The War That Came Early: The Big Switch

by Harry Turtledove

  “I’ll do that,” he said, and he did. It was war bread, black as coffee, but it wouldn’t taste too bad. The older generation did agree it was better than what they’d endured in the last war … for the time being, anyhow. This was only the second winter of the fight, not the fourth. Bruck went on, “Now I need your ration book. Nothing’s official till it gets put down there.”

  “Oh, yes. I know.” Sarah handed it to him. He did what he had to do. When she got it back, she saw he hadn’t deducted nearly enough points for the amount of bread he’d given her. “Wait. This isn’t—” she began.

  “You hush,” he told her. “Some things may not be official, but they happen anyway.”

  His son did things like that for her, but his son had motives he didn’t—or Sarah hoped he didn’t. The way things were, she wouldn’t say no. She told him what she’d told Isidor: “Thank you very much.”

  “You’re welcome. And keep your eyes open. I’m not kidding. A lot of the time, going around the rules does you more good than going through them.”

  Her brother was in the Wehrmacht. That broke every rule the Reich had. Sarah still didn’t know how Saul had managed it. Had he killed someone for his papers? That struck her as most likely. He was already on the run for smashing a labor gang boss’s head after the bastard beat him.

  Sarah said not a word about that. It was her secret, hers and her mother’s and father’s. Telling anybody else, anybody at all, put Saul in desperate danger. Come to that, it put all the Goldmans in that same danger. If the Gestapo found out what her big brother was doing, everyone would pay a price for it. The blackshirts would think all the Goldmans had known about it ever since he got away.

  And they wouldn’t be so far wrong, either. So many things they didn’t need to learn. So many things nobody needed to learn. Sarah hadn’t said anything about Saul to Isidor. She didn’t say anything about him now, or even hint that she knew more about evading the rules than she let on.

  All she did was look as wide-eyed and innocent as she could and say, “I’ll have to remember that,” as if it had never occurred to her before.

  “See that you do,” David Bruck said. “You might turn up some galoshes that way, or at least shoe leather so your feet don’t soak.”

  “I’ll be all right,” Sarah said. It hadn’t stopped raining while she got the bread. With the leaky umbrella, her feet wouldn’t be the only wet parts of her. As she left the bakery, she raised it anyhow. It was—a little—better than nothing.

  ost German officers and enlisted men stationed in Poland went into the towns there to drink and to get their ashes hauled. So far, Hans-Ulrich Rudel had resisted temptation. He didn’t drink anything they sold in a Polish tavern. Women … Going to an officers’ brothel was always a way to let off steam, as it had been in the Low Countries and France. Up till now, he’d stayed away here.

  “It’s not bad,” another pilot from his squadron told him. “Yeah, you feel like you’re back around 1910, but it’s not bad. A lot of Poles speak German. When you can’t find one who does, there’s always some Jew who’ll translate for you. Yiddish sounds awful, but the Hebes follow regular Deutsch, too.”

  “Millions of them here!” Hans-Ulrich exclaimed. “I mean, millions! How can we put them in their place inside the Reich and ally with them here?” By the way he said it, he might have been talking about a sexual perversion. Fair enough: that was how he felt about it.

  His comrade, a captain named Ernst Lau, was a couple of years older and far more worldly-wise. “How? Diplomacy, that’s how. Every Ivan a Polish Jew kills is one we don’t have to worry about ourselves. And every Jew a Russian shoots … Well, there’s a bullet that doesn’t hit one of us.”

  “But it’s crazy,” Rudel said. “How can we trust them, with so many Jews in Moscow running things for the Russians?”

  “Here’s how. Listen, now,” Lau said. “If somebody invades you, he’s the enemy. Doesn’t matter if he’s got the same religion. He’s still the enemy, ’cause he’s trying to kill your wife and take your house away from you. Anybody who helps you throw him out is the good guy in the movie. That’s the way it looks to me, anyhow.”

  It didn’t look that way to Hans-Ulrich. He would have bet it didn’t look that way to the Führer, either. He also would have bet Hitler had hardly more use for Poles than for Jews. The way things were these days, for Captain Lau to say anything else could be seen as disloyalty to the Reich. Rudel had no trouble seeing it that way—none at all. He was sure the SS and the SD wouldn’t, either.

