Hitler's war

Chapter 3

Another gray day in Munster. People in the Westphalian town said it was either raining or the church bells were ringing. Sarah Goldman could hear the bells, but it was raining anyhow. That didn’t seem fair.

Of course, for Sarah the past five years had seemed gray and gloomy and weepy even when the sun did come out. Since she was only seventeen, that seemed like forever. She hadn’t understood why the Nazis decided they had to clamp down on Jews-she and her family weren’t hurting anybody. She still didn’t understand, not really. But the time since Hitler took over had been plenty to teach her that people could act like vicious idiots without having any good reason for it.

Her mother had the radio on. She was listening to a German station. Listening to foreign broadcasts was illegal for everybody. But ordinary Germans who did something like that might escape with a warning if they got caught-the first time, anyway. Any infraction at all would send Jews straight to Dachau or Buchenwald.

“German storm troops fight today on the outskirts of Prague!” the announcer shouted. He had a hoarse, braying voice and a strong Berlin accent. Sarah thought he sounded like a Prussian jackass, which he probably was. “Czech air pirates dropped bombs on a school in Dresden, murdering seventeen innocent children at play!”

“Why were children playing during an air raid?” Hanna Goldman asked. The same question had formed in Sarah’s mind. She wondered how many people thought that way. Not very many, evidently, or the announcer couldn’t have got away with spewing such nonsense.

“Farther east, our victorious soldiers advancing from north and south have met in Moravia, sealing the fate of the Czech army and of what was the vicious bandit state of Czechoslovakia!” he trumpeted. “Now we can help the Slovaks achieve their national aspirations and whip the Bolshevik dogs back to their Russian kennel.”

“Do you hear that, Sarah?” her mother called from the kitchen. She was trying to make meager, bland rations into something worth eating for supper. Most of the time, she did it, too.

“ Ja, I hear it,” Sarah answered.

“Such rubbish,” her mother said. “Listening to that crap makes me embarrassed to be a German.”

“I know what you mean.” And Sarah did, too. In spite of everything, she still felt like a German. Why shouldn’t she? Her father had fought in the World War (the First World War, she supposed you would have to call it now) like every other German man his age. He’d won an Iron Cross, too. And he had an amazing scar on his arm where a French bullet had gouged a furrow in his flesh.

Her older brother was such a good football player, the Aryans didn’t want him taken off their team. They cared more about winning than about whether Saul was circumcised. That made nothing but sense to Sarah, but it had scandalized a lot of people in Munster. Tough men in black uniforms had paid some unofficial visits. Saul didn’t play for the Foresters any more.

But he still thought he was a German, too, in spite of everything. He and Samuel Goldman were doing their best to prove it today. Sarah didn’t know whether to hope they would fail or succeed.

The braying announcer didn’t say anything about the fighting on the Western Front. He hardly ever did. The Czechs were giving the war everything they had in them. The French and the English didn’t seem to have their hearts in it.

After an almost tearful appeal to buy war bonds, the newsman finally went away. The radio started playing music again. That was a relief. Music was-mostly-harmless. But you never heard jazz any more. The government said it was degenerate, like modern art. If the government didn’t like it, Sarah thought she should.

She was working on an essay on Goethe-Munster’s Jewish school naturally taught the German poets-when the front door opened. She put down her pen and dashed downstairs.

One glance at her father’s face, and her brother’s, told her everything she needed to know. “They wouldn’t take you?” she blurted.

“Bastards!” Saul seemed ready to kick something that wasn’t a football.

He towered over Father, who looked more sad than angry. “I had my discharge papers. I had my medal. I had my wound certificate. I had a letter from Max Lambert, who was my captain during the war. I had everything,” he said. “And we went into Wehrkreis headquarters, and they wouldn’t let us joint the Wehrmacht.”

“Bastards!” Saul said again.

Wehrkreis -Military District VI-was centered on Munster. It drew in recruits from all over Westphalia and from western Hanover. But it didn’t want a couple of Jews, even if one was a veteran and the other a fine physical specimen.

Sarah’s mother came out of the kitchen. “What did they tell you?” she asked.

“They told us no, that’s what. There’s a law, it seems, from 1935, that says Jews can’t join up,” Samuel Goldman answered. One corner of his mouth curled up in a wry smile. “Even so, I don’t think they expected to see us sticking our heads into the lion’s mouth.”

