Last Orders: The War That Came Early

by Harry Turtledove

  “You know, Gerhart, I’m old enough that there are things in this world I can live without finding out,” Lemp answered. And that, no doubt, explained why the two of them tossed the question around in whispers in Lemp’s curtained-off cabin. Beilharz pondered the reply and seemed to find it good. Which was fine, unless he hung a defeatism charge on his superior—he wouldn’t hang one on himself, of course.

  When the U-30 tied up in the harbor at Wilhelmshaven, the men roared off to the town’s fleshpots. After making his own report, Lemp had in mind a rather more upper-crust version of the same thing. Not to put too fine a point on it, he wanted to get drunk and he wanted to get his ashes hauled, not necessarily in that order. After a successful combat patrol, he figured he’d earned the right.

  What he got instead was a summons to the office of the SS man who’d pulled his best electrician’s mate off his boat for political unreliability the last time he was in Wilhelmshaven. The blackshirt was skinny and looked aristocratic; whether he was entitled to a von, Lemp didn’t know. The man punctuated his conversation by blinking his eyes and by licking and licking and licking his lips.

  Lemp eyed him with distaste he knew he didn’t hide well enough. “Reporting as ordered,” he said. He didn’t say Let’s get this over with so I can get the hell out of here, but his manner said it for him.

  Blink. The SS man stared back at him. “I see your ship met no misfortune without Petty Officer Nehring,” he said. Lick.

  He still didn’t know enough to call a U-boat a boat, not a ship. Odds were he didn’t know enough to shake it before he stuck it back in his pants, but you couldn’t tell him that. The SS knew everything—if you didn’t believe it, all you had to do was ask them.

  “No thanks to you,” Lemp growled. If the pigdog had called him in to gloat about that, he’d … He didn’t know what he’d do. What could you do to an SS man that God hadn’t done already? “Have you got any other reasons for wasting my time today?” No, he wasn’t hiding distaste at all well, was he?

  “Do not play games with me, Commander Lemp.” Lick. Blink. “The political situation is far more serious than it was when last we spoke.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Lemp replied. “I’ve been fighting the war since then. How about you?”

  Anger turned the SS man’s bony, sallow cheeks almost the color of a normal human being’s. “I told you not to play games, Lemp.” Blink. He didn’t bother with the U-boat captain’s rank any more. “Unrest is abroad in the land, and it is my duty to stamp out that unrest wherever it raises its ugly head. Believe me, I will do my duty.”

  “I’m trying to do mine, too,” Lemp said. “If you help the Reich lose the war, is that doing your precious duty?”

  “Stamping out unrest will help the National Socialist Grossdeutsches Reich win the war.” Blink. “Now. Let us get down to business. Who in your crew is from in or near the rebellious city of Münster?”

  “Rebellious?” Lemp said.

  “That’s right. Rebellious. In a state of resistance against the authority of the National Socialist Grossdeutsches Reich.” The SS man brought out the clumsy phrase as if it were one normal people used every day. He punctuated it with another blink, then continued, “Answer my question, Lemp. Who in your crew is from Münster or close by?”

  “You already took Nehring away for coming from around there and getting letters from his kin, didn’t you?” Lemp said.

  The look the blackshirt sent him was colder than winter water in the Barents Sea. “If you do not stop evading what I ask you, I promise”—lick—“you will be sorry. You have not the faintest idea of how sorry you will be.”

  What occurred to Julius Lemp was With idiots like this in charge, no wonder Münster is up in arms. He didn’t say that; it would have landed him in water hotter than the SS man’s eyes were cold. What he did say was, “I’m not evading you, dammit. Except by their accents, I don’t know where they’re from, and I don’t care. All I know, and all I do care about, is who does what and how well he does it.”

  “Your uncooperative attitude will be noted.” Blink.

  “Oh, fuck your noting!” Lemp burst out. “If you want to know where they come from, go through their files. You don’t seem to have anything better to do with your time. I damn well do.” Visions of a perfumed blond Fräulein wearing a few wisps of silk capered lewdly across his brainpan. An officers’ brothel would be a lot more fun than this. So would almost anything this side of a depth-charge attack.

