Hitler's War (43 page)

More cheers rose. These were so loud and raucous, Jochen stuck his nose into the wardroom to see what was going on. Nobody told him. Miffed, he slouched back outside. The soldiers started clapping and stomping again.

“We’ll go out there and do some more straight shooting,” Lemp said. The men shouted agreement. They were good fellows, all right—and crazy the same way he was.

F
or more than two years, the war in Spain had electrified the world. Everybody could see it foretold what would happen when Fascism squared off against Marxism. Both sides threw what they could into the struggle. Italian troops, German planes, Russian tanks…Most of the bodies, on both sides, stayed Spanish.

Not all. Chaim Weinberg wouldn’t have left New York City without a strong feeling that something had to be done to stop Fascism before it exploded all over Europe. He wasn’t the only one: the International Brigades were proof of that. Outnumbered and outgunned, the Republic remained a going concern despite everything Marshal Sanjurjo could do to crush it.

And then, when the Internationals were about to get pulled from the line, the big war
did
break out in Europe. Spain’s fight was suddenly Britain and France’s fight, too. Matériel flooded south across the Pyrenees as the French border opened up. It seemed too good to be true.

It was. As soon as Hitler turned his troops on the Low Countries and France rather than Czechoslovakia, the flood didn’t go back to being a
trickle. It dried up altogether. Everything the French could make, they shipped northeast to shoot at the
Boches
.

Germany and Italy had already pretty much forgotten about Spain. With the French and English navies in the war, the Fascists had a much harder time getting through than they’d had before. And they needed their toys to use against the Western democracies.

So Spain went from being the cockpit of world attention to the war that everybody forgot. Everybody, that is, except the poor, sorry bastards still stuck fighting it.

Lately, Sanjurjo’s men on an outpost a few hundred meters away had found themselves a new weapon: a loudspeaker system. It crackled to life now: “Come over to the winning side!” a Spaniard shouted, and the loudspeaker gave him something close to the voice of God. “Come over to us, and we’ll feed you what we eat ourselves. It’s lovely chicken stew tonight! Don’t miss it!”

“Ha!” Chaim said, and turned to Mike Carroll. “You know how to make Sanjurjo’s chicken stew?”

“First, you steal a chicken,” Carroll answered wearily. “That’s an old one. Got a smoke?”

“Yeah.” Chaim gave him a Gauloise.

“Lovely chicken stew!” the Nationalist boomed again.

“Thanks. Tastes like shit, but thanks.” Carroll puffed happily. Chaim agreed with him—the French tobacco did taste like shit. But Gauloises and Gitanes were better than no cigarettes at all—and better than roll-your-owns made from other people’s (and your own) butts.

“Chicken stew—with dumplings!”

“Lying cocksucker,” Chaim said without much rancor. Every so often, guys from the other side deserted. From what they said, the Nationalists were just as hungry, just as miserable, as the Republicans.

“Maybe their officers have chicken stew,” Carroll said.

“Now you’re talking,” Chaim said. Republican officers ate and lived
no better than the men they led. It was an article of faith on this side that the enemy’s officers exploited their soldiers—they were fighting
for
class distinctions, after all. Some of what the deserters said supported that: some, but not all. The Republicans mostly discounted anything that disagreed with what they’d thought before.

“Wonderful chicken stew! All you can eat!”

Somebody in the Republican lines fired at the loudspeaker. If you were hungry and cold and miserable, talk of food could drive you nuts. And you had to be nuts to shoot like that. At long range, with the crappy rifles and cheap ammo most Republicans carried, how likely were you to hit what you aimed at? Even if you did, what kind of damage could you do? And besides…

Chaim pulled his entrenching tool off his belt. It was very well made; he’d taken it off a dead Italian. He started digging. “That stupid asshole’s gonna bring some hate down on our heads.”

“Tell me about it.” Carroll’s entrenching tool consisted of some scrap iron a smith had beaten flat and then bolted to a stick. But it moved dirt, too. He deepened his foxhole and added dirt to the parapet in front of it and the parados behind.

