Hitler's war

Chapter 5

Another gray, damp, chilly day in Munster. Sarah Goldman sat in the rickety bleachers at a soccer pitch and watched her brother break away from the back who was trying to guard him. Both teams were made up of nothing but Jews. Saul was so much better than anyone else on the field, it wasn’t even funny.

The goalkeeper ran out to try to cut down his angle. Saul got his toe under the ball, lofted it just over the fellow’s luckless, reaching hands, and watched it bounce once and roll into the net.

“Goal!” Sarah shouted exultantly. Her mother and father clapped their hands. That made it 5-2 with only about ten minutes left in the second half. Saul’s team had the game in the bag.

But he only shrugged, as if embarrassed at what he’d done. He probably was. This was his second goal of the match, and he’d assisted on two others. The soccer couldn’t be much fun when you outclassed friends and foes alike. Saul might have made a professional in another year or two. It didn’t seem he’d ever get the chance now.

Sarah supposed she ought to count herself lucky the Jews got any chance to play at all. Yes, these bleachers might fall down in a stiff breeze. Yes, she was sitting on a blanket because she’d end up with splinters in her tukhus if she didn’t. Yes, the pitch was bumpy and looked as if it were mown by goats. This had to be the most miserable place to play for kilometers around.

Which was, of course, the only reason the Jews got to use it. Sarah pictured a plump, blond, uniformed athletic commissioner laughing till his jowls wobbled as he gave the two Jewish teams permission to play here. Maybe he thought a match here would be worse than no match at all. Were the teams involved full of Aryans, he might have been right.

Ever since 1933, though, Jews had had to take whatever scraps of comfort and pleasure they could find. Even a soccer match on a horrible excuse for a pitch was better than none. It gave people an excuse to get out of the house, an excuse to get together and see one another and gab.

Yes, a couple of policemen were also watching the game and the little crowd in the stands. What could you do about that? Nothing, as Sarah knew too well. If you were a Jew in the Reich, somebody was going to keep an eye on you.

She leaned over to her father and asked, “What do they think we’re going to do? Roll up the chalk lines and carry them home in our handbags and pockets?”

Samuel Goldman shrugged. “Maybe they do. Maybe they think we can turn the lines into bombs or something, and use them to blow up NSDAP headquarters.”

“Would you blow up Nazi headquarters if you could?” Sarah asked.

“Of course not!” Father’s reply was too loud and too quick. “The National Socialists have done wonderful things for the Reich. They’ve made Germany wake up.” Deutschland erwache! was a favorite Nazi slogan.

As Father spoke, his eyes told Sarah she’d been foolish. After a moment’s thought, she knew just how, too. Father couldn’t hope to give her a straight answer, not where anyone else could hear him talking. Yes, the only people in earshot were other Jews. But did that mean they wouldn’t betray one of their own? Fat chance, Sarah thought bitterly. If ratting on fellow Jews would give them a moment’s advantage, plenty of people would do it in a heartbeat.

Sarah hoped she would never stoop to anything as vile as that. She hoped so, yes, but she admitted to herself that she wasn’t sure. Times kept getting harder and harder. If not for Father’s gentile friends who gave him articles to write, she didn’t know what the family would have done.

Mercifully, the match ended. The teams lined up and shook hands with each other. Players tousled one another’s sweaty hair. The goalkeeper on the other side mimed chipping the ball the way Saul had, then threw up his hands in mock-or maybe not mock-despair.

The sparse crowd came down onto the pitch. Practically everybody there was related to one player or another. “You were great, Saul!” Sarah made herself sound enthusiastic, even if she knew her brother wouldn’t be.

And he wasn’t. “Big deal,” he said. “These guys try, but I feel like a grown-up playing against kindergarten kids.” He sighed. “Any soccer is better than none-I guess.” He didn’t sound sure; not even close.

“If the Foresters would let you come back-” Sarah began.

Saul cut her off with a sharp, chopping motion of his right hand. “The Foresters would. They’d take me back like that.” He snapped his fingers. “But if the SS says no…What are you going to do?” His wave took in the sorry excuse for a pitch, the fumbling opponents, and the paltry crowd. “You’re going to play in matches like this-for as long as they let you, anyhow.”

“Why would they stop you?” Sarah asked.

“Why?” Her brother snorted. “I’ll tell you why. They’re liable to realize we’re having fun in spite of everything, that’s why. And if they do-” Saul made that chopping motion again.

“Oh.” Sarah left it right there. Saul’s words had a horrible feeling of probability to them. The Nazis ruined things for Jews just to be ruining them. That was how they had fun. And since they had the Gestapo and the ordinary police and the Wehrmacht on their side, they could have fun any way they wanted.

One of Saul’s teammates called to him. The older man thumped the hero of the match on the back and handed him a bottle of beer. Saul swigged from it. He made a face. “Even the beer’s gone downhill since the war started,” he said. “It tastes like…lousy beer.”

What did he almost say? Horse piss? Goebbels piss? Whatever it was, it didn’t come out. As Father had driven home to them again and again, you couldn’t get in trouble for what you didn’t say. Nobody could inform on you for what you were thinking. That might save your life.

Or it might not. If the Nazis decided to do something to the Jews, or to a particular Jew, they’d just go ahead and do it. They didn’t need any excuses, the way they would have in a country where laws counted for more than the Fuhrer ’ s will. On the other hand, if a Jew was dumb enough to give them an excuse, they’d grab it in a heartbeat.

Sarah often wondered what she would do if Hitler or Himmler or Goring or Heydrich or one of those people came to Munster. If she had a chance…If she had a rifle…If she knew how to use a rifle…If pigs had wings…

Even if she did exactly what she dreamt of doing, what kind of revenge would the Nazis take? Would more than three or four Jews be left alive in the Reich a day after a Jewish girl shot somebody like that? Odds were against it. Too bad. The whole folk were a hostage.

In small groups, people started walking off toward their houses. No bus or trolley line ran close to this pitch-what a surprise! Buses had almost disappeared since the war started anyhow; whatever fuel Germany had went to the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine. The only private cars that still got gasoline belonged to doctors.

Well, walking a couple of kilometers was supposed to be good for you. Saul didn’t seem to fret about it. But Sarah was tired by the time she got home. Put together more exercise than she was used to and tight wartime rations-all the tighter because she was a Jew-and she felt as if she were walking uphill both ways.

There wasn’t much hot water, either. Saul complained loudest about that-after ninety minutes of running up and down the pitch, he needed hot water most. Or he thought he did, anyhow. Staring at his grass-and mud-stained soccer togs, Mother only sighed. Those wouldn’t come clean in cold water, either.

Staring glumly at black bread and cabbage and potatoes on her supper plate, Sarah asked, “What are we going to do?”

“If we get through this alive, we’re ahead of the game,” her father said, eyeing his supper with similar distaste. Sarah started to cry. She’d wanted reassurance, but all she’d got was something she had no trouble seeing herself.

* * *

A runner brought Sergeant Hideki Fujita’s squad the news: “Radio Berlin says Russia bombed East Prussia last night,” the man reported. He stumbled a little over Russia and Prussia, but Fujita followed him. The sergeant had studied a map. East Prussia was the part of Germany the Reds could reach most easily.

