Last Orders: The War That Came Early (24 page)

Hans-Ulrich could still talk to Sergeant Dieselhorst, and the noncom heard news long before he did himself. Picking a time when no one stood anywhere close, Rudel quietly asked, “What’s the latest from Münster?”

“From where?” Dieselhorst said. “You mean that little town in … was it Bulgaria or Yugoslavia?”

“Bulgaria, I think.” Hans-Ulrich matched dry with dry.

The sergeant rewarded him by hoisting one eyebrow. “Martial law is the last thing I heard. I mean, the whole
Reich
is under martial law, or as near as makes no difference, but this is the real stuff. Curfews, and they won’t just arrest you if you get out of line. They’ll shoot you.”

“That’s … harsh.” Hans-Ulrich had supported the Nazis ever since he’d decided they were the ones to make Germany strong again. Now, for the first time, he started to wonder whether he’d made a mistake. “And how do the, ah, Bulgarians like that?”

Dieselhorst smiled a thin smile. “They’re up in arms—literally, for the people who happen to have any. And I’ve heard they aren’t the only folks in Bulgaria who are. I don’t know that that’s true. Bulgaria’s a long way away, and you can’t always trust the news that comes out of it. But that’s what I hear.”

“Huh.” Rudel didn’t like the way that sounded. “How can we fight a war if the home front falls apart on us? That’s what happened in 1918.”

After coughing a couple of times, Albert Dieselhorst made a small production of lighting a cigarette. The pause let Hans-Ulrich remember what a little boy he’d been in 1918, and that he didn’t really know for himself everything that had gone on then. After said pause, Dieselhorst answered, “You know, if you build a house of cards outside and the breeze blows it over, that’s one thing. But if you build it on the kitchen table and then you knock it down, you’ve got only yourself to blame. Or that’s how it looks at me, anyway.”

He waited. Hans-Ulrich realized he had to say something. “What do you suppose Major Keller would say to that?” he tried.

“Major Keller knocks down houses of cards for the fun of it … sir,” Dieselhorst said. “If the Party had half as many people like Major Keller in it, we’d be twice as well off. That’s how it looks to me, too.”

Rudel opened his mouth. The speech about how, when enemies were everywhere, you needed National Socialist Loyalty Officers jumped to the tip of his tongue. But it didn’t jump off. Foreign foes, yes—you needed to worry about them. When your own people started hating your government, though, how could you be so sure the people were the ones with the problem?

When Hans-Ulrich didn’t come out with that canned speech, Sergeant
Dieselhorst blew a stream of smoke up toward the sky. He didn’t say anything like
You’re learning
or
You’re growing up
. The proof, as the geometry books put it, was left to the student.

Dieselhorst did say, “They would have been smarter not to mess with the bishop.”

Again, Hans-Ulrich kept quiet. This time, it was because he didn’t know what to say. He was no Catholic. He was the son of a Lutheran minister. He had no use for the Pope or his faith. But a Catholic bishop was a clergyman, too. What if the
Gestapo
had come for Pastor Rudel instead?

He had trouble imagining Johannes Rudel saying or doing anything that would make the authorities want to come after him. But if they did, he hoped the people of whichever little Silesian town he happened to be preaching in would be upset enough to try to do something about it.

So he said, “Yes, I guess they would. But we can’t change any of that. All we can do is bomb the French and the English so they don’t break through and invade the
Vaterland
.”

“Well, you’re right about that,” Dieselhorst said. “It’s bad when politics comes to the
Luftwaffe
, and it’s bad when the
Luftwaffe
gets into politics.” He ground out the cigarette under his boot heel. “And if we don’t get more fighter support, we won’t keep flying against the enemy much longer.”

Hans-Ulrich grunted. The noncom was dead right about that. Without 109s or 190s flying top cover, Stukas that ventured far past the front were asking to get shot down. When the war was new, the
Luftwaffe
had more fighters and better fighters than the RAF or the
Armée de l’Air
. German fighters were still as good as any the Western democracies made, and better than the ones they bought from America. But there weren’t enough of them here.

“Too many planes fighting the Russians,” Rudel said. “Too many trying to keep the enemy from knocking our cities flat, too.”

