Last Orders: The War That Came Early

by Harry Turtledove

  “It’s spring for them, too, n’est-ce pas?” one of the poilus ventured.

  “Oh, sure. It’s spring. But they’re professional about it, you know? And you’d better be the same way, Émile, or you’ll be sorry.”

  “Yes, sir,” Émile said, which was never the wrong answer. Maybe he knew what Demange was talking about. He’d seen some action, and he hadn’t disgraced himself.

  “All right, then.” Demange paused to light another in his long string of Gitanes. It had started when he was eleven or twelve and would stop only when they shoveled dirt over him: say, a thousand years from now, or maybe an hour and a half. He went on, “Listen to me, you dumb cocksuckers. I’m not trying to get you killed, because if you get killed, chances go up that I get killed, too, and I’m not ready to die just yet. You got that?”

  Their heads bobbed up and down. The only thing wrong with them was that their superiors kept trying to use those heads—and Demange’s along with them—to bang through reinforced concrete.

  Émile spoke up again: “If you look at it that way, sir, what we ought to do is, we ought to sit tight here and wait for the Americans.”

  Demange thought so, too. That was pretty much what France had done the last time around. After the mutinies of 1917, France couldn’t have done much else then. Even so, Demange had mixed feelings about it. He would rather see Americans dying for liberty than die for it himself. But wasn’t it monotonous and even a little embarrassing to get your chestnuts pulled from the fire twice in a row by the same country? If God was writing the script, He could have used some help from a competent dramatist.

  Daladier and his kind, of course, would defend France to the last drop of American blood. But the French generals didn’t mind killing off Frenchmen. When had they ever?

  “Tell you what, Émile,” Demange said. “When they give you a field marshal’s baton—and I promise you won’t get yours a day later than I get mine—you can tell people what to do. In the meantime, we’re both stuck with following orders from the fat, white-mustached fucks who’ve already got theirs.”

  Émile grinned at him. Some of the other soldiers muttered among themselves. Sure as the devil, one of those sniveling little rats would report him. That would be pretty goddamn funny. What was the worst the brass could do to him? Demote him? He’d thank them. He’d kiss them on their talcumed cheeks. Send him to the front? He’d already logged more time at the front than any other three men you could name. Not fearing consequences gave a wonderful sense of freedom.

  He might have invited the poilus to tattle on him, but the German loudspeakers chose that moment to come to life. Both sides had them. They were something new, something modern, something to make war even more awful than it had been for the past five thousand years.

  “Soldiers of France!” the loudspeakers boomed. Whoever was talking through them, he spoke perfect Parisian French. A prisoner reading a script? A French Fascist who’d gone over to the other side? Probably not someone from Alsace-Lorraine, at home in German and French—the accent would be different. Whoever this cochon was, he went on, “Soldiers of France, why spill your blood for Jew Bolsheviks and Jew capitalists? Do you want your towns full of nigger American troops cuckolding you and leaving you with black babies to raise? When you fight the Reich and your fellow white men, you fight the wrong enemy!”

  He might speak perfect French, but he mouthed German propaganda. “I wish they’d drop leaflets with that garbage printed on them,” Demange said. “With leaflets, at least we could get the shit off our asses.”

  The French loudspeakers shouted back a few minutes later. Plenty of anti-Nazi German-speakers, Jews and others, had taken refuge in France. Demange’s German was sketchy, but he got the drift here. They were going on about how even the German people couldn’t stand Hitler any more, so what was the point of stopping a bullet for him?

  “Is that true, sir?” Émile asked. “Are the Germans really up in arms against the Nazis?”

  “Beats me,” Demange answered cheerfully. “Our papers say they are, and of course you know everything you read in the goddamn newspaper’s got to be the straight goods, right?”

  “Mais certainement,” Émile said, cynically enough to squeeze a short chuckle out of Demange.

  “All right, then,” the lieutenant said. “But I’ll tell you this—as long as both sides want to fight the war with loudspeakers, that’s fine by me. Yeah, they’re annoying as shit. But even if you shoot a loudspeaker full of holes, it won’t squirt blood all over the place and it won’t start screaming for its mama.”

