Last Orders: The War That Came Early

by Harry Turtledove

  All the panzer crewmen agreed with that. Even Theo nodded. But Sergeant Witt said, “What can you do?” and no one had a good answer for him. The Salvation Committee’s colors were black, white, and red, just like the Nazis’. The Nazis, of course, slapped swastikas all over everything. The Salvation Committee had gone back to the flag of the German Empire, a horizontal tricolor.

  Saul did think the Salvation Committee was smart to steer clear of the Weimar Republic’s black, gold, and red. Few Germans had happy memories of the Republic. If more had been happy with it, Hitler wouldn’t have found it so easy to overthrow.

  And, of course, if more people had been happy with the present regime, Hitler would still be running things. But the German generals, faced with the idea of a two-front war against two industrial powers that each outclassed and outmanned the Reich (plus England and France, which between themselves and their colonies also outproduced and outmanned Germany), decided that they had to find a peace even if—especially if—Hitler didn’t want to.

  Out of nowhere, Theo spoke up: “You know what’s really crazy?”

  “You mean, besides you?” Saul said. He couldn’t let something so unusual pass unremarked.

  Theo ignored him. “What’s really crazy is, so many stupid fools want what’s left of the Nazis to keep running things.”

  Weeks went by when Theo didn’t say so much of his own accord. He’d hit on something important here, though, or Saul thought he had. Everything Hitler had done since the war started had pushed Germany straight toward the cliff. The Wehrmacht hadn’t taken Paris. France fought on. So did England. Joining Poland’s war against Russia hadn’t knocked out the Bolsheviks. Now the Reich was falling back or being driven back on all fronts. Why would anybody with a working set of marbles want to see more of that kind of performance?

  “Hello!” Witt said suddenly. “We’ve got what looks like a couple of companies of foot soldiers moving across our front. Now—which side are they on?” Saul couldn’t see them from the driver’s seat; the stone wall blocked his view. After a moment probably spent raising binoculars to his face, the panzer commander grunted. “Ha! They’ve got swastika armbands! Kurt! Canister!”

  “Canister!” Poske echoed. After a couple of seconds, the round clanged into the breech. The loader had to reach down and out to grab it, then bring it back and slam it home. The panzer carried only a handful of canister rounds. The crew didn’t need them very often, and naturally stowed them in the most out-of-the-way ammunition racks.

  When you did fire one, though, it could do horrible things. The panzer’s canister rounds were basically 75mm shotgun shells. They were full of lead balls, and at short range they could ruin a crowd like nothing else on God’s green earth.

  The turret traversed a little. The gun came down to shoot just over the wall. “Fire, Lothar!” Witt yelled. “They know we’re here. The motion must’ve tipped them.”

  “On the way!” Lothar Eckhardt said, and the gun boomed. Then the gunner muttered, “Oh, dear Lord!” Saul couldn’t see what the round had done to the pro-Nazi foot soldiers, but that told him everything he needed to know.

  Almost everything—a second later, a rifle round rang off the turret. It hadn’t a hope in hell of punching through, but it showed the canister shell hadn’t killed or maimed all the Landsers out there or broken their spirits.

  “Another round of the same, Kurt,” Witt said, and then, “Lothar, while he’s loading it hose ’em down with the turret machine gun.”

  “Another round of canister,” Poske said at the same time as Eckhardt was replying, “I’m doing it, Sergeant.”

  As the MG-34 mounted alongside the panzer’s big gun spat death, Saul wondered how many times they’d chewed up Russians like that. Quite a few, even if he couldn’t put an exact number to it. No matter how often it was, he’d never imagined they would be using the machine gun the same way against rebellious German soldiers.

  No, that isn’t right, he thought as the cannon roared again. We’re the rebellious German soldiers. He grinned ferociously, liking the idea.

  Then Sergeant Witt spoke to him: “Back us out of here, Adi. I don’t want them coming through the house and jumping us with grenades or Molotov cocktails. Let’s get out into the open, where we can see trouble coming.”

