Hitler's War

by Harry Turtledove

  “I hope he’ll be all right,” Mother said worriedly. “You can tell he’s not an ordinary German, after all.”

  Father followed that faster than Sarah did. “Jews aren’t the only ones who get circumcised,” he said. “Sometimes it’s medically necessary. What I wonder is how Frau Breisach knew that letter was really for us.”

  “Somebody must have recognized the handwriting.” Sarah had no trouble figuring that out. “Saul used to go over there all the time to help the Breisach kids with their homework—back when you could without getting into too much trouble, I mean. I think he was sweet on Hildegarde Breisach for a while, but…” She didn’t go on.

  “Yes. But,” her father said heavily. “I wouldn’t have minded intermarriage very much. The all-wise, all-knowing, and all-powerful State”—you could hear the stress he gave the word—“is a different story. And Hildegarde would have been insane to take the chance.”

  “If the State really were all-wise and all-powerful, Frau Breisach would have taken Saul’s letter straight to the Gestapo,” Mother said. “Some people still remember what human decency means.”

  “Never mind human decency. The Breisachs know us,” Father said. “That counts for more, I’d say. I wouldn’t bet a pfenning that they’d help some strange Jew. But we’ve lived across the street from them since the last war. We aren’t strangers—we’re neighbors. People first, Jews second, you might say. All over Germany, gentiles are probably going, ‘Well, I don’t have a good word to say about most Jews, but Abraham down the street? He’s all right.’”

  “I wonder how much good it will do,” Sarah said.

  “Some, anyhow.” Father nodded toward the now anonymous ashes in the fireplace. “And I’m jealous of your brother.”

  “For heaven’s sake, why?” Mother got that out before Sarah could.

  “He made it into the Wehrmacht,” Father answered. “I fought for Germany before. I would have done it again. I am a German, dammit, whether the Nazis want to let me be one or not.”

  “Isn’t getting shot once enough for Germany?” Mother asked pointedly.

  “If I hadn’t, the goons would have treated us even worse than they did,” Father said. “Hitler says Jews haven’t got any guts—but he can’t say that about front-line soldiers from the last war. So we have it better than most Jews—not good, but better.”

  “Oh, joy,” Sarah said in a hollow voice. “If this is better, I don’t want worse.”

  Father nodded solemnly. “You’d better not. The difference between bad and worse is much bigger than the difference between good and better. So when you think about the difference between better and worse…”

  He sounded like someone who knew what he was talking about. Chances were he did. What had life in the trenches been like? Sarah had read All Quiet on the Western Front—who hadn’t? She’d seen the movie, too. But her father had really gone through all those things, and maybe more besides. It was probably like the difference between reading about kissing and kissing, only more so.

  Mother started to laugh. “What’s funny?” Sarah asked. She sure didn’t see anything.

  Still in a low voice to foil the microphones that might not be there at all, her mother answered, “Our only son’s just gone into the Wehrmacht. And I’m happy! Happy! He has a better chance of staying safe there than he would if he were still running around the countryside somewhere.”

  Sarah laughed, too. When you put it that way, it was funny. Her father put things in perspective, the way he usually did: “If you have to go that far for a laugh, you’ve got more tsuris than you need.”

  He hardly ever dropped a Yiddish word into his German. It would have made him seem less German, more openly Jewish. It might even have made him seem that way to himself. Sarah stared at him now. She understood tsuris, of course—understood what the word meant and, these days, also understood the thing.

  “We do have more tsuris than we need,” Mother said. Neither Sarah nor Samuel Goldman tried to tell her she was wrong.

  It could have been worse, though. If the Gestapo caught up with Saul after he clouted that work boss…What would they have done to him? Whatever it was, Sarah made herself think about something else.

  “Do you suppose the British bombers will come over tonight?” she said. That was something else, all right, but not a better something else.

  “Let them.” Her father sounded almost gay. “Bombs don’t care if we’re Jews. Bombs can fall on Gestapo headquarters, too…alevai.” Two Yiddish words from him in two minutes. What was the world coming to?

  “Of course, the Gestapo men can run into a shelter,” Sarah said.

