Last Orders: The War That Came Early

by Harry Turtledove

  He hoped Mogamedov also understood he didn’t intend to do anything with what he thought he knew. A word whispered where it would find its way to an NKVD man’s ear could land the Azeri in water hot enough to boil him. Stas didn’t love Azeris. He didn’t suppose he ever would. But Azeris were wonderful fellows when measured against informers.

  Late that afternoon, the groundcrew sergeant hunted down Mouradian and said, “Comrade Lieutenant, the work crew has overhauled the hydraulics. Everything is good as new.”

  Which might mean they’d really done it. Or which might mean somebody’d told the sergeant that Pe-2 was going to fly no matter what. His broad, stubbly face betrayed nothing of what went on behind it. He was a Russian, all right.

  “For sure, Comrade Sergeant?” Stas said. “Yob tvoyu mat’?” The all-purpose obscenity literally meant Fuck your mother, but, like any good curse, it stretched and twisted like a rubber band. Here, Mouradian had in mind something like You’re not shitting me?

  “Yob tvoyu mat’, Comrade Lieutenant,” the groundcrew man said firmly. No shitting around. I really mean it. Stas had to be content with that. He wouldn’t get any stronger assurance if he dragged the noncom into court. Considering how strongly the Party put its thumb on the scales of justice, this was probably better than any testimony on oath.

  When they did fly out at sunrise the next morning, the hydraulics retracted the landing gear. He didn’t have to crank it up by hand. He had Fyodor Mechnikov check the bomb-bay doors. “Fuckers work like they’re supposed to,” the bombardier reported.

  “He wasn’t kidding,” Stas said to Mogamedov, impressed in spite of himself. “They really did fix things.”

  “You hope. Don’t jinx it,” the copilot said. Stas nodded. That was good advice.

  They flew on. Getting to the front took a while. Pretty soon, they’d have to move up to an airstrip farther west. The Nazis were falling back. They devastated the country from which they retreated. Not even Red Army men, notorious for foraging like wild animals, would find much to eat in this burnt-out terrain.

  Somewhere not far ahead lay the border between the RSFSR and Byelorussia. Maybe the Germans and Poles would try to hold on to White Russia. Maybe they’d move back all the way to the Polish border. If they didn’t do that of their own accord, the Soviet Union would have to kick them out.

  German flak guns fired at the Pe-2s. Most of the shells burst behind them. The Russian bombers were faster than the men on the ground gave them credit for. Somewhere up ahead lay the target: a Hitlerite artillery concentration that had held up a Red Army advance in this sector for days.

  We’re artillery ourselves—flying artillery, Stas thought. The Luftwaffe’s Stukas had pioneered the idea. They dropped more explosives farther away than guns could reach, and softened up the opposition so the men on the ground could slice through it. Stavka had grabbed the notion with both hands. Now the Red Air Force and Red Army were using it against its inventors.

  More German antiaircraft guns protected the 105s and 155s in their pits. The flak seemed thick enough to walk on now. Near misses buffeted Mouradian’s Pe-2. He clung to the yoke as he tipped the plane nose-down for his attack run.

  “Let ’em go!” Mogadmedov shouted to Mechnikov, and the bombs fell free. Stas zoomed back toward Soviet-held territory at just above barn-roof height. He watched one startled German soldier start to dive for a foxhole, but was gone before the Fritz made it in.

  “You know,” Mogamedov said after they got back to their own side of the front, “I think we are starting to gain on it.”

  Stas was beginning to think the same thing. Even so, he answered, “Weren’t you the one who was talking about not jinxing it?” Mogamedov’s oxygen mask didn’t show much of his face, but the Azeri wagged a wry finger.

  Now, Stas thought, let’s see if the landing gear works going down, too. And damned if it didn’t. He’d have to find that groundcrew sergeant a bottle of vodka or some good tobacco—not that crappy makhorka, which wasn’t worth smoking if you had anything better.

  They bounced once when they hit the airstrip. Riding the brakes, Mouradian brought the Pe-2 to a stop. He pulled off his flying helmet. Beside him, Isa Mogamedov followed suit. “Another one down,” the Azeri said.

