The Big Switch

Chapter 10

As a Welshman, Alistair Walsh did not have a high opinion of eastern Scotland. The terrain was low and flat and full of Scots. Dundee couldn’t have been duller if it rehearsed. Walsh said so in several pubs. He couldn’t even get into a good fight. Too many of the other soldiers stranded in those parts agreed with him.

But, all things considered, he could have been worse off. The Germans might have sunk the ship that plucked him out of Namsos. He might not have got out, in which case he would be languishing inside barbed wire in a POW camp. Yes, there were all kinds of interesting and unpleasant possibilities.

And he was on leave, while the great military bureaucracy tried to figure out what to do with him and his fellow survivors. He tried to pick up barmaids. The Scots girls were pretty, but they seemed depressingly chaste. He hired a bicycle and rode out into the countryside. Going someplace where no one was trying to kill you or even give you orders had its points.

The only thing better than traveling in a place like this by himself would have been traveling in the company of a friendly young lady. Since he wasn’t having much luck on that score, he went alone. Soldiers he saw too often anyhow. Getting away from them was more fun than going out with them would have been.

He’d had almost two decades of peacetime service between the wars. A year and a half of the genuine article was enough-no, far more than enough-to make all that seem to belong to another, and very distant, lifetime. The hired bicycle creaked and squeaked under him. He didn’t care. All he heard except for the bike were the wind, an occasional crow’s caw, and the even more occasional rattle of a passing auto. Not many motorcars were on the roads, not with petrol so savagely rationed.

His ears drank in the quiet. You didn’t realize how badly war abused them till you got away from the racket of gunfire and explosions for a while. He suspected he’d be deaf as a stump when he got older. The prospect bothered him less than it might have. The way things were going, living long enough to grow old and deaf didn’t seem half bad.

A farmer out in the middle of an emerald field of new-sprouted barley waved to Walsh as he pedaled past. Cautiously-he hadn’t been on a bicycle in a while, and the road was bumpy-the sergeant lifted a hand from the handlebars and waved back.

He rode on. Another farmer came up the road perched on a wagon pulled by two mismatched horses. Did he have a motorcar he couldn’t drive because he couldn’t get fuel for it? Walsh wouldn’t have been surprised. You made do with what you had. He’d seen as much on the Continent. He wasn’t surprised to see it in Britain, too. This time, he waved first. The farmer gravely returned the courtesy.

When Walsh first heard the buzz of airplane engines, he thought his ears were ringing because they weren’t used to so much silence all around. Before long, though, he decided the sound was real. Then, for a few seconds, he believed it was coming from an RAF plane. But that wasn’t right, either. The engines sounded a different note, one that made the short hair at the nape of his neck prickle up.

“Bugger me blind if that’s not a German,” he muttered as he pulled to a stop on the grass at the edge of the road. He peered up at the sky, shielding his eyes against the sun. “What the bleeding hell is Fritz doing here?”

A bombing raid on Dundee from Norway? A daylight bombing raid? Was Fritz that stupid? Walsh didn’t think so. And the noise in the sky didn’t sound like squadron after squadron of bombers. One plane was up there, no more. Walsh’s ears had been abused, but he was sure of that.

Then he spotted it. He recognized it right away. German planes mostly had sharper angles than their RAF counterparts. This one was… “A 110!” Walsh had no doubt. He’d been strafed several times by the two-engined fighters roaring along at just above treetop height. This Bf-110 flew quite a bit higher, but its shape was unmistakable.

He scratched his head. He wasn’t lousy any more-that was something. But why on earth would a lone 110 fly over Scotland? Had some Nazi pilot poured down too much schnapps and taken off on a bet, or full of drunken bravado? That was madness, but so was everything else Walsh could think of.

Then the madness got even crazier. A parachute popped open. Whoever’d been flying that plane was coming to earth apart from it. Why, in the name of heaven? Walsh didn’t think anything was wrong with the airplane. Even after the fellow inside bailed out, the 110 flew on as if nothing had happened. The engine note never changed. It hadn’t changed before the flyer hit the silk, either.