Fujita glanced west, toward the Halha River and the high ground on the far side. He would have been happy had only Mongol troops prowled there. But, without a doubt, Russians were peering at the Japanese positions through field glasses and rangefinders. Were they listening to some incomprehensible Soviet broadcast telling them that, 10,000 kilometers off to the west, their vast country had just given another punch in the European war?

If they were, what did they propose to do about it? Would they send more men out to this distant frontier to strengthen their Mongolian puppets? Or would they think the fight against Germany-which was, after all, much closer to their heartland-counted for more than this distant skirmish?

“Any intercepts?” Fujita asked the runner. The Russians were tough bastards-at least for Westerners-but they had horrible radio security. Half the time, they’d send in plain language what they should have encoded.

But this time the lance corporal shook his head. “Not that I heard about, anyhow,” he answered.

“All right,” Fujita said. “Any gossip about what we’ll do on account of this news?”

“Not that I heard about, Sergeant- san,” the runner repeated.

“Too bad.” Fujita made himself shrug. “One way or another, we’ll find out sooner or later.”

Whatever Japan did, the sergeant suspected it wouldn’t happen at once. Fall and winter weren’t the best time for campaigning up here. As if to prove as much, the wind swung around to blow out of the west the next morning, and carried choking clouds of yellow-brown dust from the Mongolian heartland with it.

It blew hard for three days. Dust from Mongolia blew all the way down to Peking and beyond. So close to the source, the storm was appalling. When the sky finally cleared, when the sun no longer seemed to shine through billowing smoke, the whole landscape had changed. Dunes had shifted. Some had grown, others disappeared. Dust buried the scraggly patches of steppe grass.

Captain Hasegawa, the company commander, shook his head after coming by to survey the outpost. “Can you imagine living your whole life in country like this? Turn your back on it, and half of it blows away.”

The mere thought was enough to make Sergeant Fujita shudder. “Sir, as far as I’m concerned, the Mongols are welcome to it.” Then he corrected himself before Hasegawa could: “Well, they’re welcome to all of it that doesn’t belong to Manchukuo, anyhow.”

“Hai. To that much and not a centimeter more,” Captain Hasegawa said. Fujita let out a small sigh of relief-he wasn’t in trouble, anyhow. Hasegawa looked out over the altered countryside. “At least the Russians will have as much trouble seeing what we’re up to as we do with them.”

“Yes, sir.” Fujita didn’t care to argue, even if he wasn’t one hundred percent convinced. Oh, the captain was right-the Russians wouldn’t be able to operate as usual during dust storms, either. But what about the Mongols themselves? The Japanese in this miserable place were probably lucky the natives hadn’t sneaked through the dust and slit all their throats.

“You heard the Russians are really going after the Germans?” Captain Hasegawa asked.

“Oh, yes, sir,” Fujita said. “The runner got here the day before the storm started.”

“All right,” the company commander said. “Well, you can bet we’ll take advantage of that. We’d have to be idiots not to.”

And so? Officers are idiots all the time. Fujita didn’t say that. Sergeants might take it for granted, but somebody with more gold and less red on his collar tabs wouldn’t. Fujita rubbed at his eyes, which still felt gritty. His teeth crunched every time he closed his mouth. He found something safe: “Whatever they want us to do, we’ll do it. You know you can count on that, sir.”

Of course we’ll do it. If we disobey the orders, they’ll kill us. And our families back in the Home Islands will be disgraced. Sergeant Fujita knew exactly how things worked. For common soldiers and noncommissioned officers, the army was a cruel, harsh, brutal place. Officers didn’t have it so bad-but they necessarily looked the other way while noncoms kept privates in line.

Many Japanese soldiers began coming up toward the front a few days later. Sergeant Fujita would rather have seen them move up during the dust storm, too. Pointing in the direction of the high ground on the other side of the Halha, he complained, “The Russians can watch everything we do.”

“For now,” Captain Hasegawa said. “Once we get moving, we’ll take their observation posts away from them, neh?”

“Yes, sir.” Fujita said the only thing he could. He wished he were as confident as the company commander-and, presumably, the high command. But the Japanese and the Russians had been banging heads on the border between Manchukuo and Mongolia for a while now. The Red Army had more airplanes, more armor, and more artillery-and had had the better of the skirmishes. Why should anything change now?

As if plucking that thought out of his head, Captain Hasegawa said, “The round-eyed barbarians will worry more about the Germans than they do about us. This is our neighborhood. They look towards Europe. They can’t help it.”

Since Fujita had had pretty much the same notion-and since Hasegawa was his superior-he couldn’t very well disagree. All he could do was hope it was true…and hope his own side brought in enough force to win once the serious fighting started.

Artillery did come forward along with the foot soldiers. So did sleek, modern monoplane fighters. Sitting on the ground, they looked as if they ought to sweep the Soviet biplanes from the sky.

Armored cars and a few tanks also rattled up to the front line. Fujita was glad to see them, and wished he were seeing more of them. This might be the back of beyond for the Russians, but they had plenty of tanks here.

“Don’t worry about it,” Captain Hasegawa told him when he cautiously expressed misgivings. “This isn’t the only place where we’ll be facing off against the Russians. We’ll put our tanks where we need them most.”

And where would that be? Fujita wondered. But a moment’s thought gave him the answer. If Japanese armor would strike anywhere, it would strike at the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Back before the Russo-Japanese War, the Tsar had been able to ship troops down through Manchuria. The Soviets couldn’t do that any more; Japan controlled the railroads in what was now Manchukuo. But, just on the other side of the border, the railroad was Stalin’s key to defending Vladivostok and the rest of eastern Siberia. Break the line, take it away from the Reds, and the port and the whole vast country would fall into Japanese hands like a ripe persimmon.

The Russians weren’t blind. They could see that, too. They would fight as hard as they could to protect the Trans-Siberian Railroad. But the Russian heartland lay thousands of kilometers off to the west. Japan lay right across the sea that bore her name. The Amur separated Manchukuo from the USSR, the Yalu divided Chosen-Korea, to old people-from Stalin’s ramshackle Asiatic empire. Logistics, then, were all on Japan’s side.

So the big fight would be there, along the border between Japan’s mainland possessions and Soviet Siberia. This Mongol business was only a sideshow. It would never be anything but a sideshow-that was how it looked to Sergeant Fujita, anyhow.

He sighed. “We’re stuck here, neh?”

“Yes, I think we are.” Captain Hasegawa sent him a shrewd look. “Why? Would you rather be on the Amur?”

“Yes, sir, I would.” Fujita didn’t beat around the bush. “What happens there really means something. This…This is nothing but a bunch of crap. Please excuse me for saying so, sir, but it’s true.”

He waited for a reprimand, or maybe even a slap in the face. You weren’t supposed to complain about your assignment. Oh, you could grouse with your buddies. But to a superior you were supposed to pretend everything was fine. Well, things weren’t fine. And, dammit, the company commander asked. All Fujita did was tell the truth. Of course, sometimes that was the most dangerous thing you could do, even more dangerous than charging a Russian machine-gun nest.

“We do need men here. We can’t let the Russians and Mongols steal what’s ours,” Hasegawa said. “But I admit, I wish I weren’t one of them, too.” He shrugged. “Somebody has to do it, though, and it looks like we’re the ones.”

Sergeant Fujita sighed one more time: a martyr’s sigh. “Yes, sir.”

