Two Fronts twtce-5

by Harry Turtledove

  Sarah and her mother both giggled in delicious horror. “People say those things?” Sarah exclaimed. “Aren’t they afraid the blackshirts will haul them away and start hitting them with hoses?”

  Samuel Goldman’s mouth twisted in amusement-wry amusement, but amusement nevertheless. “If the Gestapo grabbed everybody who told jokes like that, the Reich wouldn’t be able to make bobby pins any more, let alone rifles and planes and panzers. People aren’t happy. Everybody keeps wondering how long the war can go on.”

  “We did that the last time around, too,” Mother said. “We thought it had to end pretty soon. But it just dragged on and on.”

  “Tell me about it,” Father said. “In the trenches, we used to look forward to raiding the Tommies’ lines even if we were liable to get killed doing it. If we lived, we’d eat their bully beef and smoke their tobacco. They had so much more than we did, especially toward the end …” As if reminded, he rolled a cigarette from newspaper and dog-ends scrounged in the gutter. That was how Jews got their cigarettes these days; their ration had been cut off a long time ago. He smoked the nasty stuff with as much enjoyment as if it were a blend of the best Virginia and Turkish.

  “I wonder if it’s that bad this time around,” Sarah said.

  “Probably not quite,” Father answered judiciously. “We’re still living off what we’ve taken from places like Holland and Denmark. And most of what we’ve got goes to the soldiers. If they can’t fight, everything falls apart.” He grimaced. “Everything may fall apart no matter how well they fight.”

  “No Americans this time around,” Hanna Goldman observed.

  “That’s true.” Now Father spoke in musing tones. “I don’t think I ever came up against them-I was farther north. But people I know who did say they took a lot of needless casualties. They didn’t quite know what they were doing, not like our old sweats. They were brave, though. Everybody says that. And there were more and more of them, and we knew there’d be more still the longer we kept fighting. Ludendorff saw when to make terms, all right.”

  “No ‘stab in the back’?” Sarah sounded more malicious than curious.

  “No, of course not.” Her father waved the idea away. “We were whipped no matter what Hitler says. One Landser was worth more than one Tommy or one poilu or one doughboy, but so what? We weren’t worth two enemy soldiers apiece, or three, or five. If we’d kept going, they’d have steamrollered us in 1919-and don’t forget, the Austrians and the Turks had already given up and started falling apart. Stab in the back!” He snorted.

  “Can we fight to a draw if the Americans stay out of Europe?” Mother asked.

  Samuel Goldman rolled his eyes. “What am I? A prophet out of the Old Testament? I don’t know, but I don’t see Russia going out of the fight this time. The Tsar didn’t really believe his people would rise up against him if he gave them half a chance. Stalin’s like Hitler-he doesn’t trust anybody. Anyone who tries to overthrow him will have his work cut out. So the two-front war will go on. What comes of that …”

  Sarah had a different question: “Will anything be left of us by the time the war finally ends, if it ever does?”

  By us she meant us Jews. She would have explained that at need, but Father understood right away. He rolled his eyes again. “You really want me to play the prophet, don’t you? I think we’d all be dead if Poland were on Stalin’s side. Poland’s full of Jews. If they’re with the enemy, that would only make the Nazis go after us even harder than they already do.”

  “Like stealing the Brucks’ estate.” Sarah didn’t bother hiding her bitterness.

  “It could be worse,” Father said. “Most of the time, they have to think we did something before they throw us in a camp. They aren’t doing it just for the fun of it or throwing everybody in no matter what. Not yet they aren’t, anyway. And, alevai, they won’t start.”

  “Alevai omayn,” Sarah echoed. The Yiddish reminded her what she was. Could things really get worse? She supposed they could-and maybe that was the scariest thought of all.

  They’d stuck Aristide Demange up at the front again, the worthless cons with the fancy embroidery on their kepis. He would have been more disgusted were he less surprised. He was a damn nuisance. Worse, he was proud of being a damn nuisance. Of course his superiors wanted him dead. They lacked the balls to take care of it themselves. That being so, they had to hope the Boches would do the job for them.

