Last Orders: The War That Came Early

by Harry Turtledove

  They were only Banderists, though. Nobody who could order up the rockets wanted to waste them on worthless Ukrainians. The regiment got to clean them out the hard way, the old-fashioned way, then. If some soldiers got killed taking care of it, well, you could always find more soldiers.

  The bandits fought with a motley mix of Nazi and Soviet weapons. They had an MG-34, but fired it only in short bursts. Ivan guessed they were low on 7.92mm cartridges. They wouldn’t get any more from the Fritzes. Once what they had was gone, it was gone for good.

  They had to know they were licked. Without the Nazis to help them out and to distract the Red Army, they hadn’t a prayer of winning. They stayed in their foxholes and fought it out anyway. Some of them stayed quiet till the Red Army men went past them, then shot their enemies in the back. The Russians had used that trick against the Hitlerites whenever they could. Seeing it turned against them wasn’t so much fun.

  “Give it up, you fools!” Sasha Davidov shouted to the Ukrainians. “All you’ll do is die here.”

  “Suck my dick, you Communist whore!” a Banderist yelled back. Yes, they knew what they were doing. They knew why they were doing it. They were bound to know it was hopeless, too. They went ahead and did it anyhow. That made them very brave or very stupid, depending on how you looked at things.

  The Red Army men took only a couple of prisoners. One of the Banderists actually gave up—he decided he would rather die slowly than all at once. Kuchkov’s men found the other guy behind a tree with a wound in the shoulder and another in the side.

  “If you feel like doing me a favor, you’ll finish me off and not let the Chekists get their claws in me,” the Ukrainian said in his accented Russian.

  “I will if you want,” Kuchkov said—he had no more use for the NKVD than he did for the Banderists. “Fuck your mother, are you sure?”

  “Fuck you in the mouth, I sure am, Red,” the injured man replied. “I hurt like a son of a bitch. Might as well get it over with.”

  A short burst from the PPD gave him what he wanted. One of the men in Ivan’s section must have said something about it to Lieutenant Obolensky, because the company commander took Ivan aside and said, “Are you sure you should have killed that bandit?”

  “You mean the wounded prick? Fuck yes, Comrade Lieutenant! He was shot a couple of times. I hope some whore would do that for me if I asked him to. Even the Hitlerites’d put a sorry bastard out of his misery sometimes.”

  Speaking carefully, Obolensky replied, “I hope it doesn’t get back to State Security that you killed the Banderist to keep him from telling them whatever he knew.”

  “Oh.” Ivan considered that, but not for long. Then he laughed. “Fuck ’em all, you know? They can already drop on me because of Vitya and the politruk. If the cunts do, they do. Nichevo, right?”

  “Nichevo—right,” Obolensky said. “But there’s a difference between not being able to do anything about it and swimming around in gravy before you jump into the wolf’s mouth.”

  “I guess so, Comrade Lieutenant. You’re a goddamn good guy, you know?”

  “Spasibo,” Obolensky said gravely.

  “You’re a goddamn good guy,” Ivan repeated, “but fuck ’em all anyway. I’ve been doing this shit too cocksucking long. I’m not scared any more. I don’t want ’em to jug me, but I’m fucking sick of worrying about it. They shoot me? So, fine—they shoot me. They send me to Kolyma? Kolyma can’t be too much worse than some of the fuck-storms I’ve already been through.”

  “I believe you,” Obolensky said slowly. “The NKVD would have a much harder time keeping the country in line if everybody felt that way.”

  Ivan only shrugged. What he really wanted to do was ask the lieutenant who’d blabbed about him. He didn’t waste his time, though. Obolensky wouldn’t tell him. He knew as much without asking. In the lieutenant’s footwraps, he wouldn’t have answered a question like that, either. Obolensky needed people to tell him things. And if Ivan found out who the rat was, that bitch would be a fatal accident that hadn’t happened yet.

  So Kuchkov shrugged one more time. He might be able to find out without asking anybody, at least in so many words. He might not read or write, but he sure as hell could add two and two.