  “So what? Even that doesn’t always help,” Father said. And he was right. Sarah felt like a German, too, if not so strongly as Father did. But she had trouble believing any German would cry if a bunch of Gestapo men got blown up.

  German artillery crashed down on the French position. Luc Harcourt dug as hard as he could, trying to carve a cave into the front wall of his foxhole. If he could manage that, fragments would have a hard time biting him…barring a direct hit, of course. He wished he hadn’t had that last thought, but it did make him dig faster than ever.

  The ground was muddy—almost too muddy to let him make the shelter he wanted. A cave-in could kill him, too, and much more ignominiously than a shell would have. But artillery was a worse risk. Five months of war had taught Luc to fear artillery more than anything but tanks. And what were tanks but artillery on tracks?

  Luc almost had the hole he wanted when the shelling let up as suddenly as it had begun. He knew what that meant. His entrenching tool went back on his belt. He grabbed his rifle.

  “They’ll be coming any second!” Sergeant Demange yelled from a trench near the foxhole, for the raw replacements and the idiots in his section. “Make ‘em pay for it, that’s all. We don’t have a hell of a lot of room to back up in.”

  “Your sergeant is right.” That was Lieutenant Marquet—Luc thought that was his name, anyhow. He’d replaced the previous company commander a few days earlier, after Captain Rémond stopped some shrapnel with his chest. He’d been alive when he went off to the aid station. Now, who could say? The lieutenant seemed brave enough. He did like to hear himself talk, though: “Three times in a lifetime, the Boches have attacked Paris. They took it once, to our shame. We held them the last time, to our everlasting glory. Which would you rather have now, my friends?”

  All Luc wanted was to come through alive and in once piece. The only shame he worried about was letting his buddies down. They mattered to him. Paris? Next to the dirty, smelly, frightened men alongside of whom he fought, Paris wasn’t so much of a much.

  Small-arms fire picked up. The Germans knew what was going on as well as the Frenchmen they were trying to murder. They wanted to get into the French fieldworks as fast as they could, while the poilus were still woozy from the barrage.

  If they do that, I’m dead. The thought was enough to make Luc stick his head up and bring his rifle to his shoulder. A bullet cracked past, too close for comfort. He wouldn’t have had to worry about that if he’d stayed all nicely huddled in his young cave.

  No, but then he would have had to worry about other things. Sure as hell, the Germans were loping forward. The men who ran straight up and down had less experience than the ones who folded themselves as small as they could. Most of the Boches did know enough to hit the dirt or dive behind something when French machine guns started chattering.

  The Germans never got to Meaux the last time around. That meant all the damage in town was brand new. The thirteenth-century cathedral lay in ruins a couple of kilometers behind Luc. Guns and Stukas cared nothing for antiquities—and the French weren’t shy about placing observers in the steeples. If the bastards in field-gray kept pressing forward, pretty soon French guns would start shelling Meaux—and the Boches would have put men with binoculars up in high places.

  As if thinking of French guns had called them up, several batteries of
quick-firing 75s started banging away at the Germans. They’d slaughtered the Boches by the thousands in 1914, and all through the last war. Things were tougher now. German 105s outranged them and delivered bigger shells. The enemy knew better than to advance in tight-packed ranks, too. But when you needed to drop a lot of artillery on some unlucky place in a hurry, 75s were still hard to beat.

  German medics in Red Cross smocks and armbands ran around gathering up the wounded. Luc left them alone as much as he could. War was tough enough without making it worse.

  He thought so, anyhow. A medic fell, and then another one. Another German wearing the Red Cross emblem pointed angrily toward the French line…right about toward where Sergeant Demange was lurking. A moment later, that medic ducked, which meant a bullet hadn’t missed him by much. He could take a hint—he dove behind a battered stone wall.

  “Naughty, Sergeant,” Luc called.

  “So’s your mother,” Demange answered, which wasn’t exactly a ringing denial of anything.

  Luc was in no position to tell him what to do. He had other things on his mind, anyway: “Have we got any tanks in the neighborhood? Do they?”

  “Sure haven’t seen any of ours,” the sergeant said.