“We didn’t,” Saul said. “If we’d tried to join the SS, now…”

In spite of five years of ever harder times, in spite of a day of crushing disappointment, Father started to laugh. When he did, the rest of the Goldmans did, too. He lit a cigarette. German tobacco smelled nastier than it had a couple of years before. Sarah didn’t smoke, but Father said it tasted worse, too. Fewer imports…

Father blew out a gray cloud. “In fact, I’m sure they didn’t expect anyone like us,” he said.

“Why are you so sure?” Mother asked, as she was supposed to.

“Why? I’ll tell you why.” Samuel Goldman’s mouth quirked again, but this time it was more grimace than smile. “Because the Feldwebel we talked to wasn’t even mean to us. He just said it was impossible, and he kept on saying it, and he finally went and got a captain who said the same thing. The captain was polite, too-turns out he knows Max. If they had orders about how to deal with Jews trying to volunteer, they would have screamed at us and called us filthy Jewish pigdogs and maybe said we’d just volunteered to clean toilets-”

“With our tongues,” Saul broke in.

“That’s disgusting!” Sarah exclaimed.

“That’s why they do it,” her brother said, and then, “Bastards!” again.

“Anyhow, they looked at my papers. I showed them my scar,” Samuel Goldman said. “I showed them the letter. I showed them the Iron Cross, but it was only Second Class, not First.” He shrugged. “I was a corporal. Almost impossible for an enlisted man to get an Iron Cross, First Class, in the last war.”

“The Fuhrer did,” Sarah said. He was proud of it, too. He wore it on his left breast pocket all the time.

Father sighed. “I know. But he was one of a handful. The Feldwebel told me to be sure to hang on to the papers. ‘You can’t wear the uniform again,’ he said, ‘but that stuff may save your bacon anyway.’ Then he laughed like a loon, because he thought saving a Jew’s bacon was funny.”

“What do you think he meant?” Sarah asked.

“Well, things aren’t as bad for us because I’m a veteran,” Father answered. “Even the Nazis respect that some. Not enough, but some.”

“I can’t say I’m really sorry they did turn you down,” Mother said. “Now I won’t have to worry about the two of you off at the ends of the earth with nasty people shooting at you.”

Father only sighed. “Plenty of things closer to home to worry about. Where are we going to find money? What will they do to us? We should have got out before the war started. Too late now. One of the things I thought was-” He broke off.

“What?” Sarah asked it before Mother could. Or, more likely, Mother already knew.

Samuel Goldman looked at her. “If your brother and I-or even one of us-got into the Wehrmacht, nobody could say we weren’t proper Germans. Nobody would do anything to the family because we weren’t proper Germans, either.” He gave Mother an ironic nod. “We might have been safer at the front than here in Munster, you know.”

Mother’s mouth twisted. “Don’t talk about such things.”

“Why not? It’s not as if talking about them makes them come true.” But then Father was the one who looked as if he’d bitten down on a lemon. Hitler had spent years talking about all the things he wanted to do to Jews. He talked about them, and talked about them, and talked about them-and the more he talked, the more of them did come true.

That was why Father didn’t teach Roman history at the university any more. Jews were forbidden from holding academic positions. Father still made some money writing articles for the monumental Pauly-Wissowa Real-Encyclopadie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft: basically, a multivolume encyclopedia of everything that was known about ancient Greece and Rome, up to the sixth century A.D. Samuel Goldman wasn’t the only displaced Jewish professor putting cash in his pocket and bread on his table that way. If you had an Aryan academic friend who would steer things your way-who would, sometimes, put his name on what you’d written…You wouldn’t get rich, but you might get by.

Editors paid by the page, too. Jewish scholars had written some monumental articles because of that. Scholars of the next generation would have a hard time finding anything more to say about quite a few topics.

If, of course, the next generation cared a pfennig’s worth about classical antiquity. Maybe all the Aryan scholars would study Goths and Vandals and Vikings instead of Greeks and Romans. But even then, Sarah knew, Pauly-Wissowa would help.

