The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (53 page)

“We have to take back the country’s soul,” one of them said; Walsh thought it was Macmillan, but he wasn’t sure. The MP went on, “Whatever our sins, we haven’t done anything to deserve
this.
” He waved his left hand. He didn’t use his right arm much. Had he caught a packet in the last war? He was the right age.

“How do you propose to do that, sir?” Walsh asked. “Short of using soldiers, I mean? There’s plenty who like what’s going on—especially the blokes who don’t have to fight the Fritzes any more.”

Macmillan and his comrades all looked unhappy. “Ay, there’s the rub,” one of them murmured. “They think they can ride the tiger without coming back inside him.”

You could get drinks in the commons, as you could in a club. The MPs did. Cartland put Walsh on his chit. He’d come up in the world a bit, all right. These men were as disgusted and furious as any of the veterans in the Lion and Gryphon. Whether they had any better idea about how to change things remained to be seen.

NOVEMBER 5, 1940
, was chilly and gloomy in Philadelphia. It drizzled on and off. It wasn’t cold enough to turn the water in the streets to ice, but it didn’t miss by much. Peggy Druce would have been more disappointed if she’d been more surprised. Indian summer might linger this late, but more often than not it didn’t.

Her polling place was at a school only a couple of blocks from where she and Herb lived. Every fence and telephone pole was plastered with Roosevelt or Willkie posters. Some had both. Some had Alf Landon posters, too. Some had one guy’s stuck on top of the other’s. Some had a bunch of different layers going back in time like the rock strata that confounded geologists. Whoever got there with his stack of flyers and pastepot won … till the other side’s guys came by.

She marked her ballot for FDR and stuck it in the box. “Mrs. Druce has voted,” intoned the snowy-bearded poll attendant. He didn’t look old enough to have fought in the Civil War, but he might well have been alive through it.

She wondered if he’d ever seen Lincoln. One of her grandfathers had. She also wondered what Honest Abe would have made of the present
sorry state of the world. If Lincoln could have found anything good to say about it, she would have been very much surprised.

After completing the little secular ceremony, she went out onto the street. The rain had started up again while she was voting, so she raised her umbrella against it as she started home.

Several men who looked like bums collecting a day’s pay for booze called out Roosevelt’s name. Several others made noise for Willkie. Pennsylvania had laws against electioneering within a hundred feet of a polling place, but it wasn’t as if anyone took them seriously.

Peggy peeled off her galoshes when she got back. She was glad she’d worn them, even if they were ugly. She boiled water on the stove, poured it into a cup, and stuck in a bag of Lipton’s tea. They laughed at such things in England, but for fast and easy you couldn’t beat a teabag.

Her mouth twisted. She’d loved England and everything it stood for when RAF bombers unloaded on Berlin. They might have killed her, but she loved them anyhow.

Now … Now loving England wasn’t so easy. She wasn’t fighting Nazi tyranny any more. She was marching with it side by side. How could you say Horace Wilson—or Chamberlain before him—was any better than Hitler?

Oh, the English didn’t censor their newspapers … too much. They didn’t persecute their Jews … yet. Well, Mussolini didn’t persecute his Jews, either, but how many people held him up as a paragon?

“Shit,” Peggy said. Why not? Nobody was there to hear her, so the tree fell soundlessly in the middle of the forest. She poured some cognac into the hot tea. Maybe it would help sweeten her mood.

She drank the improved tea. It did warm her body the best way, from the inside out. Her spirit remained unthawed.

The radio might help. She turned it on and waited for it to warm up. The station it was tuned to gave forth with a quiz show so nauseating, she almost broke off the dial in her zeal to find a different one. Glenn Miller’s orchestra blaring away pleased her more … for a little while. The Nazis couldn’t stand jazz.

But her smile quickly slipped. Now that England was marching with Hitler, would it outlaw this “degenerate” music, too? And how about
France? How about Django Reinhardt? He wasn’t just a jazz guitarist. He had the nerve to be a
Gypsy
jazz guitarist. The Nazis gave Gypsies as hard a time as Jews, though Jews outside of Germany made more noise about what happened to their kind. Would the French abuse Django to sweeten up their partners in greed?

