Hitler's War (40 page)

Koenig stuck out his hand. Pete took it. The clasp turned into a trial of strength that ended up a push. They both opened and closed their hands several times after they let go.

Pete started to laugh. “What’s so funny?” Sergeant Koenig asked.

“We just made a bet on who’s gonna win a war that hasn’t started yet,” McGill answered. “How dumb will we look if it turns out the Japs’re up to something else instead?”

“Dumb enough, I guess,” Koenig said. “What? You never looked dumb before?”

“Not the past ten minutes, anyway,” Pete said, which drew a laugh from the other noncom. He went on, “I tell you, I wish the Japs
would
get the hell out of Peking and stay out. Town was a lot more fun when the Chinamen were still hanging on to it.”

“You got that right.” Koenig nodded in what might have been approval. “See? You ain’t as dumb as you look.”

“Heh! I’m not as dumb as you look, either,” Pete retorted. They were off duty. He could sass a sergeant if he felt like it. And he did—it wasn’t a pleasure he got often enough.

“Wise guy,” Koenig said, and then something in Chinese that sounded like a cat with its tail caught under a rocking chair. Behind the bar, Danny jumped a foot.

“Wow! What’s that mean?” Pete asked, impressed in spite of himself.

“Can’t tell you,” Koenig answered. “If I said it in English, you’d have to try and murder me.”

“Give it to me again,” Pete urged. “Sounds like it’s worth knowing.”

Koenig repeated it. Pete tried to echo him. He got the tones wrong the first couple of times. He could hear that, but he had trouble fixing it. Danny held his head in his hands. Pete finally said it the right way, which made the bartender even more unhappy.

“What’s it mean, Danny?” Pete called. Danny wouldn’t tell him, either. That made him like his new toy even better.

W
hen Alistair Walsh saw a road sign saying how many kilometers it was to Paris, he knew things weren’t in good shape. The whole point to the war was keeping the Nazis away from Paris, the same as it had been with the Kaiser’s army the last time around.

They’d done it the last time—done it twice, in fact, in 1914 and then again in 1918. He wasn’t so sure they could now. The BEF stumbled back and stumbled back. People were starting to talk about the Miracle on the Marne in 1914. Well, they were getting too damn close to the Marne again, and they sure could use another miracle.

He yawned. What he could use was sleep. One of the things nobody talked about was how wearing modern war was. You were fighting or you were marching or they were shelling you or bombing you or you were trying to promote something to eat. What you weren’t doing was resting.

He wasn’t the only one frazzled almost to death. Even though February remained chilly, exhausted soldiers curled up like animals by the side of the road. Some slept in greatcoats, some wrapped in blankets,
some as they were regardless of the cold. You had to look closely to see their chests rising and falling to make sure they weren’t corpses.

Exhausted civilians also slept by the roadside, singly and in family groups. They hadn’t done any shooting; other than that, they had as much right to be weary as the soldiers. One poor woman must have been a restless sleeper. She’d kicked off her blanket and thrashed around so her legs and backside were out in the biting breeze. Walsh got an eyeful as he trudged along.

One of the Tommies with him chuckled. “What we’re fighting for, right?” the fellow said.

“I’ve seen plenty worse,” Walsh allowed. “If I lay down beside her, though, I bet I’d cork off before I could try getting her knickers down.”

“Blimey! Me, too.” The other soldier’s face split in an enormous yawn. “Don’t know how I put one foot in front of the other any more.”

Behind them, German artillery thundered to life. Walsh jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “That’s how.”

“Too right it is. Got a fag on you, Sarge?”

Walsh listened for screams in the air that would warn of incoming shells aimed their way. Hearing none, he reached into a tunic pocket and pulled out a packet of Gitanes. “Here. Got these off a dead Frenchman. Nasty things, but better than nothing.”

“I’d smoke whatever you’ve got and thank you for it. I’m plumb out, and I’m all—” The Tommy held out his arm in front of him and made his hand tremble.