  Then again, Lau was a brave flyer. Hans-Ulrich had seen as much, and would have been convinced of it even without the Iron Cross First Class on the other pilot’s left breast pocket. Reporting him would cost Germany a man who could do the Russians—or any other enemy of the Reich—a lot of harm.

  More than a few men fought bravely for the Vaterland while disliking the National Socialists who led the country. The paradox perplexed Hans-Ulrich, but he’d seen it before. Which came first, the country’s needs or the Party’s? Most of the time, Rudel would have said they were one and the same. Most of the time, but not always. Not here, for instance.

  He wouldn’t report Ernst Lau. Back in France, before this fight with the Russians heated up, he might have. But Germany was plainly going to need every man she could get her hands on. After the Ivans learned their lesson … That would be the time for Lau to learn his.

  Rudel had thought they would fly more as the weather began to warm up at last. Instead, they found themselves stuck on the ground—literally. Poland’s unpaved airstrips (smoothed-over lines in fields, basically) turned into swamps as the snow that had lain on them for months melted and soaked in. The same thing happened in France, but it wasn’t so bad there, and there were more strips with concrete runways to help the combatants get around it. Hans-Ulrich gathered this was bad even by Polish standards, which was saying something—something unpleasant.

  Panzers stuck in the mud, too. Germany had perfected the art of striking like lightning. It overwhelmed Czechoslovakia. It drove the Low Countries into quick surrender. It almost—what a painful word!—extinguished France. It did take the Channel ports and partly sever France’s lifeline to England: a better showing than the Kaiser’s army made a generation earlier.

  And, here in Poland facing the Russians, it stopped with a wet squelch. When tracked vehicles got stuck, when horses and infantrymen went into muck up to their bellies, neither side could move fast. As often as not, neither side could move at all.

  No wonder the pilots and groundcrew men who drank drank a lot, then. And no wonder the handful who didn’t, like Hans-Ulrich, looked for something, anything, else to do. He finally decided to go into Bialystok with Lau and some of the other officers. Even looking around seemed appealing. He didn’t have to carouse. He didn’t intend to, either, even if they tried to inveigle him into it. Odds were they would, too. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen that before.

  They rode into town in a wagon driven by a Polish farmer. It had a boatlike body and big wheels, and handled the slop better than anything the Germans had brought with them. “We ought to make these ourselves,” Lau remarked. “If the mud’s this bad here, it’ll only be worse when we get into Russia.”

  “How could it be worse?” Hans-Ulrich asked.

  “I don’t know,” Lau answered. “But I’ll tell you something else, too—I don’t want to find out.” When Hans-Ulrich looked at it from that perspective, he decided he didn’t want to, either.

  Bialystok was as bad as he’d thought it would be, or else worse. It was a Polish provincial town. It was a Polish provincial town that had been part of the Russian Empire before Poland revived like the mummy in the American movie, which meant it had always been cut off from German Kultur, even the diluted version that seeped into Austrian Poland. And it was a Polish provincial town packed full of Jews.

  Long black coats, some trimmed with fox fur. Broad-brimmed black hats. Sidelocks. Bushy beards. Women in
wigs and scarves and dresses that swept the sidewalks—when there were sidewalks. Gabble in Polish, which Hans-Ulrich didn’t understand, and in Yiddish, which he didn’t want to understand. He felt as if two hundred years had fallen off the calendar.

  Some of the shops had signs in Yiddish. The strange characters might as well have been Chinese, for all the sense they made to him.

  The Jews eyed the jackbooted Germans in Luftwaffe gray-blue as warily as the Germans looked at them. It wasn’t only past confronting present—past confronting future, Hans-Ulrich thought. The Jews knew what the National Socialist government of Germany thought of them. Even a Polish provincial town had its newspaper (yes, edited by a Jew) and its radio sets. The Jews knew, all right.

