Last Orders: The War That Came Early (35 page)

“Before the war,” Sarah said. “Has to be.” They’d cut Jews’ rations sooner and harder than those of Aryans.

“I thought so, too,” Father agreed. “With this”—he tapped the tube with his finger—“we could fry some eggs if we only had some eggs.”

“Maybe a soldier will throw them away,” Mother said. Father looked so wounded, she backtracked: “Well, I’m glad you got it any which way. It will taste good on bread, and we have got some bread.”

Samuel Goldman seemed happier. “I don’t think even the Party
Bonzen
get butter very often any more. And the soldiers throw out cigarettes they’ve hardly smoked, too. They’ve got it soft in the Army.” He paused. “People would have said the same thing about us in 1918. But soldiers helped make the Kaiser leave.” His eyes twinkled. “We can hope, anyhow.”

So this was what victory looked like. Vaclav Jezek had never seen it before, not in all the days since the Czechoslovakian Army conscripted him. He’d lost in his homeland, fought to a draw in France but then had to leave when the politics shifted under his feet, and now he’d spent a good long stretch in the trenches here in Spain.

No more. The war, what was left of it, was out in the open now. Here and there, the Nationalists would try to make a stand, but regiments seemed to distrust the men on either side of them even more than they hated the Republic. As often as not, they would surrender, especially when they saw they were facing foreign troops and not their vengeful countrymen.

Vaclav was glad when it was easy. He was especially glad when he didn’t have to do a lot of marching. Carrying upwards of ten kilos of antitank rifle in the trenches was one thing. He could take it off his shoulder or his back a lot of the time. When he sneaked out into no-man’s-land, he was down on all fours or on his belly. Tramping along with it from sunup to sundown he could have done without.

Benjamin Halévy watched a section of Nationalists stack their
arms after giving up. The Czechs searched them, more to get rid of holdout weapons than in hopes of loot. The Spaniards were a poor and raggedy lot. They had nothing worth stealing, not any more.

“Poor bastards. They don’t know what they’re getting into,” Halévy remarked. “The Republicans will send them to reeducation camps, and who knows how many will come out, or when?”

“They would’ve been just as nasty if they’d won, or even worse,” Vaclav said.

The scrawny, dirty, shaggy Nationalist prisoners nudged one another.
“Russos,”
one of them said, pointing to Jezek and Halévy.

Even with his rudimentary Spanish, Vaclav got that. “They think we’re Russians,” he said, laughing.

“Czech has to sound as foreign to them as Spanish does to you,” Halévy answered. He didn’t say
to us
. He was fluent in Czech, French, and German, and could manage Catalan, Spanish, and Yiddish—and maybe other tongues, too, for all Vaclav knew.

Off the prisoners went, hands clasped on top of their heads. When they got to the rear, Republican Spaniards would take charge of them. Then their fun would really start, as Halévy had said. But the Republicans weren’t—for the most part—killing prisoners out of hand these days. Both sides had done too much of that. They meant it when they said they hated each other.

Vaclav hated Fascists and Fascism. He rather liked Spaniards. They were so different from people he’d known before he got here, they fascinated him. They sometimes drove him crazy, too, but he suspected that worked both ways.

As the Czechs started marching again, he said, “Remember how some of our guys went back to France again after the alliance against Stalin fell apart?”

“I’m not likely to forget,” Halévy replied. “The French Army tried to recall me, too, you know.”

“I was thinking, now that this war’s pretty much won, I’d like to get up there and give the Nazis some more.”

“I wouldn’t mind so much, either,” the Jew said. “Chances are I could tell them I never got their stupid recall letter.”

“Would they believe that?” Vaclav asked.

“I doubt it. But they couldn’t prove I was lying. That would be enough to keep them off my back,” Halévy said. He touched the lieutenant’s badge painted on his helmet. “I’d have to get used to being a sergeant again. My own country won’t let me stay an officer—God forbid!”

“Wasn’t that Dreyfus guy a captain back when?” Vaclav inquired, perhaps less cautiously than he might have.

