The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (7 page)

The rest of the passengers laughed like loons. Pretty soon, they were making their own outrageous cracks … all of them but Stas. Maybe the Red Army man was what he seemed to be: a fellow with plenty of hooch and a quick tongue. Then again, maybe his proper arm-of-service color was NKVD blue. Maybe he was looking to build some cases.

He wouldn’t build one against Anastas Mouradian. Despite what Sergei said, Mouradian didn’t run his mouth all the time, or in the company of people he feared were provocateurs. And vodka didn’t make him lose his caution. Some Soviet citizens ended up in the gulag for talking too much while they were drunk. But the USSR had even more drunks than camp inmates. Plastered or not, most drunks knew how to keep their big mouths shut. And if that wasn’t a judgment on the Soviet system, Mouradian didn’t know what would be.

BACK WHEN HE
was conscripted, Luc Harcourt had never imagined he would be proud of the two brown hash marks on his sleeve that proclaimed him a corporal. All he’d wanted to do was put in his time and get the hell out. He was a normal draftee, in other words.

Things looked different when you got into a war. The nasty boys in field-gray were doing their damnedest to overrun your country—and, not too incidentally, to murder you. What seemed a waste of time when he could have been working and chasing girls in the peacetime civilian world was suddenly a rather more important business.

He was proud of commanding a machine gun, too, and that his subordinates
thought he was doing a good job of it. Joinville was a small, swarthy, excitable Gascon. They called Villehardouin Tiny. In fact, he was enormous: big and strong and blond and fair. He hardly said anything, at least in French—he was much more at home in Breton. Joinville had learned some of it, and Luc was starting to pick it up. It made a good language to swear in.

Joinville carried the Hotchkiss machine gun. Tiny Villehardouin toted the tripod, which weighed a couple of kilos more. Other soldiers—just who could vary—lugged crates full of the aluminum strips of bullets that fed the Hotchkiss gun. Luc, as befitted his exalted rank, carried nothing … except when they couldn’t dragoon any privates into hauling whatever needed hauling. Then Luc took care of it. He’d been a private not so long before. He didn’t have much dignity to stand on. That was one of the reasons the other men who served the machine gun thought he made a pretty fair leader.

So did Sergeant Demange, who’d given him the slot after the poor fellow who had it became a casualty. Demange’s approval was worth having, especially if he was set over you. He was a professional noncom. He’d fought in the last war, and been wounded. A Gitane always hung from one corner of his mouth. It didn’t keep him from being fluently profane. The milk of human kindness ran thin and curdled in him; he was the most cynical man Luc had ever met.

“You can really handle that motherfucker,” he told Luc after a skirmish in which the Hotchkiss helped send the Germans off unhappy. “You see? You’re not quite the stupid, gutless asshole you were when you got sucked into the army.”

“Thanks a bunch, Sergeant,” Luc said, in lieu of
Why don’t you suck this?
He’d come far enough in his military career that he could sass Demange every now and again. He had to pick his spots, though, or he’d end up in the hospital, and not on account of the
Boches
.

“Any time, kid.” Demange grinned, showing teeth all those smokes had stained a nasty yellow-brown—if they weren’t that shade to begin with. He had to know what Luc was thinking. Mere thinking couldn’t land you in trouble … unless Demange felt like putting you there.

Artillery rumbled, off to the east. Whatever the Nazis were after, it was nothing close by. Nobody Luc knew would get hurt when those
shells came down. Sometimes that seemed to be the only thing that mattered. When you were in the middle of it, war could get very tribal.

“We should have pushed them back farther,” Luc said discontentedly.

“No shit!” Demange exclaimed, the cigarette jerking up and down. “We should’ve given ’em the bum’s rush, is what we should’ve done.”

“How come we haven’t?” Luc wondered.

Demange rolled his eyes, which were always tracked with red. It made him look angry, which he was—or, if he wasn’t, he could have taken his act on stage. “How come? I’ll fucking tell you how come. On account of the Germans scare half our generals shitless, and a big chunk of the other half want to hop into bed with ’em so we can all fight the cocksucking Bolsheviks together.”

“That’d screw things up, wouldn’t it?”

“Oh, just a little!” Demange spat out the butt, which was so short the coal almost singed his lips. He immediately took out the pack again. After he got a fresh one going, he grudgingly held out the pack to Luc.

