Two Fronts

Chapter 4

Sarah Bruck was out shopping when the air-raid sirens in Munster began to wail. It was late afternoon, with clouds overhead and the light already leaking out of the sky. Jews couldn’t go out any earlier. They had to wait till all the Aryans had picked over what little there was to buy.

All the same, she cocked her head to one side in surprise. Enemy bombers hadn’t come over Munster by day before, even if this wasn’t much in the way of daylight. She thought it was a drill till she heard the deep throb of airplane engines overhead. People around her started running.

She would have run, too, had she had anywhere to go. Behind her, someone yelled, “Head for the shelter, you Dummkopf!” in a loud, authoritative voice.

Her hair was a light brown, almost but not quite blond. She didn’t look particularly Jewish. When she whirled, she saw a policeman pointing with his nightstick.

He opened his mouth to shout again. Then he saw the yellow six-pointed star on her shabby coat. “Oh,” he said, and dashed for the nearest shelter himself.

“Scheisse,” Sarah muttered. Jews weren’t allowed in air-raid shelters. Those were reserved for citizens of the Reich, and Jews were at best grudgingly permitted residents. Here, she was like the dead atheist: all dressed up with nowhere to go.

She wasn’t an atheist, though she wondered why not more and more with each miserable passing day. She wished she weren’t so far from her husband’s family’s bakery. But the grocery store across the street from them had taken a bomb, so she had to go far afield for cabbage and beets to eat along with the bread the Brucks turned out.

Atheist or not, though, she was liable to end up dead. Bombs whistled down. She ran into the closest shop. It sold sewing accessories. Right this minute, it was empty but for her. The Aryans who ran it were down in a cellar somewhere. She couldn’t join them. She lay down behind the counter, hoping it would give her a little shelter from bomb fragments. She didn’t need to worry about flying glass. The plate glass in the window out front was gone, replaced by wood and cardboard. A thief could break in any time-not that there was much to steal inside.

Bombs started bursting. Munster lay close to the border with France. Sarah supposed French planes would have an easy time getting here now that their homeland was at war with Germany once more.

It was a strange business. Sarah had better reason to hate the Reich than she did with England or France. She wished something horrible would happen to Hitler, and she hardly cared what. But Hitler was safe-she presumed he was safe-in Berlin, and his enemies were liable to kill her here. It hardly seemed fair.

Crump! Crump! The ground shook. Antiaircraft guns hammered, though they had to be firing by ear, not by eye. The ground shook again, seriously this time, at an explosion bigger than any mere bomb. Maybe a Messerschmitt up there had shot down a bomber, and its whole load went up when it smashed to earth.

She couldn’t root for some German fighter pilot. But she also couldn’t cheer for flyers raining death and destruction on her city. Instead of rooting or cheering for anyone, she huddled there and hoped she’d stay alive.

Back at the bakery, Isidor and his father and mother would be doing the same thing. So would her mother, at the house where she and her brother had grown up. Her father-once a professor of classics and ancient history at the university, now a surprisingly proud member of a labor gang-would have scrambled for whatever shelter he could find, the same way she had. If he weren’t a wounded veteran from the last war, he wouldn’t have been even so fortunate as he was.

When this war started, Samuel Goldman had tried to rejoin the Wehrmacht even if he did limp, even if he was a Jew. So had young, athletic Saul, a footballer of professional quality-again, even if he was a Jew. The recruiters wouldn’t take either of them; the law forbade it.

Saul wound up in the Wehrmacht anyhow. He’d somehow managed to get false papers while on the run after smashing in his sadistic laborgang boss’ head with a shovel. Sarah thought that was a fine joke on the Nazis. And even if Saul was fighting the Russians in the East, he had to be safer than he would be in the Reich.

The air raid didn’t last long-no more than fifteen minutes. Sarah wouldn’t have wanted to linger above a well-defended city during the day, either. The French or English bombers buzzed away to the west. Sarah climbed to her feet and dusted herself off.