He didn’t faze Halévy—or if he did, Halévy didn’t let on. “He sure was, and look what that earned him. Devil’s Island, no less! And when it was all sorted out at last and he got his rank back and everything, what then? Why, he won the right to get shot at in the last war. Lucky fellow, Dreyfus!”

“Some luck! Did he make it through? I never knew how the story came out,” Vaclav said.

“As a matter of fact, he did,” Halévy replied. “He ended up a lieutenant colonel. If he hadn’t been a Jew, he might have commanded a brigade.” He shrugged a very French shrug.

They passed a boulder that faced the road. A graffito in Spanish defaced the ancient gray stone. “ ‘Death to traitors,’ ” Vaclav said. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen that threat. Every Nationalist faction thought all the others were traitors.

“Hell of a slogan, isn’t it?” Halévy remarked. “All it means is ‘Death to everybody who doesn’t agree with me.’ ”

“That’s what politics comes down to, isn’t it?” Vaclav said.

“No, no, no, no!” Benjamin Halévy said it in French, so it sounded even more negative than it would have in Czech. He went on, “Politics isn’t about killing the other fellow. It’s about getting him to go along with you so you can get rich off of him. You only kill him when you see he won’t go along with you.”

“Ah, thanks. Now I get it,” Vaclav said. They grinned at each other, for all the world as if they’d both been joking a moment before.

Planes buzzed high overhead. The Czechs looked up anxiously, ready to jump off the road and dive for cover if the fighters belonged to the enemy. But the planes were marked with the Republic’s red, gold, and purple, not the black X in a white circle the Nationalists
used. They might have attacked by mistake—such things had happened before. This time, the fighters kept on flying north.

A woman in a long dress weeded a vegetable plot by a roadside farmhouse. She wasn’t a witch, but she was a long way from a beauty. If she had a pretty daughter, the younger woman stayed out of sight. Vaclav didn’t see any livestock, either. Maybe the animals were hidden, or maybe the Nationalists had already eaten them. Soldiers could be worse than locusts: locusts didn’t carry rifles.

A body hung from one of the higher branches of an olive tree half a kilometer farther on. He wore a yellowish khaki Nationalist uniform. Around his neck hung a placard. “What’s this one say?” Vaclav asked.

“ ‘I betrayed my friends,’ ” Halévy answered. His arched nostrils flared. The dead Spaniard had been hanging for a few days, by the way he smelled and looked. The carrion birds would go to work on him in earnest before long.

“Some friends,” Vaclav said. A moment later, he spoke again, this time in musing tones: “I wonder how many trees will sprout fruit like that when we clean up Czechoslovakia.”

“Quite a few. Lampposts will grow that kind of fruit, too,” Halévy said. “You may not want to do too much of that, though, or all the trees and lampposts will sprout again twenty years from now.”

“Huh,” Vaclav said. “Plenty of people back there deserve hanging. You do what the Nazis tell you, you suck up to the Germans who’re holding you down, what do you expect? A big kiss?”

“No, but people have to live with each other afterwards,” the Jew replied. “I don’t think the Republicans have figured that out yet. They want to pay back everybody who wasn’t on their side.”

Vaclav had seen Spanish notions of revenge. He said the worst thing about them he could: “These people are worse than Hungarians.” For people from his part of Europe, Magyars were the touchstone of touchiness.

He made Benjamin Halévy smile. “My mother comes out with things like that,” Halévy said.

“Well, good for her!” Vaclav exclaimed.

They tramped on. A few Spaniards fired on them from rocks up ahead. The Czechs spread out and moved forward in short rushes. The Spaniards fell back to keep from getting outflanked. The advance went on.

It was bloody cold. Snow and sleet fell together. Aristide Demange swore at the miserable weather in Belgium. It wasn’t so bad as it had been in Russia, but nothing was
that
bad, the last circle of Dante’s hell included. Before long, it would be Christmas, and then 1944.