  “I have already made note of your unsatisfactory attitude,” the SS man said.

  “That’s nice,” Lemp answered blandly. “I suppose going out and fighting the war is what does it to me.”

  “I am fighting the war against treason and betrayal!” The blackshirt wasn’t doing a lizard impression any more. Now he was really and truly steamed. The shrill fury in his voice showed it, too.

  Lemp took off his cap. Even with it on, he looked less imposing than the Party functionary, because he didn’t bother with the spring stiffener. No U-boat skipper did. But the white cloth cover said he was a skipper. The grease stain on the cover said he did some real work in that cap. Whether the SS man could read those signals, he didn’t know.

  Blink. “Get out of here!” the SS man said peevishly, as if Lemp had barged in without an invitation rather than in answer to a summons. Lemp got up and left before the fellow could change his mind. The brothel first, he decided, and then the officers’ club.

  Arno Baatz had talked with Russian-speaking Germans whose job was to intercept and translate Red Army radio messages. The Ivans had crappy security. They sent way too much in clear. The guys who monitored their signals said that when they started talking about the Devil’s grandfather or his aunty, things had got screwed up but good.

  Right this minute, Baatz felt like talking about Satan’s second cousin once removed. Things in this part of Russia had got screwed up, all right, and they wouldn’t unscrew any time soon. Rain poured out of the sky. Arno had yet to see a paved road in Russia more than a few kilometers outside a big city.

  On German maps, the roads between Soviet cities had been marked as highways. In any self-respecting country, they would have been highways. In Russia, they were rutted dirt tracks. When the autumn rains fell, and when the drifted snow melted in the spring, they turned to mud. Baatz had never imagined such mud before he got here. It could suck the boots off a Landser’s feet. It could swallow a man up to his waist. It could drown a weary mule who let his head sag down into it. It could bog down a truck.

  It could bog down a panzer, too. The sensible German engineers who’d designed the Reich’s panzer forces had no more dreamt of mud like this than Arno Baatz had himself. Russian T-34s plowed through glop that held Panzer IIIs and IVs the way spiderwebs held beetles. It was demoralizing. It could wreck your chances of living to a ripe old age, too.

  Right this minute, there were no T-34s in the neighborhood. Baatz didn’t think there were, anyhow. He looked over his shoulder, but he couldn’t see much through the downfalling curtains of water. He couldn’t hear much, either. The rain plashed all around. He wouldn’t know Russian panzers were close by till one squashed him flat. That would be just exactly too late.

  Adam Pfaff squelched through the mud a few meters away. Like Baatz, he wore his waterproofed shelter half as a rain poncho. It helped a little, but not nearly enough.

  Pfaff managed a crooked grin. “You know what?” he said. “I wish we were Panzergrenadiers.”

  “Heh,” Baatz said. “I’ve heard ideas I liked less—I’ll tell you that.” Panzergrenadiers didn’t march into battle—or, as now, away from it. They rode armored halftracks so they could keep up with the panzers instead of wearing out shoe leather tramping along behind them.

  Ten minutes later, the Landsers tramped past an SdKfz 251 that was buried in mud past the axle of its front wheels. The armored personnel carrier’s two-man crew and the half-dozen glum Panzergrenadiers it had carried we
re all clumping around in the oozy muck, trying to excavate it or to get enough wood and brush under its power train to let it move again. Shelter halves or not, they were filthy and soaked.

  “I take it back,” Adam Pfaff said. “I don’t want to be a Panzergrenadier after all.”

  Baatz eyed the struggling, cursing soldiers and their disabled mount. “Maybe you aren’t as dumb as you look,” he said.

  “Hey!” shouted one of the profanely unhappy men wrestling with the SdKfz 251. “How about a hand, you clowns?”

  Pfaff clapped and clapped, as if applauding a great save on a football pitch. Arno Baatz guffawed. The Panzergrenadier called them every name in the book, and a few that would have scorched the pages had anyone tried to set them down.

  “I don’t think he likes us,” Pfaff said in tones of mild surprise.

  “Too bad,” Baatz answered. For once, the Obergefreiter didn’t seem to want to argue with him.