  Then he could fix things so the Banderists did his dirty work for him. Or if not them, the Japs. Sooner or later, the regiment would head for the Far East. The Japs were supposed to be just as much fun as the Germans, only in a different way. Yeah, they’d give plenty of chances for payback. You bet they would!

  The big, snorting American lorry rolled away from the front. “And so we bid farewell to beautiful, romantic Belgium,” Alistair Walsh said grandly as he sat in the back with a squad’s worth of men. “We say good-bye to the exotic natives and their quaint and curious customs, and to our fellow holidaymakers from the strange and distant land of Deutsch.”

  “Blimey,” Jack Scholes said. “Staff’s gone clean barmy, ’e ’as.” By the way the rest of the Tommies nodded and rolled their eyes, they sided with the gritty little private. No, Scholes had a new lance-corporal’s single chevron on his left sleeve: a parting gift, as it were. Well, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t earned the stripe the hard way.

  “Not me,” Walsh said. “You blokes have no poetry in your souls—that’s what the trouble is.”

  “Or m’ybe you’ve got rocks in your ’ead,” Scholes said. Again, by all the signs a vote would have gone his way.

  Walsh pulled a new packet of Navy Cuts out of his breast pocket. After lighting his own, he passed the cigarettes around. “He may be balmy, but he’s not a bad old bugger,” one of the soldiers said, as if he weren’t there. Most of the others nodded one more time. They were, after all, enjoying his bounty. He was about as much a politician as any other staff sergeant, and not shy about buying popularity.

  The canvas top was spread over its steel hoops to keep sun and rain off the passengers in the truck. Walsh could see out the back, but that wasn’t much of a view: the road the truck had just traveled over, and a little off to one side of it. The farther from the front they got, the fewer the smashed trees and flattened houses he spotted.

  “Bloody fucking hell,” said Gordon McAllister, who sat next to him. The big Scot’s burr only added to the sincerity of the sentiment. “We lived through it.” He didn’t talk much. When he did, it was to the point.

  Unless we run over a mine or something ran through Walsh’s head. He left it there. You didn’t want to say some things, for fear of making them come true. Any educated toff would tell you such magical thinking was superstitious nonsense. Walsh didn’t care. Not mentioning such things couldn’t make matters worse.

  On they went. They met no mines, for which the staff sergeant was duly grateful. They did have to get off the road once, to jounce along on a corduroyed track through a field. When they came back to the paving, Walsh saw why they’d left: a repair crew was filling in an enormous crater.

  “Fritzes must’ve dropped that one about an hour before the shooting stopped,” Scholes said.

  “Why’d they send us down this stinking road, then?” somebody else asked. “Couldn’t they find one without a big fucking hole in it?”

  That was one of those questions without any answer, of course. Maybe the fellow who’d planned the withdrawal had no idea about the bomb crater. Maybe he’d figured the corduroyed stretch would handle the traffic. Maybe he hadn’t given a damn one way or the other. Maybe the driver was lost.

  Or maybe, and perhaps more likely, nobody’d given a damn one way or the other. The British Expeditionary Force was leaving Belgium. By lorry, by train, by bus, and, for all Walsh knew, by stagecoach, the Tommies were pulling out and heading for Calais and the other Channel Ports. Pretty soon, they’ll all be off the Continent and back in Blighty again.

  Most of their German counterparts were already out of Belgium and Holland and even Luxembourg and back in the Vaterland. Walsh wondered what the Salvation Committee would do with all the young men th
ey’d have to demobilize, and how unhappy those young men would prove when they had trouble finding work.

  For that matter, he wondered how his own country would cope with swarms of demobilized soldiers looking for jobs. That hadn’t been easy the last time around. This go looked no easier.

  It wasn’t his problem, though. The people who would have to worry about it were the bright young men in the government: the bright young men who were his friends and acquaintances, thanks to an accident of fate.

  If Rudolf Hess had chosen to parachute into some other field … Walsh shook his head. In that case, someone else would have fetched the deputy Führer to the authorities, and one Alistair Walsh never would have found his affairs commingled with those of the great, the famous, and the powerful. But Hess had come down in that field outside of Dundee, and Walsh had taken him back into the town, and nothing was the same as it would have been otherwise. Better? Worse? How could he know? But surely different.

