Last Orders: The War That Came Early (36 page)

Wire twanged as cutters snipped it. The plashing of the rain helped hide the noises. It also helped keep the sentries from spotting the approaching Frenchmen till they were almost on top of them. Then a German called, “Halt! Who comes?” Demange knew enough of the language to get that.

“Gott im Himmel!
Is this the front?” His Lorrainer sounded convincingly surprised.

“You shithead!” the sentry said, and went on from there, telling the man what a jerk he was. He squawked when the Lorrainer’s bayonet went home, but not for long, and not loud enough to alert anyone else. The French soldier got his own helmet and greatcoat out of his pack and put them on in a hurry so his own side wouldn’t shoot him by mistake.

Somewhere not far off to one side or the other—no, to one side
and
the other—there’d be more sentries. Nobody raised the alarm, though. The other German-speaker must have done his job, too. Whispering in excitement, the French company sneaked into the village.

Most of the
Boches
seemed to be in the church. Guttural singing came from it. Christmas carols. Wasn’t that sweet? Demange whispered to the Lorrainer: “If we bust in there, can you tell ’em to give up? Tell ’em we’ll kill ’em all if they fuck around?”

“You bet, Lieutenant,” the soldier answered.

“All right. That’s what we’ll try, then. And if the assholes do fuck around, we damn well will kill ’em,” Demange said.

It wasn’t quite so simple, though. Nothing was ever as simple as you wished it would be. A German sentry paced the streets. He was caroling, too, along with the men in church. He wasn’t doing it very loud. He might not even have known he was doing it. But he warned the French troops he was there before he came around the corner. They slid into cover. With the rain, it didn’t have to be great.

That was the last mistake he ever made. Demange hid in a doorway, knife in his right hand. As soon as the German walked past, Demange silently slipped up behind him, clapped his left hand over the sentry’s mouth, and pulled his head back. He drew the knife across the Fritz’s throat. If you did it right, the guy you were killing hardly let out a peep. Demange had practice. He did it right. The German slumped to the cobbles with no more than a muffled grunt.

On to the church. Demange’s men surrounded it. In case of trouble, they could shoot through the windows and chuck in grenades once they broke the glass.

Demange and the Lorrainer and a couple of squads of his toughest men went up the stairs. The rain helped dull their footfalls. So did the racket the carolers were making. He tried the door and grinned nastily. It wasn’t even locked.

He threw it open. They rushed inside. The Lorrainer gave forth with his spiel in German. The Fritzes were staring in horror. The candlelight in there exaggerated shadows and made them look all the more appalled.
“Hände hoch!”
the Lorrainer finished. If any French soldier knew the tiniest bit of German, that would probably be it.

One by one, the Germans raised their hands. Demange and his men took charge of them. Their officer—a captain, by his shoulder boards—glared at Demange. “On such a night, this is not sporting,” he said in fair French.

Demange was inclined to agree with the Fritz, but so what? “We get orders, too,” he answered with a shrug. After a beat, he added,
“Joyeux Noël.”

Poilus
led the Germans out of the church and into captivity. A few
Boches
in the houses came out to see what was going on. They got scooped up, too; the French had to shoot only one of them. A pretty blond Belgian woman wept for him.
Too bad
, Demange thought.
You’ll be blowing someone else soon enough
.

He sent a message back to the colonel:
Village captured. No casualties on our side
. With luck, the messenger would wake him up delivering it. An ordinary officer would win a medal for this. Demange hoped the colonel wouldn’t try to kill him again for a little while. Past that, he expected nothing.

Theo Hossbach had heard that the RAF wasn’t bombing Münster any more. German radio and newspapers claimed England was going easy on the place because it was full of traitors to the
Reich
.

The RAF hadn’t come over the first few nights after the panzer regiment camped outside of Münster. But then the bombers did show up. Maybe they were striking at Münster itself. Maybe they were going after the troops sent there to restore order instead. Bombs fell on both impartially.

Inside a panzer, or in a foxhole under one, you were safe from anything short of a direct hit. That didn’t mean the bombing was fun. The Panzer IV rocked on its tracks again and again. Twenty-plus tonnes of steel tried to rear up once. “Even more fun than Katyushas!” Adi said as bombs burst all around.

