The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat

by Harry Turtledove

  Her father sighed. “Bad food, and not enough of it.” He flipped his hand up and down. “It’s not your fault. I know it’s not. You and mother do everything anyone could with what the Reich lets us have.”

  “That’s not enough, either.”

  “If it were, the Reich wouldn’t let us have it,” Father said.

  He paused then. Sarah could read his mind. He was looking for the best—or worst—way to make a pun about how the Reich really wanted to let them have it. He did things like that. But before he could this time, the front door opened behind him. He looked absurdly affronted as he half turned on his good leg, as if Mother had squashed his line on purpose.

  Hanna Goldman hadn’t, of course. Her little two-wheeled collapsible wire shopping cart was almost as empty as it had been when she set out. Some sorry turnips, some insect-nibbled greens … That kind of stuff might have done for fattening hogs. People just got thinner on it, as Sarah had sad reason to know.

  But Mother’s jade-green eyes snapped with excitement. “They’ve arrested Bishop von Galen!” she exclaimed.

  “We knew that.” By the deflationary way Father said it, he was miffed he hadn’t got to make his horrible pun.

  Mother refused to be deflated. “Did you know there’s a great big crowd out in front of the cathedral? Did you know they’re yelling at the police and the blackshirts, and throwing things at them, too?”

  “Der Herr Gott im Himmel!” Father burst out. Sarah felt the same way. Germans mostly didn’t do such things. She’d heard that, when machine guns opened up on demonstrators in the mad Berlin of 1919, the crowd fled across a park to escape the deadly fire—but people obeyed the KEEP OFF THE GRASS! signs while they ran for their lives.

  “It’s true. I saw the edges of it. I got away from there as fast as I could afterward,” Mother said. “I didn’t want to wait till the blackshirts started shooting—and I didn’t want to give them any reason to arrest a Jew, either.”

  “If each of us would have tried to take one of those pigdogs with him when they came for him …” For a moment, Father looked and sounded young and ferocious, the way he would have in the trenches in the last war. But then he sighed and shook his head and went back to his familiar self. “The Nazis wouldn’t care. They’d thank us for handing them an excuse to murder us all.”

  “They can’t murder everyone out by the cathedral,” Mother said.

  Distant gunfire seemed to give her the lie. Even more faintly, Sarah heard screams and shrieks and shouts. She supposed they’d been going on before, but she hadn’t been able to make them out. She could now. People made more noise when bullets snarled past—or when they struck home.

  “They’ll blame the Communists for this,” Father predicted.

  “There aren’t many Catholic Communists,” Sarah pointed out.

  “They won’t care,” Samuel Goldman said. “Outside agitators, they’ll call them, and they’ll say von Galen was working with them.” He spread his callused hands. “I mean, otherwise they’d have to blame themselves, and what are the odds of that?”

  Chapter 6

  Coming back into port should have been a relief for Julius Lemp and the rest of the U-30’s crew. Most of the time, it was. Coming back meant they’d made it through another patrol. RAF bombs wouldn’t sink them. Russian shells wouldn’t tear through the U-boat’s thin steel hide and send it to the bottom. Slow-crawling crabs wouldn’t pick out Lemp’s bulging dead eyes with their claws … this time.

  The men could shave their beards. They could take proper showers. They could eat food that didn’t come out of tins. They could go into town and drink and pick up barmaids and brawl. They could walk off by themselves, without someone else always at their elbow. Or they could lie on real mattresses and sleep and sleep.

  It was wonderful. Most of the time.

  Every once in a while, politics got in the way. And politics, in the Reich, turned bloody in a hurry. They’d just come back in to Wilhelmshaven when the generals tried to topple the Führer. You didn’t want to hear machine-gun fire at the edge of the base, especially when you weren’t sure who was shooting at whom or why.

  Now they were in Kiel—at the edge of the Baltic rather than the North Sea—and politics was rearing its ugly head again. Everyone should have been proud of them for sinking the destroyer and two Soviet freighters on their latest patrol. If Lemp’s superiors were, they had a gift for hiding their enthusiasm.