* * *

Joaquin Delgadillo watched italian tanks clank toward the front. The crews looked impressive in their black coveralls. Delgadillo didn’t let the stylish uniforms fool him. The Italians looked much less impressive in full retreat, and he’d seen that move more often than he cared to remember.

Mussolini’s soldiers didn’t want to be in Spain. They cared nothing for Marshal Sanjurjo’s war. And they fought like it, too. If the Reds who fought for the Republic didn’t run away, the Italians would.

The Condor Legion, now…The Condor Legion was different. Joaquin Delgadillo didn’t like Germans. He didn’t see how you could. To him, as to any Spaniard with a working set of cojones, Germans were technicians, not warriors. They made no bones about why they’d come to Spain: to learn what they needed to know for the upcoming European war. Now that war wasn’t upcoming. It was here.

But the armored forces and machine-gun units in the Condor Legion had never got a name for cutting and running, the way the Italians had. Maybe courage wasn’t what kept them in the field. Maybe it was just professional self-respect. Whatever it was, you had to admire it. This might not have been the Germans’ fight, but they performed as if it were.

Now the Germans in Spain had the same enemies as the ones back in Germany: Communists, freethinkers, republicans, liberals of every stripe. And they, and the Italians, and Marshal Sanjurjo, were doing everything they could to crush the enemy here before the aid flooding in from France and England let the Red Republic seize the initiative.

Those Italian tanks kept rattling forward. Vinaroz, on the eastern coast, lay a few kilometers to the north. Sanjurjo’s men had already taken the town once, when they cut the Republic in half. Now an enemy drive down from Catalonia, one backed by French armor and aircraft, had recaptured it.

“What do you think?” Delgadillo asked his sergeant. “Can we get it back?”

Miguel Carrasquel shrugged. “That’s what our orders are,” he answered, which meant, We’ll keep trying till we’re all dead, or till the orders change-and don’t expect the orders to change. Carrasquel had bad teeth and was missing half his left ear. His grin, then, looked most unpleasant. “What’s the matter, Prettyboy? Don’t want to get messed up?”

Joaquin didn’t think he was especially handsome. But the sergeant called anybody who hadn’t been wounded Prettyboy. You didn’t want to get mad about it. Carrasquel was a good man with a knife.

Machine-gun bullets spanged off the Italian tanks and tankettes. The commanders in the impressive black coveralls ducked down behind the shelter of their armor. One or two of them waited too long, and got hit before they could. The armored fighting vehicles clattered forward anyhow. Joaquin nodded to himself. He didn’t mind people ducking when the enemy shot at them. He did it himself-who didn’t? As long as you carried on regardless, you earned your pay.

Tanks were magnets for machine-gun fire. He’d seen that before. Fewer bullets fought the Nationalist foot soldiers who loped along with the mechanical monsters. Since Joaquin was one of those soldiers, he approved of that. One bullet hitting you was one too many.

Most of the men up ahead didn’t wear uniforms at all: not what he thought of as uniforms, anyhow. They had on overalls instead, as if they were factory workers. That made them Catalan Communists or anarchists. Up till the war started, they had been factory workers. The ones still alive after two and a half years of fighting knew their business as well as any other veterans.

Clang! That cry of metal against tortured metal wasn’t a machine-gun bullet. That was an AP shell from a cannon striking home. Sure as the devil, a tankette came to an abrupt halt. Smoke and then fire poured from it. Ammunition inside started cooking off. Joaquin didn’t think either Italian got out.

“Tanks!” Somebody pointed ahead. The man’s voice wasn’t panicked, but it wasn’t far removed, either. More often than not, the Nationalists had had tanks and the Republicans hadn’t. With aid flooding over the Pyrenees from France, the miserable Reds were getting more of their own.

These machines were French, all right. By the look of them, they’d been around since the last war. But they had turrets and treads and cannon and enough steel to keep out small-arms fire. If they weren’t exactly swift…well, so what?

One of them fired at an Italian tank. Clang! There was that horrible bell-like sound again. The Italian machine’s armor wasn’t thick enough to hold out an armor-piercing round. Somebody got out of an escape hatch in the turret before the tank brewed up. It didn’t do him much good-a burst from a machine gun cut him down before he’d run ten meters.

Tanks on both sides stopped to fire at foes, then got moving again to make themselves harder to hit. The Italian tankettes kept on moving and shooting. They mounted only machine guns, and weren’t dangerous to real tanks. They could do horrible things to infantry, though.

As the tanks slowed, so did the rest of the Nationalist advance. Joaquin flopped onto his belly behind a pile of rubble that had been a stone barn. Every so often, he rose up enough to fire. Then he crawled somewhere else before squeezing off another round. No sniper would draw an easy bead on him. Veterans learned things like that. The guys who didn’t…didn’t get to be veterans.

Sergeant Carrasquel crouched behind a fence not far away. Delgadillo waited for the sergeant to order him forward again. But the squad leader stayed where he was, firing every now and then. He kept his mouth shut. Maybe he’d decided the attack wouldn’t get much farther no matter what.

Joaquin Delgadillo sure felt that way. The Republicans had been tough even while outnumbered and outgunned. This push, plainly, aimed to take back as much as possible from them while they still were.

It also seemed designed to get a lot of Nationalist soldiers killed. Mortar bombs started whispering down around Joaquin and Sergeant Carrasquel. Both men dug like moles. Joaquin hated mortars. The Republicans had been using a Russian model for a long time. Now they also had French tubes, and those were just as good or maybe even better.

Somebody yowled like a wildcat, which meant a jagged steel fragment had bitten him. Joaquin hoped it was no one he knew. You always hated to hear a buddy get it. That reminded you how easily you might stop something yourself.

“Ave Maria,” Joaquin whispered. As he went through the Hail Mary in Latin, his left hand found the rosary in his tunic pocket. Keep me safe, he thought. Let Marshal Sanjurjo win, but please, God, keep me safe.

* * *

The North Sea in November was nowhere a skipper wanted to go. It was even less pleasant in a U-boat than it would have been in a larger surface warship. Lieutenant Julius Lemp guided U-30 north and east. He had to get around the British Isles to take up his assigned position in the mid-Atlantic.

He liked everything about his boat except the way it rolled and pitched in the heavy seas. Type VII U-boats made everything that had come before them seem like children’s toys by comparison. They had outstanding range. They could make seventeen knots on the surface and eight submerged, and could go eighteen hours at four knots underwater.

During the last war, the British mined the northern reaches of the North Sea, trying to bottle up the U-boats. With hundreds and hundreds of kilometers between Scotland and Norway, they couldn’t sew things up tight there the way they did in the Channel. But they could make life difficult, and they did.

They were supposed to be trying the same thing this time around. Lemp had orders to sink any minelayers he spotted. Odds against spying any were long: it was a big ocean, and he couldn’t see very much of it, even with the Zeiss binoculars hanging around his neck. But his superiors were thorough. They wouldn’t have got those wide gold stripes on their sleeves if they weren’t.

Gray clouds scudded low overhead, driven by a strong west wind. In clear weather, Lemp would have scanned sky as well as sea with his binoculars. One thing had changed from the last war: airplanes were much more dangerous than they had been. They could carry bigger bombs, and carry them farther. And they all had radio sets, so they could guide enemy warships to a U-boat’s path.

In this weather, though, a plane would have a devil of a time spotting the U-30. Lemp thought a pilot would have to be nuts even to take off, but he also thought pilots were nuts. Maybe it evened out.