  “Backing us out, Sergeant.” Saul put the panzer into reverse. Ivans who drove T-34s often carried a mallet to whack the shift lever and make the transmission do what they told it to. German engineering was of a higher order … even if the USSR kept turning out ungodly swarms of crude but deadly panzers.

  After Saul had backed away, Witt sent the panzer out around the end of the wall. That showed Saul what the two rounds of canister had done to his countrymen. Even if they were committed Nazis, the sight made him gulp. The only difference between Russians and Germans after they got blasted to pieces and strings was the color of the bits of unbloodstained cloth covering corpses and bits of corpses.

  More bullets rattled off the panzer, these probably from a submachine gun. Theo fired a quick burst from the bow machine gun. He raised the thumb on his left hand, which told Saul they wouldn’t need to worry about that fellow till the Judgment Day.

  “Good job,” Witt said. “I don’t think this mob will give us any more trouble, anyhow. Any orders on the radio, Theo?”

  “Nope,” Hossbach answered laconically.

  “On my own. I wonder if I can stand that much freedom.” The panzer commander paused thoughtfully. “I wonder if Germany can stand that much freedom.” It was one of the better questions Saul Goldman had heard lately. He wished he didn’t have to worry about the answer, too.

  . . .

  Over on the far side of the barbed wire, the Germans were going out of their minds. To Alistair Walsh, that meant they were going further out of their minds than they already were. When soldiers wearing the same uniform but different armbands started shooting at one another, something was rotten in the state of Deutschland.

  Only one thing could make all the Fritzes shoot in the same direction these days. When the English or French tried to push a little deeper into Belgium, the Germans turned from distracted lunatics in the middle of a civil war back into, well, Germans.

  That was the last thing any of their foes wanted. Distracted lunatics were exciting, even entertaining, to watch. Germans were dangerous. All the Reich’s neighbors had two wars’ worth of experience—France had three—about just how dangerous Germans were.

  So Walsh and his men sat tight. They didn’t shoot at the Fritzes. The Fritzes mostly didn’t shoot at them even if they showed themselves, as long as they didn’t look as if they were about to attack. It was a funny kind of war. Any kind of war that turned ordinary soldiers into would-be striped-pants diplomats struck Walsh as pretty funny.

  But that was what this war was doing. Jack Scholes came up to Walsh and demanded, “ ’Ere, Staff, wot kind of peace d’you reckon the Germans’ll figure is cricket?”

  “Haven’t the foggiest,” Walsh answered; he wasn’t ashamed to admit he had no notion of what would happen next. “Hell’s bells, Jack, we don’t even know whether the generals can beat the Nazis, or whether somebody like Himmler—no, they say Himmler’s dead: somebody like Heydrich, then—turns into the next Führer. If that happens, the fighting’ll be on again for real soon enough.”

  “Say the generals win.” Yes, Scholes was like a terrier; he didn’t want to let go of what he grabbed on to.

  “It would have to be something close to the status quo ante bellum, I expect,” Walsh said, sucked into the argument in spite of himself.

  “To the wot?” Latin was Greek to Scholes. “Blimey, you throw the fancy talk around like a toff, you do.”

  “Bugger off! There. Is that plain enough?” Walsh said. The private grinned at him, showing off snaggled yellow teeth. The only reason Walsh knew the sonorous Latin phrase was that he’d heard it a lot the last time around. He explained: “To the way things were before the war.”
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br />   “Oh.” Jack Scholes pondered, then nodded. “Makes sense. Can’t let ’em fink they turned a profit on the deal, can we?”

  “I hope not,” Walsh said. He lit a Navy Cut, offered one to Scholes, and let out a long, smoke-filled sigh. “Of course, if we don’t flatten them right and proper now, chances are we’ll have another dustup with them fifteen or twenty years down the road.”

  Scholes sent him a sly grin. “Chances are, eh? Chances are it won’t be your worry then, too.”

  “I hope not. I’ve already got shot in two wars—three would be too bloody many. But you’ll be a staff sergeant yourself by then if you stay in.”

  “Roight. And then you wake up.” The kid reacted with automatic mockery. A moment later, though, his gray-blue eyes narrowed. “D’yer really fink Oi could?”