  The poilu contemplated that. “Well, you aren’t wrong,” he said in due course. “Uh, sir.”

  Truth to tell, Demange barely noticed his near-omission of the courtesy. He felt happier about Émile’s measured praise than he had about anything in … he couldn’t remember when. I’m getting soft, he thought. He barked at some other soldier the way a man might kick a dog after quarreling with his wife.

  Before too long, the powers that be on one side or the other—for all Demange knew, it might have been the powers that be on both sides—decided war by loudspeaker was too peaceable to suit them. Howitzers and mortars started hitting the front-line trenches.

  Huddling in the mud—the springtime mud—Demange called down curses on his generals’ heads. Artillery duels always hurt the French worse than the Boches. As they had been in the last war, the Germans were masters of field fortifications. His own countrymen … weren’t.

  And the Nazis had been sitting on Belgium for years. The Belgian frontier had been the effective border between Germany and France since their unsuccessful truce and alliance against the USSR. What German soldiers took refuge in around here hardly deserved the insulting name of field fortifications. They’d had enough thought and reinforced concrete poured into them to be something else again, something more on the order of the Maginot Line.

  Somebody not far enough away started shrieking. He kept on shrieking till the stretcher-bearers carried him away. French fieldworks were just that: scratchings in the dirt. The French brass didn’t think their men would stay in any one set very long, so they didn’t bother strengthening or improving them. Poilus got carved up for their stupidity.

  After the sun went down, the Germans staged a trench raid half a kilometer south of Demange’s position. They shot half a dozen men and captured half a dozen more for grilling. “We would’ve chased ’em off if they tried that here,” Émile said stoutly.

  “Peut-être,” Demange answered. Maybe was the most he could say. He tried to keep his men alert, and more afraid of him than they were of the Boches. But anybody could get caught with his pants around his ankles.

  Those captured soldiers were probably singing like nightingales. Demange hoped they didn’t know too much. The Germans should have grabbed some generals, he thought. Generals never know anything at all.

  Spaniards were big on ceremonies. Chaim Weinberg had had to get used to that when he came over here. Americans went the other way. They did up Independence Day and Memorial Day and Armistice Day after a fashion, but only after a fashion. A ceremony over something that didn’t already have a day set aside for it? Americans mostly didn’t bother.

  With Spaniards, though, if something wasn’t celebrated and wasn’t seen to be celebrated, it might as well not have happened. Maybe it had to do with the Mass and other Catholic rites. Any which way, the Nationalists didn’t just surrender. They and their Republican counterparts staged an elaborate ceremonial to show they were surrendering.

  Chaim got invited to the surrender (which took place outside of Seville, the last major city the Nationalists held) because he was one of the longest-serving American Internationals still in Spain. So they told him, anyhow. He wondered whether La Martellita had anything to do with the invitation. He would rather she’d invited him back into her bed, but that wouldn’t happen. Little by little, he’d got resigned to the idea. Oh, well—it sure had been fun while it lasted!

  He
rode a bus down to Seville. All the way there, he wondered whether he ought to go into town and find a barber. When he finally came out with that, most of the other Internationals on the bus groaned. But two of them—a Magyar and an Estonian—said they’d been thinking the same thing. That made Chaim feel better. Other people could be crazy some of the same ways he was.

  It wasn’t a perfect surrender ceremony, even if the Nationalist soldiers stood there in neat ranks under the old red-and-gold Spanish flag. They’d stacked their arms in front of those ranks. The rifle barrels gleamed in the bright sunshine.

  The men were there, yes. Most officers above the rank of major weren’t. They’d slipped over the border to General Salazar’s Fascist Portugal … or they’d been captured, tried at summary courts-martial, and died—for the most part with exemplary courage—in front of Republican firing squads.

