Last Orders: The War That Came Early (27 page)

“Sí.”
Luis nodded. “
Señor
Carroll, he was a good comrade.”

“The best,” Chaim said. He and Mike had been in Spain together since not long after the civil war broke out. They’d saved each other’s skins more times than anybody could count. Chaim remembered his buddy every time he did anything with his smashed and much-repaired
left hand. Sometimes remembering was all you had left. Too goddamn often, in fact.

“Only thing we can do now is pay back the cocksuckers,” Luis said. “Pay them back for what they do to
Señor
Mike, pay them back for what they do to the whole country. We pay them plenty.”

Through long stretches of the fighting here, neither Republicans nor Nationalists had bothered taking prisoners. Spaniards were in terrible earnest when they fought. They weren’t always good at it, but sincerity and ferocity did duty for skill. Maybe reeducation camps were a mercy by comparison. On the other hand, maybe they weren’t.

Behind the smashed truck were two hastily dug graves. One of them had a cross made from two boards nailed together at right angles. Only a bayoneted rifle thrust into the ground with a helmet on the stock marked the other. That surprised Chaim. They talked about people who were more royal than the king. Well, the Nationalists were more Catholic, or more ostentatiously Catholic, than the Pope.

Before too long, Chaim and the rest of the advancing Republicans got into hill country their artillery had hardly touched. He gave the neat, prosperous-looking farmhouses fishy stares. Anybody could hide in places like that, and you wouldn’t know it till he started shooting at you from a window or something.

Other men saw the problem, too. They solved it with revolutionary directness: they torched farmhouses and barns and even chicken coops. Farmers and their wives and children stared with terrible eyes as smoke and fire rose from their homes.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Chaim asked a Spaniard with a torch. “You’ll make the people hate you.”

“Screw the people in these parts,” the Republican answered, scowling. “They’re all Fascist sympathizers, anyhow. Who do you think they’ve been selling their produce to?”

“But it will all be one country—your country—again pretty soon, I hope,” Chaim said. “Shouldn’t you make peace with somebody who wasn’t actually trying to kill you?”

All he got was a nastier scowl from the other man. “You sound like a counterrevolutionary,” the fellow said suspiciously.

“Oh,
fuck
you.” Chaim held up his left hand. Wounds and surgical
scars made it enough of a twisted horror to widen the Spaniard’s eyes no matter how hard he tried to hold his face straight. Chaim went on, “When you’ve got a souvenir like this, you can bitch about my ideology. Till then, just shut up, you hear?”

In the Republic, everybody said
tu
to everybody else all the time. The familiar
you
was egalitarian.
Usted
, the formal word, signaled class discrimination and pro-Fascist politics. But
tu
was also the word you used with dogs, with children, with servants, and with people you wanted to insult. Chaim used it here in the last sense. It was all in the tone of voice. He might not have a great handle on Spanish grammar, but insult he could handle.

The Spaniard flushed. He angrily turned away from Chaim. That didn’t stop him from tossing the torch into a pile of hay next to the barn here. The hay began to burn. Before long, so did the barn. If the farmer didn’t like it, what could he do? Count himself lucky the men from the Republic hadn’t shot him and gang-raped his wife.

Or he could find a hatchet, wait in the trees, and kill the next Republican soldier who came by. Chaim wouldn’t have done that, or he didn’t think he would. He came from a long line of people who’d survived pogrom after pogrom without getting their own back … till the Russian Revolution, anyhow. And his folks were in the States by then. Spaniards were different. They took vengeance seriously, and often killed without calculating cost.

He was sure the Spanish Republic was worth fighting for, worth dying for. He never would have come here if he weren’t. Whether it would be worth living in after victory came, that didn’t seem so clear. But he had an advantage over the Spaniards. If he didn’t like it, he could go home. They already
were
home, and stuck with whatever the Republic dished out to them.

Machine guns chattered. Rifles yelled. Alistair Walsh nerved himself to dash around a stone fence taller than a man. The English had pushed forward a couple of hundred yards, into a Belgian village. By the way things worked these days, that was good progress. Anything could be waiting on the far side of that fence, though. Anything at all.

And
anything
, around here, would include men in field-gray uniforms and coal-scuttle helmets. They would have Mausers and Schmeissers and MG-42s. Well, no help for it. This was one of those times that made him wish he were back in Wales, hundreds of feet underground, grubbing away at a coal seam with a pick.