She scurried out of the shop ahead of the all clear. To her relief, she got away before the owner emerged from a bomb shelter. Someone seeing a Jew coming out was all too likely to assume she’d gone in to steal while the place was deserted. People did that during air raids. A Jew, of course, would never get the benefit of the doubt.

No point going after groceries now. Along with the burbling wail of the all-clear signal, fire-engine bells clanged. Smoke rose in half a dozen places. Hearing the fire engines’ motors-hearing any motors-seemed odd. Fire engines, an ambulance, doctors’ cars: those were the only civilian vehicles still on the streets.

Sarah dithered for a moment. She was closer to the house where she’d grown up than she was to the bakery. Should she go make sure her mother was all right? She didn’t see any smoke coming up from that direction. That made her decide to go back to her husband and his folks. She’d check on her own parents later.

An electric tram rattled past. Sarah kept walking, though it was going her way. In its wisdom and mercy, the Reich had declared public transport verboten to Jews.

The tram stopped short. A bomb had burst in the middle of the street. The Aryan passengers would have to hoof it just like her. The crater was five meters wide and at least two deep. Water from a burst main rapidly turned it into a pond. The blast had blown out the fronts of several shops. A gray-haired man in a leather apron stood on the battered sidewalk in front of his ruined place of business. What would he do now? By the way his head shook like a metronome, he hadn’t the least idea.

On Sarah went. A fire crew sprayed water on a burning building. Perhaps thanks to the smashed main, they didn’t have much water to spray. All they could do was try to keep the flames from spreading. They swore fierce, guttural oaths. Sarah admired the splendid profanity.

She’d thought of the ambulance a few minutes earlier. Its bell clanged on a note different from the fire engines’. A big splash of red against a wall said somebody hadn’t made it to any kind of shelter before the bombs fell. Whoever he was, he was unlikely to need an ambulance now-or ever again. Except for the blood, there was no sign of whoever’d got in the way of that bomb.

No smoke rose from the bakery. All the same, Sarah stopped short when she rounded the last corner. There was another new pond in the street right in front of the place, with water slopping out and pouring down the uncratered pavement. And the building … The building had fallen in on itself.

“No,” Sarah whispered, as if God could or would run the film of the world in reverse till this unhappened.

People were already attacking the wreckage with spades and with their bare hands. Not all of them were Jews, either. Germans could be decent. You just couldn’t count on them to act like that. Sarah ran forward to do what she could.

A man with a white mustache gaped at her. “You’re not in there,” he said foolishly.

“I was shopping.” Absurdly, Sarah felt guilty because she wasn’t buried by bricks and beams.

“Lucky you.” The man with the mustache lived half a block down. Right this minute, she couldn’t remember his name to save her life. She had bigger things to worry about. She dug through the wreckage like a badger.

“Here’s one of them,” another old man said. After a moment, with rough kindness, he added, “Well, he never would’ve known what hit him, anyway, poor bastard.”

That had to be David Bruck. Except, as the rescuers pulled the body free of the rubble, it wasn’t. It was Isidor. Someone draped a cloth over him, but not before Sarah saw how the left side of his head was all smashed in. The man who’d found him was right. That would have killed him right away.

Sarah made a half-choked noise, then started to cry. Within a couple of minutes, the would-be rescuers also found David and Deborah Bruck. They were dead, too. “It’s a shame, girlie,” the man with the white mustache said, offering Sarah a none-too-clean handkerchief so she could blow her nose. “They might’ve been Yids, but they were nice folks.” A Jew in Germany was unlikely to win a better epitaph.

“What’ll she do now?” a woman asked, and then aimed the question right at her: “What’ll you do now, dearie?”

“I don’t know.” Sarah was just getting used to being a wife. Now, all of a sudden, she found herself a widow. “I don’t have any idea. What can I do?” It was Hitler’s war, and he wouldn’t let Jews fight in it. It reached out and killed them just the same.

Sergeant Hideki Fujita swaggered through the streets of Myitkyina. He was in town on a pass, and drunk as a lord. There were things a member of Unit 113 wasn’t allowed to talk about, no matter how drunk he got. That didn’t worry Fujita. It hadn’t worried him before he poured down a big skinful of the local rotgut, either. Germ warfare wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to sit down and gab about, not if you were in your right mind it wasn’t.