  The Boches hadn’t managed to tend to it in the last war, or in this one, either. The Reds also hadn’t done it this time through, when the rich guys decided they were even more trouble than the Nazis. So now Hitler’s boys got another crack at him. Happy fucking day, Demange thought.

  “Lieutenant?” One of the poilus in his company broke into his gloomy reflections.

  “Waddaya want, Francois?” Demange had no trouble learning his soldiers’ names. Sounding as if he gave a damn about them came harder, especially since he didn’t.

  “Lieutenant, shouldn’t we attack the Nazis?” Francois must have found some raw meat somewhere.

  “Go ahead.” Demange pointed northeast, toward the Franco-Belgian border. “They’ve spent the last year digging in, but don’t let that stop you. Be my guest, in fact. Then I won’t have to put up with your bullshit any more.”

  Francois turned red. He was a new recruit. He hadn’t gone to Russia; he had no idea what combat was like. He’d find out pretty soon any which way. Then Demange-and he himself-would see what he was worth, and whether he was worth anything. In the meantime, he complained: “No, Lieutenant, I mean the whole army!”

  “Oh, you can’t kill all of them by yourself?” Demange sounded amazed. “Listen to me, you … you bedbug, you. When we get orders, we move. Till we get orders, we sit tight. That will keep you alive for a while, probably longer than you deserve. Got me?”

  “Got you,” Francois answered. Demange’s Gitane sent up angry smoke signals. Hastily, Francois changed his tune: “I understand, Lieutenant!”

  “Good. Marvelous. Wunderbar.” Demange used the German word with an irony so savage, it almost turned unironic. And he was altogether serious when he jerked a thumb toward the tents where Francois’ comrades were huddling. “Now fuck off.”

  Francois stayed out of his hair after that. Only an idiot would have gone on messing with a lieutenant who still behaved like the bad-tempered top sergeant he had been. While Francois-to Demange, at least-was definitely a moron, he wasn’t (quite) an idiot.

  A couple of poilus in the company damn well were. Jean and Marcel were both Communists, which-to Demange, again-merely gave a name to the kind of idiot they were. Like Francois, they were hot to storm after the Nazis right away. Unlike Francois, they didn’t want to take no for an answer.

  One of them was tall and skinny, one short and kind of plump. They looked like a bad comedy team, in other words. Demange didn’t bother remembering which was which. He did hope one of them would stick a finger in the other one’s eye. That was always good for a laugh.

  “We must slay the Fascist hyenas!” the tall one gabbled. “The safety of the world proletariat depends on it.”

  Demange’s Gitane twitched. “Oh, yeah?” he replied. “Says who?”

  The Reds looked at each other. He’d seen before that Communists were as bad for that as fairies. After a pregnant pause, the short one said, “It is a well-known fact, Lieutenant.”

  “Well known to who?” Demange didn’t bother with grammar.

  “Why, to those who know such things, of course,” the soldier spluttered.

  “Yeah, well, you can kiss my balls with your well-known facts, and so can they,” Demange snarled. “I’ll give you some well-known facts of my own. When the war started, you fucking Reds didn’t want to fight at all. Then when Hitler started jumping on Stalin’s corns, all of a sudden you couldn’t fight hard enough. And then, after France decided Hitler made a better bet than Stalin, all of a sudden you were yellow again, not Red. Now it’s rush the German trenches
one more time!” He spat out the tiny butt and lit another cigarette. “You worthless pukes make me sick.”

  “Come the revolution, you will be remembered,” the tall Communist said somberly.

  “Good,” Demange growled, which made them both stare at him. He condescended to explain: “No one will ever remember you two dingle-berries for anything. I’ve shot Russians and Germans who were worth ten times both of you put together. God only knows why France doesn’t use punishment battalions. That’s where you belong.”

  They licked their lips. They knew what those were, all right. If you screwed up in the Red Army-and, these days, in the Wehrmacht, too-they handed you a submachine gun and sent you where the fighting was hottest to redeem your honor. Odds against your living through it were long, but you got blown up knowing you were doing your precious country some good.