  Still, the Nationalists did have a general at their head. Millán Astray had founded the Spanish Foreign Legion, which held many of the other side’s toughest troops. He was the one who’d given them their Long live death! motto. He himself had paid death on the installment plan. He was missing his left arm and his right eye.

  But he was here, where so many of his comrades had chosen exile. He had the courage of his convictions, all right. He was bound to know what would happen after he gave himself up to the Republicans. He could expect no more mercy than he would have given had he won.

  He was the bull in this arena, not the matador. He had not even the bull’s chance to gore. Yet there he stood, sour, hateful, and brave. Peering at him, Chaim saw that he’d even donned a red-and-gold patch over his empty eye socket for the occasion. Was that loyalty to the cause? Or was it just mockery of the victors? Either way, Chaim found himself reluctantly admiring the tough, mutilated little man. Millán Astray might be a son of a bitch, but he was a son of a bitch with style.

  A Republican color guard advanced toward him. The flag of the Spanish Republic—red, yellow, and purple—flew from a taller staff than that of the vanquished Nationalist banner. No one was going to miss any symbolic tricks today.

  Some of the Republican bigwigs following the color guard wore uniforms not very different from those of the rebels. Others clung to the overalls that had been a de facto Republican uniform for so long. That was revolutionary chic. General Astray glowered at them, but he could do no more than glower.

  He glowered again when the Republican military band played the Internationale. The Spanish Foreign Legion went into battle singing songs like “Death’s Fiancé!” This was a different tune both literally and metaphorically.

  Once the music stopped, a Republican general strode up to Astray. The Nationalist commander saluted. The Republican returned the compliment. Millán Astray reached into his holster and pulled out the pistol it held: no fancy automatic with mother-of-pearl grips, but a beat-up revolver that had plainly seen much use.

  Before handing it to the Republican, General Astray said, “You know I would rather kill you with this than give it to you. I know what you would do to my good men, though, so I will go through with what the two sides have agreed.”

  “There has already been enough killing. There has already been too much killing,” the Republican officer said. Newsreel cameras whirred, recording his image and his words. He went on, “Spain is one once more. The killing is over.”

  Millán Astray wagged a finger at him, as if to say they both knew better. And so they did; the Nationalist general had but hours to live. If that bothered him, he didn’t show it. Yes, he had style. With another salute, he presented the revolver to the Republican. Then he asked, “May I have the privilege of addressing my soldiers one last time?”

  The Republican general stirred and frowned; maybe that wasn’t in the script to which the two sides had agreed. “Briefly,” the Republican said at last, “and without inflammatory sentiment.”

  General Astray’s bow was a skeletal parody of the one a dandy might give. “You have my oath,” he said, and crossed himself to show he meant it.

  “Go on, then,” the Republican said gruffly.

  Turning, Astray also bowed to the Nationalists standing at wooden attention. “Well, boys, we did the best we could. We thought we’d cut revolution out of Spain the way you cut a cancer from the body. Instead, revolution’s gone and cut us out. You don’t know ahead of time what will happen in a war. You wouldn’t need to fight it if you did. We wouldn’t have given them a big kiss if we’d won. I don’t expect they’ll kiss us, either, now that we’ve lost. You’re men—you’re proved it. Be strong. Sooner or later, you’ll come out the other side.” He saluted them. “¡Viva la España! ¡Viva la muerte, amigos!”

  “¡Viva la muerte!” the Nationalist soldiers shouted.

  Millán Astray turned back to the Republican general. “Do what you want with me—you will anyway,” he said. “Go easy on them. They’re just soldiers.”

  “We will do what we will do,” the Republican answered in a voice like iron. Chaim suspected he had a better idea himself of what that would be like than General Astray did. The Nationalists would go through reeducation camps, all of them. The ones who were just soldiers, and not too bright, would get out after a few months. They’d be watched the rest of their lives, of course. They’d have trouble getting good jobs. Their sons wouldn’t be likely to get into good schools. But, after a fashion, they’d get along.