Sooner or later, he’d queue up at an enlisted men’s brothel and get the lead out of his pencil. That was an important reason to come into town, after all. But he wasn’t ready yet. He had more drinking to do first.

He wasn’t the only Japanese soldier wandering the Burmese town: nowhere close. He kept an eye out for his countrymen. No matter how drunk he got, there was no excuse for not saluting an officer. No excuse. Ever. If you didn’t show proper respect, you’d catch hell. In the Japanese Army, that was as much a law of nature as sunrise every morning.

He kept an eye on the Burmese, too. They looked like a pack of damned foreigners. They were a pack of damned foreigners. They were too skinny. They were browner than Japanese-not a lot, but enough to notice. Their features were softer than those of his countrymen. Their language sounded like barking dogs to him. It was even uglier than Chinese.

And he had other reasons for keeping an eye on them. Japan was running Burma at the moment because she’d chased out England, which had been running the place till the Japanese arrived. Some Burmese kissed their new overlords’ feet, glad the white men were on the run. Others, though … Well, some slaves would always stay loyal to their old masters.

For the English still lingered in India, not far enough to the west. And they did their best to aid the Chinese bandits who went on struggling against the Japanese drive to shake some order into their miserable country.

That was why Unit 113 was in business. Cholera and the plague had broken out in Yunnan Province. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands, had died on account of the diseases. Let the English try to bring materiel into China from India. What good would it do them if the Chinese who were supposed to unload the guns and munitions were dead or sick or fled to escape pestilence? Not much.

A faded mug of beer on a sign outside a tavern made Fujita walk in. The place had started life as an imitation-no doubt a wretched imitation-of an English pub. It was dark and gloomy inside. The furniture was heavier than anything a Japanese would have made. There was a dartboard on the wall. Behind the bar hung a portrait of the Emperor of Japan in military uniform. Fujita would have bet everything he owned (not much at the moment, but even so) a picture of the King of England had hung there till Myitkyina suddenly changed ownership.

The bartender was Burmese. He’d learned enough of Japanese customs to bow to Fujita as the sergeant approached. Fujita nodded back, superior to inferior. “Biru,” he said gruffly.

“Hai.” The man behind the bar bowed again. He set a bottle of beer and a pint mug-another survival of the vanished English-in front of Fujita. Then he pointed to a price list the noncom hadn’t noticed. It was written in Japanese, and was bound to be as new as the photo of Hirohito.

Fujita pulled occupation money out of his pocket. He paid hardly any attention to how much he slapped down. Anna and rupees were fine for the Burmese. They meant nothing to him. Japan still did business in sen and yen.

As the bartender made the paper disappear, Fujita poured the pint full. He drank. It wasn’t great beer, or even good beer. He hadn’t expected anything different. Where would you get good beer in a third-rate colonial town in the middle of a war? This would keep him drunk and eventually make him drunker. He wasn’t worried about much else.

He got to the bottom of the pint in three long pulls. “Fill me up again,” he told the bartender.

“Nan desu-ka?” the Burmese said, sudden apprehension in his voice. “Wakarimasen, gomen nasai.” What? I don’t understand, excuse me.

“Another. Give me another beer.” Fujita spoke slowly and clearly. You had to make some allowance for stupid foreigners.

“Ah! Hai!” The barkeep bowed in relief. He got that, all right. Another beer appeared as if by magic. Fujita paid for it. He suspected he could have got away with just taking it after he’d scared the native. But it wasn’t worth fussing about. If he’d been paying with real money instead of this meaningless stuff, it might have been. In occupation cash, though, even a miserably paid Japanese sergeant could play the rich man.

He sat down at an empty table. A couple of other sergeants were boozing at the one next to it. They owlishly eyed his collar tabs to see whether he was safe to associate with. They must have decided he was, because one of them nodded and said, “Come join us if you want to.”