Walsh got a crick in his neck. The descending ’chute was almost overhead. Walsh started to duck, imagining himself getting clopped by the German’s boots. But the breeze carried the fellow a few hundred yards into the field through which the road ran.

Walsh trotted toward him. He’d closed about half the gap before he wondered how smart he was. German pilots commonly carried pistols, while he was unarmed. But he was in his own country, for Christ’s sake. The German would have to be daft to plug him. Of course, the German had to be daft to come here like this in the first place, so what did that prove?

“Hands up!” Walsh yelled. “Hande hoch!” He spoke little German, but most British soldiers learned that one.

The flyer had a knife. He used it to cut himself free of the parachute shrouds. The canopy tumbled off across the field. The man slowly got to his feet. He favored one ankle a little. Walsh shouted at him again. With a smile, he let the knife drop to the ground and raised his hands. He was in his mid-forties-very old for a pilot-with bushy black eyebrows and a chin that stuck out. He looked oddly familiar.

“Do not fear me,” he said in good English. “I come in peace.”

“In a Messerschmitt-110? Sure you do, mate,” Walsh retorted.

“I am Rudolf Hess,” the man said.

And damned if he wasn’t. No wonder he looked familiar. In how many photographs had Walsh seen him at Hitler’s elbow? Half the time, his hand would be upraised in the stupid Nazi salute. To save his hide, Walsh couldn’t remember exactly what Hess’ title was. He was one of the biggest of the Party big shots, though. So what the bleeding hell was he doing in the middle of a Scottish field, still wearing a parachute harness? Walsh asked him, in lieu of standing there with his mouth hanging open like a stupid clot.

“I am come to confer with your government,” Hess answered, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Maybe he saw that Walsh wondered whether he was out of his skull, because he added, “Unofficially, of course.”

“Oh, of course,” Walsh said. “Confer about what?”

He guessed Hess would tell him it was none of his damned business. But Hess didn’t. “Why, about ways to end this unfortunate war between Germany and England and France, naturlich. ”

“Naturlich,” Walsh echoed in a hollow voice. “You could start by telling your soldiers to quit trying to kill me.”

“This I wish to do. We waste our time fighting one another,” Hess said seriously. “Better we should all fight the Russians together. So I feel. So feels the Fuhrer also.”

All of a sudden, Walsh stopped wondering if Hess was a nutter. The staff sergeant had no idea whether Neville Chamberlain’s government would make a deal like that, or whether France would go along if it did. But the government might. It might. The breeze felt chillier-or did the cold come from inside him? He had to force words out one by one: “I’d better take you back into Dundee.”

“ Danke schon. This would be good,” Hess said.

Back they went. It was several miles. They took turns walking and riding slowly on the bicycle. Hess spewed out a million reasons why England and France should turn on the Bolsheviks. At last, Walsh got sick of listening. He said, “Look, pal, I’m only a bloody sergeant. I can’t do anything about it one way or the other.” The German subsided into wounded silence.

When they got into Dundee, Walsh had a devil of a time convincing his superiors that Rudolf Hess was Rudolf Hess. They were even more certain than he had been that Hess wasn’t about to arrive in Scotland by jumping out of a Bf-110. Then they did believe him, and that might have been worse, because they started having kittens right before his eyes. They whisked Hess away in a swarm of military policemen.

“You will forget about this,” a captain barked at Walsh. “It never happened. You have no knowledge of it. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir.” Walsh judged that was the only possible answer that would keep him out of a military jail. The bloke who said a little knowledge was a dangerous thing knew what he was talking about. To show he understood what the captain meant, Walsh added, “I won’t tell a soul.”

“You’d better not.” The captain sent Walsh a hard look, as if wondering whether to jug him like a hare on general principles. Walsh tried to exude innocence: not easy for a man of his age and experience. After a long, long pause, the captain jerked a thumb toward the door. “Get out.” Walsh had never been so happy to obey an order in his life.

Julius Lemp was used to getting strange orders from his superiors, and even to attracting them. He was still paying for sinking the Athenia. Chances were he’d go on paying for the rest of his career, unless he did something wonderful enough to cancel out the screwup. Offhand, he couldn’t think what that might be. Finding Jesus walking barefoot across the swells of the North Sea might do it. Anything short of that, no.