If anything helped, anyway…

* * *

From Calais, Alistair Walsh could look across the Channel and see the white cliffs of Dover smudging the northeastern horizon. He’d been in France before, in 1918. He’d been a private then, an unhappy conscript. But he’d discovered he liked soldiering, even if getting shot in the leg meant he spent Armistice Day flat on his back in a military hospital.

So here he was again, this time with the three stripes and crown of a staff sergeant on his sleeve. He’d come as far as he was likely to. They wouldn’t make him an officer even if the sky fell. He’d got what little education he owned in the army, and he had a buzzing Welsh accent.

Still, staff sergeant wasn’t bad. It beat the hell out of a lifetime in a factory or a coal mine, which he would have had if he hadn’t stayed a soldier. He could break in new men. And he could talk back to lieutenants, a lot of whom weren’t much more than half his age.

He also had the pleasure of the company of his own kind. The British army would have come to pieces without its senior sergeants, and was smart enough to know it. Lying right across the Channel from Blighty, Calais had a better notion of what made a proper pub than most foreign places. In fact, the fellow who ran the Green Duck was an Englishman. He’d got wounded during the war, too, and ended up marrying his pretty French nurse and staying behind here.

Since the British Expeditionary Force crossed, the Green Duck had become the unofficial headquarters for people like Alistair: men who’d been through the mill, who wanted a place where they could get a pint or three and sit around and drink them and have a smoke without getting bothered by officers or yapping soldiers. If they thought they knew more about what was going on than the General Staff did…well, sergeants have had such thoughts since the days of Caesar, if not since those of Hammurabi.

Walsh lit a Brutus and blew smoke up toward the dim ceiling. He turned to the man sitting next to him. “I tell you, Joe, it’s not like it was in the last go-round.”

“Too bloody right it’s not.” Joe Collins’ clotted speech said he came from London’s East End. He was a wiry little fellow, tough as a rat-catching terrier and about as sentimental. He held out a hand. “Gimme one o’ them.”

“Here you go.” Walsh handed him the packet, then leaned close to let him have a light. “It’s not, I tell you.”

“I said the same fing myself.” Collins blew out smoke, then whistled respectfully. “Bastard’s strong as the devil. Turkish blend?”

“That’s right. If you aren’t going to taste it, why smoke it?” Walsh said.

“Knocks the socks off Navy Cut Gold, it does,” Collins said.

“I should hope so.” Alistair took a pull at his pint. Some places on the Continent, they sold beer by the half-liter, which wasn’t enough. None of that nonsense at the Green Duck, though. Walsh repeated, “If you aren’t going to taste it, why smoke it? And if you aren’t going to fight, why send the bloody Expeditionary Force over here?”

“Politics.” Joe Collins turned it into the filthiest word in the world. “The froggies, they’d break out in arseholes if we wasn’t here, so we bleedin’ well are.”

“Sounds right to me,” Alistair agreed. “But say what you please about the frogs, last time around they wanted to have a go at the Boche. So did we. Everybody was dead keen to get in there and mix it up. Not now.”

“No, not now. Sufferin’ Jesus!” The other senior sergeant drained his pint and waved for another one. “The way those sorry sods are tippytoeing into ‘Unland…and they ‘aven’t moved us up towards the front at all.”

“Don’t I know it!” Alistair said. “We just sit around soaking up beer and pinching the barmaids’ bums…”

“You try it, dearie, and you’ll draw back a bloody stump,” said the broad-shouldered blonde who brought Collins his refill. The words carried a bit of a French accent. The sentiment could have come from any British barmaid from Londonderry to Dover.

“Don’t pay him no mind, sweet’eart,” Joe Collins said. “If I get my mitts on you, now, you’ll love every minute of it.”

“And then you wake up,” she retorted. Away she went, with a little extra roll to her hips to show the soldiers what they were missing.

Collins chuckled. “She’d be a ‘andful and a ‘alf, she would.”

“You might say so.” But Alistair wanted to talk about the war, not women. They could always come back to women, and they probably would. For now, though…“Only ones who fight like they mean it are the Czechs-and the Germans in Czecho, too.”

“Fat lot of good it does the bloody Czechs,” Collins said. “They’d be better off if they lay down for old Adolf.”