  “Why not? The other soldiers respect you, and you’ve picked up a lot since we first bumped into each other,” Walsh said.

  “Since you first got stuck wiv me, you mean,” Scholes said, not without pride.

  “You said it—I didn’t.”

  “A staff sergeant? Me? Cor! Wouldn’t me mum bust ’er buttons?” But Scholes’ eyes narrowed again, this time in a different way. “ ’Course, I’ve got to live through this little go-round first, eh?”

  “It would help,” Walsh admitted dryly. The younger man grunted laughter. Walsh went on, “Your chances now are a hell of a lot better than they were a few days ago, at least if the German Salvation Committee wins its scrap with the Nazis.”

  “You’ve got that right, I expect,” Scholes said. “But if peace goes an’ breaks out, ’oo says the Army’ll want to keep a scrawny West ’Am supporter loike me?”

  He had a point. East End Cockneys weren’t always the first choice of the powers that be for promotion or for anything else that didn’t involve the risk of sudden death. They weren’t calm and reliable and obedient, the way country boys were supposed to be. Like their counterparts from Mancunian and Liverpudlian slums, they had the nasty habit of doing as they pleased, not as they were told.

  Still, Walsh said, “I would have gone back to digging coal if they hadn’t decided to keep me in khaki in 1919. There are ways to get them to do what you want—and I’ll be glad to put in a good word for you. We need blokes who can tell privates what to do … and who can look a subaltern in the eye and let him know he’s a goddamn fool.”

  Jack Scholes laughed again. “Oi’d ’ate that, Oi would.”

  “I daresay.” Walsh chuckled, too. “You can’t let them know you enjoy it, though. You can’t let them know you’re laughing at them. Mm, most of the time you can’t, anyhow. They need that every once in a while.”

  “When you can’t get ’em to pull their ’eads out of their arse’oles any other way?” Scholes guessed shrewdly.

  “Something like that, yes.” In a few years, Walsh wouldn’t have wanted to be the junior lieutenant who rubbed Scholes the wrong way. No subaltern would make that mistake more than once. The experience might be educational. It would definitely be traumatic.

  A sentry called, “German coming this way with a white flag!”

  Walsh got up onto the firing step to look east into Belgium. “We’ve seen more flags of truce since the Fritzes did for Adolf than in the whole war up till then,” he remarked.

  This German looked like … a German: boots, Feldgrau, Schmeisser, coal-scuttle helmet. He had an Iron Cross First Class on his left breast pocket. After a moment, Walsh noticed he wore his shoulder straps upside down. Noncoms and officers often did that so snipers wouldn’t spot their rank badges and single them out.

  “Far enough!” Walsh yelled to him. “Put down the weapon! Hände hoch!”

  The German obediently set the machine pistol on the ground and raised his hands. “I carried it to protect myself from my countrymen, not to attack you,” he said in excellent English.

  That Walsh believed him was a sign of how much and how fast things had changed. “Come on, then,” he called.

  Still holding up his white flag, the Fritz did. His unloving countrymen started shooting at him before he made it to the English trenches. He hit the dirt with professional speed and crawled the last few yards before slithering down into what Bruce Bairnsfather had so memorably tagged “a better ’ole” during the last war.

  “I hope they won’t start throwing mortar bombs at us because you got away,” Walsh said.

  “I likewise,” the German agreed. “I am Ludwig Bauer. I am a major.” He rattled off his pay number, adding, “And now I am well out the war.”

  “Which side were you on?” Walsh asked. When the officer hesitated, Walsh said, “I won’t throw you back either way—I promise. But I do want to know.”

  “May I say I am on Germany’s side and leave it there?” Bauer returned. “Other Germans may want to shoot me, but I do not want to shoot them. I would rather a prisoner of war become than hurt my own Volk.”

  As a military coup ousted England’s pro-appeasement government, some nasty Scotland Yard men hadn’t worried at all about hurting Walsh, who opposed them. “Well, I can understand that,” he said, and meant it. He turned to Jack Scholes. “Take the major back to regimental HQ. They’ll carry on from there. We don’t have to fight him any more—just feed him.”

