Last Orders: The War That Came Early

by Harry Turtledove

  Catching his eye, Pfaff said, “Good thing they didn’t stop us on a siding here. We would’ve lost half the guys.”

  “Well, we might have,” Baatz allowed.

  Way off in the east of the Reich, Breslau hadn’t been hit hard by either Russian or English bombers. When they got to Berlin a few hours later, Arno saw a city that had been bombed. Before the war started, Göring said you could call him Meyer if even a single bomb ever fell on the capital. These days, the Luftwaffe chief had to be used to his new Jewish name.

  Things didn’t improve when the train steamed west out of Berlin. The RAF and the Armée de l’Air seemed to have hit every ten-pfennig town along the tracks. Here a train station lay in ruins, there a block of flats or a factory was nothing but charred beams and broken bricks.

  The soldiers talked among themselves in low voices as they got a good look at the destruction. Arno would have liked to hear what they were saying, but no one said anything in that tone of voice close enough for him to make out the words. That in itself fanned the flames of his suspicions. If talk wasn’t defeatist, you didn’t care who heard it.

  People from units conscripted from this part of the Reich said that letters from their loved ones let them know things weren’t so good at home. Baatz had thought those letters were bound to be tinged with treason. Now, seeing the beating this part of the country had taken, he didn’t find it so easy to make such flip judgments.

  A few kilometers outside of Münster, bandits in the bushes fired at the train as it passed. A window in the car blew in, spattering soldiers with broken glass. The bullet broke a window on the other side going out. Only dumb luck it didn’t hit anybody.

  “Nice to know we’re loved and welcomed,” Adam Pfaff remarked.

  “We’re here because they’re traitors to the Führer,” Arno answered. “We’re going to whip them into shape, and we’re going to whip them into line.” He looked forward to it. If whipping people into line wasn’t what an Unteroffizier was for, what would be?

  But the whipping had to wait, because the train stopped at the edge of town instead of going on to the station. Word filtered back that somebody had messed with the switches. If an alert policeman hadn’t spotted it, they might have derailed.

  Little boys in short pants scampered by the track, yelling things at the soldiers. Baatz couldn’t make out what they were saying with his window closed. He opened his, even though that let in the outside chill. It helped less than he’d hoped. The local dialect was so far from his, it hardly sounded like German to him. But then one of the kids shouted “Arschloch!” at him and held up his right hand with thumb and forefinger making a circle and the other three fingers raised. The curse and the gesture that went with it would have been perfectly clear from Munich all the way to Königsberg.

  He almost shouted back something about the little bastard’s mother, but decided that was beneath a noncom’s dignity. But he did take a good, long look at the punk. If he ever saw him again, he’d make him sorry, twelve years old or not.

  With a wheeze and a groan and a series of jerks, the train got moving again. And that was their welcome to Münster.

  Chaim Weinberg moved forward cautiously. That was partly because, with only a hand and a half, he wasn’t as quick with his rifle as some of the bastards he might run into. And it was partly because, having fought in Spain since 1936, he had caution ingrained in him by now. That line about old soldiers and bold soldiers held all too much truth.

  But it looked as if the Nationalists really were on the ropes. Or rather, they were too busy fighting one another like the Kilkenny cats for the ever more worthless top spot in their territory to care a great deal that the Republicans were taking it away from them, more of it by the day.

  Somewhere not far from here, Vaclav Jezek had blown out Marshal Sanjurjo’s brains. From what Chaim had heard, the Czech had blown off most of the Caudillo’s head. The Fascists had had to bury him in a closed coffin because nobody in the funeral business could make him look even as much like a human being as he had before he got killed.

  The Nationalists had pulled out of these trenches so they could go after other Nationalists who fancied a different general. Most of them had, anyhow. A few diehards still figured they wouldn’t be fighting over anything before long if the Republicans overran their positions.

  Muddy, smelly, full of trash, the Nationalists’ trenches looked even worse than the ones from which the Abe Lincolns and their International brethren had emerged. The Nationalists were retreating. And they were sloppy Spaniards. Chaim had seen some of the trenches the Spanish Republicans fought from. They were no tidier than this mess.

