Two Fronts (50 page)

When it did, she changed the station as fast as she could turn the dial. That fast, bouncy jazz might be fine for jitterbugging soldiers on leave, and for the girls they’d sling over their shoulders or between their legs. Peggy wanted something with a real tune to it, though, not that pounding backbeat powered by bass fiddle and drums.

What she wanted was one thing. What she could find was liable to be a different kettle of crabs. A comic with a raspy voice and a Brooklyn accent—he seemed to want you to think he was Jimmy Durante’s cousin—made stupid jokes about how crowded trains were these days.

Trains
were
crowded. With gas rationing so tight, you couldn’t drive to Grandpa’s if the old man lived two states away. You had to take the train. And soldiers and sailors on leave or on official business had priority for seats. Okay, you could crack jokes about that. But comparing yourself to the cheese in a sandwich was just, well, cheesy. That was a joke Peggy made for herself, and it was a lot funnier than the ones Mr. would-be Durante was coming out with.

She didn’t waste more than a minute listening to him. On the next station she found, an earnest woman was explaining how to can vegetables. “Your victory garden will turn into a defeat unless you get the greatest possible use from it,” she declared.

That was bound to be true, but it wasn’t interesting, at least not to Peggy. She found some classical music. Stations were cautious about putting Wagner and other Nazi favorites on the air. If Germany and the USA did go to war, they’d probably disappear from broadcasts. But this was Vivaldi’s
The Four Seasons
. Yes, Mussolini was on Hitler’s side and Vivaldi was Italian, but he’d been dead so long it hardly mattered any more.

The Vivaldi was pleasant; as with Bach, you could listen very closely and admire how everything worked and how it all fit together—or you could just listen. Peggy just listened for a while. Then she decided she’d rather hear something else, so she looked for another station.

She found a detergent drama. Mama had just found out her daughter was falling for a guy with black-market connections. Music that had nothing to do with Vivaldi swelled dramatically as Mama tried to figure out whether to turn him in or to start rolling in lamb chops and other goodies she couldn’t hope to get honestly.

Peggy was sure Mama would rat on Rocky. That was the Right Thing to Do, so it was what people in soap operas did. Everything would come out fine in the end anyway, but that was how things worked in soap operas, too. A real Mama probably would have run out and got some mint jelly to go with the lamb chops, but people in Radioland didn’t do stuff like that.

She didn’t care enough to keep listening. Another twist of the dial captured a quiz show. Herb liked those. He was good at them, too—often better than the contestants. The capital of South Dakota? The King of Prussia during the Seven Years’ War? The American League batting champion in 1921? He’d come out with the answer before a contestant could ring a bell. And he’d be right, too. Herb knew all kinds of weird things. That probably made him better as a government examiner.

Peggy also knew a lot of weird things. The difference between her and Herb was that she didn’t passionately care about the capital of South Dakota, while he did. She supposed it was the same kind of difference as the one between people who played cards for the fun of it and the ones who wanted to serve up their opponents on a platter with an apple in their mouth. She nodded to herself. She played a decent game of bridge, and she enjoyed it. Herb fought for every point as if he were crawling under barbed wire to make a trench raid on the Hun.

So she could take quiz shows or leave them alone. She soon left this one alone. She finally found some news. The Navy said its submarines had sunk a Japanese destroyer and two freighters. That sounded good, but not good enough. She didn’t think the war in the Pacific could have been much more mishandled if she were running it herself.

Then the newsman said, “The RAF used American-built Flying Fortresses to conduct daylight raids against German manufacturing centers. The bombers, also known as B-17s, performed well and inflicted heavy damage. They have also been used by our Army Air Force to strike Japanese-held Pacific islands.”

Hitler had made Spain a proving ground for his planes and tanks. Now the
Führer
was on the receiving end as FDR did the same thing. What went around came around. Peggy would have bet dollars to doughnuts that old Adolf thought it was better to give than to receive.

A couple of miles behind Alistair Walsh, the English artillery had lined up as many guns as the artillerists could get their hands on, all of them hub to hub. They’d piled up as many shells for them as they could, too. And now they were shooting them at the Fritzes in western Belgium.

They’d started two days earlier, and they showed no signs of stopping. The staff sergeant hadn’t been at the Battle of the Somme; he hadn’t been old enough to join the Army in 1916. The bombardment before the Tommies went over the top must have been a lot like this, though.

The Battle of the Somme, of course, had been a bloody disaster, in both the slang and the literal senses of the word. A week’s worth of shelling hadn’t been enough to knock out German cannon and, more important, German machine guns. Something like 50,000 got killed trying to advance the first day of the attack, and the numbers didn’t shrink much in the days that followed. And all they acquired were a very few square miles of muck and corpses pulverized as thoroughly as modern science knew how.

He hoped—Christ, he prayed, and he wasn’t a man in the habit of praying—things would go better this time when the order to advance came. The tank was supposed to have consigned trench warfare and days-long bombardments to the same dustbin of history that held cavalry charges and infantry squares and catapults. Tanks made warfare mobile again. So all the big brains insisted, anyhow.

Then the Germans brought their Tigers into Belgium. Tigers smashed English tanks and French
chars
as if their armor were tinfoil. Not a single Allied fighting vehicle had a gun that could punch through a Tiger’s frontal plates.

Tigers were slow. They weren’t very maneuverable. They were so wide and heavy, they strained bridges and sometimes even broke them. Going forward, they left a lot to be desired. But God help you if you were in a Crusader or a Matilda and you had to try to shift them.

God hadn’t helped enough. Thanks to the Tigers and their own good soldiering and general stubbornness, the Germans had kept England and France from taking back most of Belgium.

