Last Orders: The War That Came Early (42 page)

Come to that, if Midway hadn’t been a place from which you could either cause trouble or try to stop it, no one in his right mind would have wanted to set foot on it. It could have stayed as it was in the beginning, all sand and thin grasses and crash-landing gooney birds.

But on the Pacific’s vast, watery chessboard, islands were important squares. You could put garrisons on them. Even more crucially, you could fly planes off them.

They still hadn’t told him when they were going to let him and the rest of the Marines who’d recaptured Midway get off the island and go somewhere with more civilized comforts. They also still hadn’t imported any vaccinated hookers. As far as Pete was concerned, that was really a goddamn shame.

He barked sudden laughter. The quartermaster sergeant who thought he was God’s anointed because he doled out the spiffy new helmets … They wouldn’t let that sorry son of a bitch off Midway any time soon, either. Pete wondered if they’d told the guy yet. He would have bet against it. The quartermaster was too full of himself to have got that kind of bad news.

An American flag fluttered near the chugging desalinization plant. And, Pete saw, a new banner had gone up alongside: a smaller, plainly homemade one.
MIDWAY—HOME OF THE TYPHOID MARY PARACHUTE BRIGADE
, the flag declared.

Pete laughed again. You could laugh or you could cuss or you could go Asiatic: grab a rifle or a Tommy gun and do as much shooting as
you could till they got you. Nobody here had actually done that. More than one Marine had talked about it, though. Some were just blueskying. Others sounded honest-to-God tempted.

They said that when you talked about crap like that you never actually went and did it. Pete never had worked out who
they
were supposed to be. He had seen that a lot of what they said was pure bullshit. This once, he hoped the mysterious
they
knew what they were talking about.

One way to keep from going Asiatic was to take your mind off your troubles. As soon as things like prunes and canned apple juice started getting to the island, a couple of enterprising Marines rigged up a still and started turning out joy juice. It wasn’t what you’d call good hooch—it wasn’t within miles of what you’d call good hooch—but hooch it was. With no good hooch closer than Kauai, the customers weren’t inclined to be fussy.

Navy ships were supposed to be dry, but Pete had never served on one that didn’t have some unofficial alcohol available. As long as the producers didn’t get greedy, didn’t get blatant, and did grease the proper palms, they could go about their business without much trouble.

So things went here. Nobody got too curious about the tent way off by itself. Nobody got too curious about the steady trickle of men who visited it, either.

Pete came back with a couple of canteens’ worth of the enterprising corporals’ firewater. They claimed the stuff was cognac. Pete thought any Frenchman who brewed up such nasty stuff would kill himself for shame—which, of course, didn’t keep him from drinking it. A leatherneck from Mississippi called it stump-likker. That came closer to truth in advertising.

After he’d drunk enough to take the edge off his own gloom, he wondered what would happen if you got an albatross toasted. Would a cop pull the bird over for reckless flying? Would a drunken albatross land any worse than a sober one?
Could
a drunken albatross land any worse than a sober one?

The only problem with finding out was, he had no idea how to inebriate a gooney bird. The sole fresh water on Midway was the stuff
the desalinization plant turned out. He’d never seen albatrosses drink. Maybe they got everything they needed from the fish they ate. Or maybe they drank from the Pacific. Pete had no idea. Someone who studied the birds might know, but he didn’t.

Another way to assassinate some hours was with a deck of cards. Yes, the poker games on Midway had started before the last Japs got hunted down. They hadn’t stopped since. Back in Peking, Pete had learned the expensive way not to mix booze and poker. Booze turned you into an optimist. It also turned you into a sucker. Better, or at least smarter, to wait till you had a clear head and to fleece the fools who didn’t know enough to do that.

Games here got insanely expensive. Guys had nothing else to spend their money on. They didn’t know when, or even if, they’d ever escape Midway. And so they bet as if there were no tomorrow.

For one poor leatherneck, there
was
no tomorrow. He’d won for a while. Then he started losing, and losing, and losing some more. He went through all the money he had. He went through a year and a half’s pay he hadn’t earned yet. He wrote IOU after IOU, figuring he’d start winning again pretty soon.

