The Big Switch twtce-3

by Harry Turtledove

  “My left one,” Lieutenant Demange muttered, which pretty much summed up what Luc thought of the German’s declaration. Easier to advance when you had supplies than when you didn’t. That should have been obvious even to a Nazi.

  And also easier to advance when it wasn’t so goddamn cold. At first, the Germans had been relieved when the ground froze. It let their tanks and halftracks and motorcycles and trucks move forward again instead of getting stuck in the mud every few meters.

  But Russian cold didn’t know when to quit. The winter before had been as cold as any Luc had ever known in France. Now he’d decided he was only a beginner when it came to frigid winters. He also feared he wouldn’t be by the time he came home from Russia-if he ever did. Winters hereabouts were born knowing things their tamer cousins in Western Europe never learned.

  If he ever came home from Russia… Neither he nor his countrymen had been thrilled about the idea of taking on the Red Army. A good many Frenchmen were Reds themselves, and not all of them had been weeded out of the expeditionary force, not by a long shot. Even the French soldiers who weren’t Communists would have been happier to keep fighting Hitler’s crew. The Germans, after all, had invaded them.

  But their politicians had cut a deal, and this was what came of it. The Russians had dropped leaflets (written in better French than most Germans used) urging the French soldiers to go over to them, promising not just good treatment as prisoners but practically anything else their little hearts desired.

  A few Frenchmen did desert. But the promises were so overblown, they roused Luc’s ever-ready suspicions. Anything that sounded too good to be true probably was.

  He and his comrades hadn’t advanced against the Russians with any great enthusiasm. But the Russians, no matter how juicy the promises they packed into their leaflets, fought like wild animals. They weren’t skilled military technicians, the way the Germans were. They had no quit in them, though. If you wanted to shift them, you had to kill them. They weren’t about to run away.

  And you needed to make sure you killed them all. They had the wild animal’s gift for concealment. If you saw one, you could bet ten more were hiding close by. If you didn’t see one, ten more were liable to be hiding close by anyhow. The Russians had the charming habit of digging foxholes camouflaged from the front and shooting troops who incautiously went past them in the back.

  If you walked off into the bushes to take a crap, you were liable to get your throat cut. You were liable to have worse than that happen to you, too. One poor bastard in Luc’s company had been found with a French flag-just the kind you might wave if you were lining the sidewalks at a Paris parade on Bastille Day-stuck up his ass. Luc wondered if that happened to the poor, sorry poilus who went over to the Russians with leaflets in hand. He hoped not, but he wouldn’t have been surprised.

  One thing the way the Red Army fought undoubtedly did: it made the French fight the same way. When the other bastards were sneaky and murderous and cruel, the international proletarian brotherhood looked a lot less persuasive all of a sudden. You wanted to do unto others as they were doing unto you. Wasn’t that your best chance to stay alive?

  The Germans sure thought so. They’d fought a pretty clean war in France: not perfect, but pretty clean. Luc, who’d seen Landsers shot while trying to give up, knew his own side hadn’t fought a perfect war, either. Pretty clean, maybe, but not perfect. Here in Russia, the Germans didn’t even pretend to try. They fought at least as foully as the Red Army did. Most of the time, they didn’t bother taking prisoners. When they did, they often didn’t bother feeding them.

  They also often didn’t bother feeding civilians in towns they captured. Whatever they got their hands on, they seized for themselves. In a way, that made military sense. In another way…

  “They know how to make people love ’em, don’t they?” Luc said after tramping through a village full of hollow-eyed peasants.

  “Oh, maybe a little,” Lieutenant Demange said. Somehow, he’d managed to keep himself in Gitanes. Luc, these days, was smoking anything he could find. Russian tobacco was bad; German, worse.

  “Tell you one more thing?” Luc went on. Demange nodded and raised an eyebrow, waiting for whatever the one thing was. Luc said, “I’ve always been glad I’m not a Jew, you know? I mean, who isn’t? But what with the way the Boches and the Poles treat ’em here, now I’m really fucking glad I’m not a Jew.”

  “I dunno. If you’d got your cock clipped right after you were born, you wouldn’t’ve had to come here. For some reason or other, the brass doesn’t think Jews and Nazis mix so well,” Demange said.