  He wondered what had happened to Hess since Hitler’s untimely demise. He didn’t recall hearing anything about Hess since then, not that the man with the bushy eyebrows died a brave Nazi death, not that he was still alive and fighting, not that he’d been captured, not … anything.

  His high-placed friends would know. Once he got back to England, he could find out. If he remembered. If he didn’t, that wasn’t the biggest thing in the world, either.

  After a while, the lorry pulled off onto the shoulder. “Break time,” the driver announced. “Grab some grub, brew some char, go off into the bushes and set your minds at ease.”

  “I don’t keep my mind there,” Walsh said.

  “You’ve got to remember, Staff—you’re gettin’ old,” Jack Scholes said. The other Tommies in the back of the truck chuckled. The driver whooped—Walsh couldn’t give him trouble once this ride ended.

  They washed down whatever they happened to have on them with tea brewed over smokeless cookers. Then they climbed back into the lorry. Before long, they crossed from Belgium into France. Walsh never would have known it, except that they passed two flagpoles, one flying a tricolor of black, yellow, and red, the other a red, white, and blue three-striper.

  As night was falling, the lorry pulled into a tent city on the outskirts of Calais. “This is where I came in,” Walsh said. “Where I came in three different times, as a matter of fact.”

  “Next time you get over ’ere, you can pay your own way,” Scholes said with a sly grin.

  “I’ve seen all kinds of funny places on His Majesty’s shilling,” Walsh said in musing tones. “France and Belgium and Norway and Egypt … I never would have set eyes on the Pyramids and the Sphinx if I hadn’t gone there on duty. That’s something I’ll remember the rest of my days. Christ, chances are I’d never even have seen Scotland if I’d stayed a miner.”

  “No loss.” Private McAllister was as glad to be away from his homeland as Walsh was to have escaped Wales.

  “ ’E’s right, Oi reckon,” Scholes said, grinning still. “ ’Ow much would you ’ave missed it?”

  “Not bloody much—for all kinds of reasons.” Again, Walsh saw Hess’ parachute coming down in that field. That had turned his life inside out and upside down, sure as hell. He went on, “I got shot in France, and I got shot in Africa, too. Wherever you do it, it’s not something I recommend. I didn’t get shot in Norway, but God only knows why. The Fritzes up there gave it their best try, no doubt about that.”

  “An’ now they’re leaving, an’ that Quisling sod ’oo ’elped run the place for ’em, ’e’s got to find ’imself somewhere to ’ide,” Scholes said.

  “Him and Mussert the Dutchman and Degrelle the Belgian and more besides,” Walsh agreed. “They’re all homegrown Nazis, so I don’t know if the Salvation Committee will even let them hole up in Germany. If their own people catch ’em, they’ll win a noose or a bullet.”

  “Tell me they don’t deserve it, Staff,” the younger man said.

  Walsh shook his head. “I can’t. I think they do. Then maybe we’ll have a little peace and quiet—till the next crop of gangsters and traitors gets taller and starts to need cutting down, anyhow.”

  Peggy Druce scooped bacon out of the frying pan with a slotted spatula and set the rashers on paper napkins that would soak up the grease. After cracking eggs into a bowl that already held some heavy cream and stirring the mix, she started scrambling them in the pan.

  Watching from the kitchen table, Dave Hartman blew a stream of cigarette smoke up toward the ceiling. “You’re so smooth when you do that,” he said admiringly.

  “Practice,” Peggy answered. “Not like it’s the first time I ever fixed bacon and eggs.” At her age, there weren’t many things left to do for the first time. Too many of the ones that were left had to do with getting old and getting feeble and dying. The longer she didn’t find out about those, the happier she would stay.

  But Dave took her words in a different sense. “That’s it!” he said, and nodded in complete concord. “That’s just it! You remind me of a guy who’s been working a drill press so long, he knows in his sleep all the things it can do and all the things he can do with it. When I mess around in the kitchen, I’m more like somebody who’s maybe heard of a drill press but hasn’t hardly seen one.”