“And they said it couldn’t be done!” Theo was dismayed into a complete sentence. If this was the beating he took inside so much armor plate, what were things like for civilians and their homes? How did they go on through pounding after pounding like this? They were the ones who deserved the Knight’s Cross, not the men who’d actually been trained for war.

“I hope my family are all right,” Adi said tightly. Most of the regiment
might come from Breslau and its
Wehrkreis
, but he’d grown up around here.

And, of course, he had more to worry about with his family than most people did. Theo didn’t know what to say about that. He didn’t know anything he could say that wouldn’t make Adi think his secret was under assault. So he did what he did best: he kept his mouth shut.

Next morning, the radio net crackled with reports of fresh unrest inside Münster. Some of the gray-haired sausage-makers and bookkeepers and mill hands still seemed to remember the stunts they’d learned when they went to war a generation earlier. Some of them had pistols and hunting rifles, too, toys they’d managed to keep hidden in spite of all the searches the security services had made.

They’d managed to pin down some foot soldiers. They fired from upper stories and rooftops, and slipped away before the troops could pay them back. One exasperated infantry captain complained, “The bastards might as well be Ivans, the way they disappear!”

Before long, the panzer regiment got orders to move out. “We have to put the fear of God in them,” the CO declared.

Theo relayed the command. “They make a desert and call it peace,” Adi said. Theo recognized the quotation, though he doubted anyone else in the panzer would have. The name people usually called him by was short for Theodosios; his father had been wild about Edward Gibbon. He knew more Roman history than he knew what to do with.

Back in the turret, Lothar Eckhardt said, “These people could be our fathers and mothers and sisters. I don’t know that I want to shoot at them.”

“Is that mutiny, Lothar?” Hermann Witt asked.

“I don’t know, Sergeant,” the gunner answered unhappily. “Do
you
want to shoot at them?”

“Do I want to? Of course not,” Witt said. “But I’ve done all kinds of things I didn’t want to since I put on these coveralls. That’s what war’s about.”

“You’ve never done any of that stuff to Germans, though,” Eckhardt said. “Only to the enemy.”

“If these people are enemies of the government—” the panzer commander began.

“Then maybe the government is the one with the problem, not the people,” Adi broke in.

Several seconds’ worth of silence followed. Then Witt said, “Adi, I understand why you’re saying that, but—”

Adi interrupted again: “I’m not saying it because I’m a Jew, Sergeant.” Theo’s jaw dropped all the way down to his chest, and he would have bet everyone back in the turret was just as gobsmacked. Adi’d never called himself a Jew before. He’d never come close. Now he went on, “Besides, it’s not Jews in Münster rising up against the stupid Nazis. It’s Germans, like Lothar said.”

“We swore an oath to the
Führer
. All of us did. Even you, Adi,” Witt said.

“I know. But we didn’t swear to be lemmings and follow him over the cliff,” Adi answered.

“He’s right,” Theo put in. He knew that might win him the attention of the SS and the SD. He didn’t care now, though he also knew he might care very much later. He felt like a free man. He hadn’t remembered how good that felt.

He looked out through his vision slits. Some of the other panzers around them were starting up. Some weren’t. If that didn’t mean the same argument was raging inside of them, he would have been amazed.

Witt saw the same thing. Since he could look out through the cupola, he was bound to see more of it than Theo. Plaintively, he said, “Do you want us to start shooting at each other right here in the encampment?”

“No, Sergeant.” Adi kept military respect, which made him more persuasive, not less. “The other poor conscript bastards aren’t the enemy. Himmler’s blackshirt goons are.”

“Adi, start the engines. We can go into Münster,” Witt said. “We’ll see what kind of orders they give us when we get there. If we can honorably carry them out, we will. If we can’t … We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it. We don’t have to burn it yet.”

That sounded more like a plea than an order, but Adi said,
“Zu Befehl!”
and stabbed the starter button with his forefinger. The engine
roared to life. He put the panzer into gear and rolled out of the encampment. He didn’t go very fast, and Witt didn’t try to hurry him.

Maybe Witt thought that, once people started shooting at them, he could get his crew to shoot back. Maybe he was right, but Theo wouldn’t have bet on it. He knew
he
didn’t intend to fire on any of the locals no matter what happened.