About the most interesting thing he saw on his watch was a puffin that landed on the conning tower for a moment. With its plump, dignified body and the big beak in bright crayon colors, the bird looked as if a talented but strange child had drawn it. It also looked confused, as if wondering how this convenient little island had popped up in the middle of the sea. Then it noticed Julius Lemp-and then it was flying away again, as fast as it could.

“I don’t like puffin stew,” Lemp said. The wind blew his words away. Chances were the puffin wouldn’t have believed him anyway. Birds didn’t live to grow old by trusting people.

At 1400 on the dot, Ensign Klaus Hammerstein’s shoes clanged on the iron rungs of the ladder leading up to the top of the conning tower. “I relieve you, sir,” the youngster said formally, and then, “Anything I need to know?”

“Don’t talk to puffins,” Lemp replied, deadpan.

Hammerstein’s left eyebrow-the sardonic one-rose a few millimeters. “Hadn’t really planned to…sir.” He took a deep breath, and his expression cleared. “Nice to get up here, isn’t it?”

“Don’t remind me. I’m going the other way.” With a sigh, Lemp descended into the bowels of the U-30.

When the sun shone brightly, when the sky was blue, when the sea was smooth, you could easily think that coming off watch and going back into the iron coffin that let you do your job was like going from heaven to hell. With winter on its way in the North Sea, the change wasn’t that bad, but it sure wasn’t good.

Bowels…Julius Lemp wished he hadn’t thought of that particular word, because it fit much too well. U-boats filled with every stench in the world; they might have been a distillery for bad smells. High on the list was the reek from the heads. Toilets that worked without putting the boat at risk of flooding were something German engineering was…almost up to. No U-boat had ever been lost because of a malfunctioning head-which didn’t make the toilets a nice place to be around.

Unwashed bodies, musty clothes, and stale food added to the reek. U-boats carried enough drinking water. Water for washing was a luxury they didn’t bother with. Seawater and saltwater soap were supposed to make up the lack. As with the heads, theory ran several lengths in front of performance.

Bilgewater added a swampy smell as old as the sea-as old as boats, anyhow. When you first came down into it, the combination was enough to knock you for a loop. After a while, you stopped smelling it-your brain blanked it out. But when you’d been breathing fresh salt air, the change was like getting a garbage can thrown in your face.

The sailors looked as if they might have been demons from hell, too. The orange light bulbs didn’t help. More to it than those, though. A U-boat skipper couldn’t insist on spit and polish the way officers in ordinary warships did. The men were too cramped together here-and U-boat crewmen were commonly harder cases than sailors in surface ships, too.

A lot of them started beards as soon as they left port. Shaving with saltwater soap was no fun. Even if it were, these guys were a raffish lot. They enjoyed flouting regulations. Lemp couldn’t very well ream them out for it, not when he was sprouting strawberry-blond face fungus himself.

Off-duty men looked up from a game of skat. Nobody jumped to his feet and saluted. If you sprang to attention on a U-boat, you were liable to coldcock yourself on an overhead pipe. In that, U-boats were like panzers: being a shrimp helped.

He hadn’t been below long when a shout floated down from the conning tower: “Ship ho! Ship off the starboard bow!”

That sent him scrambling up the ladder again. He wanted to see the ship for himself. No-he needed to see it for himself. If it was a warship, he would sink it if he could. No German surface units were in these waters. But if it was a freighter…Life got complicated then. Belgium and Holland, Norway and Denmark and Sweden were neutrals. Sinking a freighter bound for one of them could land the Reich in hot water. Freighters shaping a course for England, though, were fair game.

Up into the fresh air again. “Where away, Klaus?” he asked.

“There, sir.” Hammerstein pointed. “A smoke smudge.”

“Ja.” Lemp saw it, too. “We’ll have to get closer, see what it is.” They could do that. The U-30’s diesel engines gave off less smoke than did ships burning fuel oil or coal. And the gray-painted U-boat sat low in the water, making it hard to spot. Julius Lemp called down the hatch: “Change course to 350. I say again-350.”

“Jawohl. Changing course to 350,” the helmsman answered, and the U-30 swung almost due north.

Lemp and Hammerstein both raised their binoculars, waiting for the ship to come up over the horizon. Lemp didn’t forget the rest of the seascape and the sky. You could get caught with your pants down if you concentrated too much on your prey. That was how you turned into prey yourself. Every so often, when the skipper lowered his field glasses for a moment, he looked over at Ensign Hammerstein. The pup hadn’t forgotten to look other places besides dead ahead, either. Good.

“That’s no freighter, sir,” Hammerstein said after a while.

“Damn right it isn’t,” Lemp agreed. The silhouette, while tiny, was too sleek, too well raked, to haul anything so mundane as barley or iron ore. Easier to mistake a thoroughbred for a cart horse than a freighter for a…“Destroyer, I think, or maybe a minelayer.”

“I want one of those!” the ensign said. “The bastards are dangerous.”

“Too right they are,” Lemp replied. Admirals sneered at mines-but admirals didn’t have to face them. Sailors who did had a healthy respect for them. Mines were worse than a nuisance-they were a scourge. And they were an economical scourge, because they murdered ships without endangering the murderers…most of the time. But not today! Lemp set a hand on Hammerstein’s shoulder. “Let’s go below.”

The U-30 stalked the enemy warship at periscope depth. That slowed the approach, but no help for it. If the ship spotted the U-boat, she could get away-or fight back. In a surface action, the U-30 was doomed. Her deck guns were for shooting up freighters and shooting down airplanes, not for taking on anything with real weaponry.

“It is a minelayer, by God!” Lemp said. The silhouette matched the one in Jane’s Fighting Ships. How thoughtful of the English to help destroy themselves. The enemy vessel went about her business without the slightest suspicion the U-30 was anywhere in the neighborhood. That was just how Lemp liked it. It might as well have been a training run. He sneaked to within a kilometer.

At his orders, the torpedomen readied three fish in the forward tubes. The enemy ship filled the periscope’s field of view. Fighter pilots from Spain said you had to get close to make sure of a hit. The same held true under the sea.

“First torpedo- los!” Lemp called. Clang! Whoosh! “Second torpedo- los! ” Clang! Whoosh “Third torpedo- los!” Clang! Whoosh!

Under two minutes to the target. The minelayer showed sudden, urgent smoke-someone aboard her must have spotted the wakes. But you couldn’t do much, not in that little bit of time. And Lemp had aimed one of the torpedoes on the assumption that the enemy vessel would speed up.

Boom! “Hit!” Lemp shouted exultantly. The U-30’s crew cheered. Then a much bigger Boom! followed. The exploding torpedo must have touched off the mines the enemy ship carried. The minelayer went up in a fireball-and the U-boat might have been under the worst depth-charge attack in the world. It staggered in the water. Light bulbs blew from bow to stern, plunging the boat into darkness. Several leaks started.

With matter-of-fact competence, the crew went to work setting things to rights. Torches flashed on. Sailors began stopping the leaks. Lemp ordered U-30 to the surface. If there were survivors, he’d pick them up. He didn’t expect trouble, anyhow.

And he didn’t get any. Bodies floated in the chilly water. He saw no British sailors still alive. With that stunning blast, he was hardly surprised. A little disappointed, maybe, but not surprised. The minelayer had already gone to the bottom.