  “Ja, ja. Well done, I am sure,” said the graying Kapitän zur See who heard Lemp’s first report. The bare bulb above the senior officer’s desk gleamed off the four gold stripes on his cuffs. He scribbled a note or two, but only a note or two. “No doubt your log gives the full details.”

  If he wasn’t a distracted man, Lemp had never seen one. “Yes, sir,” he said.

  The captain looked up and seemed surprised to find him still there. “Do you require something else, uh, Lemp?” He had to remind himself who the squirt in front of him was. Considering some of the things that had happened to Lemp, he didn’t know whether to be relieved or alarmed—for better and for worse, he hadn’t had the kind of career that lent itself to obscurity.

  “Require? No, sir. Of course not, sir.” Lemp lied with great sincerity, as a junior sometimes had to do with a superior. “But if it’s not too much trouble, sir, I would like to have some idea of what’s going on.”

  He might have stuck the Kapitän zur See with a pin. “What makes you think anything out of the ordinary is going on?” the older man demanded. Lemp didn’t answer; he didn’t think that needed an answer. The four-striper’s sigh said he really didn’t, either. He lit a cigarette. It was only stalling, and he and Lemp both knew it. His sigh sent a stream of smoke up toward the lightbulb. “Tell me, Lemp—what is your religion?”

  “My religion, sir?” The U-boat skipper would have been more surprised had the captain asked him which position he most fancied in bed, but not much more surprised. “I’m a Lutheran, sir, but I haven’t been to church in a while.”

  The senior officer blew out more smoke, this time in obvious relief. “Well, I could say the same thing. As a matter of fact, I did say the same thing to my own superiors the other day.”

  Lemp had to remind himself that even an exalted Kapitän zur See had men to whom he needed to answer. “Why on earth did they ask you, sir?” he said, in lieu of Why on earth are you asking me?

  A brief spark in the captain’s gray eyes said he also heard the question behind the question. “There are certain … advantages to being away at sea, tending to the Reich’s business,” he replied. “You won’t have heard that the Catholics are, mm, well, some of them are, mm, unhappy about the way things are going.”

  “Sir?” Lemp said, this time in lieu of What the devil are you talking about?

  “It’s the Bishop of Münster’s fault,” the four-striper said. He sounded like a man trying to convince himself. Or that could have been Lemp’s imagination, but he didn’t think so. The answer also explained next to nothing. The Kapitän zur See must have realized as much. He stubbed out the cigarette with a quick, savage motion. “He spoke out against the Führer’s policy. From the pulpit. Repeatedly. And so the security services decided they had no choice but to take him into custody.”

  “I … see,” Lemp said slowly. You needed nerve to do something like that. You needed to have your head examined, was what you really needed.

  “There are … demonstrations of unhappiness about this here and there in the Vaterland,” the Kapitän zur See said. “This is why I asked you, you understand.”

  “Aber natürlich,” Lemp said, which seemed safe enough. Demonstrations of unhappiness? What was going on in Germany? Was the whole country bubbling like a pot of stew forgotten on the stove? He wouldn’t have been surprised. You couldn’t just go arresting bishops. These weren’t the Middle Ages, after all. But the blackshirts didn’t seem to care. They were Hitler’s hounds. Do something they didn’t like and they’d bite.

&n
bsp; “So that’s where we are. That’s why passes into town are limited,” the Kapitän zur See said. Schleswig-Holstein had been Danish till a lifetime before, and was solidly Lutheran. Even so … “The less trouble we stir up, the better for everyone.”

  “The men won’t like being restricted to base, sir,” Lemp said. As the other officer had to know, that was an understatement.

  “Yes? And so?” The Kapitän zur See sent him a hooded look. “They aren’t the only crew here, you know.”

  “Jawohl, mein Herr.” Lemp knew a losing fight when he saw one. “I’ll tell them what they need to understand.” He rose, saluted, and got out of the four-striper’s office as fast as he could.