  “Roight.” Scholes gestured with his rifle. “Come along, you.” Bauer came. He seemed as happy as a sheep in clover. And why not? Unless choking on the slop POWs ate killed him, he’d live to go home again.

  The clock over the stove said it was coming up on seven o’clock: time for the morning news. Peggy Druce turned on the radio. She didn’t want to miss anything. The Inquirer sat on the kitchen table, but the news it held was several hours old by now. Things had been changing so fast, she wanted to stay up to the minute.

  Along with the paper, she had her first cup of coffee on the table. Her first cigarette of the day sat in an ashtray, sending a thin, twisting ribbon of smoke up toward the ceiling. She hadn’t worried about breakfast yet; she wouldn’t starve before she found out what was going on.

  She suffered through a singing commercial for a brand of cigarettes she couldn’t stand and another one for an oleomargarine that promised it was just as good as “the costlier spread.” She snorted and tried without much luck to blow a smoke ring. The oleomargarine makers couldn’t call it butter because dairy farmers didn’t want the competition. A lot of places, it wasn’t even legal to add yellow coloring to oleomargarine.

  But the dairy farmers weren’t the only ones trying to grease the people who bought things. Peggy’d tried oleomargarine, which had a much more generous ration allowance than “the costlier spread” did. She’d tried it once, that is. To her, it tasted more like machine oil than butter.

  “This is Douglas Edwards with the news,” the familiar voice announced. “The German Salvation Committee continues to make progress in its fight against diehard Nazis. There are reports of panzer battles in the Ruhr and others outside of Berlin pitting the Waffen-SS against Wehrmacht units loyal to General Guderian and the Committee. SS casualties are said to be very heavy.”

  Peggy stubbed out the cigarette. Some of that was in the Inquirer, but not all of it. She thought about lighting another one, but decided to wait till after breakfast. She sipped her coffee instead.

  “German Salvation Committee members are discussing peace terms in London, Paris, and Moscow,” Edwards went on. “Certain broad outlines have become plain. Germany definitely will evacuate the Low Countries and Denmark and Norway. Her forces will also leave the western areas of the Soviet Union that they still occupy. The Salvation Committee agrees to all of this without complaint.”

  The Salvation Committee had agreed to all of that a couple of days earlier. The Inquirer had already reported about it. Peggy waited to hear some of the new news she’d been hoping for, or at least to hear there was no new news.

  “There seem to be a few sticking points in seeking a general European peace. One involves Austria, another Czechoslovak
ia, a third the district around the Polish city of Wilno, which is also claimed by the USSR, and the last the fate of the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

  “German diplomats point out that the other great powers had accepted the Anschluss joining Austria to Germany in 1938, and that England and France were on the point of conceding the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland to Germany when the assassination of Sudeten German leader Konrad Henlein by a Czech nationalist touched off the Second World War. They also point out that the Slovaks are happier in an independent Slovakia than they were as, ah, country cousins in the former Czechoslovakia.

  “These same German diplomats object to Stalin’s claims against Wilno and the Baltic states. They plainly don’t want to let down their Polish allies, who have also suffered severe losses against Russia. Stalin’s attitude seems to be that, if Germany can come out of the war with more than she began it with, the USSR should be able to do so, as well.

  “Talks, then, continue. It seems as though neither England nor France is sure of how hard a line to take. It also seems that President Roosevelt has not yet made up his mind how hard to push them—or how hard he can push them, since America so recently entered the European war. More after these important messages.”

  These messages were important only if you had dentures or were constipated. Peggy turned on the burner under the coffee pot to heat it up. Maybe Douglas Edwards would have more to say about the European situation after the commercials. She wanted to find out whether the Salvation Committee intended to start treating Jews like human beings again. If it did, and if it was willing to say it did, she figured she would have to take it seriously.

  But the next story was about an American bomber raid against Jap-held Wake Island. There was also a story about a naval battle somewhere in the South Pacific where both sides claimed to have mauled their foes’ aircraft carriers. And there was a story about how all the American soldiers and sailors in Australia were popularizing baseball there.