“Thanks.” Luc took a smoke, then bent over and leaned close for a light. He was several centimeters taller than Demange, who intimidated the hell out of him even so. And no doubt the veteran noncom knew what he was talking about here. Every squad in the French army had a Communist or two in it. No matter what the right-wing generals—almost a redundancy—thought, the Reds wouldn’t be thrilled about fighting alongside the Nazis and against the fount of Marxism-Leninism.

Luc was no Communist. He didn’t want to fight alongside the Germans, either. They’d come too close to killing him too many times. They’d killed friends, and wounded others. He respected their skill; he didn’t think you could go up against Germans without quickly coming to respect it. All the same, as far as he was concerned, they made better enemies than allies.

Of course, a devil of a lot of generals felt that way about Russians. Sergeant Demange was right—they’d sooner go after the USSR than Germany. That, to Luc’s mind, was carrying things too far.

The wind wailed down off the North Sea. Snow swirled in it. It had been snowing in a halfhearted way all morning long. Now anything
more than a few meters away vanished behind that thick white cloak. Luc shivered in his greatcoat. The wind didn’t seem to know it was there.

“Merde alors!”
he shouted over that wailing. “How are we supposed to fight a war in such filthy weather? The
Boches
could bring up an armored division, but we’d never know it till the tanks started killing us.”

“It’s a cunt of a winter, all right,” Sergeant Demange shouted back. “To hell with me if I remember a worse one, and I go back a fuck of a lot further’n you do. But you know what else?”

“What?” Luc asked.

“Goddamn Nazis’re just as screwed up as we are. Two, three, five kilometers from here, some poor cocksucking
Boche
is sitting there shivering and scared to death our tanks are right outside his trench, getting ready to squash him into a blancmange. And he hates his generals and his politicians every fucking bit as much as we hate ours.”

“Oh, yeah?” Luc said, deeply skeptical. “Why would he? His generals halfway know what they’re doing. More than you can say about ours.”

“Why? I’ll tell you why.” And Demange proceeded to: “Because his generals tried to get Hitler but screwed it up, that’s why. Now nobody on the other side trusts anybody else. And when Nazis start not trusting each other, people end up dead.” He twisted his skinny, ratlike face into an exaggerated look of regret. “Breaks my heart, y’know?”

“I’ll bet,” Luc answered, which squeezed a wry chuckle out of the sergeant.

Demange lit another Gitane. He could have been in a hurricane, with winds of 250 kilometers an hour and rain coming down like Noah’s flood, and he still would have got his cigarette going. Cigarettes, after all, were
important
. “I’ve wasted enough time on you,” he said. “Now I’ll go waste it with some other sorry son of a bitch.”

“Love you, too, Sergeant,” Luc said. Laughing—and, of course, smoking—Demange ambled away. If the cold bothered him, he gave no sign.

“What was he going on about?” Joinville asked in his nasal accent after the sergeant was gone. He distrusted sergeants on general principles, as most privates did. Being a Gascon, he perhaps distrusted them
more than most. He also hated the weather more than most. Before Luc could answer, the swarthy southerner added, “Whole German army’s liable to be waiting out there.”

Luc repeated what Demange had said about the
Boches’
fearing the French army the same way.

“He said that?” Joinville asked. Luc nodded. Joinville grunted. “Well, he’s a prick, but I guess he’s not such a dumb prick.” By the way he eyed Luc, the same applied to him. Joinville might think Luc made a good commander for the machine gun, but he didn’t like authority of any sort. He made funny noises for Tiny, translating the talk into what passed for Breton. Villehardouin nodded to show he got it. They all crouched and waited for whatever happened next. Luc wished to God winter would finally give it up. Neither God nor winter seemed to be listening.

CORPORAL ARNO BAATZ
had his knickers in a twist. Awful Arno often got his knickers in a twist, but for once he wasn’t pissing and moaning about Willi Dernen. Willi approved of that. He could handle the
poilus
who were trying to punch his ticket for him. But, as somebody famous must have said at one time or another, God deliver him from his so-called friends.

Awful Arno pointed southwest, toward the closest French foxholes. “For heaven’s sake, men, be careful as long as this damned blizzard lasts,” he said. “The frog-eaters could sneak a whole army corps past our pickets in weather like this.”

