Armistice

by Harry Turtledove

  “Yes, that would be good. That has always been the goal. How we manage it…” Petlyura shrugged. “It’s not for soldiers to decide. Our leaders will tell us what to do, and we’ll do it.” Boris nodded, even while wondering whether blind reliance on leaders wasn’t part of the problem.

  HARRY TRUMAN NODDED to the Yugoslav foreign minister as that worthy—and his interpreter—walked into the President’s office. “Good morning, your Excellency,” Truman said, extending his hand.

  Edvard Kardelj had a smooth, firm grip. He was in his mid-forties, with a neat mustache and dark hair that drew back at the temples. After he said something in his harsh, consonant-filled native tongue, the interpreter told Truman, “He apologizes for not speaking English. He knows Italian, French, and German, but never had the chance to learn your tongue.”

  “I haven’t studied German or French since my school days,” Truman said. “I’m sure we’ll do better through you.” The interpreter spoke like an Englishman who rolled his r’s.

  Kardelj said, “It is strange I am here at all. To the People’s Republic of China, Yugoslavia is a deviationist socialist state. But it is one of the few to have relations with both China and the United States, so the Chinese government approached our embassy in Peking, asking for our good offices.”

  “I’ll listen to what you have to say for them. Will they listen to what you have to say for me?” Truman asked.

  “I think so. Why would they have gone to the trouble of arranging this if they then ignored the return step?” Edvard Kardelj returned.

  “Okay, fair enough. That’s a good point. Well, what’s the message they want you to deliver?”

  “They will agree to an armistice based on the status quo ante bellum if you leave off your bombing campaign against their cities and railroads.”

  “Will they?” Truman breathed. That was what he’d been hoping for since MacArthur’s offensive into North Korea and the A-bombs falling on Manchuria hadn’t persuaded either Mao or Kim Il-sung to pack it in.

  “So they assure our people in Peking, at any rate,” Kardelj said.

  “Do they mean it? Do your people in Peking judge that they mean it?” Truman asked. “And if they do mean it, can they bring Kim along and make North Korea stop fighting, too?”

  “The ambassador judged they were serious, yes.” Kardelj pulled a gold cigarette case out of his inside coat pocket. For a Communist, he was doing pretty well for himself. He gave a smoke to his interpreter and held the case out to Truman. The President shook his head. Shrugging, Kardelj lit up. He went on, “I would not have come to Philadelphia if he had judged them to be playing games.”

  “That makes sense,” Truman agreed. “But making sense doesn’t prove anything, either. And what about Kim? If he tries to keep fighting after the Red Chinese leave, I’ll knock North Korea even flatter than it is already. Make that very clear to Peking, your Excellency.”

  “I will do so,” Edvard Kardelj replied. “Chou En-lai, the Chinese foreign-affairs minister, seems to be capable. He says his country is able to ensure that the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea will abide by the armistice.”

  “Okay,” Truman said. “But we will have reconnaissance planes over the Yalu day and night. If Mao starts sending Kim little presents, we’ll make them both sorry. Make sure Peking gets that, too.”

  “I am sure, sir, that the Chinese authorities have taken it into account,” Kardelj said. That could mean anything or nothing. Maybe they thought the USA wouldn’t go back to war once it had made something close to peace. And maybe they’re right, too, Truman thought. Everybody from Maine to California had had a bellyful of fighting.

  The interpreter opened his attaché case and took out a small, squat bottle. “Slivovitz. Plum brandy. Good Yugoslavian slivovitz, not the paint thinner the Hungarians brew. It is to toast what we have done today.” Like a conjurer, he produced three shot glasses from the case. He handed Truman the cork as he poured from the bottle.

  Truman sniffed. It smelled of plums and alcohol. Kardelj raised his little glass. “Zhiveli!” he said.

  “To life!” the interpreter glossed. They both knocked back their shots. Truman followed suit. The plum brandy scorched its way down to his stomach, where it exploded like a grenade. If this was good Yugoslavian slivovitz, he hoped to God never to try the bad stuff.

  “Is there enough in that bottle for another toast?” the President asked. “If there isn’t, I’ll have them bring up some bourbon.”