“Resume our previous course,” he told the helmsman. “We’ll celebrate properly when we’re clear.”

“Resuming previous course.” The petty officer grinned. Schnapps was against regulations-which didn’t mean people wouldn’t get a knock after a triumph like this.

Harry Turtledove

Hitler's War

These days, the British Expeditionary Force was mechanized. That meant Staff Sergeant Alistair Walsh got to ride a lorry from Calais to this piddlepot hole in the ground somewhere right next to the Belgian border. Then he jumped down out of the lorry…and he was back in the mud again. Twenty years unwound as if they had never been.

If anything, this was worse than what he’d known in 1918. He’d fought through the spring and summer then, and got wounded early in fall. Guys who’d been through the mill talked about how miserable trenches got when it was cold and wet. Guys who’d been through the mill always talked. This time, they were right.

He squelched when he walked. So did everybody else. People screamed “Keep your feet dry!” the same way they screamed “Always wear a rubber!” Not too many people listened-and wasn’t that a surprise? The first cases of trench foot meant rockets went up from the people with red stripes on their caps.

Walsh remembered a trick he’d heard about in the last war. “Rub your feet with Vaseline, thick as you can,” he told the men in his company. “Do your damnedest to keep your socks dry, but greasing’s better than nothing.”

Only one man came down with trench foot, and he didn’t follow instructions. “Good job, Sergeant,” said Captain Ted Peters.

“Thank you, sir,” Walsh answered. He was old enough to be the company commander’s father, but he would have had to start mighty young. “Some of these buggers haven’t got the sense God gave a Frenchman.”

“Or a Belgian.” Peters scratched at his skinny little mustache. Walsh didn’t think much of the modern fashion. If he was going to grow hair on his upper lip, he wanted a proper mustache, not one that looked put on with a burnt match. But he couldn’t deny that the captain was a clever bloke. Peters went on, “You know why we haven’t crossed the border and taken up positions where we might do some good?”

“Belgians haven’t invited us in, like,” Walsh answered.

“That’s right. They’re neutral, don’t you know?” The way Captain Peters rolled his eyes told what he thought of that. “They think they’ll offend the Boches if they get ready to defend themselves. Much good that kind of thing did them in 1914.”

Maybe he’d been born in 1914. Maybe not, too. Either way, he was right. “The Germans jumped them then. They’ll jump them again. Hitler’s a bigger liar than the damned Kaiser ever was,” Walsh said.

“Too bloody right he is,” Captain Peters agreed. “You can see that. I can, too. So why can’t King Leopold?”

“Because he’s a bleeding idiot…sir?” Walsh suggested. “Like one of those ostriches, with its head in the sand?”

“He’s got his head up his arse,” Peters said. Walsh goggled; he hadn’t thought the captain talked like that. “Thinks the French are as bad as the Germans. Thinks we are, for Christ’s sake.”

“What can you expect from a wog?” Walsh said. As far as he was concerned, wogs started on the far side of the Channel. The French were wogs on his side, which meant he cut them some slack. The Belgians weren’t, and he didn’t.

He had genuine respect for the bastards in the field-gray uniforms and the coal-scuttle helmets. The Germans fought hard, and in the last war they’d fought as clean as anyone else. What more could you want from the enemy?

Patiently, Captain Peters answered the question he’d meant as rhetorical: “I would expect an ounce of sense. If the balloon goes up-no, when it goes up-we’re going to have to rush forward to reach the positions we should already have. So will the French. That will give the Germans extra time to advance and consolidate, time they simply shouldn’t have.”

“What can we do about it, sir?” Walsh said.

“Damn all,” the company commander replied, which was about what the sergeant had expected. “Leopold won’t listen to reason.”

“Maybe something ought to happen to him-an accident, like,” Walsh said. “Not cricket, I know, but…Got to be some Belgians what can add two and two, right?”

“You’d think so. But if we try something like that and muck it up, what happens then?” This time, Peters answered his own question: “We throw Leopold into Hitler’s arms, that’s what. If the Belgians line up with Germany, we’re buggered for fair.”

Sergeant Walsh only grunted. He didn’t worry about Belgian soldiers. Who in his right mind would? But a Belgium leaning toward Hitler gave the Germans a red carpet for invading France. As soon as he called up a map in his mind, he saw as much. “We’d best not muck it up, then,” he said.

Peters lit a cigarette. Then he offered Walsh the packet, which an officer didn’t have to do. Walsh took a coffin nail and sketched a salute. Peters’ cheeks hollowed as he sucked in smoke. “Don’t get your hopes up for anything like that, Sergeant,” he said. “Not bloody likely, no matter how much sense it makes. The Belgies like Leopold, same as we like our King. That’s what he’s there for-to be liked.”

“Edward’s gone,” Walsh pointed out.

Now Captain Peters grunted. “You like to argue, don’t you?” he said, but a chuckle told the sergeant he wasn’t really angry. “If you could arrange for Leopold to fall in love with a popsy…”

“Could I have a couple of months’ leave to set it up, sir?”

“Why would you need so bloody long?”

“Well, sir, I’ve got to try out the popsies, don’t I, to see which one he’d like best,” Walsh answered innocently.

That won him a snort from the company commander. “Sorry, Walsh.” He looked east, across the Belgian frontier. “I’m not at all sure we’ve got two months.”

* * *

Once upon a time, U.S. Marines swaggered through the streets of Peking. People got out of the way for them. They had to be careful nowadays, though. They still counted for more than the Chinese did. But when Japanese soldiers came through, the leathernecks had to be the ones who stepped aside. Orders said so.

Pete McGill hated the orders, even though he understood the need for them. One Marine could wipe the floor with one Japanese soldier. Four or five Marines could lick four or five Japanese soldiers. The little men were plenty tough, but they were little.

And a platoon of Japanese soldiers could beat and stomp four or five Marines if they found any excuse to do it. They had, once or twice. U.S. military authorities protested when it happened. The Japs ignored the protests. As far as they were concerned, Peking was theirs now. All the other foreign troops stayed there on sufferance.

So now the idea was not to give them any excuses. “Hell of a note,” Corporal McGill complained. He and some of his buddies had just come out of the Yu Hua T’ai -the Restaurant of Rich and Fine Viands. He was full of shrimp and scallops, the specialties of the house, or he would have complained more. But he was also full of kao liang, which was brewed from millet and strong as the devil (some people said the Chinese also threw in pigeon droppings to give it extra body).

“Damn straight.” Herman Szulc knew what Pete was talking about. The big Polack had taken aboard even more kao liang than he had. Szulc got mean when he drank, too. “Ought to bust those little cocksucking monkeys right in the chops, just to show ‘em they can’t get away with shit like that.”

“Ain’t supposed to,” Pooch Puccinelli said. He always did exactly what he was told, and worried about everything else later. That made him a damn good Marine. Had the orders been to jump on the Japs with both feet, he would have. Since they were to go easy, he obeyed again-and he would do his damnedest to make sure everybody else followed along.

Szulc scowled at him. “I don’t got no orders not to bust you in the chops.”

“Well, you can try,” Pooch answered. Without orders, he didn’t back away from anything or anybody.

“Cut the crap, both of you,” McGill said. He didn’t want to have to break up a brawl between his pals. He didn’t want to get sucked into one, either. “What do you say we go get our ashes hauled?”