“Arigato.” Fujita got up and walked over. He gave his name. One of the other noncoms was called Suzuki; the second was named Ono. Fujita lifted his mug of beer. “Kampai!”

“Kampai!” They both echoed the toast and drank. Sergeant Suzuki was squat and looked strong. Sergeant Ono was thinner and quieter; Fujita guessed he was clever, at least when he wasn’t drinking. Right now, Ono and Suzuki had quite a start on him. He decided he needed to catch up.

After a while, Ono remarked, “Haven’t seen you around here before, I don’t think.”

“Probably not,” Fujita said. “My unit isn’t based in Myitkyina. I just managed to snag some leave.”

“Ah?” Sergeant Suzuki said. “Which unit is that? Where are you stationed?”

Fujita sat there and didn’t answer. Unit 113 not only didn’t advertise what it did, it didn’t advertise its existence. He was already starting to feel his beer, but he knew better than to run his big mouth.

Suzuki scowled. “I asked you a question,” he said, and started to get to his feet. And I’ll knock the crap out of you if you don’t tell me, that meant.

He was welcome to try. Fujita started to stand, too. He wasn’t scrawny himself, and he figured he knew how to take care of himself. The pub might get knocked around, but that wasn’t his worry.

But Sergeant Ono put a hand on his drinking buddy’s arm. “Take it easy, Suzuki-san,” he advised. “There are some units out there where the guys can’t talk about what they do.”

Suzuki grunted. Some people brawled for the fun of it. Fujita mostly didn’t, but he wouldn’t back down, either. Dying was better than losing face that way. Then the burly sergeant grunted again, on a different note this time. “Well, why didn’t he say so?” he growled. He looked right at Fujita. “Why didn’t you say so?”

“Because when you can’t talk about something, you can’t say you can’t talk about it, because that makes people get snoopy about why you can’t,” Fujita answered reasonably.

He thought he was being reasonable, anyhow. Sergeant Suzuki scowled again. Fujita wouldn’t have wanted to serve under him. Sure as sure, he’d be the kind who knocked privates around. “You calling me snoopy?” he rumbled ominously.

“You were snoopy.” Fujita wasn’t about to back down.

And Sergeant Ono nodded. “Hai. You were. Come on. We’re here to relax, not to fight among ourselves.”

“I’ll take you both on.” But Suzuki sat down again and waved to the man behind the bar for another drink. Fujita also waved for a fresh beer. Like Ono, he wasn’t eager to fight, even if he was ready. Getting smashed hurt less-till the next day, anyhow.

Munster’s jewish cemetery was a sad place, and not just because the dead were lain to rest there. Brownshirt thugs had tipped over a lot of headstones and taken sledgehammers to others. Long, dead grass crunched under the soles of Sarah Bruck’s shoes. The trees’ bare branches reminded her of bones.

They’d been alive. Then, like that-she hoped it was like that-they were dead. And now, two days later, graves waited for them. Her husband and his father and mother lay shrouded in cloth inside coffins even a pauper’s family would have been ashamed of before the war started. These days, the Reich felt Jews were lucky to get coffins at all. Of course, the Reich would have been happier if they all went into coffins, or at least into the ground.

Sarah huddled with her own parents near the caskets. A few of the Brucks’ relatives stood with them. Everyone wore the same dazed, shocked expression. Death was never easy. Unexpected death from the air-death at the hands of Hitler’s enemies-where was God, to let such things happen?

What did Elijah say about Baal? Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is retiring, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked. But Sarah wasn’t thinking about long-forgotten Baal. She aimed her cries at Elijah’s God. And He seemed as silent as the old Canaanitish idol.

A rabbi with a yellow star intoned prayers. Would God be more or less inclined to hear them because he wore the Nazis’ mark? Or was it all just a sham, much sound and fury signifying nothing? Shakespeare knew what he was talking about. Sarah wouldn’t say the same about Elijah.

Into the holes in the ground went the coffins. Sarah and David Bruck’s brother tossed earth onto them. The sound of the clods hitting the coffins’ thin wooden lids seemed dreadfully final.