  “I think we have sufficient,” the interpreter said. He poured. They did.

  “Good. To peace!” Truman said. “May it last longer than the last one did.” Everyone drank again. It hurt less this time. Truman guessed his nerve endings were stunned.

  “I hope the fighting is over,” Edvard Kardelj said. “Sometimes fighting is necessary. No one can say otherwise. But in my life I have seen too much.”

  “So have I, starting with the First World War. You would have been a little boy then,” Truman said. The foreign minister nodded. Truman continued, “Everyone has seen too much by now.”

  “I am a Slovenian. I joined the partisans when the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia,” Kardelj said. “I was a Communist before that, you understand, opposing the Yugoslavian monarchy. It was really a Serbian monarchy, and oppressed Slovenians and Croats and Bosnians and Macedonians.”

  Truman remembered that the Croats had enthusiastically sided with the Nazis after the invasion. The Fascist Independent State of Croatia (so-called—it was always Hitler’s puppet, always on strings) had been nasty enough to horrify even the SS. It spent its four years of existence paying back the Serbs in blood. Up till now, Truman had hardly thought to wonder whether the Croats had grievances of their own.

  “Marshal Tito doesn’t discriminate among the nationalities in Yugoslavia?” the President asked.

  “No, sir. You understand, after the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia was established, he naturally punished criminals and traitors,” Kardelj said. By punished, he meant killed or jailed or sent to a labor camp. Tito hadn’t been as vicious as the Croats before him, but he hadn’t been Mr. Softy, either. Kardelj went on, “Now all positions are given in proportion to the number of people each nationality has. If the Serbs still get more than any other group, it is only because they have the largest population. They get no excess above that. Thus no one is in any position to complain.”

  “Of course.” Truman’s voice was dry enough to make the interpreter raise a bushy eyebrow. Well, too bad, Truman thought. Nobody in Yugoslavia was likely to complain about anything Tito did. People who tried that tended to be bad insurance risks.

  Maybe Truman’s tone got through to Edvard Kardelj. Or maybe he followed more English than he let on. He said something in…Serbo-Croatian? Slovenian? Were they different? Truman didn’t know. The translator rendered it as, “You must remember, Mr. President, we are in a revolutionary situation. We have no time for kindness or gentleness.”

  “Back before I was born, we fought a civil war, too. At the end of it, we hanged the people who plotted to kill President Lincoln and some of the men who ran an especially bad prisoner-of-war camp, but that was all. No one thinks the South will ever try to leave the United States again.”

  Not unless we try to make Negroes really equal to whites and give them all the vote, Truman thought. Or maybe not even then. After World War II, he’d ordered the armed forces desegregated. People had said the sky would fall. No matter what they’d said, it was still up there.

  That would be something for his successor to worry about. No one except Richard Nixon was screaming too loudly about his extra year. He was bending the Constitution by staying on. Wartime Presidents often did that. FDR had, with his internment camps for Japanese-Americans. Lincoln had, suspending habeas corpus during the Civil War. Truman didn’t think he was breaking the Constitution. Once peace settled in, the old rules would come back.

  And the Red Chinese had had enough! That was worth toasting
, even with a plum-flavored Bunsen burner.

  —

  Everyone at the air base near Dundee celebrated, Bruce McNulty as eagerly as the rest of the flyers and groundcrew men. The B-29s wouldn’t redeploy to the Far East. The Red Chinese wouldn’t get the chance to shoot them down in bunches.

  A very drunk groundcrew sergeant—a senior mechanic—said, “This has to be how the leathernecks felt when they found out they wouldn’t need to invade Japan after all.”

  Bruce didn’t know how to answer that. For one thing, what made the invasion of Japan unnecessary was the A-bomb. He’d already dropped too goddamn many of those. For another…

  “Christ on the crapper, Andy, you didn’t have anything to worry about anyway,” a tail gunner said. “You’d stay back at the airstrip and stuff your face at the mess hall all the time. It’s us guys who go up in the air, we’re the ones sweating bullets.”

  Andy looked comically amazed. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I forgot about that.” He put his head down on the table and started to snore.