When you were in the U-boat business, strange orders were liable to get you killed. (So were ordinary orders; it was that kind of trade. But with strange orders your odds were worse.) If that bothered his superiors in the Kriegsmarine, they went out of their way not to show it.

And so the U-30 cruised slowly through the chop off the east coast of Scotland. Not very far off the Scottish coast, either: land was clearly visible to the west. One of the ratings on the conning tower with Lemp said, “If they’ve got a 105 on the beach, they can hit us with it. We can hit ’em back with the 88 on deck, too.”

“I know,” Lemp replied. “But even if they do have a 105 there, chances are they won’t shoot with it. They’re bound to think we’re one of their own U-boats, not a German machine. No German boat would be mad enough to show itself so close to their coast.”

“Sure, skipper,” the rating said, as if humoring a lunatic. “So what the hell are we doing here?”

“We are carrying out our orders,” Lemp said, which was literally true. “We are searching for any signs of wreckage or survivors from a Messerschmitt-110 that may or may not have gone into the North Sea in these waters.”

“Sure,” the rating said again. “But why?”

“Martin, you never ask that question,” Lemp answered patiently. “Because they told us to, that’s why.”

Martin only sniffed. The hell of it was, Lemp had a hard time blaming him. He wondered why they were looking for bits and pieces of a Bf-110, too. However much he wondered, he didn’t know. The hard-faced captain back in Kiel hadn’t looked the sort who was much inclined to answer questions. In fact, he’d looked the sort who would bite your head off if you had the nerve to ask any. Sometimes the best thing you could do was salute, go “Zu befehl!”, and get the hell out of there. Lemp had judged that to be one of those times.

Had he been wrong? If the Royal Navy or the RAF decided the U-30 wasn’t an English U-boat, the enemy owned all the advantages here. Cruising along in broad daylight was all very well. Audace, audace, toujours l’audace, the French said. Well, yes, but when the fellows on the other team trumped all that audacity with depth charges…

He scanned the gray-green sea. This close to the coast, all sorts of rubbish floated in it. He hadn’t seen anything from a German fighter plane, though. He wondered if some important officer’s son had been flying the 110. That might account for a search like this. He couldn’t think of much else that would.

One of the things floating in the North Sea was a basket of the kind and size that might have held a baby. Martin said, “Sir, with all this shit around, how are we supposed to recognize stuff from a 110 even if we do come across it?”

“We’ve got to do the best we can,” Lemp answered, by which he meant he didn’t have the faintest idea.

Martin, unfortunately, understood him much too well. “Right,” the rating said, and scratched the side of his jaw. Gingery stubble sprouted there. Lemp didn’t shave when he was at sea, either. Like a lot of U-boat men, from the lowliest “lords”-ordinary seamen-to skippers, he trimmed his whiskers when he got back into port.

“What do they do when we send them the message that we can’t find what they’re looking for?” another rating asked.

“We don’t send it.” Now Lemp’s voice grew sharp. “We’re ordered to maintain radio silence throughout this cruise. I will make the report orally when we return to Kiel. Have you got that?”

“Yes, skipper. Sorry,” the rating said. Lemp didn’t usually come down hard on his men, but he had to be sure no one fouled up here. Somebody’s head would roll if the U-30 broke radio silence. He knew whose, too: his.

Like the rest of the men on the U-boat, he wished he knew what was going on. He didn’t like getting sent out on wild-goose chases. He especially didn’t like it when he had to wear a blindfold while hunting his wild geese.

All of which had nothing to do with anything. They’d given him his orders. He was following them. If he found no wreckage-or even if he did-he was to return to Kiel after four days of searching. It made no sense, not to him or to the men he commanded. Maybe that was because the officers set over them knew more about what was going on than they did. Or maybe the geese had got uncommonly wild lately.

The U-boat performed the ordered search. It found nothing from a Bf-110. For that matter, it found nothing from any airplane. Lemp wasn’t sorry to order the boat away from the Scottish coast. He counted himself lucky not to have been spotted. The Royal Navy must not have believed the Kriegsmarine would give any of its boats such an idiotic assignment. Well, he wouldn’t have believed it himself if he hadn’t got stuck with it.