  A military policeman with a gorget on a chain around his neck—he wore it outside the shelter half he used for a rain cape—stood at a crossroads directing traffic. “Which regiment?” he demanded whenever another group of soldiers came up from the east.

  Baatz told him when he barked the question yet again. “Which way do we go?” the Unteroffizier asked.

  “Your lot heads southwest.” The military policeman importantly pointed down the proper muddy track. He must have had the assignments memorized. Any list, except maybe one printed on a tin cup with crayon, would have turned to mush in short order.

  “Damn chainhound,” Pfaff said as soon as they got too far from the man to let him hear. The military policemen’s emblem gave them the scornful nickname.

  “He’s just doing his job.” Arno Baatz automatically respected authority. That was what authority was there for, wasn’t it? It was to Arno. But, as soon as the words were out of his mouth, he saw he’d lost points with Pfaff. Any combat soldier with anything kind to say about the military police turned into a white crow.

  Everybody in the squad was grousing by the time they got to a large village an hour and a half later. Another Kettenhund with a gorget stood at the edge of it. “What’s your unit?” he growled. Again, Baatz told him. The military policeman looked disgusted. “Well, you buggered it up good and proper, didn’t you? You clowns were supposed to take the other fork.”

  “What kind of Teufelsdreck is that?” Baatz said. He pointed back the way they’d come. “The fool with a gorget at the crossroads sent us down here.”

  “I don’t care if the fucking Holy Ghost sent you,” the military policeman said. “You’ve got to go back and do it right.”

  Baatz and Pfaff and the rest of the weary soldiers called him so many names, the Panzergrenadiers with the bogged-down halftrack would have listened hard. Back for an hour and a half and then on again for nobody knew how long? No wonder they swore!

  For a little while, it rolled off the chainhound the way water rolled off the rubberized fabric of his shelter half. He was more patient than some military policemen Baatz had seen. Before long, though, that patience frayed. “Get moving,” he said, a new sharpness in his voice. “Do you want me to call for an officer? You won’t like it if I do, I promise.”

  Miserably, hopelessly, the Landsers turned away and headed back toward the crossroads. “What do you want to bet that other asshole tries to send us this way again?” Baatz said. No longer did he show any sympathy for military policemen.

  “I hope the Ivans bomb the crap out of that place,” Adam Pfaff said, jerking a thumb at the village they’d just left. “The chuckleheads there deserve it.” Several of the other soldiers nodded. Even Baatz didn’t reprove the Obergefreiter. Mud kept slopping into his boots.

  Getting back to the crossroads took longer than going the other way had. The tired soldiers had to keep stepping off the road while men and vehicles moving the other way went by. Many of the vehicles were horse-drawn, local panje wagons the Germans had impressed into service—that being a fancy turn of phrase for stolen. The wagons had tall wheels and boat-shaped beds. They dealt with mud better than anything from the Vaterland.

  A different Kettenhund stood at the crossroads when Baatz and his men returned. He didn’t ask questions. He just waved them onto the other fork of the road. On a day without any large favors, Baatz gladly accepted the small one.

  By the time he and his men made it to where they were supposed to go, night was falling. Other German troops filled every hut in the village. The weary Landsers ate their iron rations, fastened shelter halves together to make tents, and rolled themselves in blankets on top of more shelter halves to give themselves a quarter of a chance of staying dry. Baatz slept like a rock even so.

  Ivan Kuchkov didn’t mind the rasputitsa, not even a little bit. He was happy to sit on his ass any old time, to roll cigarettes from makhorka and from newspapers he couldn’t read, to eat black bread and sausage, and to drink his daily Red Army vodka ration and as much homebrew as he could get his hands on besides. He was happy to do that any old time, sure. But when the mud time slowed all motion to a crawl, he got the perfect excuse to stay lazy.

  Officers got their dicks all excited about patrolling no matter what, about keeping the pressure on the Hitlerite hyenas. Well, they could get their knickers in as big a twist as they wanted. Yes, Red Army men were able to keep moving no matter how muddy it got. Yes, they were better at it than the damned Nazis. Just because you were able to do something, though, didn’t mean you wanted to.