  Raising his own pint mug, Bruce said, “Here’s to unemployment!”

  “I’ve never been so glad to get put outa work,” another pilot said.

  And that was about the size of it. When your job was destroying cities, you were a lot happier if you didn’t have to do it. Bruce had heard of pilots and navigators and bombardiers who couldn’t stop brooding about the hell on earth they’d delivered during the war. A couple had got Section 8’s—psychiatric discharges. A couple of others had made sure they stopped brooding for good, one with a .45, the other with a noose.

  The scary thing was, it wasn’t as if the notion hadn’t crossed Bruce’s mind. He wished he hadn’t taken the Grasshopper across the channel. He’d seen Fakenham laid waste. Why did he need to see Antwerp, too? What was the difference but a matter of scale?

  But wasn’t scale the point? Sure it was. Over almost half a century, conventional bombs had come to seem like an extension of ordinary artillery. A-bombs were either on or just over the edge of what warfare could bear and still go on. The next stop up, H-bombs…One had killed Stalin, and everybody else for miles around him. Three or four could murder everybody in a New England state or a smallish European country.

  Why have them, then? Because if you didn’t and the other bastard did, he could use them on you and you couldn’t hit back. If he knew you had them and would use them, he wouldn’t dare trot his out. It would be like fighting a duel with flamethrowers at two paces.

  Truman, of course, hadn’t thought Stalin would use his A-bombs. Along with Hitler’s invasion of Russia, that had to count as one of the biggest military miscalculations in the history of military miscalculations. As with a lot of such things, it was much too late now to brood about might-have-beens.

  And yet, as Bruce had that thought, he also wondered how he and Daisy would have wound up getting along. He feared they wouldn’t have done very well. She’d been A-bombed. She’d barely pulled through her bout of radiation sickness. Could she have spent the rest of her life with someone who’d brought death or that kind of anguish to so many people who’d done nothing to deserve it except be born in the wrong country?

  It seemed unlikely, to say the least. He would have gambled all the same. He thought she would have, too. You couldn’t win if you didn’t bet. But you didn’t win just because you bet, either. Any number of people coming home from Nevada broke would testify to that.

  He started to get up and go to the bar for another pint of bitter. Then he realized he’d already had plenty. As the sozzled sergeant named Andy had, he put his head down on the table and went to sleep—or passed out, depending on how you looked at things.

  He woke with the sense that a good deal of time had passed and with the overwhelming urge to piss. He staggered to the jakes, almost as unstable as a B-29 with its tail shot away. The reek in there did more to wake him all the way than his bladder could. He fought not to puke while he did what needed doing. Someone, or several someones, hadn’t managed not to.

  Daisy’d cleaned her pub every night after closing time. As far as Bruce knew, she’d done it all by herself. The Owl and Unicorn was always spotless, the john always clean when it opened. Daisy’d never bitched about the work, not where he could hear her do it. To her, it was just part of the job.

  Outside the pub sat the bicycle he’d bought for getting around off the base. He mounted it and pedaled back toward his barracks. He had trouble remembering to stay on the left and trouble doing it even after he remembered. The blackout had been lifted, but street lights were few and far between. Luckily, no cars came along the road.

  The bicycle found the right building almost the way a horse with a dozing rider found the barn. Bruce lurched inside and found his cot the same way.

  When he came to the next morning, he discovered he hadn’t even taken off his shoes. Since he was an officer and presumed to be a gentleman, everyone assumed he knew his own business and nobody did it for him. He had a thick head, but not a horrible hangover. Some cold water on his face and a couple of aspirins down the hatch and he felt close to human, in a mournful way.

  Breakfast was coffee and burnt toast without butter. Quite a few of the young presumed gentlemen ate lightly and moved carefully, as if afraid their noggins would fall into their coffee cups if they weren’t wary.

  Caffeine helped the aspirins do whatever they did. Bruce went to the Quonset hut where Colonel Frank Pagliarone, the base commander, did his duty. Pagliarone was one of those Italians who got five o’clock shadow at eight in the morning. He eyed Bruce. “Have a good time last night?” he asked with a knowing smirk.

  “I got drunk, sir, if that’s what you mean,” Bruce answered. “It isn’t the same thing.”