He went on like that every time a blizzard tried to bury the German positions in northeastern France under untold meters of snow. In this truly godawful winter, he said it and said it and said it some more. Willi was sick and tired of listening to him. (Of course, Willi had been sick and tired of listening to Awful Arno long before this winter rolled around, but that was another story.)

A soldier named Klaus Metzger said, “Hey, Corporal, don’t you figure the Frenchies are as worried about us as we are about them?” Exactly the same thought had gone through Willi’s mind, but he knew
enough to keep his mouth shut. He didn’t feel like drawing Baatz’s fire today—life was too short. Metzger was a new replacement, and still naive about the ways of noncoms. Well, he’d find out.

And he did. Awful Arno swelled up like a puff adder about to strike. Willi didn’t think puff adders turned that unhealthy shade of purplish red, though. “Don’t you tell me what to figure!
I
tell
you
what to figure!” Baatz yelled. “Have you got that?”

“Sure, sure,” Metzger said with a placating little wave.

It failed to placate. Awful Arno went plum-colored: not a hue a human being was meant to have. He screamed the question again, right in Metzger’s face:
“Have you got that?”

Memories of apoplectic drill sergeants in basic training must have come back to the luckless private. He stiffened to a rigor mortis–like attention. The heels of his boots crashed together.
“Jawohl, Herr Unteroffizier!”
he said.
“Zu befehl, Herr Unteroffizier!”

Baatz went right on screaming at him. Baatz screamed at people for the fun of it. Willi didn’t think screaming at people was much fun, but he’d known plenty of noncoms who did. Awful Arno had the disease worse than most.

And he had the rank that gave him the right to be a pain in the ass. After he finally made Klaus Metzger eat enough crow to keep himself happy, he stomped off to inflict himself on soldiers farther down the trench.

Metzger stared after him. “Wow! That was fun,” the new fish said. “Is he always so bad?”

Willi shook his head. “Nah. Sometimes he’s worse.”

Awful Arno whirled. Willi’d forgotten he had rabbit ears. “What was that, Dernen?” he shouted.

“Nothing, Corporal.” Willi was ready to lie to save his own skin, or just to save himself grief.

“
Ja, ja
. Tell me another one.” But Baatz must have picked up tone rather than words, because he left it there. Willi celebrated by lighting a Gitane from a pack he’d taken off a captured Frenchman.

“Can I have one of those?” Metzger asked.

“Sure. Steady your nerves now that he’s done fucking you over.” Willi gave him the smoke, and a light.

Metzger’s cheeks hollowed as he inhaled. Then he coughed. He eyed the Gitane with sudden wary respect. “What the hell do the Frenchies put in there? Tastes like I’m smoking barbed wire.”

“That’s real tobacco, kiddo, is what that is,” Willi answered. “We mix ours with God knows what to stretch it further. You taste the straight goods again, you’re not used to it any more. You forget how strong it can be.”

“Strong? I hope to shit! One of these things could win the Olympic weightlifting medal if they ever hold the Games again,” Metzger said.

“Not this year,” Willi said. “We’re playing a different game now.”

The other
Landser
nodded. “Isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?”

A mortar round came down a few meters in front of the trench. Willi hated mortars as much as anything in this different game. You could hear ordinary artillery coming, often soon enough to have a good chance to duck. If the shell didn’t land right on top of you, you were probably fine. But only a faint whistle betrayed a mortar bomb before it burst. And ducking after it burst was what the Tommies called tough shit.

Metzger stared when Willi threw himself flat. He didn’t know what to listen for yet. Come to that, Willi wasn’t consciously aware of why he hit the dirt. He only knew he needed to. The bang and the snarl and screech of fragments slicing by overhead filled in the wherefores.

A moment later, Klaus Metzger stretched out beside him. “You all right?” Willi asked. Metzger wasn’t screaming, but wounds didn’t always hurt right away.

“Ja,” the other soldier answered. “Took me by surprise. How’d you know it was coming?”

Willi shrugged horizontally. “There’s a little noise. You’ll get the hang of it pretty quick—especially if they keep this shit up.”

More French mortar bombs were falling on or near the German entrenchments. Down the trench, from the direction in which Corporal Baatz had gone, someone started squalling like a stuck shoat. Was it Awful Arno? Too much to hope for, Willi supposed.