  His section was holding a village somewhere in the western part of the Ukraine. The peasants who lived there disliked the Red Army less than a lot of Ukrainians Ivan had run into. For one thing, they’d found out that the Germans weren’t such a hot bargain. For another, they could see that the NKVD would be calling the shots around here, and the Gestapo wouldn’t. They might not be jumping up and down about it, but they could see their bread had lard smeared on the one side, not on the other.

  This particular village had in it a wide-faced blond gal named Feodosiya. She gave Ivan one more good reason not to go out there and get his dick shot off when he didn’t absolutely have to. She’d probably sucked some Feldwebel’s cock when the Germans held this place, but that didn’t bother him. One lesson he’d had hammered into him was that you did what you had to do to get by. That went double for women.

  For now, Feodosiya had latched on to him. She didn’t worry about anything past whether what she did felt good and what she could get out of it. She could almost have been a man, in other words.

  She saw the same directness in him. “You’re all right,” she told him one time after he slipped out of her. He thought that was what she said, anyhow. No, Ukrainian wasn’t the same as Russian. When Feodosiya wanted to, she could talk so he couldn’t follow her at all. She could get him to understand, though, too, when she felt like it. She did now: “You don’t mess around the way a lot of guys do.”

  “Fuck, no, sweetie. Not me.” They lay near the fireplace, on a couple of blankets and under a couple of more. Rain dripped through the thatching on the roof in a few places. A teacup caught a little one, a pot a bigger one. Over in the far corner of the hut, a mud puddle was forming because nothing caught that leak. All the dripping and splashing noises made Ivan want to take a leak himself.

  He got out from under the blankets and, naked, walked over to a small birchwood table somebody in the village must have made—somebody who wasn’t much of a carpenter. On the table sat a jar of samogon: homebrew, moonshine, unofficial vodka. Ivan knocked back a slug. Samogon came in every quality, from literal poison to stuff better than you could buy from the state distilleries. This was pretty good, and plenty potent.

  “Here.” He carried the jar back to Feodosiya. She sat up to take it. Her tits sagged a bit when she did; she had to be around thirty. Ivan didn’t care. That just meant she knew how, as far as he was concerned. “Here’s some hot water for you,” he said. Except for his cock, he couldn’t think of anything that ha
d as many nicknames as vodka.

  She drank. She smiled. “Tak!” she said. That was one of the Ukrainian words Ivan understood. It meant yes. He would have said da—in Russian, tak was an out-loud pause for thought, something like you know—but it wasn’t worth fussing over. Then she said something more, but he had no idea what.

  He spread his hands. “C’mon, bitch,” he said. “Talk so an ordinary fucker can follow you.”

  “I said, this tastes like the stuff Volodymyr makes.” Feodosiya came closer to ordinary Russian. But the samogon-cooker’s name reminded Ivan he wasn’t in Russia. It should have been Vladimir, dammit.

  “Tall, skinny guy with a pointy nose? Kinda looks like a German prick?” he asked. Feodosiya nodded. So did Ivan. “Yeah, that’s who I got it from. Gave him some shchi from the stewpot.” Shchi—cabbage soup—and borscht were Red Army staples. You took cabbages or beets: things you could get almost everywhere. You threw some spices or whatever else you could liberate into the pot with them. You boiled it. If you had any sour cream, you plopped that into the borscht. If you didn’t, you managed without. Either way, you ate.

  Feodosiya asked him something else. He frowned—he didn’t get it. She tried again: “Aren’t you cold, standing there with no clothes?”

  “Oh, cold. That’s what you meant. Nah, I’m fine,” he answered.

  She smiled again. “Probably because you’re so hairy,” she said. Ivan’s frown darkened into a scowl. He knew how hairy he was: hairy enough so people called him the Chimp. They didn’t do it much where he could hear them, though, because he walloped the shit out of them when they did. But then Feodosiya added, “I like my men hairy. That way, I’m sure I’m not messing around with another girl.”

  He got back under the blankets with her and guided her hand to his crotch. “Here’s something else to give you a hint,” he said, his good humor altogether restored as her grip tightened on him. They went on from there.