  Since Luc hadn’t, either, he asked the next important question: “Have we got any antitank guns?”

  “Sure as hell hope so,” Demange answered. That was also less encouraging than Luc wished it were.

  Meaux lay in a loop of the Marne. Maybe the Germans were having trouble getting their armor across the river. They’d managed farther east with far fewer problems than he wished they’d had—probably far fewer than they should have had. With luck, the Allies were figuring out how to make those crossings tougher. Without luck, the Boches were feinting here so they could knock the crap out of the French and English defenders somewhere else.

  Even without tanks, they hadn’t given up in front of Meaux. More artillery came in, this barrage precisely aimed at the French forward positions. Luc cowered in his hole while hell fell all around him.

  “Up!” Sergeant Demange screamed. “Up, you gutless assholes! They’re coming!”

  Luc didn’t want to come up. Shell fragments did dreadful things. But he didn’t want to get shot or bayoneted in his foxhole, either. The Germans aimed to make the French keep their heads down so they’d make easy meat. The French couldn’t let them impose their will on the combat…Luc supposed.

  He came up firing. A German had crawled to no more than thirty meters away. He had a potato-masher grenade in his right hand. Luc shot him before he could fling it. “Heilige Scheisse!” screamed the soldier in the coal-scuttle helmet. He clutched at himself. He must not have pulled the grenade’s fuse cord, because it didn’t go off after he dropped it.

  Then French machine guns opened up, one of them from a spot where Luc hadn’t known his side had a machine gun. The Boches hadn’t known it was there, either. Several of them fell. Others ran back toward the river. Luc would have done the same thing in their boots. Flesh and blood had limits, and facing machine-gun fire out in the open went beyond them.

  The German Luc had shot lay where he’d gone down. He wasn’t dead; he kept thrashing around and yelling and swearing.

  “Make him shut up,” Sergeant Demange called. “Either blow his head off or go out there and bring him back.”

  Neither possibility appealed to Luc. Killing a wounded man in cold blood felt like murder. If he were lying there wounded, he wouldn’t want the Germans taking pot shots at him.

  But if he went out there to get the Boche, other soldiers in field-gray might nail him. He knew he had only a few seconds to make up his mind. Demange wouldn’t hesitate longer than that before shooting the German himself. He wouldn’t have second thoughts about it afterward, either.

  “Je suis dans le merde,” Luc muttered. Up shit creek or not, he had to do something. He climbed out of the foxhole and crawled toward the wounded Boche.

  Firing had slacked off. That could end any second, as he knew too well. None of the few rounds flying about came close—the Germans weren’t aiming at him, anyway.

  “I’ll take you in,” he called to the soldier in field-gray, hoping the fellow understood French. “We’ll fix you up if we can.”

  “Merci,” the man answered in gutturally accented French. “Hurts.”

  “I bet,” Luc said. The bullet had torn up the German’s left leg. “Can you climb up on top of me?”

  “I’ll try.” The Boche did it. He felt as if the fellow weighed a tonne—he was a bigger man than Luc, and weighted down with boots and helmet and equipment. Slowly—the only way he could—Luc crawled back toward the French line. Seeing what he was doing, the Germans paid him the courtesy of aiming away from him.

  Other hands reached out to pull the wounded man off him. The German groaned as they got him down into the trenches. Luc had never been so glad to get under cover again himself. “Whew!” he said. “I felt naked out there.”

  “You did good, kid,” Sergeant Demange said, and handed him a Gitane.

  “Thanks.” Luc leaned close for a light.

  “You didn’t go out there pretty damn quick, I was gonna plug the motherfucker,” Demange said.

  “Yeah, I figured. That’s why I went.” Luc’s cheeks hollowed as he sucked in harsh smoke.

  “Maybe they’ll learn something off him,” the noncom said. “He’ll sing like a goddamn canary, and sergeants, they know stuff.” Not without pride, he tapped his own chest.

  “Was he a sergeant? I didn’t notice,” Luc said. Demange rolled his eyes. Grinning, Luc added, “If I’d known that, I would’ve shot him for sure.”