“Ready, boys?” he asked the soldiers who huddled in a smashed-up house with him. Nobody said no. It was too late for that, however much they might wish it weren’t.

He held a Mills bomb in his right hand. He’d already pulled the grenade’s pin. He kept his thumb on the detonator. They told you not to do that—you could ruin yourself by mistake. But they weren’t here, and he was. All kinds of rules went out the window in wartime.

“Let’s go, then,” he said. He sprinted, all hunched over, to the end of that wall. He chucked the Mills bomb around behind it without showing his hand for more than a split second. As soon as the bomb burst, he sprayed the other side with bullets fired blindly from his Sten gun. That only added to the guttural cries there.

He and his men dashed around the wall then, firing as they did. Several Germans were down. Others gaped in horrified amazement.
“Hände hoch!”
Walsh yelled. The Master Race didn’t always want to fight to the death.

Sure enough, these Fritzes had had enough and then some. They threw away their weapons and raised their hands. Some of them shouted
“Kamerad!”
And one added “We surrender!” in excellent English.

That made things easier. Walsh’s German was limited to the phrases you needed to tell prisoners what to do, and he rarely understood what the Germans answered. So he was smiling as he said, “Tell ’em we won’t hurt ’em if they do what we tell ’em.”

The German spoke in his own language. Then he asked, “May we tend to our wounded, please?”

“Right. Go ahead. Then we’ll take you back,” Walsh said. The Germans dusted antiseptic powder on wounds and bandaged them. They gave a badly hit man one morphine shot, and then another. Walsh wasn’t sure he’d make it. If they let him die comfortably, it was the last and not the smallest favor they could do for him.

“I am glad to be out of the fighting,” said the man who spoke English. He had a cut on the back of one hand and another on his cheek from grenade fragments. Neither was much worse than a scratch. He’d been lucky.

“Bet you are,” Walsh said with rough sympathy. “Want a fag?” He held out his packet of Navy Cuts.

“Danke schön,”
the German said. “I am Eberhard Rothmann. I am a
Gefreiter
. My pay number is—” He rattled it off. After lighting the cigarette, he went on, “I am very glad to be away from this. Twice now in twenty-five years our leaders have taken us into losing wars.”

“So why did you Germans go, then?” Walsh asked. The lads in Field Intelligence would be happy to get their hands on this bird. He sang like a canary.

“Because they told us what to do, first the Kaiser and then the
Führer
, and then we did it,” Rothmann said. “And look what we have for doing it.” He gestured at his dead and injured countrymen. “But now, from what I hear, we have had a bellyful of this stupidness.”

One of the other Germans must also have spoken English, or at least understood it. He said something sharp in German. Eberhard Rothmann answered in the same tongue. Then he went back to English.

“What I say is so, even if it likes Klaus not,” he said. “The people, they have had enough of foolishness.”

“He is liar!” Klaus said. His English had a much thicker accent than Rothmann’s.

Walsh cared nothing about that. He told off Jack Scholes and a couple of other men. “Don’t let anything happen to them,” he said. “Don’t shoot them unless they run or they try to jump you. Get their wounded to an aid station. Got all that?”

“Roight, Staff,” Scholes said impatiently. He gestured with his bayoneted Lee-Enfield. “Come on, you filthy buggers. ’Op it, loik.”

Hop it they did. Walsh and the remaining Englishmen warily pushed forward. He peered around the smashed, charred carcass of a German armored car, then hastily jerked his head back. “There’s a Tiger a hundred yards down the path,” he whispered. “Stay low, for Christ’s sake.”

No one had seen him peek out. If the Tiger crew or the other Fritzes who were bound to be close by the monster realized the Tommies were so close, exterminating him and his pals wouldn’t take long.

“Shall we send ’em a flying ’ard-on?” one of the men asked. The bazooka’s phallic rockets hadn’t needed long to get a dirty name pasted to them.

But Walsh shook his head. “He’s front end-on to us,” he said. “It won’t get through his armor.” The bazooka was a better antitank weapon than anything the infantry had had up to now. It beat the stuffing out of the PIAT. It had its limitations, though. A Tiger’s thick frontal armor was more than it could handle.

“What do you want to do, then?” the soldier asked—a reasonable enough question.