  Assuming that made you happier while you were trying to shove your guts back into your belly where they belonged.

  Demange had long been sure he had an easier time coping with the enemy than with people who loudly declared they were on the same side. The cons in the fancy kepis were a case in point. Francois, Jean, and Marcel were another. And the peasants of northeastern France made one more.

  Well, actually they didn’t declare they were on Demange’s side. By the way they acted, he wouldn’t have bet on it, either. They were most of them big, fair fellows who looked more like Belgians-or Germans-than proper Frenchmen. He understood only about half of their clotted dialect: less than that when they larded it with Flemish words to make it harder. What he did understand, he commonly didn’t like.

  For their part, they didn’t like the French Army. They’d been occupied by the Boches during the last war and the first part of this one. That gave them plenty of practice at hiding anything an occupier might want. These days, they figured their own country’s armed forces were doing the occupying.

  To say they were reluctant to cough up supplies for the poilus beggared the power of language. You wouldn’t see a sack of grain or a chicken or even a turnip anywhere near their farmhouses. They would spread their hands and go “Rien.” Looking around, you’d be tempted to believe they had nothing.

  But their bellies hung over their belts. Their wives had double chins. Demange knew what hungry people looked like. He’d seen enough of them in Russia, and in Germany right after the end of the last war. The peasants hereabouts weren’t hungry. They just wanted to hang on to what they had.

  They weren’t shy about letting you know what they thought of you, either. After Demange and some of his men requisitioned three fat geese, the farmer from whom they took them growled, “You people are as bad as the Boches.” He could speak perfectly plain French when he felt like it.

  “Ah, your mother,” Demange replied. The thought of goose fat on his tongue helped mellow him as much as anything ever did. “If we were Boches, we’d be banging on you with our rifle butts right now.”

  “Merde.” The farmer spat. “The Boches were here, remember. Not that you cons did anything to keep them out. And they were correct enough. They paid for what they took, in fact.”

  “Oh, it’s pay you want?” Demange flipped him a franc. “Here. And I’m giving you something else to go with it, too.”

  “What’s that?” The farmer stared at the gold-colored (but only gold-colored-it was really aluminum-bronze) coin in disgust.

  “Your fucking big mouth, with all its teeth still in it. And believe me, pal, you don’t know how lucky you are.” Demange gestured to his men. Off they went with the geese, leaving the farmer staring after them, his fists clenched uselessly by his sides.

  The airstrip by Philippeville was every bit as grim as the barbed wire surrounding it had made Hans-Ulrich Rudel fear it would be. The locals were surly. The food was worse than it had been in Russia. That didn’t just dismay Hans-Ulrich; it horrified him.

  Sergeant Dieselhorst complained about it, too. He was a noncom, after all. Pissing and moaning were second nature to him. But, unlike Rudel, he knew the ropes. Hans-Ulrich often suspected the older man had been born knowing the ropes. “Rules are different here,” he said after Hans-Ulrich made rude noises about the stew the mess cooks had ladled out.

  “Rules? There weren’t any rules in Russia.” Hans-Ulrich didn’t want to think about the fat that had flavored those potatoes. If it wasn’t motor oil, it had no business tasting so much like it.

  “That’s the point … sir,” Sergeant Dieselhorst said patiently. “In Russia, we went and grabbed whatever we wanted. We didn’t care whether the goddamn Ivans liked us or not. It’s different here. We don’t want the Belgians to hate our guts and go playing games with the froggies. So we can’t take as much from them as we did in the East.”

  “So we get stuck with that hog-swill ourselves.” Rudel belched. The last stew didn’t improve when it came up instead of going down. “Sure makes me want to jump into the Stuka and kill things-I’ll tell you that.”

  “There you go.” Albert Dieselhorst grinned wryly. “You see? It boosts morale.”

  Hans-Ulrich said something he was ashamed of as soon as it came out of his mouth. He didn’t talk like that most of the time. He was a minister’s son, after all. And his father’s hard hand, applied to the seat of his pants or the side of his head, had done its best to make sure he never talked that way. Every once in a while, though …

  Sergeant Dieselhorst laughed so hard, Hans-Ulrich wondered if he would have a heart attack. “Oh, shut up,” the pilot muttered.