No English planes happened on the U-30 as it hurried back across the North Sea. The farther Lemp put the British Isles behind him, the happier he grew. He was downright delighted when the boat got back to Kiel. But his pleasure chilled when armed guards on the pier kept anyone but him from going ashore. “We have our orders,” said the chief petty officer in charge of the detachment. That was a sentence unchallengeable in any branch of any military service the world around.

More sailors with Mausers escorted Lemp to the office where he was to make his report. He wasn’t astonished to find Rear Admiral Donitz there waiting to hear him. Whatever was going on, it was going on at levels far over his head.

He came to attention and saluted. “Reporting as ordered, sir. My news is very simple: we saw nothing and found nothing.”

“Very well,” Donitz said. “That makes it more likely the 110 reached England, then. Scotland, I should say.”

“Sir, did you want it to do that?” Lemp asked.

The admiral looked through him. “Don’t worry about it, Lieutenant.” In his mouth, Lemp’s rank might as well not have existed. A word from him, and Lemp’s rank wouldn’t exist.

“Yes, sir,” Lemp said. “But you can’t wonder if I’m a little curious. Everyone on my boat is a little curious, or more than a little.”

“It has to do with high policy. You can tell them that much,” Donitz answered. “And you can tell them not to push it, not if they know what’s good for them.” His eyes were gray-blue, and at the moment frigid as the North Sea in February. “The same goes for you.”

Lemp could take a hint. “I understand, sir,” he said quickly.

“I doubt that. The scheme surprised me when I heard about it,” Donitz said. “If it works, everything changes. And if it doesn’t, we’ve lost very little.”

What was that supposed to mean? One more quick look at Donitz’s face discouraged Lemp from asking. He saluted again. Then he asked, “May my men go ashore for liberty now?”

“After you let them know they’d better keep their mouths shut,” the admiral said. “Anyone who makes a mistake will regret it. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir,” Lemp said. Clear as mud, he thought. Maybe events would answer his questions for him one of these days. Or he might spend the rest of his life wondering. You never could tell.

Chaim Weinberg believe his eyes. Was he really seeing this? Damned if he wasn’t. Half a dozen French tanks clanked up to the stretch of line the Abe Lincoln Battalion was holding outside of Madrid. These weren’t slow, ancient Renaults-leftovers from the last war. They were brand-new Somua S-35s, the best medium tanks the French made. The Spanish Republic had got a few-only a few-in 1938. Chaim didn’t know France had turned any loose since.

But here they were, painted a pale grayish green that put him in mind of olive leaves. It was a good color for operating in Spain. It would be even better once they got dusty and dirty. The Italians and Spaniards painted theirs khaki. The German tanks of the Legion Kondor were mostly dark gray, which made them stand out more. That mattered only so much. If you couldn’t stop them, so what if you saw them coming?

He wasn’t the only guy who got a charge out of seeing these-nowhere near. And he wasn’t the only guy who could see what they meant. The Abe Lincoln Battalion, like the International Brigades generally, was full of people who found politics a game more exciting than baseball, bridge, or chess.

“We’re going to knock Sanjurjo’s cocksuckers into the middle of next week,” somebody said gleefully. “The froggies must’ve decided Hitler ain’t gonna do ’em in, so they can turn loose of some of their toys.”

“About fuckin’ time, ain’t it?” Chaim said. “Been a year now since the big German push fell short. They woulda given us these babies back then, we coulda started cleaning out the Nationalists that much sooner.”

“Piss and moan, piss and moan,” the other Abe Lincoln said. “We’ve got ’em now. That’ll do it.”

Maybe it would. Each tank had the Republic’s flag-horizontal stripes of red, yellow, and purple-painted on the side of the turret. The crewmen were Spaniards. They all seemed as enthusiastic as the men from the International Brigades. They knew what the tanks meant. In a word, victory.

So it seemed to Chaim, anyhow. The next interesting question was, could victory and manana coexist? The Abe Lincolns were wild to hit the Nationalists in front of them as soon as the tanks arrived. The attack was ordered-but nobody bothered to tell the artillery, which stayed quiet. Even with tanks, you couldn’t go forward without artillery support. Well, you could, but they didn’t. Things got pushed back a day.