  “I’ll bet you do fine.” Peggy had trouble imagining Dave as less than competent at anything to which he set his hand. She served up breakfast. “Do you want another cup of coffee with this?”

  “Sure. Thanks, sweetie.”

  After she poured for him and for her, she put the frying pan in the sink and filled it with soapy water. That would save on elbow grease when she did the dishes. Things wouldn’t dry out and stick to the inside of the pan like cement. “Why can’t they make a frying pan where it’s enamel or something else smooth in there, so you could wash it easier?” she said.

  “You could …” Dave stretched out the word, and the silence after it, while he thought things over. Then he went on, “I bet it’d be swell to begin with. After a while, though, you’d bang on the enamel with your spatula and your big fork and your serving spoon, and the surface would get as scratched up as steel does, or maybe worse. Same with the grit from cleanser, and you couldn’t use steel wool. If you had nothing but wooden kitchen tools and you washed your frying pan with a sponge and soap all the time, it might stay okay long enough to be worthwhile.”

  “I guess.” Peggy was glad he didn’t make her sound like a jerk even while he picked to pieces what she’d thought was her good idea. She continued, “There ought to be something like enamel that food wouldn’t stick to but that you wouldn’t need to baby.”

  “Yeah, there ought to. Only trouble is, I have no idea what that’d be,” Dave said. “I wish I did—I bet I could get rich off it.” He shrugged. “I’m not a metallurgist, or a chemist, either. Working with metal and stuff, you pick up bits and pieces, but bits and pieces are all I’ll ever have. For a guy who quit school halfway through the tenth grade, I’ve done okay for myself.”

  “You sure have. Your hands know just what they’re doing.” Peggy winked at him. “They probably do when you’re at work, too.”

  He blushed like a kid still wet behind the ears, though her language hadn’t been even slightly blue. He was more straitlaced about those things than Herb. Talking dirty had made Herb laugh and got him excited. It shocked Dave, all the more so since he thought of her as a high-class lady. That didn’t stop him from enjoying her company when they were together in bed, or why would she have just cooked him breakfast? It did mean she behaved differently with him from the way she would have with her ex-husband.

  Herb hadn’t been Peggy’s first man, though she didn’t know if he knew that. He had been the first whose likes and dislikes she’d paid close attention to. Now she was learning somebody else.

  And somebody else was learning her, too. They’d fumbled some to begin with, each finding out what worked with the other and what didn’t work so well. That seemed strange and interestin
g. She and Herb had known the right answers without thinking, which might have been part of the problem. The other part was that, after she got back from Europe, they’d known without caring.

  Care Dave did. If he was as precise with his lathes and presses and punches as he was with her, he had to be the best machinist in Pennsylvania, if not in the whole country. And he still seemed surprised she wanted to fool around with him. She found that flattering and funny at the same time.

  He glanced over at the clock above the stove. Her eyes followed his. It was a few minutes before eight. “Want I should turn on the radio, see what’s gone wrong since last night?” he said.

  “Sure. Just because it’s Sunday, that doesn’t mean everything’s perfect,” Peggy said.

  She’d never had trouble living without much in the way of religion. Neither had Herb, who was too cynical to believe in things he couldn’t see for himself. Dave wasn’t somebody who sang hymns in church, but he took for granted the beliefs he’d soaked up as a kid. Peggy hadn’t exactly shocked him, but she had made him blink a few times.

  He clicked the knob on the little kitchen set. When the sound came up, a smooth-voiced announcer was flogging Bon Ami cleanser. He claimed it didn’t scratch. Dave’s raised eyebrow called him a liar.

  “This is Lowell Thomas with the news,” came next. “The Soviet Union has declared martial law in newly annexed Lithuania after two assassins, one armed with a bomb, the other with a submachine gun, murdered Field Marshal Ivan Koniev, Stalin’s military governor, as he traveled by car from his residence to his office in Kaunas. Kaunas is currently the capital of Lithuania, though the recently incorporated Vilno may take the other city’s place.

  “Speaking from Finland, Lithuanian exile groups call Koniev’s assassination a powerful blow for liberty. Russian reprisals in occupied Lithuania are said to be very harsh, although not much news has come out of the USSR following the announcement of the killing.”