“Now you’re talking!” Puccinelli was always ready for that. Herman Szulc didn’t say no. What Marine would have? Peking was pussy paradise. There were lots of whorehouses, they were cheap, most of the girls were pretty, and all of them were versatile. The only drawback was, it was mighty easy to come down venereal. Flunk a shortarm inspection, and the Corps landed on you like a ton of bricks.

With money in his pocket and kao liang in his veins, Pete wasn’t inclined to worry about that-not now, anyway. Even a Marine corporal was a rich man in Peking. He knew damn well the Restaurant of Rich and Fine Viands had overcharged him and his pals as much as the Chinamen thought they could get away with. He didn’t care…too much. The chow was good, and it was still damn cheap. Whorehouses worked the same way. You could get whatever you wanted, and it wouldn’t cost you half of what you’d pay in Honolulu or San Diego. The Chinese put down less? Well, so what?

The Marines came out of Hsi La Hutung-an alleyway wider than McGill’s wingspan, but not by a whole lot-and out onto Morrison Street. Somebody’d told McGill that the Chinese name for the street was Main Street of the Well of the Prince’s Palace, but it was Morrison Street to all the foreigners in Peking. Iron sheeting covered the well these days, but people still shoved it out of the way and drew up water every now and then. Some of the Royal Marines said Morrison had been a writer for the Times of London, and he’d lived at Number 98. Nowadays, an Italian firm occupied the building.

Chinese on foot, Chinese on bicycles, plump Chinese riding in rickshaws pulled by gaunt Chinese, older Chinese women hobbling along on what they called lotus feet, Chinese (inevitably) selling things, Chinese spitting and blowing their noses…

Chinese scrambling out of the way…Chinese leaping from the street onto the rickety sidewalks…Chinese bowing low…

“Oh, fuck,” Puccinelli said. “Here come those goddamn slant-eyed mothers.”

Chinese were slant-eyed, too, but Pooch wasn’t talking about them. Up Morrison Street came a long column of Japanese soldiers. They marched in formation, a bayoneted rifle on each tough little man’s right shoulder. When a noncom spotted a Chinaman who failed to show proper respect, four Japs jumped out of the line, grabbed the offender, and kicked him and beat him with rifle butts. They left him groaning and bloody and hustled back into place.

“Nod to the slanty bastards,” McGill said. He met a Japanese sergeant’s eye and nodded, equal to equal. The Jap gazed back. His gaze showed nothing for a moment. But then he nodded back. He’d won the exchange-Pete had acknowledged him first.

The other Marines also nodded to the Japanese troops. They got a few nods in return. Most of the Japs just ignored them. Nobody gave them a hard time. As far as Pete was concerned, that would do fine.

When the tail of the column got out of earshot, Szulc said, “Been a lot of the little monkeys going through town lately.”

“Yeah.” McGill nodded. “I hear they’re mostly getting on trains and heading north.”

“They gonna finally get off the pot with the Russians?” Szulc said. “Talk about deserving each other…” No Marine in Peking felt anything better than grudging respect for the Japanese, and Pete had never run into a Polack who had anything good to say about Russians.

“Who cares? That ain’t our worry any which way. We were gonna get laid, remember?” Puccinelli kept his mind firmly on what mattered-or in the gutter, depending on how you looked at things.

* * *

Number 1 Good Time, the joyhouse said in English. It had a bigger sign in Chinese. Pete would have bet that was dirtier. The Chinese had no idea what shame was, as far as he could see.

“Marines!” the madam exclaimed. Meal tickets! was what it sounded like. Sure as hell, they would have to pay more for this than the locals did, too. “Make you happy!” the middle-aged woman went on. Make me rich, she probably meant. Her cut of the wages of sin looked pretty nice. She wore brocaded silk. Gold gleamed around her neck and on her fingers and ears; jewels sparkled in her hair.

“Show us the girls!” That was Szulc, who also didn’t believe in dicking around when it came to dicking around.

“Yes, yes, yes!” The madam was all smiles. Pete McGill heard the ching of a cash register in her agreement. Well, what the hell did you expect when you went to a whorehouse? This gal had blond sisters back in the States. He’d dealt with his share of them. All the same, it did take a little of the edge off.

He got the edge back when he picked his girl. She reminded him of a Siamese cat, except her eyes weren’t blue. He paid the madam and took the girl upstairs.

His being large and hairy didn’t faze her. She wasn’t just in from the countryside, then; she’d seen round-eyes before. She didn’t know any English, though. Oh, well, McGill thought. He could show her what he wanted. He could-and he did.

The way she gasped and squeezed him inside at the end made him think he brought her off, too. Of course, whores were part actresses. If they made the john think he was a prize stud, he’d shell out more. And Pete did give her an extra dollar, saying, “Don’t tell the old bitch downstairs.”

She hugged him and kissed him and made the fat silver coin disappear even though she was naked. Pete didn’t see exactly where it went. Into her lacquered hair? Or…? He shrugged. It wasn’t his worry.

Szulc was sitting in the waiting room when he got down there. Puccinelli took longer coming back. “Twice!” he said proudly.

“You went off in your pants the first time?” McGill gibed.

“Not likely!” Pooch said. “You shoulda heard that broad squeal!”

“Thank you! Thank you! Drink?” the madam said. Herman Szulc looked ready, but Pete shook his head and steered his buddies out.

“You don’t wanna have any fun,” Szulc complained.

“I don’t wanna get drugged and rolled,” McGill answered. “I may be dumb, but I ain’t that dumb. If I was a regular there, I might chance it, but not when it’s my first time in the joint.”

“Let’s go some place where they do know us and drink there,” Pooch said.

“Now you’re talking!” Szulc said. It sounded good to Pete, too.

When they got back to the barracks, they were drunk as lords. The next morning, McGill repented of his sins. Coffee and aspirins blunted down the whimwhams without stopping them.

Pete felt so rotten, he almost forgot about the long column of Japanese troops he’d seen the night before. Almost, but not quite. He reported to Captain Horner, his company commander.

Horner heard him out, then nodded. “Uh- huh,” the officer said thoughtfully. “You think they were going to head north?”

“Well, I don’t know for sure, sir,” McGill replied. “If I was a betting man, though, that’s how I’d lay my money.”

“If you were a betting man…” Horner snorted. “You’d bet on how many raindrops landed in a pail in twenty minutes.” He had a Tidewater accent thick enough to slice. A hell of a lot of Marines, and especially Marine officers, had a drawl. And Captain Horner knew him damn well.

“One good thing, sir,” McGill said. The captain raised a blond eyebrow. Pete went on, “If the Japs are heading north like that, they ain’t gonna jump on us right away.”

“You hope,” Horner said. Pete nodded. The company CO was right. He sure as hell did hope.

* * *

Interned. Officially, Vaclav Jezek was classed as a displaced person. It wasn’t quite the same as being a POW. The Poles were treating all the Czechs who’d got over the border-soldiers and civilians, men, women, and children-the same way.

Yeah, they were treating them all the same way, all right. They were treating them all like dogs.

Barbed wire fenced off the Czechs’ encampment from the rest of Poland. Poles with rifles and sandbagged machine-gun nests made sure the Czechs didn’t come through the wire. The DPs lived under canvas despite rain and cold. They ate Polish army rations. That was what the Poles claimed, anyhow. If it was true, Vaclav pitied Polish soldiers.