  By the time he returned to the barracks, the U-30’s crew had already found that next to none of them would be able to go into town. They weren’t happy about it, which was putting things mildly. “What, the shitheads don’t think we deserve to blow off steam? They can blow it out their assholes, is what they can do.” That was Paul, the helmsman—a chief petty officer, and as steady a man as Lemp had ever known. If he was within shouting distance of mutiny, the rest of the submariners had to be even closer.

  Lemp spread his hands in what looked like apology, even though U-boat skippers weren’t in the habit of apologizing to their men. “There’s nothing I can do about it, friends,” he said. “It’s politics, is what it is.” He summarized what the Kapitän zur See had told him. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the senior officer didn’t want ratings to know such things. Well, too damn bad for him if he didn’t.

  Some of the sailors, naturally, were Catholics. Some were convinced Nazis. The largest number cared little for religion or politics. “So this bullshit is what’s keeping us confined to base?” one of them said. “That’s nothing but Quatsch. If we want to get into fights, we’ve got better things to brawl about than some stupid, loudmouthed bishop.”

  “Do we?” another sailor said. “The government shouldn’t tell us how to be religious. They fought wars about that back in the old days.”

  “A bishop’s got no business telling government what to do, either,” the first man retorted. “They fought wars about that in the old days, too.” By the way the two ratings glared at each other, they were both ready to square off on the spot. By the way their friends shifted toward one or the other, everybody knew which side of the fence he stood on.

  “That will be enough of that,” Lemp said sternly. “As you were, all of you.” For a bad couple of seconds, he didn’t think they’d listen to him. That was the worst feeling an officer could get. Obedience sprang from consent, no matter how much the military tried to conceal that. When men stopped listening to their leaders … You got the end of 1918 all over again. No German in his right mind wanted to repeat that long fall into chaos.

  But then one of the ratings said, “Ah, fuck it. It’s got nothing to do with crewmates.” After a moment, the other man nodded. Tension left the barracks hall like water leaving a dive chamber when a U-boat surfaced. The rating went on, “If we can’t go into town, the least they could do would be to bring some broads onto the base and set up a brothel here.” All the sailors nodded in unison to that.

  It seemed like a good idea to Julius Lemp, too. “I’ll see what I can do,” he promised, and headed back toward the Kapitän zur See’s office. A few girls, even homely ones who smelled of onions, would go a long way toward making sure the men remembered what they were supposed to be doing and why. They’d also go a long way toward making sure the men remembered their superiors cared about them. And that would help them remember what they should be doing and why, too.

  SOME OF THE STREETS in Bialystok had trees growing alongside them. The locals bragged about their tree-lined boulevards, and said they made Bialystok just like Paris. Only a bunch of provincial Poles and Jews could imagine that a Polish provincial town was anything like Paris, but try and tell them that.

  Hans-Ulrich Rudel didn’t. For one thing, life was too short. For another, he’d never been to Paris himself. He’d bombed the place when the Wehrmacht fought its way to the suburbs, but that wasn’t the same thing. He’d promised himself leave in the French capital after it fell, but it didn’t.

  So here he was two years later, on leave in Bialystok instead. At the moment, the trees were bare-branched, even skeletal. But the leaf buds were starting to swell. Spring was on the way. Before long, Bialystok would be green again, even if not Parisian.

  Signs on shops and eateries were in incomprehensible Polish and just as incomprehensible Yiddish. The one had the right alphabet but alien words, the other pretty much familiar words in an alien script. Both added up to gibberish for him.

  But he’d come here before, often enough to know where he was going from the train station. If he had got lost, spoken Yiddish made far more sense to him than the written kind, and Bialystok was full of Jews. He could have asked one of them. These days, the town also had its share of chain dogs—German Feldgendarmerie, their gorgets of office hung around their necks from chains. He was glad he didn’t need to talk to them. The less he had to do with them, the better.

  A drunk Pole reeled out of a tavern. That would have been a cliché, except the Pole, in a uniform of dark, greenish khaki, was arm in arm with an equally plastered German in Feldgrau. They were both murdering the same tune, each in his own language. Drunken Germans weren’t such a cliché, which didn’t mean Hans-Ulrich hadn’t seen his share of them and then some.