“Tell that to the next Czech you see,” Walsh said. “Go on-I dare you. But make sure I’m there, mind, on account of I want to watch him wallop the snot out of you. And he will, too. You’re a tough bugger, Joe, but these blokes from the middle of Europe, they bloody well mean it. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“Oh, I could lick a Czech or a Pole,” Collins said. “But if I turned me back ‘arf a mo’, ‘e’d bloody well pull a knife out of ‘is boot top and give me one right in the kidney. They don’t fight fair in those parts.”

Maybe that was it. Maybe it was just that Central Europeans were dreadfully in earnest. The one who’d plugged Henlein and touched off this mess-he must have known he wouldn’t get away. He did it anyhow. A generation earlier, Gavrilo Princip and his Balkan buddies hadn’t counted the cost, either.

“I wish they’d move us forward,” Walsh said. “I don’t give a shit about hanging out my washing on the Siegfried Line, but I’d like to see the goddamn thing.”

“Careful what you wish for-you may get it,” Collins said.

“Not here, by God.” Alistair Walsh shook his head. “The Frenchies say they did their duty by Czecho when they stuck half of one toe into Germany. And we did ours by the Frenchies when we crossed over. Fight? Oh, no, dear!” His voice rose to a shrill, effeminate falsetto.

Joe Collins laughed. So did the Englishman behind the bar. The tap-man could afford to. He’d done his bit the last time around, and paid enough so that nobody wanted anything else from him now. Walsh soaked up the beer. This was soft duty. He knew he shouldn’t complain. Drinking pints in a Calais pub when he should have been in a trench brewing tea with hot water from the cooling jacket of his machine gun didn’t feel right, though. Somebody in charge knew damn all about what was going on.

Or maybe that somebody knew entirely too well. There was a notion more frightening still.

* * *

Prague dead ahead. Ludwig Rothe’s Panzer II approached the capital of Czechoslovakia from the east. Prague was surrounded, utterly cut off from any hope of relief. If the Czechs had any brains, they would surrender. If they had any brains, they would have surrendered a long time ago.

Luftwaffe planes dropped leaflets on the capital along with bombs. Winds swept some of the leaflets far from the target. Ludwig had seen a couple of them. They showed Prague in flames while Jewish-looking men labeled FRANCE and ENGLAND played the violin. The German caption beneath them read Your allies fiddle while Prague burns; Ludwig presumed the Czech forest of consonants meant the same thing.

Burn Prague did. The sour smell of smoke and damp clogged the panzer commander’s nostrils. There was just enough drizzle to cut down visibility-not enough to do much against fires. Prague had been catching it since the war started. Not much of the place could still be standing. How many civilians and soldiers had died in the rain of high explosives? Ludwig could smell corpses, too.

But the Czechs fought on in the ruins, perhaps fueled by the courage of despair. If you want us, come and get us. Come pay the butcher’s bill for us, they seemed to say. And they were making it as expensive as they could.

Fritz Bittenfeld drove the panzer past the burnt-out hulk of a Czech T-35, and then past a dead Panzer I that had had the turret blown clean off the chassis. Ludwig winced when he saw that. Nobody’d really intended the Panzer I for anything more than a training vehicle. It didn’t have the firepower or the armor to fight other tanks.

If an emergency came along before your bigger machines were ready, though…If that happened, you used what you had and hoped for the best. And sometimes you got it, and sometimes you bought the farm like the two sorry sons of bitches inside that baby panzer.

Ludwig knew too well his own Panzer II was only a small step up. Its main armament was a good deal better than the Panzer I’s pair of rifle-caliber machine guns. It carried thicker armor, too. But the armor wasn’t that much thicker. The cannon on Czech tanks had no trouble piercing it.

He looked this way, that way, the other way. While he was at it, he wished for eyes in the back of his head. Smashed buildings came closer and closer together as the Wehrmacht pushed into Prague’s suburbs. Tanks and antitank guns and Czech soldiers with Molotov cocktails had all kinds of places to hide.

Landsers were supposed to root out such dangers. Panzers and foot soldiers worked best together. Each helped protect the other. Armor was great for disposing of machine-gun nests that could hang infantry up for days. Ground pounders returned the favor by spotting lurking soldiers or guns.