  But Stalin’s greed had put Poland and Germany on the same side. And so, no matter what they might be thinking, some of the Jews in their long coats nodded to the Luftwaffe officers. Along with his comrades, Hans-Ulrich found himself nodding back.

  A big blond Pole—he looked like a big blond bear—ran the tavern the Germans picked. Rudel couldn’t tell what the barmaid who came over to their table was. She was pretty—he could tell that. She understood German well enough, too. “Mineral water,” he told her when she glanced his way.

  She nodded. “With what?”

  “Just mineral water, please.”

  She raised an eyebrow. He nodded back at her to show he meant it. Helpfully, Ernst Lau explained, “He gets his long trousers pretty soon, sweetheart, but he doesn’t have ’em yet.”

  She raised that eyebrow again. What color were her eyes? Not quite brown, not quite green. Hazel wasn’t exactly right, either, but it came closer than any other word Hans-Ulrich could find. “He can drink what he wants,” she said, her voice cool. Did Yiddish flavor her German, or only Polish? Once more, Hans-Ulrich had trouble being sure. On thirty seconds’ acquaintance, he got the feeling he’d always have trouble being sure about her.

  When she brought back the mineral water, she took the top off the bottle where he could watch her do it. The barman hadn’t spiked it, she was saying without words. “Thanks,” he told her, both for the bottle and for the courtesy. Then he asked, “What’s your name?” The worst thing she could do was walk away without answering.

  For a second, he thought she’d do just that. But, after the momentary hesitation, she said, “Sofia.”

  “Sofia what?”

  “How did you know?” she said, and did walk off. What was he supposed to do with that? Try to find out more, he told himself, wondering if he could. He’d found one thing, anyhow: a fresh, good reason to come back to Bialystok. He wouldn’t have bet on that when he climbed into the wagon.

  “MOSCOW SPEAKING,” the radio declared. Sergei Yaroslavsky didn’t think he was likely to be listening to any other station. For one thing, he recognized the announcer’s voice. For another, this was a Soviet radio set, and picked up only the frequencies of which the government approved.

  The samovar in the corner of the Red Air Force officers’ wardroom bubbled softly to itself. More officers drank vodka than tea, though. Sergei hadn’t known Poland shared the rasputitsa—the mud time—with Russia. But the squadron’s SB-2s weren’t going anywhere for a while. Neither was anything else for a few hundred kilometers in any direction you chose.

  “Happy day,” somebody said. “What’s gone wrong since this morning?”

  In a different—perhaps not such a very different—tone of voice, a question like that might have earned the bigmouth who came out with it a trip to the gulag. It also might have done that if the pilots and copilots hadn’t started drinking. You made allowances for somebody who got plastered, especially when you were on the way to getting plastered yourself.

  “Valiant Red Army forces continue to press attacks against the subhuman Fascist German beasts and their Polish stooges. Considerable territory has been gained,” the newsreader declared. If you’d never heard of the rasputitsa, you might believe that. Or if the considerable territory was to be considered in meters and not kilometers, it might even prove technically true. The war in Poland had really and truly bogged down.

  But when they gave the fellow on the radio the lying copy, what was he supposed to do? Tell the truth instead, assuming he knew what it was? They’d shoot him. They’d do horrible things to him first, and worse things to his loved ones, no doubt where he could listen to them scream. He went along, the same way everybody else did.

  “A Committee of Polish National Liberation was announced today in Pinsk,” the man with the smooth voice continued. “Its role will expand as the workers and peasants of the peace-loving Soviet Union free their Polish brethren from the oppression they have suffered at the hands of the Smigly-Ridz cabal.”

  Smigly-Ridz was turning out to be Hitler’s puppet, though odds were he would deny that if anyone called him on it. And the Poles on the Committee of National Liberation were Stalin’s puppets. Sergei wondered if he would have seen things so clearly without the vodka sparkling through him.

  “Yet another Japanese attack on the outworks of Vladivostok was repelled with loss yesterday,” the newsreader said. “Red Air Force bombers punished the aggressors.”

  Sergei raised his tumbler. “Here’s to Stas!” he said. The other flyers drank with him.

