Hitler's War (5 page)

Shrieks filled the air as darkness descended. She turned around and went the other way, against the confused tide. If the lights weren’t working, the goddamn elevator wouldn’t, either. The stairs were…that way.

Peggy liked to think she looked ten years younger than her forty-five. She hadn’t put on weight, and peroxide kept her hair about the same color it had always been. But, in spite of her misplaced optimism the night before, she had a coldly practical streak. When she was Peggy Eubank, growing up a devil of a long way from the Main Line, her mother told her, “Kid, you’re eleven going on twenty-one.” If Mom had been half as smart as she thought she was, she would’ve been twice as smart as she really was. But she’d hit that nail right on the head.

And so—the stairs. Peggy found the door as much by Braille as any other way. The stairwell wasn’t very light, either. Somebody bumped into her and said,
“Excusez-moi.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Peggy said, and then,
“C’est la guerre.”
And wasn’t that the sad and sorry truth?

Gray early-morning light spilled out of the door that led to the lobby. Three flights of stairs had made Peggy’s feet start to hurt, but more broken glass crunched under her soles. She would hurt worse if she took off the heels.

The lobby looked like hell, and smelled pretty bad, too. It reminded her of a butcher’s shop with a whole bunch of fresh meat. Some of this meat came in trousers and dresses and nightclothes, though. Stewards and bellhops—they had different titles here, but basically the same jobs—were doing what they could to help the wounded. One of them was noisily sick on the floor, which only made the stink worse.

And, in what looked at first like a scene from a Three Stooges tworeeler, a couple of men near the front desk were punching and kicking each other and poking each other in the eye. Even with more bombs going off not terribly far away, they went at it hammer and tongs. But one of them swore in Czech, the other in guttural German. The big war had started, and so had their own little private one.

“Mon Dieu!”
exclaimed a man standing next to Peggy. His voice said he was the fellow who’d bumped her on the stairs.
“C’est—”
He broke off, at a loss for words.

“It’s hell on wheels,” Peggy said. “You understand?
Comprenez?”

“Yes. But what am I to do?” He spoke good British English. “I was for two years a prisoner in the last war. If the
Boches
come here, they will intern me again, as an enemy alien. I do not wish this at all.”

If
the Germans came to Marianske Lazne? No,
when
they came. The border wasn’t more than a long spit to the west. Peggy had her passport. The United States was neutral. The Nazis would treat her better than that poor Frenchman…if they or the Czechs didn’t blow her to the moon while they were bashing each other over the head. Right this minute, that looked like a pretty big if.

“Maybe you can get a train out of town if you hustle,” she said.

“It could be,
Mademoiselle,”
he said, not noticing the ring on her finger. Herb was still in Philadelphia. He’d been set to join her in Paris in a couple of weeks. Well,
that
wouldn’t happen now. All kinds of things wouldn’t happen, and all kinds of worse ones would. The man went on, “Will you accompany me? This is no more—no longer—a good place to be.”

He was dead right—no, live right—about that. “Let’s go,” Peggy said.

As soon as she got her first look at a bomb crater, she wasn’t sure outside was the best place to be. Marianske Lazne sat in a valley with pines and firs all around. The hotels and other buildings were mostly Austro-Hungarian leftovers from before the war
(before the last war
, she thought). They had more architectural gingerbread than the wicked witch’s house in the Grimm fairy tale.

Right now, Peggy was trapped in a grim fairy tale of her own. Some of those buildings had chunks bitten out of them. Several were burning. Wounded people, bodies, and pieces of bodies lay in the streets. And
everybody who wasn’t wounded or blown to bits seemed to be running toward the train stations.

All kinds of people took the waters here. Some were ordinary Czechs and Slovaks. Some were Germans. Some came from other European countries. Peggy spotted half a dozen Jews in long black coats and wide-brimmed black hats. If the Frenchman beside her didn’t want to deal with the Germans, they
really
didn’t want to—and who could blame them?

There was a shriek in the air, getting louder by the moment. The Frenchman knocked her down and lay flat on top of her. She started to scream. Then more explosions shook Marianske Lazne, and she realized he hadn’t gone mad and wasn’t trying to assault her right out in the middle of the street.

“Artillery!” he bawled in her ear. “When you hear that sound, for God’s sake
get down!”