  “Wonder why that is,” Luc said. “Maybe they aren’t as dumb as they look.”

  “Couldn’t prove it by me,” the older man answered. “But the other funny thing is, the Germans aren’t doing anything to the kikes in Poland. They can’t stand ’em, and neither can most of the Poles, like you said. But the government there doesn’t want the Nazis fucking with ’em, on account of they’re Poland’s kikes. Politics can spin your head around faster’n absinthe.”

  “You ever drink that shit?” Luc asked. It had been illegal about as long as he’d been alive, but Demange was old enough to have tried it before it was outlawed… and afterwards, if he respected the laws against it the same way he respected everything else.

  “Oh, sure,” the veteran said casually. “Take some mighty strong brandy and smoke some hashish while you’re pouring it down. That’ll give you the idea.”

  “Got you.” Luc had no more smoked hashish than he’d drunk absinthe, but he wasn’t about to let on. Demange would have been as ready to scorn lower-middle-class respectability as he was with anything else that drew his notice. Strong brandy Luc did know. He’d heard about the kinds of things hashish did, so he could make what he thought was a halfway decent guess about absinthe.

  If Demange saw through him, the veteran didn’t let on. He didn’t have much time to let on: the Russians started shelling the French positions. They might have most of Europe in arms against them, but they showed no signs of giving up. Holland and Belgium, Luxembourg and Denmark had fallen down on their backs with their legs in the air and their bellies showing when the Germans invaded them. Czechoslovakia and Norway hadn’t lasted much longer. Now that they were conquered, they weren’t giving the Nazis much trouble any more.

  Only France had fought back hard (with, Luc grudgingly admitted to himself, some help from England). France… and now Russia. France hadn’t-just barely hadn’t, but hadn’t-let the Wehrmacht nip in behind Paris. Moscow was a hell of a lot farther from the German, or even the Polish, border than Paris was from the Rhine. The same held for St. Petersburg-no, it was Leningrad these days-and Kiev. The Russians could trade much more space for time than France had been able to.

  Luc wished he hadn’t had such thoughts with Red Army 105s crashing down all around him. He wanted to hope he’d go home one day, not to know he’d be stuck in this goddamn Russian icebox forever and a day. What he wanted and what he was likely to get no doubt weren’t even related to each other.

  Chaim Weinberg had seen Czechs in Spain before. There were more than a few of them in the International Brigades, along with men from just about every other country in Central Europe. That’s why they call ’em Internationals, smart guy, he jeered at himself. He admired what he’d seen of them, too. They had the same solid virtues as most Germans, without being such assholes about it. Almost all of them spoke German, and they could make out his Yiddish, so he could talk with them. He approved of talking. Plenty of people said he did it too fucking much.

  He’d never seen so many Czech soldiers all at once, though. And he’d never seen so many who weren’t all solidly Marxist-Leninist, either. But the Popular Front was alive and well in Republican Spain. These Czechs might not be Communists, but nobody could say they weren’t anti-Fascist. They’d hated the Nazis enough to keep shooting at them even after their own country went under.

  Chaim rapidly discovered t
hey were damn fine soldiers, too. Nothing they saw outside of Madrid fazed them, not even a little bit. On the contrary: they’d learned their trade in a harder classroom than any Spain offered. One guy used an antitank rifle as a sniper’s piece. That struck Chaim as swatting flies with an anvil, but the Czech was a damn maestro with the brute. Anything that moved, out to a mile away from him, maybe farther, was liable to stop moving very suddenly.

  His name was Votslav, or something like that. He looked down his rather blunt nose at Marshal Sanjurjo’s men. “They don’t know much about taking cover, do they?” he said in slow, deliberate Deutsch.

  “They’re brave. They’re Fascist pishers, but they’re brave.” Chaim admired the courage of the Spaniards on both sides. As far as he was concerned, they carried it to, and sometimes past, the point of insanity.

  But Votslav, a military pragmatist, only shrugged. “A fat lot of good it does them. They wouldn’t be so easy to kill if they didn’t parade around like a bunch of dumbheads left over from Napoleon’s time.”

