about to fight for the
Führer
. They aren’t the same thing, and it doesn’t matter if the Prime Minister says they are. I know a damned lie when I hear one. I don’t care who comes out with it, either.”

Even under the rather dim bulbs that lit the personnel office, he could see the other sergeant go red. “It’s just as well that you’re getting out,” the man said.

“You bet it is,” Walsh agreed. He started to turn away, then paused. “When does it become official?”

“Oh, you’re out. Don’t fret yourself over that,” the personnel sergeant said. “The gents who run things, they don’t want your kind in. You can take that to the bank, you can.”

For upwards of twenty years, officers had been telling Walsh that men like him were the backbone of the British Army. His fitness reports
had shown the same thing. All the same, he didn’t doubt the personnel sergeant for a minute. Men who were not only able to think for themselves but insisted on doing so were dangerous—at least to their superiors’ peace of mind—in any army.

Walsh left the personnel office with his last fortnight’s pay and his provisional discharge papers in hand. He wondered if London would look different now that he was a civilian. It didn’t, not so far as he could tell. A crew of men in uniform was hauling down a barrage balloon. No one expected Russian air raids, and people didn’t have to worry about Hitler any more. Wasn’t life grand?

Part of it was: no one could give him orders now. On the other hand, he needed to start worrying about bed and board … and everything else. What
was
he going to do now? As he’d told the personnel sergeant, he hadn’t the faintest idea. But he wouldn’t do anything because some damn Fritz told him to. As far as he was concerned, that mattered most.

THE TRAIN ROLLED
into Germany. German soldiers—or maybe they were just frontier guards; their uniforms looked funny—waved to the French soldiers inside. Some of the
poilus
waved back.

Luc Harcourt muttered in disgust. To hell with him if he’d do anything like that. Most of the fellows who waved were new fish. They hadn’t come up against German tanks and artillery and machine guns and dive bombers and grenades and … The list went on and on. They hadn’t come up against Germans, was what it boiled down to. Luc had. Politics might put him on the same side as the
Feldgrau
bastards, but politics couldn’t make him like them.

Beside him, Lieutenant Demange chain-smoked Gitanes. He would have done that anywhere, probably including church. “I wish I never would have come along for this, you know?” Luc said.

“Yeah, yeah. Wish for the moon while you’re at it.” Demange gave out as much sympathy as he usually did: none. “You should have let the pox eat off your foreskin. Then they would have thought you were a kike and given you something else to do.”

“You love everybody, don’t you?”

“But of course.” The cigarette in the corner of Demange’s mouth
jerked as he spoke. It always did. Somehow, it never fell out, even when it got so small the coal was about to singe his lips.

“Well, come on. Did you ever figure we’d be fighting with the Nazis and not trying to blow their heads off?”

“No, but I’m not that surprised, either.
Cochons
we’ve got running things, they were always scared to death of another war with Germany. That’s how come we’ve got the Maginot Line. That’s how come Daladier went to fucking Munich: to hand Hitler the Sudetenland. But Hitler went to war anyhow, so we got sucked in. The good thing about fighting the Russians is, they’ve got to go all the way through Germany before they can bother us.”

“Oh, no, they don’t. We’re going to them,” Luc said.

Demange waved that aside. “You know what I mean. Think like a Paris politico. If the Germans took the place, they’d grab your mistress and her flat, and you’d be stuck in the provinces with your wife.” He rolled his eyes at the inexpressible horror of the idea.

“Wonderful. Fucking marvelous,” Luc said. “I’d sooner be a politico stuck with a fat, fifty-year-old wife than a
poilu
on his way to Russia to get his dick shot off.”

“But the politicos don’t give a shit what you’d sooner.” Demange pointed out that basic truth with a certain savage gusto all his own. “And they’ve got tough bastards like me to make good and sure you do like they tell you.”

“You’re on your way to Russia to get your dick shot off, too,” Luc observed. “What good does being a politico’s watchdog do you?”

“Hey, I still get to tell all the sorry
cons
under me what to do,” Demange answered. “Now that the dumb fucks went and made me an officer, I get to tell more sorry assholes what to do than ever.”

“Doesn’t help when the artillery starts coming in,” Luc said.

For once, he might have got under Demange’s armored hide. “Ahh, shut up,” the older man said. Because he was an officer and Luc only a sergeant, Luc had to do as he was told.

In due course, they passed from Germany into Poland. Luc had never heard French spoken with a Polish accent before. German-accented French was a joke—a nervous joke, but a joke. Luc remembered a prewar cartoon of Hitler holding out a French translation of
Mein Kampf
and going,
“Barlons vrançais.”
The way he butchered the French for
We speak French
gave his words the lie. But French with a Polish twist sounded extra weird—along with odd pronunciation, the Poles put the accent for every multisyllable word on the next to last.

And Poland looked weird, too. It wasn’t the people Luc saw from the windows as the troop train rolled through towns (well, except for the black-hatted, long-coated, bearded Jews, who seemed like refugees from another time). It wasn’t even the towns themselves. None of them would turn into Paris any time soon, but no provincial French towns would, either. It was the countryside. There was too much of it, and it was too flat.

“What did they do to get it like this?” he asked Demange. If the veteran didn’t know everything, he sure didn’t admit it. “It looks like somebody ironed the whole place.”

“We spent billions of francs building the Maginot Line, like I was talking about a few days ago,” Demange answered. “How much do you suppose the Poles would have to lay out to make themselves some mountain ranges?”