  Up ahead and to the left, a brief firefight broke out: rifles and a Tommy gun or two. Chaim trotted toward it. If cleaning up the Fascists and cleaning them out was easier than it had been, he wanted all the more to get in on it. But the shooting had stopped by the time he drew near.

  A Republican with one of those Tommy guns led three gloomy Nationalists toward the rear. Their hands stayed high. The Republican grinned at Weinberg. “We’ll reeducate these putos,” he said. “Or I’ll finish them now if they want to run.”

  “Bueno,” Chaim answered, and gave a thumbs-up. It wouldn’t be so good for the captured Fascists, though. Republican reeducation camps owed a lot to their models in the USSR. The only thing the Spaniards couldn’t duplicate was Siberian weather. Up in the mountains, they even came within screaming distance of that.

  He scurried along a communications trench toward the rear. It wasn’t straight—nobody in his right mind left a long, straight stretch of trench waiting to be raked by small-arms fire or lethal fragments from a shellburst—but it didn’t have enough bends to make him happy. He hoped nobody from the other side would lob any artillery this way. He hadn’t heard the Nationalists’ big guns at all today. He didn’t miss them a bit.

  The ground at the far end of the trench was as full of shell holes as a sixteen-year-old’s face was full of pimples. A sixteen-year-old’s face, however, didn’t present the spectacle of a burnt-out truck that had taken a direct hit. It didn’t have bushes growing on it, either, only peach fuzz that was trying to turn into whiskers.

  One of the other Abe Lincolns waved to him. Chaim waved back. “Hey, Luis!” he called. Luis was from Madrid. He was a pretty good guy. He’d joined the Americans a couple of years ago now, and had picked up a lot of English.

  “We’ve got the fuckers by the short hairs,” he said now. When you learned English from soldiers, that was the kind of English you learned.

  “Bet your ass we do,” Chaim said. “Now we twist.” He illustrated with a graphic gesture. Luis laughed. So did Chaim, but only for a moment. Then his face clouded. “I wish like hell Mike woulda lived to see the day.”

  “Sí.” Luis nodded. “Señor Carroll, he was a good comrade.”

  “The best,” Chaim said. He and Mike had been in Spain together since not long after the civil war broke out. They’d saved each other’s skins more times than anybody could count. Chaim remembered his buddy every time he did anything with his smashed and much-repaired left hand. Sometimes remembering was all you had left. Too goddamn often, in fact.

  “Only thing we can do now is pay back the cocksuckers,” Luis said. “Pay them back for what they do to Señor Mike, pay them back for what they do to the whole country. We pay them plenty.”

  Through long stretches of the fighting here, neither Republicans nor Nationalists had bothered taking prisoners. Spaniards were in terrible earnest when they fought. They weren’t always good at it, but sincerity and ferocity did duty for skill. Maybe reeducation camps were a mercy by comparison. On the other hand, maybe they weren’t.

  Behind the smashed truck were two hastily dug graves. One of them had a cross made from two boards nailed together at right angles. Only a bayoneted rifle thrust into the ground with a helmet on the stock marked the other. That surprised Chaim. They talked about people who were more royal than the king. Well, the N
ationalists were more Catholic, or more ostentatiously Catholic, than the Pope.

  Before too long, Chaim and the rest of the advancing Republicans got into hill country their artillery had hardly touched. He gave the neat, prosperous-looking farmhouses fishy stares. Anybody could hide in places like that, and you wouldn’t know it till he started shooting at you from a window or something.

  Other men saw the problem, too. They solved it with revolutionary directness: they torched farmhouses and barns and even chicken coops. Farmers and their wives and children stared with terrible eyes as smoke and fire rose from their homes.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Chaim asked a Spaniard with a torch. “You’ll make the people hate you.”

  “Screw the people in these parts,” the Republican answered, scowling. “They’re all Fascist sympathizers, anyhow. Who do you think they’ve been selling their produce to?”

  “But it will all be one country—your country—again pretty soon, I hope,” Chaim said. “Shouldn’t you make peace with somebody who wasn’t actually trying to kill you?”