Peggy did scream then, but on a note different from the one she might have used a moment earlier. Through the shell bursts she heard more shrieks, men’s and women’s and Lord only knew whose. Something warm and wet and sticky splashed her hand. She looked at it. It was blood—not hers, or she didn’t think so. With a little disgusted cry, she wiped it off her robe. No, not hers: no more welled out.

More and more shells landed on and around Marianske Lazne. How many guns did the Germans have, anyway? “Make it stop!” she yelled to the Frenchman. “Jesus, make it stop!”

“I wish I could,
Mademoiselle,”
he replied.

Peggy heard guns going off, too, in the woods around the spas. The Czechs were making a fight of it, anyhow, or trying to. But Marianske Lazne was within artillery range of the border, as she knew much, much too well. How long could this little country hold off Hitler’s armored legions?

After what seemed forever, the bombardment eased. Peggy raised
her head and looked around. She wished she hadn’t. Her husband had fought in the Great War. He’d never talked much about what he’d done and what he’d seen. If it was anything like this…Peggy understood why not. She would spend the rest of her life wishing she could forget what artillery did to the civilians in Marianske Lazne. She remembered one thing Herb had said, talking to someone else who’d seen the elephant: “Artillery—that’s the killer.” Jesus, he wasn’t kidding.

As politely as she could, she tapped the Frenchman on top of her on the shoulder. “Could you move, please? You’re squashing me.” He had to weigh close to 200 pounds, and there was nothing between her and the sidewalk but two layers of silk.

“I do apologize,” he said, and rolled to one side. “This is…very bad. Very, very bad. But if you hear that sound in the air, you must get down at once, without hesitation. It is your best chance to save yourself.”

“God forbid I ever hear it again,” Peggy said. The Frenchman crossed himself.

No trains went out. No trains came in. Maybe the Germans had bombed the tracks. Maybe Czechoslovakia was using the railroads to haul troops around. Peggy saw no dun-colored Czech uniforms in town. Every so often, though, the guns in the woods boomed. What kind of forts lay between the border and Marianske Lazne? How long would the Germans take to break through them. Two good questions. Peggy had no good answers.

The town was full of clinics. They weren’t equipped for carnage like this, but they did their best. Unhurt people did what they could for the wounded. Peggy carried stretcher after stretcher. She got more blood on her robe, but hardly noticed. The hotels set out the usual massive spread of cold cuts for breakfast. She ate…somewhere.

About ten o’clock, the mist retreated and a wan sun came out. Airplane motors throbbed overhead. Peggy looked up. She’d never seen anything like those ungainly vulture-winged planes before. One after another, they peeled off in dives. It was fascinating to watch. But the
shrieks they let out as they dove reminded her of incoming artillery. She got down, as the polite but portly Frenchman had said she should.

People gave her funny looks—for a few seconds, till the first bomb went off and the vulture-winged planes started machine-gunning the town as they zoomed away.

Half a dozen Czech biplane fighters showed up then. They looked like last year’s models next to the vulture-winged jobs with the swastikas on their tails, but they shot down two of them. Peggy wasn’t the only one cheering her head off.

She went on lugging stretchers till her feet started to bleed. Somebody gave her a pair of flats. They were too big, but still an improvement. She moved more casualties, and more, and more yet.

By midafternoon, she heard small-arms fire off to the west. It kept getting closer. She feared she knew what that meant: the Germans were pushing the Czechs back. She spotted more of the Nazi dive-bombers. Now that they’d delivered their terror message, they were doing serious work, pounding Czech positions.

The hotels kept putting out food. It was about all they could do. One displayed a sign in several languages:
WE HAVE LOCKED UP OUR GERMANS.
That was brave. It might also have been stupid. If the Nazis rolled into town, they wouldn’t be happy.

When
the Nazis rolled in, Peggy feared. That evening, she got a blanket and a chair and counted herself lucky. Sleep wouldn’t come, no matter how exhausted she was. She would have looked to play more bridge, but fireplace and candles didn’t give enough light. The electricity stayed off. She sat there and listened to the advancing gunfire.

