Last Orders: The War That Came Early (34 page)

But things weren’t so simple here as they had been in fleabitten Russian villages. These people weren’t Ivans. They were as German as he was. And, while shooting them wouldn’t have bothered him one bit, the idea plainly did bother a lot of soldiers.

“We put on the uniform to protect these people,” grumbled a private named Bruno Gadermann. “We didn’t put it on to shoot them down like dogs or Russians.”

“We put on the uniform to protect the state, the
Grossdeutsches Reich
,” Baatz explained. “That’s what we swore our oath to the
Führer
to do. Sure, we have to fight against our foreign enemies. But we have to fight against treason at home, too. Treason is what ruined the
Reich
in 1918—the stab in the back.”

He believed what he said. He was too young to remember those days himself, but that was what people had said ever since he started noticing what people said. Adolf Hitler said it. The National Socialist Party—to which Arno was proud to belong—said it: thundered it, even. Why wouldn’t he believe it, then?

Not everybody did, not quite. Adam Pfaff stirred when he spoke of the stab in the back. Pfaff’s politics had always been suspect, at least as far as Arno Baatz was concerned. But the
Obergefreiter
only stirred. You couldn’t gig a man for that. He might have had an itch or something. Baatz didn’t believe it for a minute, but an officer, even the loyalty officer, would want more in the way of proof than he could give.

“It doesn’t seem right, that’s all,” Gadermann said.

“Following your superiors’ orders doesn’t seem right?” Arno asked, his voice ominously calm.

He was disappointed when Gadermann saw the rapids ahead before he crashed into the rocks and turned over. “I didn’t mean that, Corporal,” the soldier answered quickly.

“Well, what did you mean, then?”

“Nothing, Corporal. I didn’t mean anything.” Gadermann made a production of charging his pipe with tobacco, tamping it down, and lighting it. Baatz thought pipes looked faggy and the stuff guys smoked in them smelled foul, but they weren’t against regulations or anything.

Questioning your superiors’ authority was. The National Socialist Loyalty Officer would be very interested to hear about it. What happened to Bruno Gadermann after that wouldn’t be pretty. Unlike Pfaff, he didn’t know when to keep his big trap shut.

On the other hand, he’d probably be scared enough to shut up and do as he was told from now on. If he disappeared, the rest of the men in the squad would understand why. That might scare them, too. Or it might make them sympathize with Gadermann and with the rebels in Münster, and leave them unreliable when they were needed most.

If you couldn’t count on the men you led … If you couldn’t count on them, you were screwed. Your country was screwed. After the stab in the back, the Kaiser couldn’t count on his men to keep order any more. And that was why the Kaiser—well, it would be his son now, wouldn’t it?—wasn’t running Germany any more. So it seemed to Arno, anyhow.

He glanced over at Adam Pfaff again. Pfaff didn’t say boo. He was too sly a barracks lawyer to lay his neck on the chopping block.
What a shame
, Arno thought. Pfaff was good enough in the field. Baatz still wished he weren’t stuck with a troublemaker like him.

The squad moved out again the next morning to check people’s papers and generally keep a lid on things. As they tramped toward the couple of blocks they could call their own, Pfaff remarked, “Boy, the RAF has knocked the snot out of this place, hasn’t it? You don’t see ruins like this farther east.”

Baatz wanted to come down on him for that. It sounded too much like defeatism. But how could he, when every word was the plain and simple truth? Münster
had
been bombed halfway back to the Stone Age, and you
didn’t
see so much damage where enemy bombers had to fly farther to strike.

Then Bruno Gadermann said, “No wonder people around here aren’t happy with the government. I wouldn’t be, either, if it let me get clobbered like this.”

“That will be enough of that, Gadermann,” Arno snapped. He rounded on Adam Pfaff. “You see what you’re doing? You’re encouraging him to think disloyal thoughts. That’s a military offense.”

“It would be if I were doing it,” Pfaff said. “But you’re really reaching today, aren’t you? If I bitched about the weather and then Bruno complained it was raining, too, you’d blame that on me.”

“The weather is fine today,” Baatz said. And it was—it was chilly, only a degree or two one side or the other of freezing, but the sun was out and just a few clouds scudded across the sky.