As the gravediggers got to work to finish covering over the bodies, the rabbi led the mourners in the Kaddish. Sarah had learned little Hebrew and less Aramaic, but she knew the prayer by rote: she’d been saying it since her last grandparent died not long before the Nazis took over. She often thought the old people were lucky because they hadn’t lived to see what Hitler did to the Jews.

After the last omayn, people drifted away from the graveyard. The Brucks’ kin went their way, Sarah and her parents theirs, and the rabbi, his head down, trudged off by himself. Sarah didn’t even want to think about everything he must have put up with since the Fuhrer came to power.

“I’m sorry, dear,” Samuel Goldman said, not for the first time. “Isidor was a good fellow, and too young to be gone.” He set a callused hand on her shoulder. “I know my being sorry doesn’t make you feel any better, but I am anyhow. Your mother is, too.”

“I am,” Hanna Goldman agreed softly.

Father was right, as usual-it didn’t make Sarah feel any better. With a sob that was at least half a hiccup, she shrugged his hand away. His mouth twisted, but he let his arm drop. He’d always believed reason and good sense would prevail against anything. The Nazis provided a horrible counterexample to that. Loss of a loved one gave another.

“What am I going to do?” Sarah said.

She knew what she’d do for the next little while: she’d stay with her parents, the way she had before navigating the shoals of Nazi bureaucracy to win permission to marry Isidor. All that work, all that tsuris-for what? For nothing. For a bomb howling down out of the sky and killing some Jews who hated Hitler but weren’t allowed to use shelters along with the Reich’s Aryan citizens.

Father looked around. Seeing no one within earshot, he spoke in an even lower voice than Mother had used a moment before: “The Nazis are our misfortune.”

No wonder he made sure nobody could overhear him! How many times had Hitler pounded his lectern and thundered The Jews are our misfortune!? More often than Sarah could count, anyhow. If someone heard one of those Jews mocking his slogan, what would happen to the scoffer? A beating? A trip to Dachau? A bullet in the back of the head? Something along those lines. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be good.

Mother clucked reproachfully. “Watch yourself, Samuel,” she said.

“Oh, I do,” he replied. “If I didn’t, our misfortune would already have happened to me.” The professor of classics and ancient history turned street repairman corrected himself with his usual precision: “More of our misfortune would have happened to me, I should say.”

None of that answered Sarah’s question, of course. Yes, it had been only two days since the air raid. As usual, Jews got their dead into the ground as fast as they could. Then something else occurred to her: “Gevalt! What will any of us do for bread now?”

“We’ll probably do without, that’s what,” Samuel Goldman said, and he was much too likely to be right. The Brucks’ bakery had been the only one in Munster from which Jews were allowed to buy any. Would the authorities let them visit an Aryan establishment because they had no other choice? Or would the brownshirts declare that it was their own fault the bakery got bombed?

“I can bake bread,” Mother said, but with no great enthusiasm. And who could blame her for that? Baking every day from scratch was a devil of a lot of work. It wasn’t as if she had lots of time on her hands, or as if she weren’t worn out already.

“They’ll probably set you to doing it without yeast, and tell me to make bricks without straw.” One of Father’s eyebrows quirked upward toward his graying hair. “My guess is, they would have done it a long time ago if they weren’t so allergic to the Old Testament. I mean, those are tried and true things to make Jews do.”

“God was the One Who made us bake without yeast. It wasn’t Pharaoh,” Mother pointed out.

“Well, what if it wasn’t?” Father returned. “You don’t think Hitler thinks he’s God-and expects his good little Aryans to think so, too?”

A tram rattled past. It needed paint. One of the iron wheels clicked against the track as it went round and round. Repairs weren’t coming any time soon, not with the war on. Sarah wasted no time worrying about that-or about getting on the tram. The motorman would have thrown her and her folks off the trolley had they tried. The yellow star made it easy for Aryans to follow laws against Jews to the letter.

In normal times, in sane times, Sarah would have had a claim on some of Isidor’s estate. But facing Nazi bureaucrats again was too revolting for her even to think about, much less to do. If David Bruck’s brother wanted to take them on, he was welcome to whatever he could pry out of them.