A hell of a thing when you couldn’t enjoy music without worrying about politics. But you couldn’t. Once upon a time, she’d liked Wagner—not always in large doses, but she had. She couldn’t listen to him any more without remembering how he made Hitler and the rest of the Nazi
Bonzen
stand up and whinny. The thought of that congealed her own pleasure.

And she couldn’t hear Shostakovich—or Aaron Copland, for that matter—without thinking,
Oh, yeah. He’s a Red
. Maybe the music would outlast the politics. Beethoven’s had. Nobody cared any more about what had inspired him. All that mattered was what he’d conceived in his mind and set down on paper.

Commercials followed: Ivory Soap, White King detergent, Old Golds, and De Sotos. Thirty seconds a pop, with singing and music as professional as they’d be on a piece of music from Tin Pan Alley. No great surprise there: Tin Pan Alley songsmiths sometimes turned working girl and sold their talent to the highest bidder. So did musicians and singers who hadn’t quite got to the top—and sometimes the ones who had. Neither the Nazis nor the Reds would have approved. Peggy wasn’t so sure she did, either, but for reasons of taste rather than ideology.

What she wanted was news. It was a quarter to the hour. The next record was a lot duller than the Glenn Miller piece. It was duller than a couple of the ads, in fact. They couldn’t all be gems. That was why some Broadway shows went dark after a week.

The news turned out to be mostly guesses about electoral turnout and reports of tornadoes ripping through the Midwest. Anything across the sea? Peggy would have done much better to turn on the shortwave set for the BBC or Radio Berlin or—less polished—Radio Moscow.

More commercials followed. Peggy didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.
This
was what she’d pined for all the time she was stuck in Scandinavia? As a matter of fact, it was, or at least some of what she’d
pined for. The rest, the biggest part, hadn’t come back from the office yet.

Peggy cast a longing look at the brandy bottle, but she didn’t pick it up. She and Herb still hadn’t had that heart-to-heart about who’d done what while they were apart for so long. She wondered if they ever would. A lot of married years had taught her that the best conversations were sometimes the ones you didn’t have. But there was a difference between
didn’t
and
couldn’t. Couldn’t
constipated things.

She thought so, anyhow. Maybe Herb did, too. Or maybe he didn’t have anything like that to talk about. She just didn’t know, and she didn’t have the nerve to find out. She was pretty sure he would forgive her, but she didn’t want to get any forgiveness unless she could dole out some of her own at the same time.

“Life’s a bastard sometimes, you know?” she told the refrigerator. It didn’t give her any back talk, for which she was duly grateful.

She had a beef stew going and close to ready when Herb walked through the front door. He fixed himself a stiff bourbon on the rocks. “Well, I voted,” he said, in tones as thrilled as the ones he would have used to announce he’d had a cavity filled.

“Yeah, me, too,” Peggy said. “Build me one of those, would you?”

“Sure.” He suited action to word. As he gave her the drink, he said, “Not like the last couple of times, is it? Hard to get excited about what happens.”

“Landon might win. Then we’d all leave town,” Peggy said.

“Boy, you can sing that in church!” Herb exclaimed.

After supper, they sat around with more drinks and plenty of smooth American cigarettes and listened to the returns come in. Taken as a whole, the Republicans put up a better fight against FDR than they had in 1932 or 1936. They picked up seats in the House and in the Senate.

But, with Alf Landon siphoning votes away from Willkie, Roosevelt won the slot at the top of the ticket going away. State after state reported an FDR plurality, if not always an FDR majority.

“A third term,” Herb said. “How about that?”

“How about that?” Peggy echoed. After a moment, she added, “It feels like it should mean more somehow, you know?”

“If England and France hadn’t flipflopped, we’d probably be in the war by now,” Herb said. Peggy nodded. They could talk about politics. That was easy. The other things, the harder things, still remained unsaid.

HANS-ULRICH RUDEL
didn’t think he’d ever been so happy to see snow fall, not even when he was a little boy and it promised him a white Christmas. The snow swirling around the airstrip promised him something even better: a chance to start pounding the Ivans again.

“About time!” he said, sticking out his tongue so snowflakes would land on it. “I was starting to wonder if the mud would ever freeze hard.”

Sergeant Albert Dieselhorst chuckled wryly. “Everything happens if you wait long enough. The trick is not going nuts while you’re waiting—and not driving everybody around you nuts, too.”