“Know what you mean. I’ve run dry myself a couple of times.” Walsh proffered the French cigarettes. “Take two or three, then.”

“I’d be much obliged, if you don’t mind.” The soldier stuck one in his mouth and stashed the other two in a breast pocket of his grimy battledress. He struck a match and inhaled. “Cor!” he said in tones of deep respect. “Like smoking a bleeding blowtorch, ain’t it?”

Walsh had also lit a Gitane. After blowing out smoke, he coughed
like a man in the last stages of consumption. “What’s that you say?” he inquired.

The other soldier laughed. He took a second, more cautious, drag. “Damn froggies like ‘em this way, don’t they?”

“I expect so. They’d make ‘em different if they didn’t,” Walsh said.

“Fuck.” The Tommy shook his head. “We ought to be on Adolf’s side.”

“Bugger that, mate,” Walsh said. “Germans shot me once, and it’s not for lack of trying they haven’t done it again. Yeah, the French are a bad lot, but those bastards in field-gray are worse.”

“Take an even strain, Sergeant. I was only joking, like.” But then the soldier added, “They make damn good soldiers, though.”

“They make damn good dead soldiers,” Walsh said. He also had a healthy regard for German military talent. He’d never met an English soldier who’d fought the squareheads who didn’t. To him, that only made Germans more dangerous. It didn’t mean he wanted to switch sides. He pointed to the town ahead. “Is that Senlis?” He probably butchered the pronunciation, but he didn’t care.

“I think so.” The soldier to whom he’d given a smoke also seemed glad to change the subject.

At its core, Senlis had what looked like really ancient walls with towers. The spires of a cathedral poked up from inside them. Walsh remembered that the Germans had burned the town and shot the mayor and several leading citizens in 1914. The damage had been made good in the quarter-century since. All the same, he didn’t want to fight alongside people who did things like that.

He also wasn’t eager to fight against them. Willing, yes, but not eager. They were too bloody good at what they did.

In front of those old, old walls—would they go back to Roman days?—an English captain with half a company’s worth of men was nabbing stragglers. “You and you!” he called to Walsh and the Tommy
to whom he’d given some Gitanes. “You think we can hold this town, eh?”

The other soldier didn’t say anything. It wasn’t quite what the Articles of War called mute insolence, but it wasn’t far removed, either. Sergeant Walsh said, “We can try, sir.” He didn’t agree with the officer, but he did admit the possibility.

That was plenty. “Fall in with me, then, the both of you,” the captain said. “If the Hun tries to take this place, we’ll give him what he deserves and send him off with his tail between his legs, what?”

How many years had it been since Walsh heard anybody call Germans Huns? More than he could remember. The captain was about his age, so he’d probably done time here in the last war.

Most of the civilians had cleared out of Senlis, which meant they were causing traffic headaches somewhere south and west of here. Soldiers could pick and choose the empty houses they tried to defend. Walsh went through his, but didn’t find anything worth eating or drinking.
Too bad
, he thought.

He had three privates with him. They were all Yorkshire farm boys, and spoke with an accent he had to work to follow. His might have sounded just as strange to them, but that was their lookout. They understood him well enough to keep watch at all the windows—and to give him a tin of M & V. He felt better after wolfing down the meat-and-vegetable stew.

Senlis got a couple of hours’ respite before the Germans turned their attention to it. Then artillery walked up to the town. Walsh crouched down with the three privates: they were Jim and Jock and, improbably, Alonzo. The house they’d taken over was made of stone. It would stop fragments unless it was unlucky enough to take a direct hit.

“Where’s our guns?” Alonzo complained.
Goons
, it came out when he said it. However it came out, it was a damn good question. The Germans
always seemed to put their guns where they needed them. The Allies…sometimes did.

Stukas screamed down out of the sky, one after another. Crouching huddled under the kitchen table, Walsh cursed the vulture-winged monsters and their sirens. He also cursed the RAF, both for not shooting them down and for not having anything like them.