  It wasn’t the first time Chaim had heard a European talking about Napoleonic tactics when he meant something old and outdated. The guys from the Abe Lincoln Battalion who thought about history (some cared no more about it than Henry Ford did) spoke of the Civil War the same way.

  The other Civil War, Chaim reminded himself. A redheaded guy in a new-looking tunic with Czech’s sergeant’s pips came up to them in the trench. He spoke to Votslav in Czech, but Chaim needed no more than the blink of an eye to realize what he was. “Vos macht a Yid?” Chaim said.

  And the other fellow needed only a moment to size Chaim up. “You’d know the mamaloshen, all right,” he said. “Who are you? Where are you from?”

  “I’m Chaim Weinberg, out of New York City. You?”

  “Benjamin Halevy. Paris. My folks came from Prague, so I grew up with a bunch of different languages. I was liaison for the free Czechs till Daladier decided to turn into Hitler’s tukhus-lekher. Now I’m here.” His wave didn’t get higher than the parapet-the Nationalists would have snipers, too. “The verkakte Garden of Eden, right?”

  “ Verkakte is right, anyway.” Chaim didn’t need to look around to know how abused the landscape was.

  “Go slow,” Votslav said. “I have trouble keeping up when you guys jabber like that. It’s not the German I learned in school.”

  “Bet your putz it’s not, buddy,” Chaim said, not without pride. Benjamin Halevy chuckled. The real Czech only sighed and scratched his head. Both he and Halevy wore Adrian helmets. They covered less of the head than the ones the Spanish army issued. Chaim liked them better even so. Spanish helmets looked too much like the German Stahlhelms they were modeled on. He didn’t like looking like a Nazi storm trooper-no way, nohow. He sometimes did it; he’d seen too many men dead from a piddly little fragment that happened to pierce their skull to want to avoid that if he had any chance at all. Nothing could make him happy about it.

  Halevy waved again, this time toward Sanjurjo’s lines. “Jezek’s right-those guys aren’t such hot stuff. We ought to advance and clean ’em out.”

  Was I that eager when I first got here? Chaim supposed he had been. He was still willing. He wouldn’t have stood in this chilly trench if he weren’t. But he doubted he’d ever be eager again. He said, “The French must have been feeding you a lot of raw meat.”

  Benjamin Halevy’s crooked smile was all Jew. “Because we’re new here, we think everything’s easy, you mean?”

  “Yup.” That was English-of a sort. Halevy and-Jezek, was it?-understood anyhow.

  “Maybe this is true. And maybe we have reason for it.” The Czech soldier’s German could be awkward, but it worked. It was a hell of a lot better than Chaim’s Spanish. Jezek explained, “Now that we cannot shoot Nazis any more, we have to make do with people who get into bed with Nazis.”

  “People who dance the mattress polka with Nazis,” Halevy amended. Chaim grinned. The Yiddish phrase had more bounce than the polite German, both literally and figuratively.

  Thinking about dancing the mattress polka naturally made him think about La Martellita. He’d got what he wanted from her, all right. And he’d also got much more than he’d bargained for when he first jumped on her shikker bones. She didn’t want to see an abortionist. Even under the Republic’s liberal laws, they were illegal, which didn’t mean business ever went bad for them, here or anywhere else.

  That she didn’t want to find one had surprised Chaim. La Martellita seemed such a perfect Red, somebody who wouldn’t think twice about something like that. Maybe taking the girl out of the Catholic Church was easier than taking the Catholic Church out of the girl. Heaven knew that was true about plenty of Jews who converted to Christianity.

  So now things were official. The civil ceremony took a minute and a half-two minutes, tops. He didn’t feel particularly married afterwards. Married or not, he hadn’t been anywhere close to sure his brand-new bride would let him touch her again. That, in fact, was an understatement. He’d wondered if she would plug him as soon as the “I do”s were over. A widow could give a baby a legitimate last name, too.

  But no. He really must have pleased her the second time they made love together, when she’d let him touch her after he tenderly battled her hangover. And so he got one night’s worth of honeymoon back at her cramped flat. It would have been just his luck to have a Nationalist air raid interrupt things at some critical moment. But, again, no.