Then one of the tanks broke down, and the driver to another caught influenza, which spread to the rest of his crew the next day, to two other crews the day after that, and to the Abraham Lincolns the day after that. “Germ warfare,” an International said dolefully, in between sneezes. “The fucking Nationalists are trying to make us too sick to fight.”

If they were, they made a good job of it. Chaim lay flat on his back, weak as a kitten with aches and fever, for five days, and felt as if one of the fancy French tanks had run over him for a week after that. The tanks, meanwhile, sat out in the open. No one seemed to wonder whether the Nationalists were watching.

At last, everything was ready again. The attack was scheduled for 0600. The artillery barrage was scheduled for 0500. It actually started at 0530. By Spanish standards, that was a masterpiece of punctuality.

At 0618 on the dot, the tanks rumbled forward. The Abe Lincolns trotted along with them. Nothing like putting all those tonnes of hardened steel between yourself and the other fellow’s machine guns.

Chaim loped with his buddies. He wasn’t a hundred percent yet, despite enough aspirins to make his ears ring. He wished he were still in bed-with luck, with La Martellita, but even alone would do. But he’d improved to the point where he could carry a rifle without falling over. He went forward. Plenty of other Americans-and the foreigners and Spaniards who filled out the battalion-were in no better shape.

One of the fancy French machines stopped so the commander, who doubled as the gunner, could blast a machine-gun nest to ruin. Which he did. But, while he was doing it, a Nationalist soldier popped up out of a foxhole next to the tank and chucked a wine bottle filled with blazing gasoline through the open hatch. Flames, greasy black smoke, and screams rose from inside the tank. The Republicans shot the brave Nationalist, but the damage was done.

“Fuck,” Chaim said, eyeing the pyre the tank had become. The Republicans had invented the infantryman’s antitank weapon. The Nationalists had christened it the Molotov cocktail. Now both sides used it. So did foot soldiers everywhere who had to fight tanks without antitank guns.

Another Nationalist threw a Molotov cocktail at the back of a Somua S-35. Flaming gasoline dripped down through the louvers over the engine. Before long, the engine started burning, too. The crew got out, but that tank wouldn’t go anywhere ever again.

“Assholes,” an American near Chaim said. “Don’t they know how expensive those goddamn things are?”

“I wonder how the Republic is paying for them,” Chaim said.

“IOUs,” the other Abe Lincoln said. They both laughed. The Spanish Republic might not have thought it was so funny. Spain’s gold reserves had gone to the USSR for safekeeping, and to pay for Soviet aid in the dark days when no one else thought the Republic was worth helping. Would that gold ever return from Moscow? Chaim might be a loyal-if talkative, even argumentative-Marxist-Leninist, but he wasn’t holding his breath.

Whang! That was a big shell hitting, and devastating, a tank. The machine brewed up at once. You could kill tanks with artillery, but most antitank guns were of smaller caliber than the monster that fired that round. The Germans made an 88mm antiaircraft gun. Being Germans, and thorough, they also made an armor-piercing shell for it. Chaim would have bet that was what had put paid to the French tank.

And another round from the same gun, whatever the hell it was, blew the turret clean off another S-35. “It’s like the bastard tipped its hat when it got hit by that one,” Chaim said. It wasn’t a bad joke… as long as you didn’t happen to be inside the turret when the big shell hit. If you did, you were too dead to appreciate the wit. You were, in fact, scorched raspberry jam.

The last two surviving tanks decided they wanted to go on surviving. They wheeled around almost in their own length and hightailed it for the rear. One tank used the thick black smoke rising from another that had been killed as a smoke screen for its own getaway.

Chaim had trouble blaming the crews, though he knew people in positions of authority might have no trouble at all. Going forward into certain death was a losing proposition. And what about going forward into likely death? his mind gibed. Advancing without armor support sure made death more likely. His own death, for instance.