Several windows in the French house were already broken. The ones that weren’t blew in now, leaving small snowdrifts of glass spears on the floor. Walsh swore some more, resignedly. Sure as hell, he’d end up cutting his hand or his leg on them.

Somebody was yelling for a medic. Somebody else was screaming for his mother. One of the Yorkshire lads crossed himself. Alistair Walsh was no Catholic, but he understood the gesture. Nobody but a desperately hurt man made noises like that.

Before long, the screaming stopped. Walsh hoped the wounded man got morphine. More likely, the poor bugger passed out or just died. “Up, lads,” the sergeant told the privates. “I expect we’ll have company before long.”

“Won’t get no clotted cream from me,” Jock said, chambering a round in his Enfield with a
snick!
of the bolt.

Sure enough, here came the Germans. They moved up in little stuttering runs from one bit of cover to the next. Some of them had leaves and branches fixed to their helmets with bands cut from old inner tubes. No, no one could say they weren’t skilled at their murderous trade.

A Bren gun opened up a couple of houses away from Walsh’s. He liked the British army’s new light machine gun a lot. It really
was
light—you could pick it up and shoot from the hip if you had to. And it was air-cooled: no need to worry about pouring water (or, that failing, piss) into the metal cooling jacket around the barrel. Best of all, it worked reliably. What more could you want?

It made the Germans hit the deck. They started shooting at the house where it lurked. When they did, the muzzle flashes from their Mausers gave the British infantrymen good targets. Walsh fired and reloaded, then ducked down and crawled to another window to fire again.

Something bit him through the knee of his battledress. “Bloody glass,” he muttered.

The Bren gun barked again. German medics in Red Cross smocks ran up to recover casualties. Walsh didn’t shoot at them. Fair was fair. The Germans mostly didn’t shoot at British medics.

A lull followed. The Germans seemed surprised anyone was fighting hard to save Senlis. Since Walsh had been surprised when the captain made a fight for the place, how could he blame them?

“What happens now, Sergeant?” Alonzo asked.

“They could shell us some more. They could call in the Stukas again, or the tanks,” Walsh said. None of the three Yorkshiremen seemed to want to hear that. Walsh went on, “Or they could decide we’re a tough nut and try to go around us instead of pushing through.”

“That’d be good,” Alonzo said. Jack and Jock both nodded. After a moment, so did Alistair Walsh.

AFTER SARAH GOLDMAN’S FATHER TIED
his necktie every morning, he pinned his Iron Cross Second Class onto the breast pocket of his jacket. Samuel Goldman wanted to remind the Nazi thugs and
Gestapo
goons who came to scream at him that he’d done his duty for the
Vaterland
in the last war and would have done it again this time if only they’d let him.

Maybe the
Eisenkreuz
did some good. The Goldmans remained in their home. The Nazis hadn’t hauled the rest of them off to Dachau or Buchenwald even if Saul had killed a member of the Master Race.

The Nazis hadn’t caught Sarah’s big brother, either. Saul had fled the
labor gang…and, after that, he might have fallen off the face of the earth. Sarah had no idea what he’d done. Whatever it was, she admired it tremendously. The policemen with the swastika armbands also had no idea what he’d done. It drove them crazy.

“No, sir,” Samuel Goldman told a foul-mouthed
Gestapo
officer. “He has not telephoned us. You would know if he had,
nicht wahr?
You must be tapping our telephone line.”

“You bet your scrawny ass we are, Jew,” the secret policeman said. “But he could be talking to some other lousy kike who’s passing you coded messages.”

“It is not so, sir.” Sarah’s father kept his temper better than she dreamt of being able to do. Maybe he had a deeper understanding of what was at stake in this game. Or maybe he was just blessed with a disposition more even than hers.

“Ought to take you all out and give you a noodle,” the officer growled.

“I beg your pardon?” Somehow, Samuel Goldman still managed to keep the dignity a professor of ancient history and classics should have.

The
Gestapo
officer jumped up and walked around behind him. He put the tip of his outthrust index finger against the back of Samuel Goldman’s neck.
“Bang!”
he said, and then, “A noodle.”