He waited for Pfaff to accuse him of missing the point on purpose (which he was) or of being an idiot. Either way, he could jump on the
Obergefreiter
’s corns. But Pfaff kept quiet. How were you supposed to hang a man when he wouldn’t give you any rope?

A labor gang cleared rubble from the streets with push brooms and spades. Several of the men in it wore the yellow Star of David. One of them, a gray-haired little guy with a limp, came to attention when the
Wehrmacht
troops tramped by.

“Look at the sheeny, pretending to be a soldier,” Arno said scornfully.

“I bet he was, in the last war. He’s got the look,” Adam Pfaff said. “They took Jews then. They took everything that could walk on two legs and wasn’t a chicken.” He chuckled. “The soldiers took all the chickens.”

“Funny. Funny like a truss,” Baatz said. “Even if they did stick a uniform on him, odds are he found some cushy slot away from the trenches, the way kikes always like to do.”

“Where’d he hurt his leg, then? Catching a packet’s the easiest way to do that,” Pfaff replied.

Arno almost asked the laborer. But how could you trust a Jew’s answer? And he had the uneasy feeling the old bastard might show he was wrong. Now staying quiet served his purpose, so he did it.

“Go fight the Russians, you stinking sacks of shit!” someone shouted from one upstairs window or another. “Go fight the Russians, and leave us alone!”

Had Baatz carried a Schmeisser or a Russian PPD instead of his rifle, he might have hosed down the whole block of flats. Things were out of hand, sure as hell!

Someone had painted
FREE THE BISHOP!
and
HIMMLER TO DACHAU!
on a wall. The corporal stared in astonished outrage. The nerve of these people! He pointed at the graffiti. “Why don’t they have a cleanup crew getting rid of those?” he demanded.

Worse was yet to come, right around the corner. He found himself gaping at
PEACE!
and
THE TRUE CROSS, NOT THE HOOKED CROSS!
Hakenkreuz
was German for
swastika
.

“I don’t think the Catholics here like the Party much,” Adam Pfaff remarked. Once more, Baatz would have come down on him if only he could have. Was Pfaff a mackerel-snapper himself? Arno couldn’t remember.
Have to find out
, he thought.

Getting to the checkpoint was nothing but a relief. He could browbeat civilians, which was almost as much fun as browbeating soldiers. If he hadn’t been so angry with the Catholics in Münster, he would have given a pretty young Jewish woman a harder time. Her papers were in order, but he might have felt her up anyway, just for the fun of it. As things were, he let her go with no more than a growl. Only after she’d got half a block away did he wonder if he was going soft.

Sarah Bruck didn’t need long to decide she liked German soldiers better than blackshirts. Oh, the corporal who checked her papers had a mean face and piggy eyes, but you couldn’t blame a man—too much—for the way he looked. He examined her documents and handed them back with no worse than, “Well, all right, get the hell out of here.”

For once, the Nazis in Münster weren’t shrieking about the Jews. The Jews here weren’t up in arms against the government. There weren’t enough of them, and they knew too well what the SS would do to them if they did have the nerve to rise.

There were lots of Catholics in Münster, lots and lots. They had the sort of safety numbers gave. Not even the Nazis could snuff out a whole German city, no matter how much they might want to. Himmler had to find other ways to scare the locals into submission. No doubt he had spies planted among them. But Sarah would have bet the Catholics had spies in the SS and the SD, too. Not everybody put the
Führer
ahead of the Savior.

None of which should have had anything to do with her, since she
couldn’t stand the
Führer
and didn’t believe Jesus was the Savior. But Jews could get caught in the crossfire like anybody else. Regardless of her likes or beliefs, she also had to worry about other people’s: an ancient lesson for Jews.

She came to another checkpoint a few blocks later. Again, she presented her papers. Again, they passed muster. But as she went on, one of the
Wehrmacht
men patted her on the behind.

She kept walking, her back stiff. Anything else would have been worse. This way, they just laughed. If she provoked them … She didn’t want to find out what would happen if she provoked them. All at once, though, she didn’t like ordinary soldiers so much.