Luc hadn’t looked at it like that. After a moment’s thought, he nodded. “Yeah, that’s about what it would take, isn’t it?” He clicked his tongue between his teeth as another kilometer of plain rolled by. “But what happens because they can’t make mountains?”

Lieutenant Demange’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a horrible grin. “What happens? I’ll tell you what happens, my little cabbage.” He made as if to pat Luc on the cheek. Luc knocked his hand away. Unfazed, Demange finished, “Germans and Russians happen, that’s what.”

“Mm.” Luc nodded again. “Must be fun being a Pole, huh?”

“Well, some of the broads aren’t half bad,” Demange said, and Luc nodded one more time. Some of the women he’d seen were spectacular beauties, with more stuff to hold on to than you could shake a stick at. But, again, Demange wasn’t done. He gave his verdict with the air of a judge passing sentence: “Except for that, you couldn’t pay me enough to be a Pole.”

Once more, Luc didn’t care to try to tell him he was wrong. When the people running your country saw the Nazis as the lesser of two
evils—and when they might well prove right—you were, not to put too fine a point on it, in deep shit.

Once they got east of Warsaw, they started passing through country that had been fought over. It all looked much too familiar to Luc: the wrecked farmhouses, the untended fields, the rusting hulks of tanks and trucks, the cratered ground, the occasional crashed airplane, the hasty graves marked by homemade wooden crosses or just by rifles topped with helmets. The farther east they went, the worse the fighting looked to have been.

Then things changed again. Without warning, signs stopped making any sense at all. Luc could no more understand Polish than he could fly, but he could try to sound out the incomprehensible words. Chances were he was botching them worse than Poles botched French, but he could try. When the alphabet itself stopped meaning anything …

When the alphabet itself stopped meaning anything, they weren’t in Poland any more. They were in the USSR. The Germans had the same problem here. Luc saw quite a few of their signs importantly pointing this way and that, stark black letters on a snowy ground. He didn’t read German, either, though more of the words looked familiar than they did in Polish. But even seeing letters he could understand felt oddly reassuring.

The train stopped. Luc expected silence outside the car now that the noise from the engine and the wheels was gone. Instead, he heard something like far-off thunder. Somebody’s artillery was going to town.

Lieutenant Demange gave him that dreadful grin again. “Well, we won’t have to go real far to find the front, will we?”

“No. What a pity,” Luc said, for all the world as if he meant it. Demange’s sour chuckle said he understood.

A German officer came up to the detraining Frenchmen and immediately started shouting orders—in his own language, of course. None of the soldiers in khaki moved. Luc knew that, even if he did speak German, he would sooner lose a nut than admit it. Apparently, he wasn’t the only one here who felt that way.

His government could make him board a train. It could ship him east. But it couldn’t turn him into a good ally. If the Germans didn’t
happen to like that, well … What a pity. For the first time since stepping down onto Soviet soil, he smiled.

A DORMOUSE MIGHT
find room to sleep inside a Panzer II. An ordinary human being didn’t stand a chance. Theo Hossbach and his crewmates did the next best thing: they dug out a space under the little panzer, using its armored chassis and tracks to protect them from anything the Ivans threw their way.

It was crowded under there, but less crowded than inside the machine. Not so many sharp metal corners to catch you in the knee or the elbow or the side of the head, either. And Theo and Adi Stoss and Hermann Witt got along pretty well. They shared cigarettes and food and, whenever they could liberate some, vodka.

“I didn’t like those clouds late this afternoon,” Stoss said as they were settling down. “Looked like rain.”

“Smelled like rain, too. Still does,” Witt put in, wrinkling his nose in the fading, gloomy light. “Wet dust—know what I mean?”

Adi nodded. So did Theo. One of the reasons you dug in under your panzer was to give the beast room to settle. If the ground was soft, it could settle enough to squash you flat unless you were careful. And, of course, it would settle more if rain softened things.

But they’d dug enough of a cave so they wouldn’t have to worry about that. Which didn’t mean Theo didn’t worry. Theo always worried. He had reason to worry here, too. When the fall rains started in this part of the world, they didn’t stop for six weeks or so. All the roads that weren’t paved turned to bottomless lengths of ooze. The next paved road Theo saw more than a couple of kilometers outside a Soviet city would be the first.

That was on the panzer commander’s mind, too. “You know, our maps eat shit,” he remarked, not quite apropos of nothing.

“You bet,” Adi Stoss agreed. “What they call main highways are horrible dirt tracks. And the secondary roads—the ones on the maps, I mean—mostly aren’t there at all for real.”

“The railroads suck, too,” Witt said. Once soldiers started bitching,
they commonly had a hard time stopping. “Why did the fucking Ivans pick a wider gauge than everybody else in Europe?”

“So we couldn’t use our rolling stock on their lines when a war started,” Adi answered. “It works, too.”

By the same token, the Russians couldn’t use their cars and engines farther to the west. Their planners must have been afraid they were more likely to retreat than to advance when they banged heads with Germany. On the evidence of two wars, those planners had known what to fear.

Theo pulled his blanket over his head. Adi and Hermann kept talking for a while, but they lowered their voices. Theo fell asleep as if sledgehammered. Anybody who said war wasn’t a wearing business had never been through one.

He woke early the next morning to a soft, insistent drumming on the panzer overhead and on the ground all around. No wonder it had looked like rain the afternoon before. No, no wonder at all. His lips shaped a soundless word:
“Scheisse.”

His comrades stirred a few minutes later. They swore, too, not at all silently. “Break out the soup spoons,” Adi said. “The easy advances just quit being easy.”