Only he didn’t. And, one dark, moonless night, he walked down to the edge of the ocean and blew his brains out. The note by his body read
Well, I guess I’m square now, and my folks will get my insurance
.

That was sobering. It didn’t stop the games, but it did make people cut back on the stakes and not allow gamblers down on their luck to pledge money they hadn’t made yet. Pete liked the changes. Gambling was all very well, but the only way anyone needed to risk his life was in action against the Japs.

Or, now, against the Germans. Pete still held his grudge against the slanties, but he wouldn’t have said no if someone sent him storming ashore on some Belgian beach. Hitler’s would-be supermen thought they were hot shit. Their daddies had, too, till U.S. Marines taught them better in France. Some of those old Marines were still in the service. Lots of them had taught Pete the soldiering trade. Giving the Nazis what-for would be a way to show them how well he’d learned his lessons.

Would be. He was about as far from the
Wehrmacht
as a human
being could get. He had no idea when the brass would decide Midway was decontaminated enough to make shipping people off it safe. In the meantime, he had stump-likker and poker games. Oh, it was one hell of a life, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it just?

Spring was in the air. Aristide Demange surveyed it with the same jaundiced gaze he turned on summer, fall, and winter. So birds were singing? So flowers were blooming?—at least till artillery fragments cut them down to size. So bright green grass sprouted in shell holes and on the parapets of entrenchments?

So what?

Demange scowled at his men, too. “You think the
Boches
can’t kill you because the sky is blue and you’ve got a stiff bulge in your pants? The Germans don’t care. They’re just waiting for you to do something stupid so they can blow your balls off. Then you won’t have to worry about hard-ons any more.” His voice rose to a shrill, mocking falsetto.

“It’s spring for them, too,
n’est-ce pas
?” one of the
poilus
ventured.

“Oh, sure. It’s spring. But they’re professional about it, you know? And you’d better be the same way, Émile, or you’ll be sorry.”

“Yes, sir,” Émile said, which was never the wrong answer. Maybe he knew what Demange was talking about. He’d seen some action, and he hadn’t disgraced himself.

“All right, then.” Demange paused to light another in his long string of Gitanes. It had started when he was eleven or twelve and would stop only when they shoveled dirt over him: say, a thousand years from now, or maybe an hour and a half. He went on, “Listen to me, you dumb cocksuckers. I’m not trying to get you killed, because if you get killed, chances go up that I get killed, too, and I’m not ready to die just yet. You got that?”

Their heads bobbed up and down. The only thing wrong with them was that their superiors kept trying to use those heads—and Demange’s along with them—to bang through reinforced concrete.

Émile spoke up again: “If you look at it that way, sir, what we ought to do is, we ought to sit tight here and wait for the Americans.”

Demange thought so, too. That was pretty much what France had
done the last time around. After the mutinies of 1917, France couldn’t have done much else then. Even so, Demange had mixed feelings about it. He would rather see Americans dying for liberty than die for it himself. But wasn’t it monotonous and even a little embarrassing to get your chestnuts pulled from the fire twice in a row by the same country? If God was writing the script, He could have used some help from a competent dramatist.

Daladier and his kind, of course, would defend France to the last drop of American blood. But the French generals didn’t mind killing off Frenchmen. When had they ever?

“Tell you what, Émile,” Demange said. “When they give you a field marshal’s baton—and I promise you won’t get yours a day later than I get mine—you can tell people what to do. In the meantime, we’re both stuck with following orders from the fat, white-mustached fucks who’ve already got theirs.”

Émile grinned at him. Some of the other soldiers muttered among themselves. Sure as the devil, one of those sniveling little rats would report him. That would be pretty goddamn funny. What was the worst the brass could do to him? Demote him? He’d thank them. He’d kiss them on their talcumed cheeks. Send him to the front? He’d already logged more time at the front than any other three men you could name. Not fearing consequences gave a wonderful sense of freedom.