Broad-winged Heinkel 111s and slim Dornier bombers-Flying Pencils, people called them-gave Prague one more dose of modern war. Antiaircraft shells burst all around them. Not many Avias rose to challenge the bombers. The little biplanes sure looked as if they came out of the last war, but they’d given Germany’s fancy new 109s all they wanted and then some. The Messerschmitts hadn’t knocked them out of the sky. Bombers had finally plastered so many Czech airstrips that few Avias could get off the ground.

A Czech machine gun up ahead barked. Ludwig got ready to dive back into the turret. Anybody who talked about how the Slavs were a bunch of Untermenschen had never run into Czech engineering-or Czech infantry, for that matter. The guys in the brown uniforms knew what they were doing. They meant business, too.

Then, all of a sudden, the machine gun fell silent. So did all the guns on the Czech side. Little by little, German firing also wound down. Fritz’s voice floated out of the speaking tube: “What’s going on?”

“Beats me,” Ludwig answered. “Stay ready for anything. It’s liable to be some kind of trick.”

“Don’t worry. My asshole’s puckered good and tight,” the driver said. Ludwig laughed. Then he wondered why. If you hadn’t shit yourself or come close, you hadn’t really been in combat.

A Czech officer with a flag of truce came out from behind a battered house. He was an older man, old enough to have started out in the Austro-Hungarian army. He walked toward Ludwig’s panzer, probably because it was the closest vehicle with a German cross on it. “Will you take me back to your commanders?” he called. Sure as hell, his German had a cloyingly sweet Vienna accent, with Slavic palatals under that.

“I will, sir, but what for?” Ludwig asked.

“I have come to arrange the surrender of Prague.” No matter how sugary his accent, the Czech sounded infinitely bitter. “You’ve murdered enough innocent civilians. We can’t stand it any more. I hope you’re satisfied.”

“I just want to get out of this in one piece,” Ludwig said.

The Czech looked at him. “ Ja, you go where they tell you and do what they tell you. You’re nothing but a little cog in the machine-but it’s a big machine, and it’s slaughtered us. Will you give me a ride?”

“Of course, sir, if you can clamber on up. Not much room inside here, but you can ride on top of the turret. I’ll take you back to Regimental HQ, and they’ll know what to do with you…Theo!”

“What is it?” the radioman asked.

“Get on the horn with the regiment. Tell ‘em I’m bringing back a Czech colonel-I think he’s a colonel-with a surrender offer for Prague. Tell ‘em it looks like we’ve got a cease-fire up here for the time being, too.”

“Nobody tells me anything,” Theo grumbled. Sitting there at the back of the fighting compartment, he was the last to know, all right.

“I’m telling you now,” Ludwig said.

He gave the Czech officer a hand. The man might not be young, but he was spry-he didn’t really need the help. He might-he undoubtedly did-hate everything the German stood for, but he stayed polite about it. What did the diplomats call that? Correct-that was the word. Ludwig held out a pack of cigarettes. The Czech took one. “Thank you,” he said again. “Have you also got a blindfold for me?”

The accent that made Ludwig think of strudel didn’t go well with the cynical question. Trying to stay polite himself, the panzer commander said, “Your men fought well.”

“We are still fighting well,” the Czech said proudly. “This surrender offer is for Prague, perhaps for Bohemia, but not for all of Czechoslovakia. The war goes on in the east.”

Ludwig didn’t think his superiors would like that. He shrugged. He was only a sergeant. It wasn’t his worry. From the bowels of the panzer, Theo said, “Regiment says to bring him in. And they say the truce here can hold, as far as they’re concerned.”

“In the last war, we did not have communications like these,” the Czech officer said. “Do all of your panzers have radio sets?”

He sounded casual-so casual, he made Ludwig wary. “Sir, I’d better not talk about that. Security, you know,” the German said. He spoke into the tube that let him talk to the driver: “Back to HQ, Fritz.”

“Right, Sergeant.” The Panzer II turned nimbly and headed back toward the east. The Czech officer seemed to be taking mental notes. If he was coming in to surrender, it might not matter. Ludwig sure hoped it wouldn’t.

* * *

Fighters dueled over the Ebro. Chaim Weinberg watched the new French machines mixing it up with the 109s. Now that France and Germany were at war, the supply spigot to Spain finally got turned on. The Republic had seen more new equipment the past two weeks than in the two years before.

Just because it was new didn’t mean it was good. A French fighter spun out of control, trailing smoke. The Messerschmitt that downed it sought fresh prey.