Sure as hell, the shot woke up the Nationalist artillery. Sanjurjo’s men had more guns and better guns than the Republicans. Hitler and Mussolini had been lavish in supplying their Spanish friends till they got distracted. Nobody on the Republican side had ever been lavish with anything, not till the Czech fight started and not for long enough then.

Fragments wined and snarled overhead. Chaim dug like a mole, trying to make what vets of the last war called a bombproof. He should have done that a long time ago. He knew as much, but nobody liked to dig without need. Now the need was here.

Mike Carroll made dirt fly, too. They both stopped about the same time. Somebody not far away had been wounded, and was making a godawful
racket. “I’d better go get him,” Chaim said, though he could think of few things he wanted to do less. As if to convince himself, he added, “God knows I’d want somebody to pick me up if I got hit.”

“Yeah.” Carroll also scrambled out of his hole, even if he’d just improved it. Not being by himself above ground made Chaim a little less lonely. It also made him wonder if he’d have to try to make pickup for two. Well, if he stopped something himself, somebody was out there to make pickup on him.

He scuttled along like a pair of ragged claws—some damn poem picking the exact wrong moment to bounce around in his head. Like a snake would have been closer, because his belly hugged the ground every second. Off to his left, Mike also looked flattened by a steamroller.

To add to the joy, a couple of Nationalists started shooting at them with rifles. Luckily, none of the rounds came close. Spaniards, whether Nationalists or Republicans, made piss-poor riflemen. Chaim didn’t know why that was true, but it sure seemed to be. The bullets got close enough to scare him cracking past, but no closer than that.

He crawled past some trench a shell hit had caved in and flopped down into the earthwork beyond with a sigh of relief. Mike Carroll made it, too. There lay the wounded guy, trying to clutch his chest and his leg at the same time and howling like a banshee. Two other men from the International Brigades were nothing but raw meat and blood—no blaming them for not helping their buddy, because nobody could ever help them again.

“Fuck,” Carroll said hoarsely. “See who it is?”

Chaim hadn’t noticed—one injured fighter sounded much like another, no matter which language he’d grown up speaking. Now he took a look. “Fuck,” he echoed. “It’s Milt.”

Milton Wolff—
El Lobo
to the Spaniards on both sides—had led the Abraham Lincoln Battalion since Robert Merriman was lost the spring before. He’d kept them in the line no matter what Sanjurjo’s goons
threw at them. He wasn’t just their heart; he was also a big part of their backbone.

And he was badly hurt. Fragments had shredded his left calf and thigh and laid open the left side of his chest. “Jesus,” Chaim muttered. His stomach tried to turn over. He wouldn’t let it.

“What do we do?” Carroll sounded as lost and horrified as Chaim felt. If you saw your father like that…“What
can
we do?”

“Try and patch him up. Try and get him back to the docs. Maybe they can pour some blood into him,” Chaim answered. Republican doctors could do more with transfusions than just about anybody. That was one of the few places where the Republic worked well—if the crack mobile unit was anywhere within a few kilometers, anyhow.

They used their wound dressings. They used strips of cloth from their uniforms and from those of the dead men, who didn’t care any more. One of the corpses had a miraculously unbroken syringe in a belt pouch. Chaim jabbed Wolff with it—it was the only painkiller he was likely to get.

Wolff was a big man—six-two, easy—which only made things worse. Manhandling him over to a communications trench that went back was no fun for Chaim or Mike Carroll or the wounded Abe Lincoln officer. Hauling him across bare, broken ground and praying the snipers didn’t get lucky would have been even worse…Chaim supposed.

They were heading back instead of sideways when Wolff stopped screaming and asked, “Will I die?” He sounded amazingly calm. The morphine must have hit him all at once.

“I don’t think so, Milt,” Chaim answered, and hoped he wasn’t lying. “We’ll get you patched up.”

“You bet,” Mike agreed.

A Red Cross flag flew over an aid tent. In his bad Spanish, Chaim asked, “Is the blood truck close?”