“Wait,” Walsh answered. “Let’s see what the Germans have in mind. If they pull out on their own, we don’t have to drive them out.” They wouldn’t kill any enemy soldiers that way. On the other hand, the Germans wouldn’t find the chance to kill any of them, either. Walsh approved of not getting killed. He wasn’t even especially keen on getting wounded. He’d done it before, and found it overrated.

If the Germans decided to come forward again … That might not be very enjoyable. He flattened himself out, wiggled forward, and looked ahead from under the dead armored car. He didn’t see any approaching jackboots. Not seeing them suited him fine.

Dusk began to descend. The Tiger’s engine noise got louder. Walsh’s heart leaped into his mouth. The tank could squash the armored car and him with it and never break a sweat.

But why would it bother? A couple of rounds of HE and a burst or two from the machine guns would finish him with ease, thank you kindly.

He risked another peep around the armored car’s mudguard. The Tiger was backing up—backing away, in other words. The tank commander stood head and shoulders out of the cupola so he could see where he was going. Two or three German foot soldiers standing nearby waved and pointed to steer him away from obstacles. Walsh wondered why they bothered. What was a Tiger made for, if not for grinding obstacles under its tracks?

Sure as hell, its retreating rear end took out the corner of a house. The house fell in on itself. The Tiger, unfazed, backed over and through the wreckage. The infantrymen pulled back with it.

“Bugger me blind,” Walsh said as he pulled his head in once more. “I think it’ll be all right—till tomorrow, anyway.”

He had ration tins in pouches on his belt. The first one he grabbed was steak and kidney pie, without a doubt the best ration the Army made. One of the men carried a cooker that burned methylated spirit with an all but invisible flame. They brewed tea. Life might not be ideal, but it looked a lot better after grub and char.

Snow came later in the Ukraine than it did in Russia proper, but come it did. Ivan Kuchkov and his men put on white snow smocks and whitewashed their helmets. The smocks would get dirty soon enough. Well, so would the snow. They’d stay camouflaged for a while.

Sasha Davidov was putting on a fresh coat of whitewash when Ivan came up to him. The skinny little Jew looked up before Ivan got very close. You couldn’t sneak up on him. Nobody could—certainly not Ivan, and he was pretty good at sneaking. Those hair-trigger nerves made Sasha such a good point man.

“What do you need, Comrade Sergeant?” he asked.

“Not a fucking thing, not right now,” Ivan answered. “Tomorrow … Tomorrow I hear we get some tanks.”

Davidov nodded. “Yes, I heard that, too.” With his beaky nose, he looked like a sparrow—a sparrow that badly needed a shave, but even so.

“Did you? I just now found out, so fuck your mother,” Kuchkov said without heat. “Who told you? One of your clipcock buddies?”

“You keep your ears open, you hear things,” Davidov said, a
yes
that wasn’t a yes.

“You keep your mouth open, somebody’ll stick a dick in it,” Kuchkov said. Then he got back to the business at hand: “So we’ll be going forward again.”

“Seems pretty likely,” Davidov agreed.

“Yeah. It does. So you take your sorry kike ass out before sunup
and see what kind of cunts we’ve got in front of us,” Ivan told him. “The more we know, the better the chances we fuck them and they don’t fuck us.”

“I’ll do it, Comrade Sergeant,” the Jew said. “But I’m pretty sure they’ll be Germans.”

Ivan was pretty sure of the same thing. “Goddamn Hitlerite dickheads,” he said in disgust. “Always those Nazi pricks. Never the Hungarians any more. Never the shitass Romanians and their stinking cornmeal mush.” His scowl made him even uglier than he was already. “And I fucking know why, too.”

“Because there are more Germans—and a lot more front-line Germans—than anybody else?” Davidov was a rational, sensible man. Except for being a hell of a good scout, he was wasted in the field. He should have gone back to Stavka and helped the generals decide how to move armies around.

Of course, rational and sensible didn’t necessarily mean right. Ivan laughed a nasty laugh. “No! Shit, no! That doesn’t have one single fuck to do with it. The NKVD cunts, they’ve got it in for us. They didn’t throw our sorry asses in a penal battalion after Vitya plugged the prick of a
politruk
. They didn’t bother. Keep sending us up against Hitler’s bitches for a while and we get used up any which way, know what I mean?”