  All he got was a nastier scowl from the other man. “You sound like a counterrevolutionary,” the fellow said suspiciously.

  “Oh, fuck you.” Chaim held up his left hand. Wounds and surgical scars made it enough of a twisted horror to widen the Spaniard’s eyes no matter how hard he tried to hold his face straight. Chaim went on, “When you’ve got a souvenir like this, you can bitch about my ideology. Till then, just shut up, you hear?”

  In the Republic, everybody said tu to everybody else all the time. The familiar you was egalitarian. Usted, the formal word, signaled class discrimination and pro-Fascist politics. But tu was also the word you used with dogs, with children, with servants, and with people you wanted to insult. Chaim used it here in the last sense. It was all in the tone of voice. He might not have a great handle on Spanish grammar, but insult he could handle.

  The Spaniard flushed. He angrily turned away from Chaim. That didn’t stop him from tossing the torch into a pile of hay next to the barn here. The hay began to burn. Before long, so did the barn. If the farmer didn’t like it, what could he do? Count himself lucky the men from the Republic hadn’t shot him and gang-raped his wife.

  Or he could find a hatchet, wait in the trees, and kill the next Republican soldier who came by. Chaim wouldn’t have done that, or he didn’t think he would. He came from a long line of people who’d survived pogrom after pogrom without getting their own back … till the Russian Revolution, anyhow. And his folks were in the States by then. Spaniards were different. They took vengeance seriously, and often killed without calculating cost.

  He was sure the Spanish Republic was worth fighting for, worth dying for. He never would have come here if he weren’t. Whether it would be worth living in after victory came, that didn’t seem so clear. But he had an advantage over the Spaniards. If he didn’t like it, he could go home. They already were home, and stuck with whatever the Republic dished out to them.

  Machine guns chattered. Rifles yelled. Alistair Walsh nerved himself to dash around a stone fence taller than a man. The English had pushed forward a couple of hundred yards, into a Belgian village. By the way things worked these days, that was good progress. Anything could be waiting on the far side of that fence, though. Anything at all.

  And anything, around here, would include men in field-gray uniforms and coal-scuttle helmets. They would have Mausers and Schmeissers and MG-42s. Well, no help for it. This was one of those times that made him wish he were back in Wales, hundreds of feet underground, grubbing away at a coal seam with a pick.

  “Ready, boys?” he asked the soldiers who huddled in a smashed-up house with him. Nobody said no. It was too late for that, however much they might wish it weren’t.

  He held a Mills bomb in his right hand. He’d already pulled the grenade’s pin. He kept his thumb on the detonator. They told you not to do that—you could ruin yourself by mistake. But they weren’t here, and he was. All kinds of rules went out the window in wartime.

  “Let’s go, then,” he said. He sprinted, all hunched over, to the end of that wall. He chucked the Mills bomb around behind it without showing his hand for more than a split second. As soon as the bomb burst, he sprayed the other side with bullets fired blindly from his Sten gun. That only added to the guttural cries there.

  He and his men dashed around the wall then, firing as they did. Several Germans were down. Others gaped in horrified amazement. “Hände hoch!” Walsh yelled. The Master Race didn’t always want to fight to the death.

  Sure enough, these Fritzes had had enough and then some. They threw away their weapons and raised their hands. Some of them shouted “Kamerad!” And one added “We surrender!” in excellent English.

  That made things easier. Walsh’s German was limited to the phrases you needed to tell prisoners what to do, and he rarely understood what the Germans answered. So he was smiling as he said, “Tell ’em we won’t hurt ’em if they do what we tell ’em.”

  The German spoke in his own language. Then he asked, “May we tend to our wounded, please?”

  “Right. Go ahead. Then we’ll take you back,” Walsh said. The Germans dusted antiseptic powder on wounds and bandaged them. They gave a badly hit man one morphine shot, and then another. Walsh wasn’t sure he’d make it. If they let him die comfortably, it was the last and not the smallest favor they could do for him.