“All that time with Isidor-it might as well never have happened,” she said in slow wonder. “He’s-gone.” She still wore her wedding ring. That and a little bit of dirt on her hand from where she’d tossed earth into the grave were almost the only signs she’d ever been married.

To her surprise, her mother shook her head. “You loved him, and that changed you, too,” Hanna Goldman said. “Love is never wasted. You should always cherish it when you find it, because you never find it often enough.”

“Listen to your mother.” Samuel Goldman sounded serious to the point of solemnity. “More truth in that than in Plato and Aristotle and both Testaments all lumped together.”

Was there? Sarah had no idea. Right now, she had no idea about anything. She didn’t even know how much she’d truly loved Isidor. Not so much as she should have-she was pretty sure of that. He hadn’t swept her off her feet: nowhere close. He’d never been a sweeping-off kind of guy. She’d liked him. She’d cared about him. She’d enjoyed the things he did when no one else was around, and she’d liked doing such things for him.

Did all that add up to love? One more thing she didn’t have the faintest idea about. What she knew was, she wouldn’t get the chance to find out now, not with Isidor she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t even have a child to remember him by-one more thing of which she was no longer in any doubt. When you got right down to the bottom of things, life was pretty rotten, wasn’t it?

Very little that Aristide Demange had seen in Russia impressed him. Very little that the veteran lieutenant had seen anywhere impressed him. He made a point of not being impressed. He’d done it for so long, it was second nature to him by now.

You couldn’t help noticing Russia’s vastness, though, even if you made your point of doing no more than noticing. You couldn’t help noticing the fine tanks Russian factories turned out, either. Nor could you help noticing the frigid con of a winter Russia had. Well, hell, even Napoleon had noticed the Russian winter, though chances were he’d also done his goddamnedest not to let it impress him.

And you couldn’t help noticing what a pack of thumb-fingered oafs the Ivans were. Half the time, they didn’t know what to do with all those fancy tanks. Their tactics would have had to loosen up to seem rigid. They drank like swine. Of course, if Demange had had leaders like theirs, he would have drunk that way himself.

So here was Murmansk. Murmansk had but one raison d’etre: to get men and things into and out of Russia the year around. Thanks to the last gasp of the Gulf Stream as it slid past the northern tip of Scandinavia, the local harbor never iced up. It was the only port in the USSR that could make such a boast.

But it was at best tenuously connected to the rest of the country. A single rickety rail line led down to Leningrad and ultimately to Moscow. Odds were no one knew how many men had died building that line during the last war, or how many perished every year keeping it usable. If anyone did know, he worked for the NKVD and didn’t care. Demange had seen labor gangs of scrawny prisoners laying fresh ties under the watchful gaze of guards with submachine guns.

Murmansk itself was ugly as a toadstool. Wood huts housed the people who worked by the harbor. Wood smoke and coal smoke hovered over the town in a choking haze London would have envied. Except for fish pulled fresh from the Arctic Ocean, the food was bad and there wasn’t enough of it.

He hadn’t got away from the war, either. The Germans knew what Murmansk meant to the Ivans. Their bombers flew out of Norway through the long winter nights and pummeled the harbor and the rest of the city. Russian fighters buzzed overhead. Russian antiaircraft guns yammered away whenever the Luftwaffe came from the west. Russian papers claimed whole squadrons of He-111s and Ju-88s hacked out of the sky. French-speaking Russian officials delighted in translating those stories for any Frenchman who would sit still and listen.

Demange knew bullshit when he heard it. He also knew he was liable to end up floating in the cold, cold water if he gave forth with his opinions. He assumed anyone who knew French had to work for the NKVD. He smiled and nodded in the right places. Hypocrisy lubricated human affairs here, as it did so often.

Getting into Murmansk had been an adventure punctuated by Stukas. Getting back to la belle France was liable to be an adventure punctuated by U-boats. A torpedo was the kind of thing that could ruin a troopship’s whole day. And spring was in the calendar.