Thus the reversion to the last war’s tactics.
If we kill them all and smash the whole countryside to rubble
, the thinking seemed to be,
we’ll be able to walk through them and then get on with the war
.

It might work. Stranger things had happened … hadn’t they? The generals seemed confident. Of course, from everything Walsh had heard, they’d seemed confident at the Somme, too. Even if this did work, would England and France have to repeat it ten miles farther east, and then another ten miles later after that? If they did, would any Belgians not in exile be left alive to reclaim their country? Would any country be left for them to reclaim?

Fascinating questions, all of them, but not questions even the most senior NCO was in any position to answer. Walsh mainly worried about what would happen once the shelling stopped and the officers’ whistles ordered the advance. Most of the Tigers, he assumed, would survive. A few would take direct hits on the turret or engine decking and go up, but most would remain.

What about the ordinary
Landsers
in their holes? Whether the guns could do for them would determine whether this was a replay of the Somme or something with a happier ending from the English point of view.

At the Somme, even English troops in sectors where the Fritzes got smashed had trouble going forward because the ground was so torn up. When they did advance, the ground complicated resupply or made it impossible. Now there were tanks and Bren-gun carriers and other tracked vehicles that could cope with the worst terrain. That would help.

Not all the shells here flew from west to east. The Germans shot back whenever they saw the chance—and, no doubt, whenever they managed to get shells to their big guns. Some of it was counterbattery fire. That didn’t bother Walsh. When the buggers in
Feldgrau
took their whacks at the English front line, though …

All he could do was hunker down and hope nothing landed close enough to murder him. He’d picked up a Blighty wound in each fight so far. If he got hit again, he couldn’t count on being so lucky three times in a row.

RAF bombers pounded the Germans, too, the usual planes by night and a few squadrons of American Fortresses by day. Spitfires escorted the day bombers, but the
Luftwaffe
savaged them anyhow. Watching one fall out of the sky in a flat spin with two engines on fire made Walsh think there might be more rugged ways to make a living than the one he’d found for himself.

Little by little, the English bombardment lifted. It didn’t die out altogether, but went after more distant targets. Ever so cautiously, Walsh looked out over the forward lip of the hole in which he crouched. If people ever sent a rocket to the Moon, whoever peered out from the cabin might see a landscape that looked a lot like this one. Oh, he wouldn’t spot shattered tree stumps on the Moon—or Walsh didn’t think so, anyhow. And all those battered coils of barbed wire also struck him as unlikely … unless the Lunarians were fighting a particularly vicious war amongst themselves. And if there were Lunarians, they might be.

Tanks rumbled and clanked forward. Infantrymen trotted along with them to protect them from determined Fritzes with grenades and Molotov cocktails or other handheld unpleasantnesses. Walsh wasn’t sorry his company hadn’t been told off for that little job. They’d done it before. Whenever you took the lead, you wanted to make sure you had all your policies paid up.

Blam! … Clang! … Boom!
Walsh didn’t see the enemy tank or antitank gun that opened up on the English armor. He recognized the flat, harsh bark of an 88, but wasn’t sure whether the dreaded German beast was mounted on a Tiger or in an emplacement all that gunnery hadn’t taken out. Either way, the
clang!
was a round penetrating a tank’s vitals, while the
boom!
was all the ammo inside the iron coffin going up at once. The turret flew off the stricken tank. It came down fifteen or twenty feet away, and squashed a luckless Tommy. The poor beggar was doubtless dead before he knew it, not that that would be much consolation for him and his mates.

Blam! … Clang! … Boom!
Another English tank turned into a burning hulk. The surviving tanks started shooting, but at what? Walsh still couldn’t see the cannon that was murdering them. Then German MG-34s and the newer, still more vicious MG-42s opened up on the foot soldiers stumbling across the broken ground.

Walsh had hated MG-34s since he first made their acquaintance in the war’s early days. They were as portable as Bren guns—you could even pick one up and fire it like a rifle if you had to—but put three or four times as much lead in the air. MG-42s were even worse. They fired so fast, you couldn’t really hear the separate rounds. An MG-42 sounded like a buzz saw, and cut men down like a buzz saw, too.

Officers’ whistles shrilled. “Follow me, men!” a captain shouted. “Our armor will lead us into the Germans’ rear!” He clambered up out of his hole and dogtrotted after the tanks and the men who’d advanced with them.

Follow me!
almost always produced the desired effect. So did a calculated show of bravery like the one the captain gave. “Come on, lads!” Walsh called to the Tommies within earshot. “No help for it—let’s be at ’em!” He got out of his own lovely foxhole and went after that captain.

He’d already seen more than enough to make him sure the attack wouldn’t do what the generals hoped it would. The bombardment hadn’t smashed the Nazis’ tanks or wiped out their machine-gun nests. Which meant neither foot soldiers nor armor would be seeing the Germans’ rear any time soon.

To show that to the brass hats, though, the Army had to pay the butcher’s bill. Walsh slipped in some mud and sprawled on his belly. A couple of rounds from a German machine gun cracked through the air where he probably would have been if he hadn’t taken a header.

Another man was down not far away, wailing and clutching at his thigh. Walsh crawled over to him. He did what he could to dress the wound. He gave the Tommy morphine. He stayed with the poor fellow as long as he could, or a little longer. It let him do something useful that didn’t put him in too much danger of getting killed. At last, reluctantly, he had to return to the attack. He could already see it wasn’t going anywhere. Eventually, the blokes who gave the orders would realize the same thing. His job now was to stay alive till they did. If their orders in the meantime would let him.

A SOFT BED
. Clean sheets. A shower ever day. Regular meals with enough food in them. Except for a scalp laceration and a mangled hand, Chaim Weinberg would have said he hadn’t had it so good since he got to Spain.