“I know,” Sergeant Dieselhorst replied with what sounded like exaggerated patience. “You would have hoped the people who got us into this war wondered whether this would happen when they told us to start shooting.”

“They thought we’d win in a hurry,” Hans-Ulrich said.

“Yes, yes.” Sure enough, the sergeant’s patience showed more and more. “Winning in a hurry was Plan A. But they should have had Plan B ready ahead of time in case we didn’t, and Plan C in case something funny happened, and Plan D in case something stupid happened, and … and on and on. That’s why God, or maybe the Devil, made the General Staff,
nicht wahr
?”

“I don’t think either one of Them would want to get blamed for it,” Hans-Ulrich answered.

He surprised a laugh out of Sergeant Dieselhorst, which wasn’t something he managed every day. “There you go!” Dieselhorst said. “You know, you can be dangerous if you give yourself half a chance.”

“Who, me?” Rudel did his best to assume a look of wide-eyed innocence. For a minister’s son, the look came naturally. The sergeant’s snort confirmed that.

It started to rain then. That was another reason they weren’t flying. The clouds in Belgium blew right off the ocean. When it was cloudy here, the ceiling was almost always low. You didn’t want to go up in a dive-bomber when you might dive below the ceiling to drop your load and then not have time to pull up before you hit the ground.

The fellows in the level bombers didn’t fret about such things. They flew above the clouds, not below them. They could bomb in any weather. But they were none too accurate even when they could see what they were aiming at. When they couldn’t … Well, the bombs were bound to come down on something or other.

Up ahead of the airstrip, German guns started firing on the enemy positions facing them. Before long, French guns answered. Chances were none of the men serving the 105s could see their target, either. That didn’t mean dropping shells on it wouldn’t hurt the other side. Stretcher-bearers and ambulances would carry wounded men back to aid stations.

Gravediggers would be busy, too. Hans-Ulrich seldom thought about such things. When you were flying, you were too busy to worry about them. Only at times like this, when you couldn’t go up, did they invade your mind.

It was also only at times like this that you got the chance to think about politics. And that was bound to be just as well.

Alistair Walsh had found one thing almost unchanged from the last war to this one. Wherever the front was in France or Belgium,
estaminets
would spring up right behind it. They’d sell you bad wine and watery beer, fried potatoes, fried eggs, and, if you were brave enough, fried sausages.

Somebody’d said you never wanted to know what went into politics or sausages. Was that Bismarck? Walsh thought so. The mustached old bugger might have been a Fritz, but he knew what he was talking about just the same. And you especially didn’t want to know what went into sausages you bought at an
estaminet
within earshot of the guns.

Which didn’t mean Walsh hadn’t ordered a couple of them with his chips and his pint. Horse? Cat? Hedgehog? Ground-up inner tube? There was enough pepper and garlic mixed up with everything else to keep you from noticing how rank the meat (or possibly rubber) was.

He thought so, anyhow. A corporal sitting at the table next to his took a bite and pulled a face. “I think the landlord chopped up his granny and stuck her in here, like in the penny dreadfuls back when,” the fellow said.

Walsh donned a contemplative look as he ate some more off his plate. “Not dry enough for granny,” he said after he swallowed. “Maybe it’s his maiden aunt.”

“If she tastes like this, no bloody wonder she died a maiden,” the corporal answered. He swigged from a glass of wine and grimaced again. “And this here is grape juice and vinegar.”

“It could be worse,” Walsh said. “The Army could be feeding us.” The bloke with two stripes on his sleeve had no comeback to that. Walsh added, “I bet it’s worse on the German side of the line, too. The
estaminets
there likely dish up turnip sausages and sawdust chips.”

“How do you know these ain’t?” the corporal asked, which was a better question than Walsh wished it were.

This wasn’t one of those
estaminets
with pretty barmaids, or even homely barmaids, available
pour l’amour ou pour le sport
. The landlord’s two strapping sons brought food and drink and took away dirty dishes. They weren’t in uniform. They were ready to fight for their country’s liberation to the last drop of English blood.

Well, it could have been worse. They weren’t fighting in Hitler’s Walloon Legion, either. The Fascist Belgians fought harder than the Germans did. They knew what the Allies would probably do to them if they got captured, so they made sure they didn’t.