Not surprisingly, the Republican attack bogged down. Chaim wasn’t the only Abe Lincoln who could see that Sanjurjo’s soldiers would slaughter them if they banged their heads against a stone wall without tanks to smash it down. They’d gained a few hundred meters before things went south. Okay, fine. Chaim pulled a fancy entrenching tool off his belt (some Italian who’d taken Mussolini’s orders would never need it again) and started improving the hole in the ground in which he huddled.

Dirt flew from more holes and bits of shattered trench as other members of the battalion imitated him. Or, more likely, he was imitating others. He doubted he was the first one who’d decided the Abraham Lincolns had gone about as far as they could go. You didn’t need to belong to the German General Staff to figure it out. No more tanks equaled no more advance. If that wasn’t one of Euclid’s axioms, it should have been.

Now… would the Nationalists counterattack? Not right away, anyhow. They might have feared the tanks would come back or more would show up. Chaim knew better, but he wasn’t about to tell them. He kept on digging. He’d spent a lot of time in foxholes. If you worked at it, you could make them nearly bearable. Work he did.

Corporal Baatz glowered at Willi Dernen. “Let me see that paper one more time,” he said suspiciously.

“Sure.” Willi handed it over. Did Awful Arno think he could have forged a certificate of leave? He might have, if he’d thought he could get away with it. But he hadn’t. This one was legitimate. Could Baatz make the same proud claim?

Still unhappy, the underofficer handed it back. “If you’re even one minute late returning to duty, your ass is mine,” he declared.

“Sure, Corporal,” Willi repeated. He would have said anything to get Awful Arno out of his hair. “Can I go now?”

“Yeah, go on. Get out.” Baatz wasn’t about to do anything so bourgeois-so human-as to wish him a good time. That wasn’t his style. Why one of his own men hadn’t shot him… Why haven’t I shot him? Willi wondered. Easy to do in combat. I probably wouldn’t’ve got caught.

All he wanted to do now was get away from Baatz, get away from the war. He gave his Mauser and grenades to the Feldwebel in charge of the company’s weaponry. The senior noncom told him to have fun on leave. They weren’t all shitheads. Some of them sure were, though.

Out of the line. Away from Awful Arno. Then the chain dogs were on him. So Landsers called military policemen because of the metal gorgets they hung around their necks. Once more, his papers passed muster. The Kettenhunde never cracked a smile, but they waved him on.

Antiaircraft guns stuck their snouts into the sky around the train station. The stationmaster was also a Feldwebel -and, at a guess, a veteran of the last war who’d been called up to help run the military trains. Willi showed him the leave papers. “All right, son,” the gray noncom said. “Where do you want to go?”

“Breslau. That’s where I’m from,” Willi answered. Homesickness, long swallowed, welled up inside. “All the way over on the other side of the Reich. ”

“Thought so, by the way you talk.” By his own musical, half-Scandinavian drawl, the Feld came from Schleswig-Holstein, up near the Danish border. He puffed on a pipe and nodded to himself. “Well, we can do that.”

And he did. Along with the leave permit, which he returned, he gave Willi a round-trip ticket to Breslau. “Do I have to pay anything?” Willi asked.

The Feldwebel looked affronted. “Don’t be silly. You’re in the service of the Reich. If we can’t take care of our own, what are we good for?”

Luxurious that care wasn’t. Willi’s seat was hard, and the car packed with soldiers getting away from action for a while. The stink of so many bodies that hadn’t washed lately would have bothered Willi… had he noticed it. He fell asleep almost as soon as the train started rolling. The hard seat and crowding bothered him no more than the thick fug. He’d slept in plenty of worse places. Nor was his the only snore rising to the low ceiling-far from it.

When he woke, he was back inside Germany. The train was rolling through countryside that hadn’t been bombed or shelled. It looked abnormal to Willi. He’d been at or near the front too goddamn long. He wanted to say something to somebody about it, but he had no friends sitting close by. Half a dozen soldiers in the car were still sawing wood, too. He kept his mouth shut. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have practice. When Awful Arno ordered you around, biting your tongue became a matter of self-preservation.

A few of the towns through which the train rolled showed bomb damage. The locals probably thought they’d survived disaster. They didn’t know how lucky they were. If they stayed lucky, they wouldn’t find out.