  “Jawohl, mein Herr! Zu Befehl!” Dieselhorst came to attention, clicked his heels, and shot out his arm in a Party salute all the more sarcastic for being so full of vigor. Then he dissolved in mirth again.

  “It wasn’t that funny,” Rudel said. Sergeant Dieselhorst wordlessly called him a liar. In something close to desperation, Rudel added, “Shut up or I’ll pop you one.”

  He got his crewmate’s attention, anyhow. Dieselhorst favored him with a mild and curious gaze. “Well, sir, you can try, anyhow,” he said.

  Hans-Ulrich was larger and younger and stronger. He neither smoked nor drank, so he was bound to be in better shape, too. Sergeant Dieselhorst just stood there, waiting to see what happened next. He wouldn’t start anything, not when he was squaring off against an officer. Something about the way he stood suggested that he expected to finish whatever Rudel did start, though. How many dirty tricks had he learned, in the Luftwaffe or in one barroom brawl or another?

  More than Hans-Ulrich really wanted to find out about. With dignity, the pilot said, “There. That’s better. You aren’t braying like a jackass any more.”

  Sergeant Dieselhorst’s expression might have said it took one to know one. It might have, but Hans-Ulrich didn’t try to find out. Sometimes-pretty often, in fact-you were better off not knowing things officially.

  RAF bombers droned overhead on nights when the English thought the time was ripe to drop some Schrechlichkeit on German cities. They didn’t bomb Belgium very often, though. Nor did the Luftwaffe pound the French positions just over the border, though German bombers hit Paris and London under cover of darkness.

  Sitting there outside of Philippeville not doing anything much finally irritated Hans-Ulrich enough to make him complain to the squadron commander. “We should have stayed in Russia, sir! At least there we’d be flying and blowing up Ivans.”

  Colonel Steinbrenner smiled and raised an eyebrow. Hans-Ulrich wondered whether Steinbrenner would point out that, had they stayed in the East, he might still be able to get leave in Bialystok and disport himself with Sofia. But the colonel didn’t. All he said was, “Both sides here have their reasons for not pushing things as hard as they might.”

  “Sir?” Rudel’s one-word reply politely declared he didn’t believe it for a minute.

  Colonel Steinbrenner’s sigh said he understood as much, and that he thought he was dealing with a classic specimen of boy idiot. “We’re at war with France and England, yes,” he said, coming as clo
se as he could to explaining things in words of one syllable. “But that’s not the war we want, and it’s not a war they want very much. If we don’t push it, maybe, just maybe, the boys with the top hats and striped trousers can make it go away. Then we will see the Ivans again-count on that.”

  “Ah.” Hans-Ulrich was an indifferent chess player. Someone else’s clever move often made sense to him-once a man who knew the game better explained it. He never would have seen it or made it himself. He found himself with the same feeling now.

  “So that’s what’s happening-I mean, what isn’t happening,” Steinbrenner said. “For the time being, we have to stay ready, that’s all. If the diplomats bugger it up, we’ll get all the flying we want and then some. Or if England and France decide they do mean it after all …” He made a sour face. “Here’s hoping they don’t. Life is complicated enough as is.”

  As he’d needed to more than once before, Rudel reminded himself that Steinbrenner had taken over the squadron after the Sicherheitsdienst hauled away the previous CO because he wasn’t loyal enough to satisfy them. So the colonel was politically reliable. And if a man who was politically reliable could go so far …

  In that case, life really was complicated enough-and then some.

  “Heil Hitler!” Steinbrenner said, which meant he’d had as much of Hans-Ulrich as he aimed to take.

  “Heil Hitler!” Hans-Ulrich echoed. His arm shot out in the Party salute. So did Colonel Steinbrenner’s. The junior officer beat it.

  Before long, though, not flying started to drive him crazy (or, depending on how you looked at things, crazier). The Stukas remained grounded. He talked himself onto a Fieseler Storch reconnaissance plane for a look-see above the French lines.