  “I am glad to be out of the fighting,” said the man who spoke English. He had a cut on the back of one hand and another on his cheek from grenade fragments. Neither was much worse than a scratch. He’d been lucky.

  “Bet you are,” Walsh said with rough sympathy. “Want a fag?” He held out his packet of Navy Cuts.

  “Danke schön,” the German said. “I am Eberhard Rothmann. I am a Gefreiter. My pay number is—” He rattled it off. After lighting the cigarette, he went on, “I am very glad to be away from this. Twice now in twenty-five years our leaders have taken us into losing wars.”

  “So why did you Germans go, then?” Walsh asked. The lads in Field Intelligence would be happy to get their hands on this bird. He sang like a canary.

  “Because they told us what to do, first the Kaiser and then the Führer, and then we did it,” Rothmann said. “And look what we have for doing it.” He gestured at his dead and injured countrymen. “But now, from what I hear, we have had a bellyful of this stupidness.”

  One of the other Germans must also have spoken English, or at least understood it. He said something sharp in German. Eberhard Rothmann answered in the same tongue. Then he went back to English.

  “What I say is so, even if it likes Klaus not,” he said. “The people, they have had enough of foolishness.”

  “He is liar!” Klaus said. His English had a much thicker accent than Rothmann’s.

  Walsh cared nothing about that. He told off Jack Scholes and a couple of other men. “Don’t let anything happen to them,” he said. “Don’t shoot them unless they run or they try to jump you. Get their wounded to an aid station. Got all that?”

  “Roight, Staff,” Scholes said impatiently. He gestured with his bayoneted Lee-Enfield. “Come on, you filthy buggers. ’Op it, loik.”

  Hop it they did. Walsh and the remaining Englishmen warily pushed forward. He peered around the smashed, charred carcass of a German armored car, then hastily jerked his head back. “There’s a Tiger a hundred yards down the path,” he whispered. “Stay low, for Christ’s sake.”

  No one had seen him peek out. If the Tiger crew or the other Fritzes who were bound to be close by the monster realized the Tommies were so close, exterminating him and his pals wouldn’t take long.

  “Shall we send ’em a flying ’ard-on?” one of the men asked. The bazooka’s phallic rockets hadn’t needed long to get a dirty name pasted to them.

  But Walsh shook his head. “He’s front end-on to us,” he said. “It won’t get through his armor.” The bazooka was a better antitank weapon than
anything the infantry had had up to now. It beat the stuffing out of the PIAT. It had its limitations, though. A Tiger’s thick frontal armor was more than it could handle.

  “What do you want to do, then?” the soldier asked—a reasonable enough question.

  “Wait,” Walsh answered. “Let’s see what the Germans have in mind. If they pull out on their own, we don’t have to drive them out.” They wouldn’t kill any enemy soldiers that way. On the other hand, the Germans wouldn’t find the chance to kill any of them, either. Walsh approved of not getting killed. He wasn’t even especially keen on getting wounded. He’d done it before, and found it overrated.

  If the Germans decided to come forward again … That might not be very enjoyable. He flattened himself out, wiggled forward, and looked ahead from under the dead armored car. He didn’t see any approaching jackboots. Not seeing them suited him fine.

  Dusk began to descend. The Tiger’s engine noise got louder. Walsh’s heart leaped into his mouth. The tank could squash the armored car and him with it and never break a sweat.

  But why would it bother? A couple of rounds of HE and a burst or two from the machine guns would finish him with ease, thank you kindly.

  He risked another peep around the armored car’s mudguard. The Tiger was backing up—backing away, in other words. The tank commander stood head and shoulders out of the cupola so he could see where he was going. Two or three German foot soldiers standing nearby waved and pointed to steer him away from obstacles. Walsh wondered why they bothered. What was a Tiger made for, if not for grinding obstacles under its tracks?

  Sure as hell, its retreating rear end took out the corner of a house. The house fell in on itself. The Tiger, unfazed, backed over and through the wreckage. The infantrymen pulled back with it.

  “Bugger me blind,” Walsh said as he pulled his head in once more. “I think it’ll be all right—till tomorrow, anyway.”