Only a couple of pharmacies still let Jews buy, even during the restricted hours they could use for shopping. She’d never imagined getting a bottle of aspirins could turn into an adventure. Of course, she’d never imagined all kinds of things that had happened since the war started.

Marrying a baker’s son? Being widowed a few months later? Being widowed by bombs from England, which was Hitler’s enemy and should have been the German Jews’ friend? More mystery in any of those than in the familiar bottle with the white tablets with the familiar
BAYER
stamped on them crosswise.

Had the Nazis pressed the Bayer company to change the shape of their stamp to a swastika? Sarah supposed they wouldn’t have. They made noises about tolerating Christianity … as long as the people who professed it did what the regime told them to. German Christians, so called, seemed eager to blend their beliefs with Nazi ideology.

Catholics went along less readily. Some of them conformed where they could. Others, not so much. If they’d conformed more readily, Münster wouldn’t lie under martial law now.

A rifle cracked, once, twice, back in the direction from which she’d come. A moment later, a machine gun snarled an angry reply. Someone screamed, a voice faint in the distance. The shrieks went on and on. Sarah wanted to stick her forefingers in her ears to block them. A badly wounded human sounded too much like a big dog hit by a car.

Heading home, she went around the checkpoint where the soldiers had handled the merchandise. She realized she took the same kind of
chance at every checkpoint she came to. Maybe the new troops she met would be even worse. But maybe they would leave her alone.

“Why are you out?” asked a sergeant she’d never seen before after he inspected her identity documents.

“I needed some aspirins.” She showed him the bottle.

He made a thoughtful noise halfway between a cluck and a grunt. “All right. Münster’s a headache for everybody, I guess. But go on home now, and stay there till you really need to come out.”

“Thanks,” she said in glad surprise.

“You’re welcome,” he answered. Then he spoiled it by adding, “
Heil
Hitler!”

Or did that spoil it? Sarah wondered as she hurried away. He’d just been decent to a Jew, or as decent as a German soldier was likely to get. Wouldn’t he need to give his men a signal that he remained loyal to the regime and that what he’d done didn’t mean anything?

The harder you looked at things, the more complicated they got. Her father had said as much. But he was talking about things like how closely the speeches in Thucydides matched what the speakers really said or why Brutus joined the plot against Julius Caesar. If it was true everywhere, what did that mean?

What is truth?
Pilate asked. It was a good question in New Testament days, and it remained a good question now. Truth was something like whatever remained after you looked at a question from every angle you could.

Sometimes, of course, nothing was left after you did that. Hitler’s speeches sounded splendid, but he hardly ever said anything but
I want it because I want it
. A three-year-old would have got his bottom warmed for that. The
Führer
got thousands of people yelling
Sieg heil!

Sarah wondered what would have happened if the war had gone the way Hitler wanted, if Paris had fallen in the early days of 1939. Would people here be up in arms against him now? She didn’t think so. England would have made peace then—what choice would she have had? And the German flag might be flying over the Kremlin right this minute.

As things were … As things were, she made it through the rest of the checkpoints without getting groped again. She supposed it was a
triumph of sorts. When you were out of sorts, though, you wished for bigger triumphs than that.

“I hope it wasn’t too much trouble,” her mother said when she got home.

“It could have been worse,” Sarah said. If it could have been better, too, she didn’t spell that out.

She also didn’t need to. “Oh, dear,” Hanna Goldman said. “Maybe I should have gone myself. They wouldn’t have bothered me.”

“I’ll live.” Sarah suspected her father would tell her it was only soldiers being soldiers, which was to say, men being men. The really scary thing was, that might well be true. Men could get annoying enough any time if they thought you were attractive. Men with rifles at hand, she was discovering, could be worse. How were you supposed to say no if one of them insisted that you say yes?

But when Samuel Goldman came home, he was excited about other things than man’s inhumanity to woman. He pulled a tinfoil tube out of one of the inside pockets of his jacket. “Look at that! Will you look at that?” he exclaimed. “It’s half full—more than half full—of butter! Butter! Can you believe it? A soldier just threw it away, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. And if he could afford to throw butter out, he didn’t. When’s the last time we saw any?”