  And, again, he worked hard to please her. Despite that second time, when they started as man and wife she looked ready to spit in his eye and tell him he was the lousiest fuck in the history of fucking. Had she kept that attitude after they turned out the lights, he would have begun with three, maybe four, strikes against him.

  One more time, though, no. She seemed to decide that, as long as she was going to do this, she might as well do it right. When she did it right, she did it up brown. She was no blushing virgin bride-anything but. Some of the things she did without being asked might have surprised a pro. They sure surprised Chaim, not that he complained.

  Afterwards, his heart still thundering, he blurted, “When I can see again, I’ll try to tell you how marvelous that was.”

  “You are… as good as I remember,” La Martellita answered-tepid praise compared to his, but better than he’d hoped for. She added, “Get off me now. You’re squashing me flat.”

  “Lo siento.” And Chaim had been sorry. He hadn’t wanted to do anything to ruin this. And, some time in the not very indefinite future, he’d looked forward to another round, and then, with luck, one more after that.

  Dancing the mattress polka… He smiled, there in the trench. One of these days before too long, he’d get another furlough. And then he’d hurry back to Madrid, hurry back to his new wife. If he had only not quite nine months of marriage ahead of him here, he aimed to make the most of them.

  Julius Lemp hated winter patrols. A U-boat would roll in a spilled glass of water. When the seas were high and the wind howled down from the north, he feared the U-30 would capsize. That wasn’t likely; U-boats were designed for these conditions. But the sour stink of puke never left the boat when she tossed and capered like a badly spooked pony.

  He’d hoped things would be better in the Baltic’s close confines than in the North Sea or the wide, wild winter waters of the North Atlantic west of the British Isles. And things were… better. That only illuminated the vast gap between better and good.

  Some of the waves the harsh winds stirred up here were big enough to send deluges of frigid seawater down the hatch at the top of the conning tower and into the U-30. Besides drenching the sailors, the water shorted out electrical equipment, gave the pumps a workout, and even threatened the massive batteries that powered the U-boat’s electric motors while she was submerged.

  “If we stayed at Schnorkel depth, skipper, we wouldn’t have to put up with this,” Gerhard Beilharz said up on the conning tower, water dripping from his oilskin cape and headgear
.

  “Maybe,” Lemp answered. “But maybe not, too. When we’re running seas like this, what are the odds a big wave-or a bunch of big waves, one after another-would make the Schnorkel ’s safety valve shut? And then how long would the diesels take to suck all the fresh air out of the pressure hull? Or, if the valve didn’t work, water would come down the pipe and flood the engines, and then we’d really be screwed.”

  A little stiffly, Beilharz said, “That safety valve is plenty reliable.”

  “All right,” Lemp said in magnanimous tones. “We wouldn’t get flooded. We’d just have to learn to breathe diesel fumes instead.”

  “That… can happen,” the engineering officer admitted. A good thing for him, too: Lemp might have pitched him off the conning tower and down into the pale gray sea had he tried to deny it. Still sounding like a maiden aunt talking about the facts of life, Beilharz went on, “That’s only possible with waves like these. When the water’s calmer, the snort behaves just fine.”

  “I know. I know.” Lemp also knew the Schnorkel wasn’t the only thing with a slightly unreliable safety valve. Gerhart Beilharz had one, too. Since Lemp didn’t want it to stick and Beilharz to explode, he kept on soothing the tall junior engineering officer: “It’s very valuable most of the time. But you don’t want to use it when the seas run this high.”

  That you was deliberate. Beilharz had made it plain he did want to use the snort now. Lemp made him think twice. At least he could think twice, which put him one up on a lot of people Lemp knew… and two up on some. With a sigh, Beilharz said, “When you put it that way, I guess you’re right.”

  “Happens to everyone now and again.” If Lemp laughed at himself, he beat other people to the punch.

  As usual, the ratings atop the conning tower swept sky and sea with their field glasses. The sky was cloudy, with a low ceiling. The sea’s mountains and chasms changed places without cease. The Ivans were unlikely to come across them till things moderated… which might be tomorrow and might be next spring. But unlikely didn’t mean impossible. The ratings stayed alert. They were solid men. Lemp didn’t have to get on them to make sure they stayed that way.