Most of the Polish guards treated the Czech men-and especially the soldiers-like animals in the zoo. (Quite a few of them were friendly to the Czech women-what a surprise! And some of the women gave their all, too, for better food or more food or whatever else they happened to need.)

A few of the guards turned out to be human beings in spite of being Poles-that was how Jezek saw it, anyhow, though he wasn’t an unbiased observer. He could talk to them in bits of Czech and Polish and in (dammit!) German. “We don’t want you people here,” one of the decent guards said. “You embarrass us.”

“Why?” Vaclav said. “All we did was get out alive after the fucking Nazis went and jumped us.”

“But Poland and Germany are friends,” the Polish soldier said. “That’s why we don’t want you here.”

“Friends with Germany? God help you!” Jezek said. “Is the pig friends with the farmer? Till he’s a ham, he is.”

The Pole-his name was Leszek-pointed east. “Germany keeps the Russians away. Better Hitler than Stalin any day.”

“Better anybody than Hitler,” Vaclav said stubbornly. “Anybody. Better the Devil than Hitler.”

Leszek crossed himself. “Stalin is the Devil. He turns churches into stables and brothels. And half the Reds who run Russia are kikes. Hitler knows what to do about them, by God. We ought to give ours what-for, too. If we don’t, they’ll steal the country out from under us.”

Vaclav didn’t care about Jews one way or the other. He just said, “If you end up in bed with the Nazis, you’ll get it as bad as the Jews do.”

“You’re only mad because the Germans beat you,” Leszek said.

“Sure. And Poland never lost a war,” the Czech retorted. Even if Leszek wasn’t a bad guy, that reminder was more than he could stomach. He stomped off. Vaclav wondered if he’d come back with his buddies to do some real stomping. But Leszek didn’t, which only proved he had an even temper.

A few days later, a Czech-speaking Polish officer addressed the displaced persons. He used Czech words, all right, but he pronounced them like a Pole: with the accent always on the next-to-last syllable, not at the beginning of a word, where to Czech ears it belonged. “A Czechoslovak government-in-exile has been formed in Paris,” he said. “Its leaders say they will care for anyone who comes to them. I am looking for volunteers at the moment.”

Never volunteer. Any soldier knew that ancient basic rule. Vaclav’s hand shot up all the same. Anything had to be better than this. And what would the Poles do to Czech soldiers who didn’t volunteer? Ship them back over the border into German hands? Then it would be a POW cage for the rest of the war-if it wasn’t a bullet in the back of the neck.

Several other men also raised their hands, and a few women as well. The rest stood where they were without doing anything. The Polish officer’s lips thinned. He must have expected a bigger response. When he saw he wouldn’t get one, he said, “All right. Take whatever you have and meet me by the east gate in fifteen minutes.” He strode away, his polished boots gleaming.

Vaclav didn’t need fifteen minutes to gather his belongings. The Poles had relieved him of his rifle and ammunition and helmet and entrenching tool. He’d eaten the iron rations he’d carried. About all that was left in his pack were a blanket, a spare pair of socks, a housewife for quick repairs-he’d never make a tailor-some bandages, and his bayonet, which the Poles hadn’t wanted. It made a perfectly good eating knife.

A couple of Czechs who hadn’t raised a hand joined the men and women who had. They must have decided, as Vaclav had, that anything beat this.

The Polish officer led a squad of riflemen. “Come with me,” he told the Czechs. “Make sure you come with me. If you try to run off, I promise you will never do another foolish thing again.”

Off they went, at a brisk military march. Some of the Czechs weren’t young, and couldn’t keep up. Grudgingly, the Polish officer slowed down for them. He might have laid on a truck or two. He might have, but he hadn’t.

They marched for eight or ten kilometers. It didn’t faze Vaclav; he’d done far worse with far more on his back. Other interned soldiers also managed easily. But some of the civilians looked ready to fall over dead by the time they got to a shabby little railroad depot sitting there in the middle of nowhere.

Half an hour later, a train chugged up from out of the west. “Get aboard,” the officer said.

“But-it’s going east!” one of the women complained.

“Ano.” The Pole nodded. He said that in perfectly proper Czech; in his own language, yes was tak.

“Paris is that way!” The woman pointed in the direction from which the train had come.

“So is Germany,” the officer reminded her. The woman’s face fell. The Pole went on, “The train will take you to Romania. There are supposed to be arrangements to transport you from there to France. If there aren’t…” He shrugged. Vaclav had no trouble understanding that. If there weren’t, it was the Romanians’ worry, and the Czechs’. It wouldn’t be the Poles’, not any more.

He wasn’t the only one to figure that out. Three or four people balked and refused to get on the train. The woman who thought they would cross Germany to get to France was one of them. She wasn’t bad-looking, but Vaclav felt better about boarding after she didn’t want to. If someone stupid wanted to stay, leaving looked like a better plan.

The conductor spoke no Czech, only Polish and German. Those were enough. One car seemed reserved for the DPs. “No dining car for you,” the conductor told them. “We bring you food.” His scowl said they weren’t paying customers, so they didn’t deserve anything good. Jezek sighed. He didn’t suppose they’d let him starve.

And they didn’t. Cabbage and potatoes with little bits of sausage wasn’t his idea of a feast, but it wasn’t so bad as it might have been. It was better than he’d got in the displaced persons’ camp.

Krakow. Tarnow. Przemysl. Lwow. Kolomyja. And then the Romanian border. Polish and Czech were close cousins. Most Czechs and a lot of Poles knew enough German to get by. Romanian was something else again. The Romanian customs men who knew another language spoke French. That must have made them very cultured. It didn’t help Vaclav one damn bit.

An older man in his compartment translated for him-and for several other people. “I told them who we are and why we’re going through their country,” the Czech reported.

“What do they say?” Vaclav asked.

“They know about us. They know they’re supposed to let us in,” the older man replied. “I don’t think they’re very happy about it, though. They want to be rid of us.”

“Everybody does,” Vaclav said bitterly. The older man didn’t contradict him. He wished the fellow would have.

Romanian stewards replaced the Poles. Romanian cooks must have done the same thing, because the next meal the DPs got was a bowl of cornmeal mush. “Mamaliga,” said the man who dished out the food. “C’est bon.”

“He says it’s good,” said the Czech who spoke French.

He could say whatever he wanted. That didn’t make it true. The mamaliga did fill Vaclav’s stomach, though; when he finished the bowl, he felt as if he’d swallowed a medicine ball.

Vaclav could look out the window as the train rolled through Romania. Neither he nor any other Czech was allowed to step out onto the platform at stops, though. Romanian soldiers with rifles made sure they stayed inside their car. Lenin could have been sealed in no tighter when he crossed Germany to join the Russian Revolution. “We’re in quarantine,” said the older man who spoke French.

“How come? What did we do?” Vaclav said.

“We loved our country. We still do,” the other man answered. “The Poles and Romanians don’t want to make Hitler angry-the Romanians worry about Hungary, too, because most of the people in northwestern Romania are Magyars. So they’ll get rid of us, and they’ll try to pretend we’re not here while they’re doing it.”

He proved exactly right. Even when the train reached Constanta, the port on the Black Sea, Vaclav and his fellow DPs had precious little freedom. They were herded from their car to a waiting bus. No one was allowed close enough to speak to them; they might really have been diseased.