With a sigh, Walsh set a shilling and a little silver threepence on the table, grabbed his greatcoat, and walked out. English coins were valuable all out of proportion to the official rate of exchange. For all the veteran knew, the Belgians melted them down and made ingots out of them. He didn’t care, as long as he could cheaply buy whatever he needed.

He shrugged on the greatcoat before he’d gone more than a few steps back toward the line. The wind blew out of the north, and warned that winter was on the way. For good measure, he pulled a khaki wool muffler out of his pocket. It was scratchy as all get-out—the Army worried as little about things like comfort as it could get away with—but it kept his neck warm.

Only a few trees still stood. As in the last war, hard fighting had smashed most of them to matchsticks and toothpicks. Leaves on the survivors were going, or had mostly gone, yellow. That sharp wind would soon blow off the ones that still clung to the branches.

Walsh hated bare-branched trees. Those skinny sticks thrusting up toward the sky put him in mind of bones with the flesh rotted off them sticking up from hasty, badly dug graves. You saw things like that after artillery tore up one of those burial plots. Walsh wasn’t the kind to worry about unquiet ghosts, but he also saw those bones in his nightmares.

There was one stretch of ground on the way up to his position that the Germans could get a glimpse of. If they saw you, they’d fire a burst from one of their machine guns. The range was extreme. No one bullet was likely to hit you. That was why they fired the burst—they’d spend a dozen bullets, or a couple of dozen, in hopes of the hit.

When Walsh came to the couple of hundred yards where he might be in danger, he got down on his hands and knees and crawled so the
Feldgrau
sons of bitches wouldn’t spot him. A couple of men were walking the other way. They didn’t laugh at him—they did the same thing. The Fritzes were too good at hurting you even when you didn’t give them any extra chances.

He sighed when he traveled up the zigzag communications trenches to the front line. The Germans had a better chance of hurting him up here, of course. But it was also a very familiar place. He’d spent a lot of time in trenches like this, through two wars and in training stints between them. He knew how to make himself at home, or as much at home as anyone could be in this low-rent district of hell.

At least it hadn’t rained for a few days. The trenches were muddy. You couldn’t get away from mud during a war, any more than you could get away from blood. But there weren’t any reeking puddles or pools; the water had soaked into the ground. That made a difference. You hated to roll into a puddle in your sleep and soak yourself. The stench wasn’t so bad after things had dried out a little, either.

He nodded to Jack Scholes, who took to this life the way any tough little creature would. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“Not bloody much,” Scholes said. “Germans must ’ave packed it in, loike.”

“And then you wake up!” Walsh exclaimed. “That’ll be the day. Chances are they’re plotting something instead. Do you believe anything different, even for a minute?”

“Believe it? Nar.” The young cockney shook his head. “But Oi can ’ope, roight, loike anybody else?”

“Should never take hope away from anyone,” Walsh said, more seriously than he’d expected to. “Just don’t get your hopes up too high for no reason, or they’ll come crashing down, and you with ’em.”

“That’s the times when the Fritzes got tanks wiv ’em,” Scholes said shrewdly. “Ain’t seen none. Ain’t ’eard none, neither.”

“Well, good,” Walsh said. It wasn’t that he wanted the Germans to strike somewhere else along the line. He didn’t wish that on any of his countrymen. He didn’t even wish it on the French, not unless some froggy had gone out of his way to provoke him.

He wished the Germans would just turn around and go home. He was ready to follow them till they crossed over the border between Holland and their own country. He was ready to stop there, too, and wave good-bye as they vanished back inside Hunland. And as long as they stayed there and didn’t bother anybody else, he was ready to let them stay there and go to hell in their own way.

The trouble with them, of course, was that they had the nasty habit of not wanting to stay there. Every so often, they burst out like locusts and tried to send everybody else to hell their way. They’d almost brought it off twice now. If they went back into Hunland now, would they decide third time was the charm along about, oh, 1962?

If they did, he wouldn’t be the one who had to drive them back. He wouldn’t be a Chelsea pensioner by then, one of the ancient, doddering soldiers who sometimes went to the football club’s matches, but he wouldn’t be ready to pick up a Lee-Enfield or even a Sten gun like the one he had now and go charging across a weedy field whilst machine-gun bullets cracked past him.