Hitler's War (47 page)

“You men have served under Major Koral for some time—isn’t that so?” the SS man said.

“Ja,”
Ludwig said. Fritz and Theo both nodded. No harm in admitting that, not when the blackshirt could check their records and find out for himself that Koral had led the panzer battalion since the war started.

“All right,” the SS man said, in now-we’re-getting-somewhere tones. “How often have you heard him express disloyalty toward the
Führer
and the
Reich
?”

“Disloyalty?” Ludwig echoed. He had trouble believing his ears. But the SS man nodded importantly. He seemed as full of his own righteousness as the more disagreeable kind of preacher. Picking his words with care, Ludwig said, “Sir, you do know, don’t you, that Major Koral’s already been wounded in action twice?”

“Yes, yes.” The SS man nodded impatiently, as if that were of no account. To him, it probably wasn’t. He went on, “I’m not talking about his military behavior. I’m talking about his political behavior.”
You idiot
, his gaze added.
You’re supposed to know things like that without being told
.

Sergeant Rothe bristled at so obviously being thought a moron. But then he chuckled to himself. If the blackshirt figured him for a
Dummkopf
, a
Dummkopf
he would be, by God. “Sir, the major just gives me orders. He doesn’t waste his time talking politics with noncoms.”

“What’s going on, anyway?” Theo sounded as innocent as an un-weaned baby. His dreamy features let him get away with that more easily than Ludwig could have.

The SS man didn’t hesitate before answering, “You will have heard that certain
Wehrmacht
generals betrayed their country by viciously plotting against the
Führer
?”

Ludwig had heard that, all right, from Hitler’s own lips. Telling the SS man as much struck him as the very worst of bad ideas.
“Gott im Himmel!”
he exclaimed, as if it were a complete surprise. “I heard it,
ja
, but I thought it was only enemy propaganda.” Beside him, Theo and Fritz nodded.

“It’s true, all right,” the blackshirt said. “They were disgraces to the uniform they wore, disgraces to the
Volk
, disgraces to the
Reich
. And so we must purify the army of all their associates and of everyone who might have shared their vicious views. Now do you understand why I am inquiring about Major Koral?”

“He wouldn’t do anything like that,” Fritz said. “He wouldn’t put up with anybody else who did, either.”

Theo nodded again. “That’s right.”

“I think so, too,” Ludwig said.

“You might be surprised. You might be very surprised indeed,” the SS man said. “We’ve found treason in some places where no one would have thought to look for it if these generals hadn’t disgraced themselves.”

If Ludwig hadn’t heard it from the
Führer
, he would have wondered what that meant. He did wonder what the SS and the
Gestapo
were up to now. Had they sniffed out more real treason, or had they “discovered” it regardless of whether it was really there? He didn’t ask this fellow that kind of question. That it could occur to him might be plenty to mark him as disloyal.

He did ask, “Why do you think Major Koral might be mixed up in this…this
Scheisse
?”

“Scheisse
it is,” the SS man agreed. He pulled a scrap of paper from the right beast pocket of his tunic. “He has…let me see…a long history of association with General Fritsche, and also with General Halder. He may have been a Social Democrat before 1933—the record is not completely clear about that, but it is worrisome. And one of his cousins was formerly married to a Jew.”

If Fritsche and Halder were two of the generals who’d tried to overthrow the
Führer
, that might mean something. Or, of course, it might not. Ludwig had a long history of association with his cats, but he’d never wanted to eat mice himself. The rest didn’t seem to mean much. The Social Democrats had been the biggest party in Germany during the Weimar Republic. They were about as exclusive as a blizzard. Ludwig had no great use for Jews, but he thought one of his cousins was married to one, too. He hoped to God the SS would never dig that out and use it against him.

“Sorry not to be more help, sir,” he said insincerely.

“Like the sergeant said, Major Koral’s always been brave in combat,” Theo added. “Didn’t he win the Iron Cross First Class? Didn’t they put him up for the
Ritterkreuz
?”

The Iron Cross First Class—just like the
Führer, Ludwig thought—one more thing he knew better than to say out loud. But the two awards weren’t really comparable. Lots of officers got the Iron Cross First Class now. For a common soldier in the Kaiser’s army to have won it the last time around was much more remarkable. Even the Knight’s Cross in this war wasn’t the same.

The SS man looked unhappy enough at Theo’s mild questions. “That has nothing to do with anything,” he said stiffly. “If you recall anything suspicious about him, report it to your superiors at once. At once, do you hear?” He tramped off, his back ramrod straight.

“Jesus Christ on roller skates!” Fritz said. “I think I’d sooner go to the dentist than get another little visit like that.”

“You can spread that on toast and call it butter,” Theo agreed. Ludwig
supposed it was agreement, anyhow. The radioman came out with the strangest things sometimes.

Fritz Bittenfeld found a new question: “Should we go tell the major he’s got hounds sniffing on his trail?”

“If we see him in the field, sure,” Ludwig said. “But those fucking goons’ve got to be keeping an eye on him. If we go blab, what happens to us? We stick our dicks in the sausage grinder, that’s what?”

“Oh, that smarts!” Theo said in shrill falsetto. Ludwig and Fritz both laughed. Better to laugh than to grab at yourself, which was what Ludwig’s figure of speech made him want to do. Assuming it
was
a figure of speech, of course. With the SS, you could never be sure. And if they did it for real…Ludwig wanted to grab at himself again.

Bitterly, Fritz said, “It’s a hell of a note when you find out combat’s not the worst thing that can happen to you.”

“Yeah, it’s a hell of a note, all right,” Ludwig said. “You going to tell me it isn’t true? I can deal with the Czechs and the French and the English. I can even deal with the Russians if I have to. My old man fought in the East the last time around. Yeah, I can cope with that—bet your ass I can. But heaven help me if I’ve got to try and handle the cocksuckers who think they’re on my side.”