  “In daring strikes, Soviet bombers also brought the fighting home to Tsitsihar and Harbin,” the man continued. “The Japanese lackeys of the so-called state of Manchukuo had the gall to protest, but General Secretary Stalin and Foreign Commissar Litvinov rejected their foolish babbling out of hand.”

  “Good for Stalin!” growled Colonel Borisov, the squadron commander. The vodka made his nose red as a strawberry. It also made him sound even more sure of himself than he would have otherwise.

  Heads bobbed up and down all along the table, Sergei’s among them. He wasn’t currying favor—he thought Borisov was right. So-called state of Manchukuo was right! The Manchukuans were just as much puppets of the Japanese … as those Poles in Pinsk were of Stalin. What went around came around, sure enough.

  “In western Europe, France and England both claim gains against the Nazi hyenas,” the announcer said. “German radio denies the claims. Dr. Goebbels, of course, is the prince of liars, but the degenerate capitalists of western Europe are not far behind. Be it noted that neither France nor England has properly suppressed its native Fascist movement. Significant factions within both countries favor abandoning the fight against the Hitlerites and banding together with them for a crusade against the stronghold of the proletariat on the march.”

  “Bring on the French swine! Bring on the Englishmen, too! We beat them after the last capitalist war, and we’ll smash ’em again! See if we don’t!” Yes, Borisov had taken a lot of vodka on board.

  Vladimir Federov politely called him on it: “But, Comrade Colonel! Imagine the Nazis with no enemy in their rear. If they throw everything they have at us …” He let his voice trail away.

  “We’ll fucking smash ’em, I tell you!” Colonel Borisov thundered.

  Federov wanted to argue more. Sergei could see as much. His gesture urged his copilot to take it easy. If Borisov remembered this after he sobered up, or if somebody reminded him of it, Federov would not be happy.

  Anastas Mouradian would have shown what he thought with a lift of a few millimeters from one black, bushy eyebrow. Everyone but Borisov would have noticed, and nobody would have been able to prove a thing. Southerners had that subtlety. Federov, plainly, didn’t.

  The newsreader talked about overfulfillment of steel-production norms. He praised the Stakhanovite shock workers of Magnitogorsk, and added, “No German bombing plane will ever be able to reach them and disrupt their labors!”

  He was bound to be right about that. How many factory towns beyond the Urals belched smoke into the sky around the clock as they made all the things the Soviet Union needed? Hundreds, maybe thousands. They would have been villages before the Revolution, if they were there at all. Distance kept them safe
from Nazi bombardiers.

  Germany couldn’t hide like that. Soviet aircraft had already delivered stinging blows to East Prussia, and had even raided Berlin a few times. The great powers of the West were supposed to be mighty in the air. Why weren’t they pounding Hitler’s manufacturing centers harder? Didn’t it prove how halfhearted they were in their war against the Fascists?

  When the announcer started going on about wheat and barley production, Sergei stopped listening. Yes, the people of the USSR had to eat. Try as the fellow on the radio would, he couldn’t make figures detailing the number of hectares to be planted anything but deadly dull.

  “Collectivization continues to advance,” he said proudly. “The very idea of personal property will soon fade away.”

  Sergei owned nothing. His flying suit, his rations, his billet, his bomber … all from the state. The vodka? He wasn’t sure where the vodka came from. He’d downed enough of it so he didn’t care, either. As long as he could get his hands on some whenever he felt the urge, nothing else mattered.

  Once the newsreader got into the production reports and the economic news, you could talk over him without fear of being seen as uninterested in the life-and-death struggle on behalf of the workers and peasants—and without everybody frantically shushing you for opening your big trap. One of the pilots said, “Well, we’ve got a few weeks till things dry out. What happens then?”

  “It should be the same kind of war it was last year,” Colonel Borisov said. “And the Devil take England and France.”

  He was the squadron commander. Because he was, Sergei said only, “Here’s hoping you’re right, Comrade Colonel.” The USSR was a classless society in law. In law, yes. But you’d still get the shitty end of the stick if you pissed off the fellow entitled to tell you what to do. Drunk or sober, Sergei knew that.