It wasn’t in the air. The weather stayed colder than any Frenchman who hadn’t been born in a deep freeze would have believed possible. Blizzards roared down from the North Pole one after another. Snow swirled through the air, thicker than tobacco smoke in an estaminet.

The French pissed and moaned about it. The stolid Russians clumped through it. Their valenki kept their feet from freezing. Their greatcoats, unlike Western European models, were made to withstand Arctic cold. They wore fur hats with flaps they could lower and tie to keep their ears from going solid and breaking off. And they figured large doses of vodka made the best antifreeze.

Not even their stolidity, though, could keep the sun from moving farther north in the sky every day. Daylight had been almost nonexistent when Demange got to Murmansk. He liked that fine. Darkness was the best time to get through the Barents Sea without being spotted by German submarines or bombers based in northern Norway.

But his regiment was somewhere down in the queue. The Russians were even more fanatical about queuing than the English were, and that said a mouthful. They were less efficient about it, though. And they didn’t have enough freighters in Murmansk to deal with the influx of French soldiers.

For the life of him, Demange couldn’t see why they didn’t. They were good proletarians, so maybe their diplomats didn’t wear pinstriped trousers the way French officials did. No matter what they wore, they must have spent a lot of time talking the French into climbing out of Hitler’s bed and coming back to Stalin’s. If they wanted French troops out of their country so badly, why in blazes didn’t they have ships waiting to take them away?

Because they were Russians. That was the only answer Demange could see. They spewed propaganda about the dictatorship of the proletariat and about the glories of centralized planning. When the Germans made noises about planning, they meant them. The Ivans? They were like a chorus of whores singing the praises of virginity.

It would have been funny if it hadn’t stood a decent chance of getting Demange killed. Once the equinox passed, days in these latitudes stretched like a politician’s conscience. Murmansk went from having no daylight to speak of to having too bloody much in what seemed like nothing flat.

Demange shepherded his company aboard a rusty scow through more snow flurries. But it was going on nine o’clock at night when he did it, and he had no trouble seeing the falling snow. “Come on, my dears,” he growled. “Out of the frying pan, into the fire.”

“Don’t you want to get home, Lieutenant?” one of his men asked as they stumped up the gangplank.

Demange still couldn’t get used to being called Lieutenant. He’d spent too many happy years as a sergeant despising junior officers. Now he’d turned into what he’d scorned for so long.

To make matters worse, he’d run out of Gitanes. He was reduced to smoking Russian papirosi: a little bit of tobacco at the end of a long paper holder. Russian tobacco tasted funny, and the holder felt wrong in his mouth. All that left him even more short-tempered than usual. “Jules, I want to get home alive,” he answered. “And we’d’ve had a hell of a lot better chance sailing out of here three weeks ago.”

Jules opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. That was the smartest thing he could have done.

The freighter wallowed away from the pier. It took its place in a convoy. Royal Navy destroyers and corvettes served as escort vessels. Seeing them cheered Demange up-a little. On the water, the English had some idea of what they were doing. He certainly preferred them as escorts to ships from the Red Fleet. At least he could be pretty sure their skippers weren’t blind drunk.

Out into the Barents the convoy went. It zigzagged till night finally fell. As soon as darkness descended, all the ships hightailed it west at the best speed of the slowest freighter. Demange would have been content to leave that sorry con behind to shift for itself … unless, of course, it happened to be the miserable tub that was carrying him.

In these latitudes and at this season, daybreak came all too soon. The ships stopped hightailing and started sedately zigzagging once more. Demange peered out at the gray-green water. He’d yell if he saw a periscope-which would probably help just enough to let him go down yelling.

He saw nothing but ocean and a few scudding seabirds. No Flying Pencils or broad-winged Heinkels droned overhead to bomb the convoy. No Stukas roared down on the ships with sirens screaming like the end of the world.

A few days later, he did see something he’d never seen before: a coastline that a sailor told him belonged to Scotland. He’d fought alongside Tommies in two wars, but that was his first glimpse of the British Isles. It made him think he likely would make it back to France. And the Germans, having missed this fine chance to kill him, would get more shots at it.