  “We’ll probably go out again tomorrow,” Stas answered. He’d read Shakespeare only in Russian, which he figured put him level with the poet: it wasn’t his language, and it wasn’t the Englishman’s, either. Even in translation, though, he remembered some tolling lines:

  Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

  Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

  To the last syllable of recorded time;

  And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

  The way to dusty death.

  He remembered them, yes. He only wished he could forget them.

  Ropes and sawhorses with boards across them kept civilians out of the square in front of Münster’s cathedral. In a way, that annoyed Sarah Bruck. Now she had to take a long detour to get from the shops back to her house. Life was hard enough for Jews without any more added tsuris.

  In another way … She’d called things when she hoped out loud that RAF bombs would land there. They’d damaged the cathedral. That was a shame because it was a handsome building that had stood for centuries. But they’d done worse to the SS men garrisoned in the square to hold the cathedral against Münster’s Catholic community.

  Those barricades weren’t there just to keep people from falling and hurting themselves in bomb craters. They were there so civilians wouldn’t see what had happened to the Nazis’ Übermenschen and their tools of war.

  The bodies were gone now. Sarah’s father hadn’t taken them away, but he’d been cleaning rubble in the square when the people who were in charge of such things came to do their jobs. His comment was, “I’ve seen bad things in bombed-out houses. I saw worse things in the trenches during the Kaiser’s war. But I never saw anything that bad before.”

  Here and there, glancing in as she hurried past, Sarah could still make out bloodstains on stones and bricks. Once the blood soaked in, you had a devil of a time washing it out. You had to paint over it, and even then you could sometimes see it, like the ghost of death.

  You could smell it, too. Sarah’s nostrils twitched at that faint odor, like a pork roast that hadn’t gone into the icebox. She didn’t think she’d ever smelled death till the war started. She knew that stench much too well now.

  Speaking of paint … Someone had daubed a graffito on a wall. God’s vengeance for Bishop von Galen, it said. The letters ran into one another, and paint dripped down from them. The commentator must have sneaked out in the dead of night and written while he couldn’t see what he was doing. He managed to get his message across even so.

  If anyone had caught him doing it … Sarah didn’t like to think what would have happened after that. The Gestapo had all kinds of ingenious tools for making people unhappy.

  That people were already unhappy with the regime, she knew. That they were unhappy enough to keep showing their unhappiness was new. The authorities’ response seemed to be that, if they killed enough unhappy people, and killed them publicly enough, the rest would either stop being unhappy or stop daring to show they were unhappy. The first struck Sarah as unlikely. The second? Maybe not.

  She hurried away from the graffito. If a policeman or a blackshirt saw she was near it, he’d also see the yellow Stars of David on her clothes. He’d put two and two together and get five. But would he care? Not even a little bit, not when he’d nabbed a Jew.

  She’d done better shopping than she often managed these days. She had a pretty good head of cabbage in her stringbag, along with some parsnips and rhubarb that cattle wouldn’t have turned up their noses at. Considering what was usually in the shops, especially in the late-afternoon hours when the Nazis let Jews get what the Aryans hadn’t bought, it was something of a triumph.

  A tram rattled past. It was as sorry as everything
else in civilian Münster these days. Its iron wheels were rusty. Rust streaked the fading paint on the side of the car, too. No one had touched it up since the fighting started, and that was a long time ago now. The whining electric motor sounded as if it would turn up its toes and die any day now. Of course, it had sounded that way for the past year and a half, so maybe it wouldn’t.

  She watched it go without trying to flag it down: one more thing that would land a Jew in hot water. Public transport was for Aryans only. Jews had to hoof it.

  She wouldn’t have got far with this one, anyhow. So she told herself, and not all in the attitude of the fox convinced the grapes had to be sour. The Aryans would be getting out three or four blocks ahead. A labor gang had filled in a big bomb crater in the middle of the street, but no one had laid replacement tracks yet.

  Sarah wondered whether the new tracks would ever come. They were made of steel, after all, and steel went into panzers and U-boats and big guns and helmets and a host of other things soldiers and sailors and flyers needed. What soldiers and sailors and flyers needed, the Reich gave them.