A little farther east, the Germans were holed up in a village they’d held for years. They were comfortable there, and warm. Half the kids under four had probably come out of their mothers making the Nazi salute.

Crouching in a miserable, freezing hole in the ground wasn’t the same. Demange wanted either to take the village ahead away from the Fritzes or fall back to the last one the French had liberated.

His superiors didn’t feel like listening to him. Regimental headquarters lay a couple of villages back. The colonel there was plenty comfortable. “Your zeal does you credit, Lieutenant, but the weather militates against a successful attack, I fear,” he said, spreading his clean, well-groomed hands in regret. “It is a pity, isn’t it?”

“The Germans didn’t think this kind of weather was too shitty in 1938,” Demange pointed out.

“And they failed,” the colonel said placidly.

They’d failed to take Paris. They’d sure taken everything from the Dutch border to the suburbs of the capital, though. Demange refrained from pointing that out; he could see it wouldn’t help. Instead, he said, “Well, how about letting us fall back a kilometer or two, then, to get into warmer quarters?”

“Give back even a millimeter of liberated Belgium? Give it up?” The colonel shook his head.
“Pas possible!
You will stay where you are and accommodate yourself to your circumstances.”

“Right, sir. I see you’ve accommodated yourself to
your
circumstances mighty well,” Demange said. He didn’t know this had been the
mayor’s house before the colonel ensconced himself in it, but that was the way to bet. It was the biggest, most comfortable house in the village. He knew that, all right.

The colonel’s graying mustache quivered. “Why should I not demote you for insubordination?” he asked, no doubt thinking the mere idea would reduce Demange to a quivering slice of gelatin.

To the colonel’s unhappy amazement, Demange laughed in his face instead of quivering. “Because I’d thank you for it, that’s why,” he snarled. “I never wanted to be an officer in the first place. I got stuck with it, is what happened to me.”

He left without saluting. He also left without waiting for permission. If
Monsieur le Colonel
wanted reasons to demote him, now the stinking
con
had a whole raft of them.

But
Monsieur le Colonel
turned out to be made of subtler and more vindictive stuff than that. Not long after Demange came back to his cold, wet hole in the ground, a runner brought an order forward. Demange’s company was to attack and seize the village in front of them. By tomorrow. Or else. The order said nothing about artillery support or any other help from the rest of the regiment.

“Merde,”
Demange muttered, and the Gitane in the corner of his mouth twitched as he spoke.

“Could it be that you succeeded in provoking our brave and aggressive regimental commander?” Lieutenant Mirouze asked—he was learning how to talk to Demange, all right.

“Yeah, I fucking provoked him,” the older man replied. “But I did too good a job. The old bastard doesn’t want to break me down to sergeant, dammit. Not even down to private. The
con
wants me dead. And if the rest of the company buys plots behind mine, he doesn’t give a fart.”

“What do we do, then?”

“I’ll think of something. Bastard’s cute, is he? I’ll show him.” Demange figured he would, too—or die trying. The colonel hadn’t left him any other choices.

Going straight at the village in broad daylight with the
Boches
watching and waiting would generate the slaughter the regimental CO
had to expect. That would also be the kind of attack the unimaginative son of a bitch would make himself if someone ordered
him
to take the place.

So Demange gathered his men together and plotted a night attack instead. Then he asked, “Any of you dopes from Alsace or Lorraine?” As he’d hoped, a couple of soldiers were. He tried another question: “Can you talk enough German to get by?”

They both nodded. He’d hoped they would. Those provinces had been history’s football, kicked back and forth again and again between France and Germany. Most people knew some of both languages. He stuck the German-speakers up front with
Stahlhelms
on their heads and captured Nazi greatcoats on their backs. With luck, they’d fool the Fritzes’ sentries long enough. Without luck … Without luck,
Monsieur le Colonel
would get what he wanted no matter how cute Demange played it.

The men slithered forward an hour before midnight. It had warmed up enough to turn sleet into icy rain. You had to be crazy to try anything in weather like this. Demange hoped the Germans thought so, too, and that they were all busy screwing their Belgian whores.