Chaim wasn’t the only guy from the International Brigades who swore. In how many tongues did those curses rise? He’d thought-everybody’d thought-enough stuff would come from France to let the Republic settle the Nationalists’ hash in nothing flat. There was more, but there wasn’t that much more. And Sanjurjo’s bastards still seemed to be getting stuff from Germany and Italy. That shouldn’t have happened, either.

England had the biggest navy in the world, didn’t she? And the French had lots of ships, too. So why weren’t they doing a better job of closing down Sanjurjo’s supply lines? The only answer he could think of was that they didn’t give a damn.

Then he stopped worrying about their strategic options. A couple of those Messerschmitts dove for the deck. They weren’t running from the French planes. They were going to shoot up the Republican trenches.

Bullets kicked up spurts of dust, closer and closer. Chaim was too far from a dugout to dive into one. He folded himself into a ball to make as small a target as he could. The roar of the powerful engine and the hammering guns filled his world.

The 109 was overhead, so low that he imagined he felt the wind of its passage-or maybe it wasn’t his imagination. Then the plane was gone. But even if the wind was imagination, he didn’t want to unfold. He had to will himself into doing it.

Somebody not far away was groaning. That got him moving. You did for a buddy, because you wanted to be sure a buddy would do for you, too.

That big blond guy wasn’t an American. Chaim thought Gyula was from Hungary. Gyula spoke several languages, including English. In every damn one of them, he sounded like the guy who played Dracula. What he said now wasn’t in any language Chaim knew. It sounded impressive as hell, though.

“Wow,” he said. “What’s that mean?”

Gyula looked at him. The Hungarian had a mashed foot-no wonder he was groaning. He’d be lucky to keep it. “A horse’s cock up your ass,” he said in English.

For a second, Chaim thought the other guy was cussing at him. Then he realized Gyula was just answering his question. “Let me bandage you up,” Chaim said. He yelled for stretcher-bearers in English and Spanish. His own accent was god-awful, but people would understand that.

“You better cut my shoe off,” Gyula said. “Don’t try to yank it over the wound. I kill you if you do that.”

With that damn Bela Lugosi voice, he should have sounded silly. He should have-and no doubt he would have, if he didn’t so obviously mean it. Clumsily, Chaim took the bayonet off his rifle. At least it had a blade; it wasn’t one of the damn spears the French liked.

Gyula’s boot was falling apart anyway. That made things easier. Chaim winced when he got a good look at the wound. The Hungarian’s instep was smashed all to hell. Yeah, he’d lose most of the foot if not all of it.

He saw the same thing. As Chaim wrapped a puttee around the wound to slow the bleeding, he said, “I can go home now. Admiral Horthy won’t draft me.”

“Mazel tov,” Chaim said dryly. “He’ll shoot you instead, and not in the foot.” Gyula was close to forty. He’d fought in the last war, and for Bela Kun in Hungary’s short-lived Communist revolution. If he went back to Budapest, he’d be about as welcome as the smallpox.

“Right now, I wouldn’t mind. Hurts like a motherfucker,” Gyula said. “Got any morphine?”

Chaim shook his head. “Sorry. Wish I did.” He meant that. He could have got nailed as easily as Gyula. Dumb luck, one way or the other.

The stretcher-bearers showed up then. They were Internationals, too. That was good-or Chaim thought so. They’d be gentler with Gyula as they took him away. Spaniards faced their own pain with stolid indifference…and they were even more indifferent when somebody else got hurt.

Away they went. They wore Red Cross smocks and armbands. That might keep the Nationalists from shooting at them. On the other hand, it might not. This was a rough old war. You really didn’t want to let the other side capture you, no matter which side you were on.

Cautiously, Chaim straightened up till he could peer over the lip of the trench. He wanted to make sure Sanjurjo’s bastards weren’t swarming forward. As soon as he did, he ducked down again. He wouldn’t come up again in the same spot. He knew better than that. Why give the snipers a free shot at you? Guys who did that ended up with a new hole in the head.

He took a swig from his water bottle. It wasn’t water, but sour white wine-horse piss, really. But it was less likely to give you the galloping shits than Ebro water was. He’d had dysentery once, and was glad he’d got over it. He sure as hell didn’t want it again.