  “No, hey? Plenty of people would tell you different,” Colonel Pagliarone said. “But what are you doing here if you tied one on? You don’t need me to read the riot act. I know you better than that.”

  “No, sir,” Bruce admitted. He would have been laughing behind a wooden façade if Pagliarone had told him off. But the base CO was smart enough to know as much. Taking a deep breath, Bruce went on, “Now that peace looks like it’s here worldwide, I want to start the paperwork that will separate me from the Air Force.”

  “Okay. That’s serious business.” Pagliarone lit a Camel and held out the pack to Bruce. He took one with a word of thanks. After a puff or two, the colonel went on, “You sure you want out, son? You stay with it, you’ll make bird colonel for sure, likely wind up with stars on your shoulders.”

  Bruce shrugged. “None of that matters to me any more. Permission to speak frankly, sir?”

  “How am I gonna stop you? You leave the Air Force, it won’t matter. You change your mind and stay in, you’ll never see another promotion, but you say you don’t give a shit. So go ahead and talk.”

  “Thank you, Colonel. Way it looks to me is, I’ve blown up too many cities. I’ve dropped too many A-bombs on men, women, and children, and most of them would never have done me any harm in a thousand years. If I do any more of it, I’ll shoot myself next time I get as drunk as I was last night.”

  “You aren’t the only flyer who feels that way.” Pagliarone’s voice went from rasping to surprisingly gentle. “Some of them get over it, you know.”

  “Uh-huh. And some of them don’t. Everybody knows suicides are way up. Everybody with an eye to see knows why, too. If you ask more from a man than he can possibly give and he gives it anyway, how surprised are you gonna be when he discovers he’s got nothing left inside afterwards?”

  Pagliarone looked at the short butt on his Camel. He stubbed it out in an ashtray made from a brass shell casing. He started to say something, stopped, and then tried again. This time, he came straight to the point: “Okay, McNulty, you sold me. I’ll get those papers rolling. Won’t be long, promise.”

  “Thank you very much, sir,” Bruce said. I may live. I just may.

  —

  “Here. Want a cigarette?” Aa
ron Finch asked the question in English. He held out the pack so Istvan Szolovits could have no doubt what he meant.

  “Thank you.” Istvan knew he was a smart kid. He still had an accent when he used English, but he was getting good at small talk. One step led to the next, almost as if in a dance. For more complicated things, or things where he didn’t know in which direction the conversation would go, he stuck to Yiddish. Behind that, he longed for Magyar. His thoughts still came first in it, and had to be translated into other, less satisfactory tongues.

  “Any time.” Aaron flicked his lighter. Istvan leaned close to start his cigarette. Aaron went on, “I had a good time when you came to dinner a couple of weeks ago, just so you know. You’re welcome any time.”

  “Am I really?” Istvan fought to hide his surprise. “I’ve kept meaning to tell you how sorry I am that I upset your relatives. The only thing that stopped me was, I was too embarrassed.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Aaron said. “You told ’em the truth, and they didn’t like it. Is that your fault or theirs?”

  “What is truth?” Istvan returned.

  Aaron pushed his glasses farther up on his nose. “Thank you, Pontius Pilate,” he said. In America, a Jew could come out with a crack like that without worrying who might overhear. It was exhilarating, as if water had turned to wine. For Istvan, freedom took getting used to. Aaron went on, “You told ’em what the truth looked like from your point of view, anyway. They needed to hear it.”

  “Did they?” Istvan knew he sounded doubtful.

  “Damn right they did.” Aaron sounded very sure of himself. From what Istvan had seen, he always did. He wasn’t always right—who was?—but he was always sure. He added, “It’s easy being a Jew in the USA. It’s easy being a Red in the USA, too. You really have to work to get thrown in jail for it here. And you’re never going to grab power, not in a million years. So you sit on the sidelines and you make noise and you drink. You might as well be at a football game.”

  He didn’t mean what Istvan meant by football. Americans called that soccer, and ignored it almost completely. American football was something like rugby and something like war. They played it in helmets and body armor. They needed the protection; it was the kind of game that broke unprotected people to pieces.