  Civilians in Münster? They were a different story. They would eat whatever the soldiers didn’t want. If they needed to get off the tram, walk past the damaged stretch in the line, wait for another car, and board again, Party Bonzen didn’t care. It was all part of the war effort, wasn’t it? After Germany won, civilians wouldn’t need to do things like that any more.

  After Germany won. If Germany won.

  Quietly, people were starting to wonder what would happen if Germany lost. People a generation ahead of Sarah remembered what things had been like after the last war: the shortages, the humiliation, the crazy inflation that turned years of savings into pocket change. Everybody seemed convinced it would be worse this time around.

  Sarah’s mother seemed pleased at the vegetables she’d brought home. “They’ll go fine with the barley cakes in the oven,” she said.

  “Yes, they will.” Sarah worked hard to hide her lack of enthusiasm. Barley cakes were uninspiring. And even what claimed to be barley flour probably had peas and beans ground up in it. They were easier to disguise there than they would have been with wheat, since barley rose less on its own than the more costly grain did.

  Samuel Goldman came home with a tin can whose label had come off. “I found it in the gutter,” he said matter-of-factly. “It’s not rusty. It’s not dented. It’s not bulging. Open it up and see what’s in it. If it smells all right, we can try it.” His mouth twisted. “Isn’t life grand, when we get to be guinea pigs?”

  “With our luck, it’ll be beets, or maybe sauerkraut,” Hanna Goldman said.

  “Just the same, it’ll be food we wouldn’t have had otherwise,” her husband replied. He smiled that lopsided smile again. “Always assuming we live through it, of course.” Even talking about scavenged canned goods, he sounded like a professor.

  “I’ll get the can opener,” Sarah said. Before she used it, she washed the can and inspected it herself. Father was right—it looked fine. She let out a little yip even before she got the lid all the way off. “Chicken!” she exclaimed, as overjoyed as Lancelot might have been when he first beheld the Holy Grail.

  Father picked up the can and sniffed it. He smiled and nodded. “Smells great,” he said. Sarah nodded, too—it did. Father handed Mother the can. “Why don’t you cook it on the stove?” he told her. “That will help kill anything bad that may be in there.”

  “I’ll do it,” Mother answered, and reached for a frying pan.

  “In America, I hear, they even put meat for dogs and cats in cans,” Father said. That was something to think about in a country where people were starting to eat dogs and cats. He went on, “If this were dog food, I think I’d eat it anyway. If I barked afterwards, I’d bark on a full stomach.”

  “If you think I’ll argue with you, you’re barking up the wrong tree,” Sarah said. Her father looked suitably pained.

  The canned chicken tasted as good as it looked. Sarah went to bed happy. The RAF didn’t come over Münster. She didn’t wake up puking. It was a fine day.

  Alistair Walsh eyed the new piece of military hardware with a veteran’s suspicion. “What in God’s name is that?” he asked.

  “Somefin’ from the Yanks.” Jack Scholes brandished what looked more like a stovepipe than anything else Walsh could think of offhand. It was made of cheap sheet metal and painted the dark green the Americans called olive drab—they painted the trucks they sent across the Atlantic the same color. Scholes went on, “They call it a bazooka. Suppose to beat the PIAT all ’ollow.”

  “Huh,” Walsh said thoughtfully. That would be good—that would be wonderful, in fact—if it turned out to be true. The PIAT (short for Projector, Infantry, Anti-Tank) was the Tommy’s personal antitank weapon. A powerful spring sent a shaped-charge bomb flying at enemy armor.

  You could kill a tank with a PIAT. You could if you were brave and lucky and very close to the damn thing, at any rate. Otherwise, your chances of killing yourself were much better. People had done the job with it. But you could also rupture yourself cocking the miserable beast—that was a powerful spring. And the PIAT was almost impossible to cock lying down. You looked like a monkey humping a football when you tried. It was easiest (not easy, never easy, but easier) standing up. Of course, standing up gave Fritz a clear shot at you most of the time.

  No wonder the PIAT wasn’t popular.

  “What do you shoot through this bloody thing?” Walsh inquired. “Spit wads?”

  “Gordo’s comin’ up wiv a sack o’ the bombs,” Scholes answered.