More chain dogs came through the cars at a stop, checking people’s papers. Willi showed his without hesitation. Why not? They were good. Farther back in his car, the military policemen caught somebody whose papers weren’t good, or who didn’t have any. They dragged the poor bastard away. “I can explain,” he kept saying. If he couldn’t, he’d landed in more trouble than he knew what to do with.

Willi had zwieback and a tube of butter in his pockets. Hoping the dining car would give him something better, he made his way to it. The stew was cabbage, potatoes, and tripe rubbery enough to use as a tire retread. The coffee was German ersatz, not spoils taken from French houses. It tasted bad and had next to no kick. All things considered, butter smeared on crackers might have been better.

Because the train traveled slowly and made many stops, he took almost a day to cross the country and get to Breslau. People got on and off. Some of them were civilians. Some of the civilians were women. Hearing women talking in a language he could understand was a treat he’d forgotten.

Breslau was a city of bridges, set right in the middle of the Silesian plain. It was also a city of many smokes. There was coal nearby, and iron, so factories worked round the clock. And it was a city of many Jews. Willi had known that before, but he hadn’t thought about it one way or the other. Riding the streetcar out to his folks’ block of flats, he got his nose rubbed in it. The yellow stars on the clothes of people on the street leaped out at him. No yellow stars on the streetcar passengers, though. Public transport was for Aryans only.

No one sat near him. People stood up instead, as far away as they could. He realized he really could use a bath. He was a little embarrassed, but only a little. If they couldn’t figure out he was just back from the front, too bad.

Even if he was ripe, his mother squealed and almost squeezed the breath out of him when he knocked on the door. “Why didn’t you wire that you were coming?” she demanded.

“I thought I’d surprise you,” he said.

“Think? You didn’t think.” But Klara Dernen didn’t sound angry. “Now where am I going to get my hands on a nice, fat hen?” She winked. “There are ways that don’t cost ration points. Magda owes me. If she’s got one, or knows where to get one…”

“Sure, Mutti,” Willi said. You could always find a way around rules you didn’t like, whatever they happened to be. He’d seen that.

A hot bath! When was the last time he’d had one? He couldn’t remember. It had been a while, though. He put on civilian clothes when he got out of the tub. The pants were too big through the waist, but all his shirts felt tight at the shoulders. He was in better shape than he had been before the Wehrmacht got him.

His younger sister, Eva, and his kid brother, Markus, both squealed when they got home from school. They told him about Russian air raids and running for the cellar. “That’s just like fighting, huh?” Markus said.

“Pretty much.” Willi left if there. Markus was only thirteen. The war would be over-the war had better be over-by the time he got old enough to fight.

Sure enough, Mother got her fat hen. She’d make a better chicken stew than the thumb-fingered soldiers who cooked in the field. It filled the flat with a savory smell. Father came home not long before the stew was ready. Herbert Dernen worked in a factory that had made clocks before the war and was turning out gauges and dials for panzers and planes these days.

He’d fought in France in the last war. After a long, measuring look at Willi, he slowly nodded at whatever he saw. “Well, son, now you know” was all he said, and it seemed more than enough.

“Now I know,” Willi agreed. No, they needed not another word on that score.

Father understood. So did other men of his generation, and other soldiers on leave. Willi couldn’t find anyone else in Breslau who did. He felt like a stranger, or maybe even a Martian, in his home town. That didn’t stop him from seeing-and kissing, and doing his best to feel up-the girls he’d been friendly with before conscription called. But they were either like his brother and thought they knew all about war because some bombs had fallen here, or they wanted him to explain what the fighting in France was like.

And he couldn’t. If you hadn’t done it, you’d never get it. In that, it was more like screwing than anything else. He said so once. He thought it would get his face slapped. Instead, it got him laid. Even afterwards, though, he couldn’t tell sweet Susanna what shooting and being shot at and getting shelled and bombed were like. They weren’t like anything.

He couldn’t tell her about the camaraderie, either, not in any way that would make sense to her. But, when his leave was up, a big part of him was glad, or at least relieved, to head west once more. He was a real, for-sure Frontschwein, all right. God help me, he thought, but it was true.