“¿Quién sabe?”
a harried-looking male nurse answered. He sounded like a fruit, but that was the least of Chaim’s worries. And he did gasp when he found out who the wounded Abe Lincoln was.
“¿El Lobo? ¡Madre de Dios!”
He crossed himself.

By the way people went dashing out of the aid tent, Chaim got the idea they’d track down the blood truck as fast as they could. He wondered whether they would have done the same if he came in wounded. Actually, he didn’t wonder: he knew damn well they wouldn’t.

And he had a hard time getting pissed off about it. He was just a
soldado
. He had his uses, but their were plenty more like him. Milton Wolff was
El Lobo
. If he stayed out of action long, the Lincolns wouldn’t be the same. And, while the rest of the world might have forgotten the Spanish Civil War, it remained brutally real to the people who went on fighting it.

HANS-ULRICH RUDEL WAS GETTING SICK
of huddling in muddy slit trenches. This one was in western Belgium. It was two in the morning, and British bombers were overhead again. By the roar of their engines, they weren’t very far overhead, either. RAF Whitleys and Hampdens couldn’t fly very high no matter how much their pilots might wish they could.

And, at night, it hardly mattered.
Luftwaffe
night fighters found enemy planes more by luck than any other way. When German bombers struck England under cover of darkness, the RAF’s night fighters had the same problem.

Bombs whistled down. Some of them landed close enough for the bursts to make Rudel’s ears hurt. Blast could do horrible things to you even when fragments and flame didn’t. He buried his face against the trench wall. He’d come out looking like the end man in a minstrel show, but he didn’t care. As long as he came out.

More explosions, and the rending crash of something metal going to
smithereens all at once. “Goddamn flying suitcases!” somebody a couple of meters away said.

“Ja!”
Hans-Ulrich nodded, smelling mold and damp. Hampdens were a lot like
Luftwaffe
bombers, though more slab-sided than any of them—hence the nickname. Whitleys were bigger, slower, and clumsier, but carried more bombs. They could take a lot of punishment…and needed to, because they got it. Rudel wouldn’t have wanted to fly one in the daytime. The British had tried that, but not for long.

Well, the
Luftwaffe
wasn’t sending Stukas over England any more, either. Some things cost more than they were worth. Even biplane Gladiators were dangerous to the German dive-bombers. As for Hurricanes and the newer Spitfires…!

The real trouble was, Hurricanes and Spitfires chewed up Bf-110s almost as easily as they mulched Stukas. Bf-109s held their own against the top RAF fighters, but they had short range and couldn’t linger long over England. And, when they had to escort the 110s as well as the bombers, they couldn’t mix it up with the enemy the way they should.

From everything Rudel had heard, nobody in the
Luftwaffe
higher-ups had dreamt the 110 would show such weaknesses. War gave all kinds of surprises—including the nasty ones.

A few more bombs fell. Then things eased off; the drone of enemy engines faded in the west. Hans-Ulrich spat to get the taste of loam out of his mouth. “Well,” he said brightly, “that was fun.”

Several people in the trench told him what he could do with his fun. Somebody who knew his classics quoted Goethe’s Götz von Berlichen:
“Du kannst mich mal am Arsch lechen.”
Even if it was poetry,
Lick my ass
got the point across.

He climbed out of the trench. Something was burning: a Stuka in a half-blasted revetment. The orange flames sent a dim, flickering light across the airstrip. “Got to put that out,” a flyer said. “If the damned Englishmen see it, they’re liable to come back.”

Groundcrew men started playing a hose in the Ju-87. That would
take a while to do any good. Gasoline and oil liked to keep burning. And the ammo in the Stuka’s machine guns started cooking off. The popping seemed absurdly cheerful. “Hope none of those rounds hits anybody,” Hans-Ulrich said.

“Jesus Maria!” somebody said—a Catholic, by the oath. “That’d be all we need.”

Somebody else was exhausted, relentlessly pragmatic, or both: “Only thing I hope is, I can get back to sleep.”