When he looked again, ten or fifteen yards down the trench from the place where he’d last popped up, he spied two or three Nationalists looking out of their trenches a couple of hundred yards away and toward him. As he ducked, he saw them ducking at the same time.

They’re scared of me, he thought, not without pride. They even looked like Fascist assholes. Like most of Sanjurjo’s better troops, they wore German-style helmets. But they were scared of a dumb Jew from New York City. If that wasn’t a kick in the nuts, he didn’t know what would be.

If you had a rifle in your hands, you were dangerous. It was as simple as that. The thing you had to remember, though, was that the other son of a bitch was dangerous as long as he had a rifle, too.

* * *

Vaclav Jezek stumbled over the border. Behind him, Slovakia was going to hell in a handbasket. The Germans were breaking in from the west. The Hungarians, not about to miss a chance to seize again what they’d ruled for centuries, were breaking in from the south. The Slovaks were up in arms-German-supplied arms-against what was left of Czechoslovakian authority. Ingrate bastards, Jezek thought, not that anybody gave a damn about his opinion.

He didn’t know what the Poles would do with him-to him-either. Poland was also more or less at war with Czechoslovakia. By now, Tesin would be Cieszun, or however the hell the Poles spelled it. He doubted whether his own country tried very hard to defend the mining town. When a lion jumped you, you didn’t worry about the jackals.

The country was rough and broken. Most of the leaves were off the trees, though, which made people easier to spot. And, being off the trees, the leaves lay underfoot. Every time Vaclav took a step, they crunched underfoot. They might as well have shouted Here I am!

But so what? He didn’t want to sit around in a Nazi POW camp till the war ended. Whatever the Poles did to him had to be better than that…didn’t it? Behind him, he could still hear bombs and shells bursting and machine guns going off. More Czech soldiers-the ones who could-were stumbling north, out of the fighting. They’d made the same calculation he had. Now…were the lot of them right?

Somebody up ahead shouted something. Vaclav almost understood it. Polish and Czech were closely related-not so closely as Czech and Slovak, but still…A word here and there came through, even if each of them seemed to carry an extra syllable or two.

Vaclav stood still. He thought that was what the Pole was telling him to do. “I give up!” he shouted back. “You can intern me!”

The Pole came out from behind a tree. He wore a greenish uniform, not brown like Vaclav’s (not filthy and tattered like Vaclav’s, either) or German field-gray. The bayoneted rifle he carried looked extremely businesslike. Moving slowly and carefully, Vaclav unslung his own piece and laid it on the ground in front of his feet.

With a nod, the Pole advanced on him. They tried to talk. It was an exercise in near misses and frustration. Then the Pole-a big blond fellow-raised an ironic eyebrow and asked, “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”

“Ja,” Jezek said miserably. Two Slavs, having to go back and forth in German!

“Gut,” the Pole said. “Jetzt konnen wir wirklich einander verstehen.” And they could really understand each other now, no matter how much Vaclav loathed the idea. Still in German, the Pole went on, “Give me your name and rank and unit.”

Dully, Vaclav did. “What will you do with me?” he asked.

“We have a camp a few kilometers to the north,” the Polish soldier answered. “Did you say you wanted to be interned before?”

“Ja,” Vaclav said again.

“I thought so, but I wasn’t sure,” the Pole said. “Well, you will be. You are not a prisoner of war, not here. Poland and Czechoslovakia are not formally at war.”

“No. You just grabbed,” Jezek said bitterly.

With a shrug, the big man in the green uniform answered, “So did you Czechs, after the last war. Otherwise, the coal mines down there would have been ours all along. And then you act like your shit doesn’t stink.”

“Oh, mine does. I know that,” Vaclav said. “But if you are friends with Hitler, he will make you sorry.”

“Better him than Stalin and the damned Reds,” the Pole retorted.

“You find friends where you can. At least the Russians did something for us. More than France and England did,” Vaclav said.

“What did you expect? They’re full of Jews,” the Pole said. No wonder he liked Hitler better than Stalin. He stooped, picked up Vaclav’s rifle, and slung it over his own shoulder. Then he pointed north. “The camp is that way. Get moving, Corporal Jezek.”

Shoulders slumped in despair, Vaclav got moving.