The corporal’s first glimpse of the sea left him underwhelmed. It was flat and oily-looking. It didn’t smell especially good, either. And the Greek freighter that would take them to France was a rust-streaked scow.

“Italy’s in the war,” Vaclav said as he clumped up the gangplank. “What if they bomb us?”

“Then we sink,” the older man answered with a veteran’s cynicism-he must have fought in the World War. He went on, “But I don’t think they will. Greece is neutral. The Italians want Albania. They won’t make her neighbor angry by going after Greek ships.”

“You hope,” Vaclav said, showing off his own cynicism.

“Don’t you?” the other man returned. Vaclav could only nod.

Sailors shouted unintelligibly. The freighter’s engine groaned to life. Coal smoke belched from her stacks. Longshoremen on the wharf cast off mooring lines. The ship shuddered as she backed clear.

A couple of Romanian officials stood there watching. To make sure none of the Czechs jumped overboard and tried to swim ashore? Maybe they thought the DPs would be so stupid. France was worth going to. Romania? Only a Romanian could want to live here.

Land receded. The ship rocked on the waves. The air smelled of salt and, faintly, of garbage. Vaclav didn’t care. He was out of his cage. He was going toward something. It might be only a bullet in the ribs when he got back into action. He knew that. Next to God only knew how long inside the displaced-persons camp, even a bullet in the ribs didn’t look so bad.

* * *

Ludwig Rothe attacked his Panzer II’s Maybach engine with a wrench. As far as he was concerned, the engine could have been stronger. Could have been, hell- should have been: 135 horsepower just wasn’t enough to shove nine tonnes of steel as fast as the panzer ought to go. Trying to do the job made the engine wear out faster than it would have otherwise.

Not far away, another panzer crew was working on a captured Czech LT-35. That was a tonne and a half heavier than a Panzer II, and had only a 120-horsepower motor. Its gun made it formidable, though. Rothe had seen that in Czechoslovakia. He wished the Germans could have taken the Skoda works undamaged instead of bombing them into rubble. But then he shrugged inside his black coveralls. What could you do?

Aschendorf was all the way on the other side of Germany from Czechoslovakia. The Dutch frontier lay only a few kilometers to the west. Camouflage netting hid both German and captured panzers from the air. They’d moved into position at night, with only blackout lights to keep them from running into one another or running off the road.

Nobody’d told Ludwig what the High Command had in mind. But nobody’d ever called Frau Rothe’s boy a Dummkopf, either. He didn’t figure the panzers were massing on the border with Holland to drive around looking at tulips.

He called over to the sergeant who commanded the LT-35: “Hey, Willi! Got a butt on you?”

“Oh, I might.” Willi Maass patted his pockets and came up with a pack. Ludwig ambled over. Willi gave him a cigarette and then a light. He lit one himself a moment later. He was a big brown bear of a man, dark and hairy, with some of a bear’s stubborn ferocity, too. After he blew out smoke, he asked, “So when does the balloon go up?”

“Whenever the Fuhrer wants,” Ludwig answered. The cigarette was crappy. He didn’t think it was all tobacco. Imports had gone down the toilet since the war started. During the last war, England had squeezed hard enough to make people starve. Things were nowhere near so bad now. Not yet, anyway.

The papers were full of stories about how good the war bread was, compared to what it was like the last time around. It was black and chewy, but it did still taste as if it was mostly made from grain. If it was a lot better than the last war’s version, that must have been really dreadful.

“Well, sure,” Willi said. “But when’ll that be?”

Ludwig looked around. It was camouflage netting and dummy buildings as far as the eye could see. “Can’t sit too long,” he said. “We’ll start feeling like moles in holes if they leave us here for weeks at a time. Besides, camouflage or no camouflage, pretty soon the French and the English will figure out something’s going on. Or do you think I’m wrong?”

“Not me,” the other sergeant said. “I think you hit the nail right on the head. I’d just as soon get going, too. I feel like moss’ll start growing on my panzer if we wait around much longer.”

“I’ll tell you something else makes me think we’re going to get rolling pretty damn quick,” Ludwig said. Willi Maass made a questioning noise. Rothe explained: “I saw Waffen-SS units coming in yesterday. Those guys are like stormcrows-they don’t show up till something’s about to pop.”

“Well, you’ve got that right,” Willi said.

They both smoked for a while and let it rest right there. You never could tell who was listening. Ludwig didn’t know what to think about the Waffen-SS. It looked like Himmler’s effort to horn in on the Wehrmacht. Not many men in the army liked that idea. Rothe knew damn well he didn’t. On the other hand, the guys with the SS runes on their right collar tabs had fought like mad bastards in Czechoslovakia. If there was trouble, they were nice to have around.

“It’ll be interesting,” Maass offered.

“Interesting. Yeah.” Ludwig stubbed out his cigarette under his boot. “I better get back to work.”

Willi Maass laughed. “Nice to know you’re eager about it.”

“Ah, fuck you-and your shitty cigarette,” Ludwig said. Laughing, he and Maass both headed back to their panzers.

Captain Gerhard Elsner came by a few minutes later. He eyed the exposed motor and Rothe’s grubby hands. “Can you be ready to move tomorrow at 0600?” the company commander asked.

“Sir, I can be ready to move in twenty minutes,” Ludwig answered proudly. “I’ve got ammo. I’ve got gas. My driver and radioman are here. Let me slap the louvers down, button her up, and we go.”

“That’s what I want to hear,” Elsner said. He’d been a noncom in the last war, and wore the Iron Cross Second Class. “Unless it rains or snows between now and then, we’re going to give them what for.”

“At 0600? We’ll be there,” Ludwig promised. “It’ll still be dark, or close.”

“No darker for us than for them,” Captain Elsner said. “We’ll be ready. We’ll know where we’re going and what we’re up to. They won’t.”

“Ja.” Ludwig hoped it would make a difference.

Everybody got a good supper: one more sign things would start any minute. The panzer commander stuffed himself. After this, it would be whatever he could get his hands on: iron rations and horsemeat and whatever he could steal from houses and shops. He shrugged. Holland was supposed to be rich. If he hadn’t starved in Czechoslovakia, he wouldn’t over there, either.

Nobody’d bothered to tell him why Germany needed to invade its smaller neighbor. He didn’t worry about it. Why should he? He was just a sergeant. When the officers pointed him in some direction and said Go, he went. An attack dog would have done the same thing. That was what he was: the Fuhrer ’ s attack dog.

He lay down to sleep by his panzer. So did Fritz Bittenfeld and Theo Hossbach. But Fritz wasn’t all that interested in sleeping. He kept going on about what Dutch women would be like, and Belgian women, and French women…

Theo didn’t say anything. He hardly ever did, except when he had to. Fritz wouldn’t shut up, though. Finally, Ludwig said, “You can’t screw them all.”

“I can try,” the driver said valiantly.

Ludwig laughed. Next thing he knew, Captain Elsner was shaking him awake. What seemed like a million engines throbbed overhead: the Luftwaffe, flying west to soften up whatever the Dutchmen had set up to try to slow the attack.

He was gnawing on black bread and sausage when his panzer rolled out-at 0600 on the dot. Artillery thundered all around him. The noise was terrific. He wouldn’t have wanted to be a green-uniformed Dutch soldier with all that coming down on his head. No, indeed. He was on the right side-the one giving the pounding, not the poor sons of bitches taking it.