  “Why am I not surprised?” Walsh said. Gordon McAllister was a hulking Scotsman. He wasn’t long on brains, but by God he was strong. People called him the Donkey, but not where he could hear them—not more than once, anyhow. When he spoke, which was seldom, he had a thick burr. It was hard to believe his accent, Walsh’s buzzing Welsh consonants and odd vowels (at least to an Englishman’s ears), and Scholes’ glottal Cockney all belonged to the same language.

  McAllister came up a couple of minutes later, with a large canvas sack, also olive drab, slung over his shoulder. It clanked when he set it down. Scholes reached inside and displayed the round that went through a bazooka. “ ’Ere you go, Staff.”

  Walsh whistled softly. A PIAT bomb looked like the makeshift it was. This thing … “Like something out of a Flash Gordon movie, isn’t it? Except for the paint job, I mean.” Like seemingly everything else that had anything to do with the American military, the round was painted olive drab.

  “You’re a smart one, you are. It does at that, don’t it?” Scholes sent him an admiring glance. He went on, “You load it into the tube ’ere. There’s a battery, like, connected to the trigger, an’ it fires orf the rocket motor.” He chuckled. “They say you don’t want to be be’ind it when it goes—not ’arf you don’t.”

  “I daresay. If there’s a rocket in that thing, it’ll fry your bacon for fair,” Walsh said. “How far will it shoot?”

  “Couple ’underd yards for tanks, they tol’ us,” Scholes replied. “Farther’n that for ’ousebreakin’.”

  “Right.” Walsh nodded. You could hit a house or a bunker out past three hundred yards with a PIAT, and you’d hurt it when you did. A tank? You might nail one at a hundred yards. Twenty-five or thirty made your odds better—if you didn’t buy your plot trying to sneak in so close.

  “I want to go ’untin’, I do,” Scholes said. “Bag me a Tiger. Bleedin’ shyme I can’t take the ’ide ’ome an’ ’ang it on me wall.”

  “Mind the claws,” Gordon McAllister rumbled. Like a lot of what he did say, that seemed very much to the point.

  “Will it get through a Tiger’s armor?” Walsh asked with interest. A PIAT wouldn’t pierce the monster German tank from the front. Neither would anything else in the English or French armory. Too many brave tank crews and antitank gunners had found that out the hard way.

  “It’s supposed to.” Jack S
choles didn’t sound entirely convinced, either. Walsh couldn’t blame him. No one who’d seen a Tiger in action had an easy time believing anything could stop it.

  “So you and Gordo are trained up on this beast, are you?” the staff sergeant asked.

  McAllister’s long-jawed head bobbed up and down. “It’s dead easy,” Scholes said. “Gordo shoves the round in till it clicks, like. ’E stands so I don’t singe ’is whiskers when I shoot. I fire it off. Then I duck, on account of the Fritzes’ll shoot at where I was.”

  “Think so, do you?” Walsh’s tone was dry. If that thing with fins was a rocket, it would leave the tube trailing fire. Yes, something like that might draw a German’s interest. But something that let a foot soldier take out a tank from a couple of hundred yards away would draw any Tommy’s interest, and never mind the chances he took using it.

  Walsh wondered whether the Germans already knew about the new tank-buster from America. Maybe some other English or French units had used them. Or maybe some of the Belgians had blabbed. This part of Belgium was full of French-speaking Walloons. Some of them liked the Nazis even if they did speak French, dammit.

  Two mornings later, they were ordered forward for a reconnaissance in force against the German positions. Scholes carried the bazooka. McAllister lugged the sack of rounds. Walsh wondered what would happen if a rifle bullet hit one of those rockets. He didn’t wonder long. They’d bury Gordo in the proverbial jam tin, that was what.

  An MG-42 started buzzing away ahead of them. The Tommies hit the dirt. That horrible thing spat out so many bullets, one of them was bound to punch your ticket if you stayed on your feet. Walsh peered through bushes. There it was, muzzle flashes winking malevolently. Sure as hell, it sat in a concrete emplacement, safe against anything but a direct hit from an artillery shell. Or … a bazooka round?

  “See the bugger, Jack?” Walsh called, not lifting his head far from the dirt. “Can you hit it from where you’re at?”