He might have invited the
poilus
to tattle on him, but the German loudspeakers chose that moment to come to life. Both sides had them. They were something new, something modern, something to make war even more awful than it had been for the past five thousand years.

“Soldiers of France!” the loudspeakers boomed. Whoever was talking through them, he spoke perfect Parisian French. A prisoner reading a script? A French Fascist who’d gone over to the other side? Probably not someone from Alsace-Lorraine, at home in German and French—the accent would be different. Whoever this
cochon
was, he went on, “Soldiers of France, why spill your blood for Jew Bolsheviks and Jew capitalists? Do you want your towns full of nigger American troops cuckolding you and leaving you with black babies to raise?
When you fight the
Reich
and your fellow white men, you fight the wrong enemy!”

He might speak perfect French, but he mouthed German propaganda. “I wish they’d drop leaflets with that garbage printed on them,” Demange said. “With leaflets, at least we could get the shit off our asses.”

The French loudspeakers shouted back a few minutes later. Plenty of anti-Nazi German-speakers, Jews and others, had taken refuge in France. Demange’s German was sketchy, but he got the drift here. They were going on about how even the German people couldn’t stand Hitler any more, so what was the point of stopping a bullet for him?

“Is that true, sir?” Émile asked. “Are the Germans really up in arms against the Nazis?”

“Beats me,” Demange answered cheerfully. “Our papers say they are, and of course you know everything you read in the goddamn newspaper’s got to be the straight goods, right?”

“Mais certainement,”
Émile said, cynically enough to squeeze a short chuckle out of Demange.

“All right, then,” the lieutenant said. “But I’ll tell you this—as long as both sides want to fight the war with loudspeakers, that’s fine by me. Yeah, they’re annoying as shit. But even if you shoot a loudspeaker full of holes, it won’t squirt blood all over the place and it won’t start screaming for its mama.”

The
poilu
contemplated that. “Well, you aren’t wrong,” he said in due course. “Uh, sir.”

Truth to tell, Demange barely noticed his near-omission of the courtesy. He felt happier about Émile’s measured praise than he had about anything in … he couldn’t remember when.
I’m getting soft
, he thought. He barked at some other soldier the way a man might kick a dog after quarreling with his wife.

Before too long, the powers that be on one side or the other—for all Demange knew, it might have been the powers that be on both sides—decided war by loudspeaker was too peaceable to suit them. Howitzers and mortars started hitting the front-line trenches.

Huddling in the mud—the
springtime
mud—Demange called
down curses on his generals’ heads. Artillery duels always hurt the French worse than the
Boches
. As they had been in the last war, the Germans were masters of field fortifications. His own countrymen … weren’t.

And the Nazis had been sitting on Belgium for years. The Belgian frontier had been the effective border between Germany and France since their unsuccessful truce and alliance against the USSR. What German soldiers took refuge in around here hardly deserved the insulting name of field fortifications. They’d had enough thought and reinforced concrete poured into them to be something else again, something more on the order of the Maginot Line.

Somebody not far enough away started shrieking. He kept on shrieking till the stretcher-bearers carried him away. French fieldworks were just that: scratchings in the dirt. The French brass didn’t think their men would stay in any one set very long, so they didn’t bother strengthening or improving them.
Poilus
got carved up for their stupidity.

After the sun went down, the Germans staged a trench raid half a kilometer south of Demange’s position. They shot half a dozen men and captured half a dozen more for grilling. “We would’ve chased ’em off if they tried that here,” Émile said stoutly.

“Peut-être,”
Demange answered.
Maybe
was the most he could say. He tried to keep his men alert, and more afraid of him than they were of the
Boches
. But anybody could get caught with his pants around his ankles.

Those captured soldiers were probably singing like nightingales. Demange hoped they didn’t know too much.
The Germans should have grabbed some generals
, he thought.
Generals never know anything at all
.

Spaniards were big on ceremonies. Chaim Weinberg had had to get used to that when he came over here. Americans went the other way. They did up Independence Day and Memorial Day and Armistice Day after a fashion, but only after a fashion. A ceremony over something
that didn’t already have a day set aside for it? Americans mostly didn’t bother.