  The sergeants, the lieutenants, the captains … They wouldn’t get off so lightly. They’d do hard labor on short rations for a long time. None of them would come out of the camps for years. A lot of them wouldn’t come out at all, unless they did it feet-first.

  In Yiddish, he whispered to the Magyar who’d also thought about the barber of Seville: “Those Fascist bastards are gonna have a rough time.”

  “After everything they did, they deserve a rough time,” the Hungarian International replied in Bela Lugosi–flavored German.

  “Well, yeah.” Chaim couldn’t let such a challenge go unanswered. He was asking to get reported if he did. Then he’d get to find out about reeducation camps from the inside. He found a question to distract from his last comment: “What’ll you do now that the war here is over?”

  “Go fight the Nazis—aber natürlich,” the Magyar replied. “You?”

  “Maybe I’ll do that,” Chaim said. “Or maybe I’ll go home, then come back and fight ’em in my own country’s uniform.”

  That shut the Hungarian up. Soldiers in his country’s uniform marched side by side with Hitler’s men. Pleased with himself, Chaim watched the Nationalists trudge off into captivity.

  Vaclav Jezek stood with the rest of the soldiers of the Czechoslovakian government-in-exile as a Spanish Republican brigadier general harangued them. The general spoke no Czech—as far as Vaclav could tell, you could count the number of Spaniards who did speak Czech on the fingers of one hand, and you wouldn’t need to worry about the thumb or the pinkie. The officer delivered his speech in lisping Spanish.

  Like most of his countrymen, Vaclav understood at best one word in ten—not even enough to catch the drift. He turned to Benjamin Halévy. “What’s he going on about?” Halévy could make sense of Spanish, along with several other languages.

  He could, and he did: “He’s telling us what a bunch of heroes we are. Tigers of valor, he calls us.”

  “Does that sound as stupid in Spanish as it does in Czech?” Jezek asked, genuinely curious.

  “Just about,” said the Parisian Jew with the parents from Prague. The Republican general gave forth with a gesture straight out of grand opera. It must have signaled a change of subject, because Halévy went on, “Oh—now he’s going on about how many Hitlerite Fascists we’re going to kill once we get to Belgium.”

  “Happy day,” Vaclav said. With the fighting in Spain over and done with, the foreign contingents that had fought for the Republic were heading home if their homes happened to be free, or into battle against the Nazis if their homes remained occupied.

&nb
sp; “You’ve paid your dues and then some,” Halévy said. “You could probably find a way to get a discharge.”

  “Sure—I could go to a whorehouse,” Vaclav said. The Jew sent him a severe look. Ignoring it, he continued, “What I really want to do most is go home. And that’s the one thing I can’t manage.”

  He’d grown up in Prague. His family had lived there for as long as anybody could remember. And Prague had lain under the Germans’ muscular thumb for the past five and a half years. Of all the lands Hitler had overrun, Bohemia and Moravia would be the last ones he coughed up. The Red Army might march into Berlin before it marched into Prague. And even if it did march into Prague, the Russians would make landlords almost as nasty as the pigdogs with the swastika-clutching eagles on their tunics.

  Benjamin Halévy set a hand on his shoulder in mute sympathy. A moment later, Vaclav jerked off the hand, not from anger but from surprise. The Republican general had just come out with a very Spanish version of his name. He wouldn’t have recognized it if he hadn’t heard the like before.

  “What’s he want?” he hissed to Halévy.

  “Go up to him,” the Jew answered, also sotto voce.

  Vaclav did. The Spaniard shook his hand and did the double cheek-brush so beloved by Latins (and by old-fashioned Austrians and Magyars pining for the lost days of the Dual Monarchy). Then the man switched from his own language to trilled, lisped German: “Can you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir,” Vaclav said.

  “Good. You are much to thank for our victory. You shot the enemy of the people, Franco. Then you shot the bigger enemy of the people, Sanjurjo. Spain never forgets you for this.”

  “Thank you very much, sir.”

  “Remember, we make you for this an honorary citizen of Spain. If you ever need help, a Spanish ambassador gives it to you, same as if you were born here.”