About midnight, Czech soldiers fell back through Marianske Lazne. One of them, dirty, weary, harried—peered into the hotel. He shook his head and walked on. The Czechs didn’t try to fight in the town. Peggy supposed she should have been grateful to them for not causing more civilian casualties. She hoped it wouldn’t hurt their defense.

Rattling, clanking German vehicles entered Marianske Lazne at
3:17, Czech cuckoo-clock time. Peggy went out to look. She almost got shot. A peremptory wave from a tough-looking, black-uniformed man in a tank sent her reeling back into the hotel.
Under new management
, she thought, and finally started to cry.

LUC HARCOURT DIDN’T LIKE SERGEANT DEMANGE
. What private in his right mind
did
like his sergeant? Demange was little and skinny and tough, with a tongue sharper than a bayonet. He looked unwontedly serious now as he gathered his squad together. Without preamble, he said, “The French Republic is at war with Germany.”

Along with the rest of the men, Luc stared at the sergeant. He was just a conscript himself. All he’d ever wanted to do was serve his time and get out. The first thing he found out when he put on the uniform and the Adrian helmet was that nobody gave a damn about what he wanted.

Demange paused to light a Gitane. He even smoked like a tough guy, with the cigarette hanging down from the corner of his mouth. “England is with us,” he said. “And the Russians have declared war on Germany, too.”

“Oh, joy,” Paul Renouvin said. He wasn’t a bad guy, but he’d been at a university somewhere before the draft got him, and he liked showing off how much he knew. “That would matter a lot more if Russia bordered Germany. Or even Czechoslovakia.”

Sergeant Demange looked as if he wanted to spit in Renouvin’s eye. He contented himself with blowing smoke in the college kid’s face. “Shut up, punk,” he rasped. “The point is, we’ve got allies, dammit. So when we march into Germany, it’s not like we’re marching in all by ourselves.”

We?
Luc wondered.
We as in France, or we as in this squad?
He wanted to know—it was his neck, after all. But he didn’t ask. One way or the other, he figured he’d find out pretty damn quick.

And he did. “We move out in half an hour,” the sergeant said. “Remember, we’re doing this for the poor goddamn Czechs.” He sounded like a guy telling his girl they’d be doing it for love. Who cared why? They’d be doing it.

“What happens if the
Boches
shoot at us?” somebody asked.

“Well, we’re supposed to be cautious,” Demange said. “But we’re supposed to move forward, too, so we will. And we’ll shoot back, by God.”

“My father did this in 1914,” Luc said. “Red kepi, blue tunic, red trousers—there are photos at home. Not color photos, of course, but you know what the colors were.” Several of the other soldiers nodded.

So did Sergeant Demange. “They were targets, that’s what,” he said. “I did it myself in 1918. We wore horizon-blue by then. Not as good as khaki”—he tapped his sleeve—“but Christ, better than red. How many times your old man get wounded?”

“Twice,” Luc answered, not without pride.

“Sounds about right. He was luckier than a lot, that’s for goddamn sure.” Demange glanced at his watch. “Twenty minutes now. If we aren’t marching at 0630 on the dot, I’ll be in trouble. And if I’m in trouble, you sorry assholes are in
big
trouble.”

Luc wondered why 0630 was so sacred. Would the war be lost if they started five minutes late? As far as Czechoslovakia was concerned, they were starting three days late. The Czechs said they were still fighting hard. The Germans claimed enormous victories. Somebody was lying. Maybe two somebodies were.

The border bulged south below Saarbrücken. At 0630 on the dot—Sergeant Demange and his ilk knew how to get what they wanted—French soldiers started moving into the bulge. A few French guns fired at the German positions ahead. A few German guns shot back. Both sides seemed halfhearted. Lou had been through much scarier drills.

Fields on the German side of the border looked—surprise!—just
like fields on the French side. The only way Luc could be sure he’d crossed into Germany was by looking over at a German frontier post, abandoned now, that lay athwart a two-lane macadam road a few hundred meters off to the southeast.

Soldiers from another company poked through the frontier station as if they’d just occupied Berlin. Then, without warning, something over there went
boom!
Sergeant Demange hit the dirt. For a moment, Luc thought he’d been hurt. But then he got up and brushed wheat stubble off himself, altogether unselfconscious. “You hear a noise like that, you better get flat,” he remarked. “I bet those Nazi cocksuckers booby-trapped the station.”