He kept his voice down. No one but his buddies could possibly have heard him. Only after the words were out of his mouth did he wonder if he could trust Fritz and Theo. They all trusted one another with their lives on the battlefield. But political matters were different—and, as Fritz had said, worse.

If he and the driver and the radioman
couldn’t
trust one another…Ludwig swore under his breath. This was the nastiest thing the SS did, right here. If you weren’t sure you could count on people who’d already saved your bacon more times than you could remember, then what?

You were screwed, that was what.

“We’re as bad as the Russians, you know?” Theo said, which was too
close for comfort to what Ludwig was thinking. The radio operator went on, “Pretty soon I’m going to start praying for cloudy weather.”

“What the hell is
that
supposed to mean?” Ludwig demanded.

“Well, if my shadow isn’t there, I don’t have to worry that it’ll betray me to the
Gestapo
when I’m not looking,” Theo answered. That either made no sense at all or altogether too much.

“Maybe it isn’t there
because
it’s off betraying you to the
Gestapo.”
Later, Ludwig wondered about himself. At the time, what he said seemed logical enough—to him, anyhow.

It didn’t faze Theo, either. “Nothing would surprise me any more,” he said. “Shadows aren’t to be trusted. No matter how much you feed ‘em, they never get any fatter than you do. And have you ever seen one that wasn’t as dark as a nigger, even when it was walking on a snowbank?”

Fritz looked from one of his crewmates to the other. “I think you’ve both gone round the bend,” he declared.

“Zu befehl,”
Theo said—
at your service
. He clicked his heels, as if he were a Prussian grandee or an Austrian gentleman with more noble blood than he knew what to do with.

A battery of French 75s near Meaux started shelling the panzer park at extreme long range. Only a few shells came close enough to drive the Germans into the holes they’d dug. They
had
dug holes, of course; whenever they stopped for more than a few minutes, they dug. Anyone would have thought
Wehrmacht
men—and their French and English counterparts—descended from moles rather than monkeys.

“Wonder if the SS shithead has enough sense to take cover,” Fritz remarked.

“Nobody’ll miss him if he doesn’t,” Ludwig said. “With a little luck, even the Frenchmen won’t miss him.” Fritz and Theo both groaned. Neither tried to tell him he was wrong.

After a while, when the French guns didn’t blow up any ammunition
dumps or show other tangible evidence of success, they eased off. The panzer crews came up above ground. And there was the blackshirt, a pistol in hand, leading Major Koral to a waiting auto with a swastika flag flying above its right fender. Face pale and set, the major got in. The car sped away, back toward Germany.

“What is this world coming to?” Ludwig wondered out loud.

“Nothing good,” Fritz answered. “Dammit, we’ve still got a war to fight.”

“So does Major Koral,” Theo added. Koral would likely lose his. And who would get the blame if the
Wehrmacht
also lost its?

P
aris in wartime. Alistair Walsh had seen the City of Light in 1918, too. Then, though, it had been pretty clear that the Kaiser’s troops wouldn’t make it this far. Bombers were only nuisances in those fondly remembered days.

Things were different now, not quite twenty-one years later. Maybe 1914 had felt like this: the sense of the field-gray Juggernaut’s car bearing down on the city, with all the people in it wondering whether to run away or to grab what amusement they could before everything disappeared.

British money went a long way in France. Walsh remembered that from the last time around, and it still seemed true. He’d got buzzed at a bar where the fellow serving drinks—a man no more than a couple of years older than he was—had a patch over his left eye and walked with a limp. “You here before, Tommy?” the Frenchman asked in fair English.

“Oh, yes.” Alistair brushed his wounded leg with one hand. “I caught a packet, too—not so bad as yours, but that’s just bloody luck one way or the other.”

“Yes. We could both be dead,” the bartender agreed, handing him his whiskey and soda. “And you—you have another chance.”

“Right.” Walsh didn’t like thinking about that, however true it was. “So do you, pal, come to that. Damned Germans bomb Paris every chance they get.”

The Frenchman called his eastern neighbors several things unlikely to appear in dictionaries. Walsh hadn’t learned a lot of French in his two stays on the Continent, but what he had learned was of that sort. “You bet,” he said, and slid a shilling across the zinc-topped bar. “Here. Buy yourself one, too.”

“Merci.”
The barman made the silver coin vanish.

“Damn shame about the Eiffel Tower, too,” Walsh added awkwardly.

“When the top part falls off—fell off—it should fall on the government’s head,” the French veteran said. “Then maybe it do some good. After we beat the
Boches
, we build it again.”

“There you go.” Alistair started to suggest that the Germans could pay for it, but he swallowed that. Reparations had been nothing but a farce after the last war. Why expect anything better this time around?

“Drink up,
mon ami,”
the Frenchman said. “You will look for other sport, eh? Night still comes too soon, especially with blackout.”

“Too right it does.” Walsh realized the barman really liked him. Otherwise, the fellow would have tried to keep him in there forever. But the man must have realized he’d do all right from his other customers. Soldiers wearing several different uniforms packed the place. As long as none of them was in German kit…

Walsh had to push through double blackout curtains to get out onto the street. A little light leaked out despite the curtains. A
flic
blew his whistle and shouted something irate. Since Alistair didn’t understand it, he didn’t have to answer. That was how he felt, anyhow. And it was already dark enough to let him fade into the crowd before the copper could get a good look at him.

He knew where he was going, or thought he did. The house was supposed
to be around the corner and a couple of streets up. He figured it would be easy to find even in the dark: places like that always had queues—or, given French carelessness about such things, crowds—of horny soldiers outside waiting their turn for a go with one of the girls.