  As a matter of fact, he was heading for a tavern himself, though not this one. Another block up from the station, half a block over … He nodded to himself. He recognized the Polish sign out front, even if it made no sense to him. He walked in. The place smelled of tobacco and sweat and beer and fried food—and stale piss from the jakes out back.

  Poles and Germans drank together here, too. So did Jews and Germans, which would have been unimaginable back in the Reich. The Poles didn’t like their Jews, but they didn’t hit them with the same legal restrictions the Germans did. Maybe they couldn’t; one person in ten in Poland was a Jew, only one in a hundred in Germany. Wehrmacht personnel here had orders to conform to local customs and laws.

  A short, swarthy barmaid sidled up to Hans-Ulrich. She spoke in throaty Yiddish: “You may as well sit down, not that the boss’ll make a zloty off you if you keep on drinking tea.”

  “Hello, Sofia. Won’t you at least tell me you’re glad to see me?” Rudel didn’t grab her or kiss her in public. She didn’t like that. Did she go with other men while he was in the East fighting the war? If she did, he’d never heard about it. The way things were these days, that would do.

  “I’m at least glad to see you,” she answered, deadpan. She wasn’t exactly a Jew; she had a Polish father, which in the Reich’s classification scheme made her a Mischling first class. But she thought of herself as Jewish, and she was snippy like a Jew. Back in Germany, Hans-Ulrich would have endangered his career by having anything to do with her. He could get away with it here—could, and did.

  She took him to a corner and brought him a glass of tea. She found his teetotaling as funny as most of his service comrades did. She was also as nervous about seeing a German—and a Nazi Party member at that—as he was about going with a Jewess. In bed, everything was fine. The rest of the time … Hans-Ulrich sometimes thought they came from different planets, not just different countries.

  Sofia was well informed about his planet, though. Along with the sweet, milkless tea, she gave him a mocking grin. “So even the Catholics in Germany say Hitler can’t get away with some of the stuff he’s trying to pull?” she said.

  As a Lutheran minister’s son, his opinion of Catholics had never been high. “A lot of that is just enemy propaganda,” he said. None of it had come over the German radio or appeared in any army or Luftwaffe newspaper. That didn’t mean he hadn’t heard a few things, or more than a few. It did mean he wasn’t obliged to believe them—not officially, and not when Sofia tried to rub his nose in them.

>   She quirked a dark eyebrow. “Well, if you say so,” she answered, which meant she wasn’t obliged to believe him, either. She went on, “The big switch was good for something, anyhow. I got a card from my mother the other day, from Palestine.”

  While England and Germany were at war, mail from Palestine—a British League of Nations mandate—didn’t travel to Poland because it was friendly to Germany. Now that England had joined the crusade against Bolshevism, things moved more freely. “There’s rather more to it than that, you know,” he said stiffly. He often was more literal-minded than might have been good for him. Sofia enjoyed getting under his skin. As if having a mother who felt strongly enough about being Jewish to go to Palestine after the Pole she’d married (a drunkard, if you listened to Sofia) walked out weren’t enough!

  “If you say so,” Sofia repeated. Big things—like who would win the war—meant little to her. Or, if they did, she wouldn’t let on. A small thing—like getting a card from her mother after a long silence—counted for more.

  “I think you’re trying to drive me crazy,” Hans-Ulrich said.

  “It would be a short drive,” she retorted, which made him regret—not for the first time—getting into a battle of words with her. He was a good flyer, not such a great talker. But everybody knew Jews were born talking, and in that Sofia took after her mother. Rudel assumed as much, anyhow, without even thinking about it.

  He tried to change the subject: “What time do you get off today?”

  “Why? What have you got in mind?” She didn’t just answer a question with another question. She answered one with two.

  “Whatever you want, of course,” Hans-Ulrich said. Bialystok’s nightlife consisted of a few movie houses, a dance hall or two, and a Yiddish theater. Even with trees lining the streets, Paris it was not.