  “Funny man,” Demange said scornfully. “You got that crappy hash mark on your sleeve, so you think you’re entitled to be a goddamn funny man.”

  “Sergeant, if it meant I’d come through the war without getting shot, I’d never make another joke the rest of my life,” Luc promised.

  “Oh, yeah?” Sergeant Demange said. Luc’s head bobbed up and down as if it were on springs. Demange spat out a tiny butt, crushed it underfoot, and lit a fresh Gitane. Then he returned to the business at hand: “Well, you don’t need to worry about that, on account of it doesn’t.” Luc already knew as much. All the same, he wished Demange hadn’t spelled it out.

  ANASTAS MOURADIAN WAS DRUNK. Yes, a blizzard howled outside. Even so, a proper Soviet officer wasn’t supposed to do any such thing. Sergei Yaroslavsky knew that perfect well. He would have been angrier at Mouradian if he weren’t drunk himself.

  They couldn’t fly. They had plenty of vodka. What were they going to do—not drink it? Try as he would, Sergei couldn’t come up with a good reason for leaving it alone.

  Ivan Kuchkov was bound to be drinking with his fellow enlisted men. If the Chimp got smashed, the rest of the aircrew should, too. It showed solidarity between enlisted men and officers. It also showed that neither enlisted men nor officers had anything better to do when they couldn’t get an SB-2 off the ground to save their lives.

  “If Hitlerite bombers show up now, if we have to take shelter outside, we’ve got plenty of antifreeze in our blood,” Sergei said.

  “Never mind Hitlerite bombers. What about Hitlerite soldiers?” When Mouradian was sober, he spoke excellent Russian. He stayed fluent when he got drunk, but his Armenian accent turned thick enough to slice.

  Sergei laughed and laughed. When he got drunk, everything was funny. “Where would Hitlerite soldiers come from?”

  “Out of the sky. With parachutes. Like they did in Holland and Belgium.” Anastas looked around the inside of the tent, his eyes big and round like an owl’s: he might have expect Nazi parachutists to pop up any minute now.

  That owlish stare only made Sergei laugh harder than ever. He looked around the inside of the tent, too. Enough of the wind outside got in to make the flame from the kerosene lamp flicker. That wasn’t why his wide, high-cheekboned face registered dismay. “We’re out of pelmeni! And pickled mushrooms! Wher
e’d they go?”

  Mouradian patted his stomach. “Good. Not spicy enough, but good.” Being a southerner, he liked everything full of fire. As far as Sergei was concerned, the mushrooms and the meat dumplings were fine this way. Russians had all kinds of snacks that went with vodka. Even a half-skilled cook at a forward airstrip could do a decent job with some of them.

  “We had a big plate of them,” Sergei said sadly. The plate was still there. But for a couple of crumbs from the pelmeni, it was bare. Sergei sighed. He pointed at Anastas. “Not even the fucking Germans would be crazy enough to drop parachutists in this weather.”

  “God shouldn’t have been crazy enough to make this weather.” Mouradian must have been very drunk, or he wouldn’t have talked about God so seriously. It gave Sergei a hold on him, which wasn’t something anybody in the USSR wanted to give anyone else. Of course, there was something close to an even-money chance neither of them would remember anything about this come morning.

  Even without dumplings or mushrooms, Sergei raised his tumbler. “Za Stalina!”

  “To Stalin!” Anastas echoed. They both drank. The vodka was no better than it had to be. It went down as if Sergei were swallowing the lighted kerosene lamp. The really good stuff slid down your throat smooth as a kiss, then exploded in your stomach like a 500kg bomb. But this got you there, smooth or not.

  Sergei sighed. If it was harsh now, he’d feel it worse in the morning. The good stuff didn’t make you think elephants in hobnailed boots were marching on top of your skull.

  “We have aspirins?” he asked.

  “Somewhere,” Mouradian said vaguely. Then he brightened. “We’ll have more vodka.”

  “Da.” That cheered Sergei up, too: at least a little. Another dose of what made you feel bad could make you feel better. He reached for the bottle again. If he drank it now, he’d feel better right away.