“Did I do that?” Hans-Ulrich sounded less innocent than he might have wished he did.

“You said it, sir. I didn’t,” Dieselhorst answered, which could only mean
yes
. It was also pretty much the same thing Jesus told Pilate when asked if he was King of the Jews.

You shouldn’t be thinking about Jews
, Hans-Ulrich’s well-trained National Socialist side insisted. But he didn’t always listen to that side. At the moment, his
Schwanz
didn’t want to listen to that side at all.
Sofia’s only a
Mischling.
She’s not a full-blooded Jew
, he told himself uneasily.

As if reading his mind—a trick good sergeants often gave the impression of owning—Dieselhorst asked, “And how’s your lady friend in Bialystok?”

“Fine, as far as I know,” Hans-Ulrich answered uncomfortably. “I haven’t heard from her since the last time I went back there on furlough.”

“Uh
-huh
,” Dieselhorst said, which could have meant anything at all. “You suppose she knows how to write you through the
Feldpost
?” Mail to military men got through almost no matter what. Even the
Frontschweine
got their letters from friends and family and lovers, sometimes under fire in the trenches.

“Well, I didn’t tell her,” Rudel said, more uncomfortably still. No one superior to him had said anything to him about having a half-Jewish
girlfriend. What would happen if he started getting letters from her, though? Letters always made things seem more official, more permanent. They might force the powers that be to notice.

“Don’t fuss.” Dieselhorst’s good cheer didn’t go with his own worries. “If she wants to find out, I’m sure she can.”

“Danke schön.”
That wasn’t what Hans-Ulrich wanted to hear. He changed the subject: “I wish they’d let us get airborne again now that we can.” Sitting around through the Russian mud time had only given him more of a chance to stew in his own juices.

“Don’t you worry. It’ll happen soon enough, whether you want it or not.” Dieselhorst shook his head in resigned amusement. “Somebody’s been feeding you raw meat, hasn’t he?”

By way of reply, Rudel said something he wished he had back the second it came out of his mouth. Instead of withering Sergeant Dieselhorst, it made the rear gunner and radioman laugh. Rudel retreated in disorder.

He was flying again the very next morning, against a concentration of Russian armor and infantry west of Pskov. Bursts of colored smoke from German artillery pointed out the village in which the Ivans had holed up. Without that, he might not have known which village it was. Nobody could say the Russians weren’t masters at concealing themselves, no matter whether one tried to find them on the ground or from the air. Several
Wehrmacht
men had got their throats cut inside German lines, with no remaining sign of whoever’d done the dirty work.

But the huts in the village weren’t big enough to hide panzers from the air. The enemy soldiers had done what they could, piling brush and whatnot over the parts that stuck out. That changed the houses’ outlines, though, and gave the game away. “I’m going in on one,” Hans-Ulrich told Dieselhorst as he tipped the Stuka over into a dive.

However much he wished he would, he didn’t catch the Russians by surprise. Tracers from enemy machine guns leaped up toward the Ju-87. A bullet gouged his thick windshield but didn’t get through. The panzer he’d picked as his own swelled beneath him.

His thumb hit the firing button. The Stuka staggered in the air as the underwing cannon went off. One round from each of them and Rudel
was hauling back on the stick for all he was worth, yanking the dive-bomber out of its plunge by brute force.

“You got him!” Dieselhorst yelled through the speaking tube. “The son of a bitch is burning!”

“Good,” Hans-Ulrich said. “Let’s go around again and see if we can take out another one.”

“You’re the boss,” Dieselhorst replied. If his tone implied that he thought Rudel was a few liters short of a full gas tank, the pilot didn’t have to listen to him.

Listen Hans-Ulrich didn’t. He fought for altitude. It took a while—the Ju-87 really did lose performance when it carried these 37mm guns. Then he dove again. This time, the Ivans were waiting for him but good. They fired off everything they had as his plane plunged toward the ground. But they had only machine guns and rifles. A Stuka was built to shrug off a good many small-arms hits and keep flying. Hans-Ulrich fired the 37mm guns again.

“He’s burning, too!” Dieselhorst reported as the pilot pulled out of the second dive. “Burning like a motherfucker!”