They’d just reached the outskirts of town when the radio crackled to life again. “All panzers! All panzers! Halt and return immediately to your encampment!” a sharp, unfamiliar voice ordered.

“On whose authority?” someone asked—probably a captain in charge of a company.

“I am Colonel Joachim von Lehnsdorff, of the General Staff. I have relieved your regimental commander because he has issued orders beyond his competence. Return to your encampment at once, I tell you!” That Prussian-accented voice carried the snap of command.

“Zu Befehl, Herr Oberst!”
The man who’d questioned him gulped before getting his acceptance out.

Hermann Witt said, “I never heard of the General Staff canning a regimental CO before.”

“What do you want me to do, Sergeant?” Adi asked.

“Oh, go back. Go back. I’m not sorry to get an order like that, not even a little bit,” Witt answered. “But it’s like even the
Wehrmacht
can’t make up its mind what it wants to do.”

“It’s probably just like that,” Theo said. After that sentence, he spent another one: “The
Wehrmacht
has to decide whether it belongs to the Nazis or to Germany.”

Beside him at the front of the panzer, Adi grinned crookedly. “What you mean is, the
Wehrmacht
has to decide whether Germany belongs to it or to the Nazis.”

That was the question, all right, much more than
To be or not to be
. Theo found himself nodding. But it was more complicated than Adi made it out to be. The armed forces were divided against themselves. A good-sized chunk of the
Wehrmacht
, from the rank and file up into the officer corps, favored the Nazis.

Hermann Witt said, “I wonder what the
Führer
will do when he finds out about this.”

“We’ll all find out,” Adi said. By then, the panzer was clanking away from Münster. Theo was content with that. He’d worry later about whatever came next.

The man in the white coat—the doctor, Pete McGill supposed he was—shook his head. “No, I’m sorry, Sergeant, but no one who retook Midway will be leaving the island right away.”

“That’s a crock … sir,” Pete said. He had to remind himself that military doctors carried officer’s rank. “I’m healthy as a horse. All the guys who were gonna get sick, they’ve gone and done it by now.”

“We don’t know that for sure,” the man in the white coat replied. “We won’t know that for some time to come. If it makes you feel any better, I’m stuck here along with you.”

“It doesn’t make me feel one goddamn bit better,” Pete said. “Uh, sir.”

And yet, however little he wanted to admit it, he had to grant that the sawbones had a point of sorts. Leathernecks on Midway had died of plague and of anthrax. One poor bastard had died of smallpox. Pete had never seen that before, and hoped to heaven he never saw it again. It was a hell of a nasty way to cash in your chips.

“This island may never be safe for human habitation again—certainly not for anyone who hasn’t been thoroughly immunized,” the doctor said. “We can give it back to the gooney birds. They don’t seem to come down with any of the human diseases here.”

“So what did we go and take it back for, then?” Pete growled. “Way you sound, the Japs would’ve dropped dead by themselves pretty damn quick.”

“Anyone who wasn’t thoroughly immunized, I said,” the doctor answered. “The Japs were. So were you men. So am I. Things would have been much worse if that weren’t true.”

“It’s 1944 now,” Pete said. “When do we get turned loose? In 1946? Or 1950? Or 1960? Or is this a waddayacallit—a life sentence?”

“I’m sorry, but I have no idea,” the doc said. “Can you imagine the stink if you guys leave Midway and start an epidemic somewhere?”

Pete could imagine it, all right. What he couldn’t do was care. He
scowled. “Terrific … sir. Least people could do for us is bring in some broads who’ve had all their shots. By the time they could leave, they’d be richer’n anybody else on the island. Bet your ass they would.”

“Good for morale but bad for morals, I’m afraid,” the doctor said primly. “You’ll just have to imagine you’re on a warship on an extended cruise. In effect, you are.”

The Japs had been stuck out here without any whores, too. That was probably one of the reasons they’d fought almost to the last man. They’d got so mean, they hadn’t cared whether they lived or died. And die they had. On an island with no place to hide, everybody on one side or the other was going to. The Japs didn’t surrender, and the Marines didn’t try to get them to.