Last Orders: The War That Came Early (47 page)

“To the wot?” Latin was Greek to Scholes. “Blimey, you throw the fancy talk around like a toff, you do.”

“Bugger off! There. Is that plain enough?” Walsh said. The private grinned at him, showing off snaggled yellow teeth. The only reason
Walsh knew the sonorous Latin phrase was that he’d heard it a lot the last time around. He explained: “To the way things were before the war.”

“Oh.” Jack Scholes pondered, then nodded. “Makes sense. Can’t let ’em fink they turned a profit on the deal, can we?”

“I hope not,” Walsh said. He lit a Navy Cut, offered one to Scholes, and let out a long, smoke-filled sigh. “Of course, if we don’t flatten them right and proper now, chances are we’ll have another dustup with them fifteen or twenty years down the road.”

Scholes sent him a sly grin. “Chances are, eh? Chances are it won’t be your worry then, too.”

“I hope not. I’ve already got shot in two wars—three would be too bloody many. But you’ll be a staff sergeant yourself by then if you stay in.”

“Roight. And then you wake up.” The kid reacted with automatic mockery. A moment later, though, his gray-blue eyes narrowed. “D’yer really fink Oi could?”

“Why not? The other soldiers respect you, and you’ve picked up a lot since we first bumped into each other,” Walsh said.

“Since you first got stuck wiv me, you mean,” Scholes said, not without pride.

“You said it—I didn’t.”

“A staff sergeant? Me? Cor! Wouldn’t me mum bust ’er buttons?” But Scholes’ eyes narrowed again, this time in a different way. “ ’Course, I’ve got to live through this little go-round first, eh?”

“It would help,” Walsh admitted dryly. The younger man grunted laughter. Walsh went on, “Your chances now are a hell of a lot better than they were a few days ago, at least if the German Salvation Committee wins its scrap with the Nazis.”

“You’ve got that right, I expect,” Scholes said. “But if peace goes an’ breaks out, ’oo says the Army’ll want to keep a scrawny West ’Am supporter loike me?”

He had a point. East End Cockneys weren’t always the first choice of the powers that be for promotion or for anything else that didn’t involve the risk of sudden death. They weren’t calm and reliable and
obedient, the way country boys were supposed to be. Like their counterparts from Mancunian and Liverpudlian slums, they had the nasty habit of doing as they pleased, not as they were told.

Still, Walsh said, “I would have gone back to digging coal if they hadn’t decided to keep me in khaki in 1919. There are ways to get them to do what you want—and I’ll be glad to put in a good word for you. We need blokes who can tell privates what to do … and who can look a subaltern in the eye and let him know he’s a goddamn fool.”

Jack Scholes laughed again. “Oi’d ’ate that, Oi would.”

“I daresay.” Walsh chuckled, too. “You can’t let them know you enjoy it, though. You can’t let them know you’re laughing at them. Mm, most of the time you can’t, anyhow. They need that every once in a while.”

“When you can’t get ’em to pull their ’eads out of their arse’oles any other way?” Scholes guessed shrewdly.

“Something like that, yes.” In a few years, Walsh wouldn’t have wanted to be the junior lieutenant who rubbed Scholes the wrong way. No subaltern would make that mistake more than once. The experience might be educational. It would definitely be traumatic.

A sentry called, “German coming this way with a white flag!”

Walsh got up onto the firing step to look east into Belgium. “We’ve seen more flags of truce since the Fritzes did for Adolf than in the whole war up till then,” he remarked.

This German looked like … a German: boots,
Feldgrau
, Schmeisser, coal-scuttle helmet. He had an Iron Cross First Class on his left breast pocket. After a moment, Walsh noticed he wore his shoulder straps upside down. Noncoms and officers often did that so snipers wouldn’t spot their rank badges and single them out.

“Far enough!” Walsh yelled to him. “Put down the weapon!
Hände hoch!
”

The German obediently set the machine pistol on the ground and raised his hands. “I carried it to protect myself from my countrymen, not to attack you,” he said in excellent English.

That Walsh believed him was a sign of how much and how fast things had changed. “Come on, then,” he called.

Still holding up his white flag, the Fritz did. His unloving countrymen started shooting at him before he made it to the English trenches. He hit the dirt with professional speed and crawled the last few yards before slithering down into what Bruce Bairnsfather had so memorably tagged “a better ’ole” during the last war.

“I hope they won’t start throwing mortar bombs at us because you got away,” Walsh said.

“I likewise,” the German agreed. “I am Ludwig Bauer. I am a major.” He rattled off his pay number, adding, “And now I am well out the war.”

“Which side were you on?” Walsh asked. When the officer hesitated, Walsh said, “I won’t throw you back either way—I promise. But I do want to know.”

“May I say I am on Germany’s side and leave it there?” Bauer returned. “Other Germans may want to shoot me, but I do not want to shoot them. I would rather a prisoner of war become than hurt my own
Volk
.”

As a military coup ousted England’s pro-appeasement government, some nasty Scotland Yard men hadn’t worried at all about hurting Walsh, who opposed them. “Well, I can understand that,” he said, and meant it. He turned to Jack Scholes. “Take the major back to regimental HQ. They’ll carry on from there. We don’t have to fight him any more—just feed him.”

“Roight.” Scholes gestured with his rifle. “Come along, you.” Bauer came. He seemed as happy as a sheep in clover. And why not? Unless choking on the slop POWs ate killed him, he’d live to go home again.

The clock over the stove said it was coming up on seven o’clock: time for the morning news. Peggy Druce turned on the radio. She didn’t want to miss anything. The
Inquirer
sat on the kitchen table, but the news it held was several hours old by now. Things had been changing so fast, she wanted to stay up to the minute.

Along with the paper, she had her first cup of coffee on the table. Her first cigarette of the day sat in an ashtray, sending a thin, twisting
ribbon of smoke up toward the ceiling. She hadn’t worried about breakfast yet; she wouldn’t starve before she found out what was going on.

She suffered through a singing commercial for a brand of cigarettes she couldn’t stand and another one for an oleomargarine that promised it was just as good as “the costlier spread.” She snorted and tried without much luck to blow a smoke ring. The oleomargarine makers couldn’t call it butter because dairy farmers didn’t want the competition. A lot of places, it wasn’t even legal to add yellow coloring to oleomargarine.

But the dairy farmers weren’t the only ones trying to grease the people who bought things. Peggy’d tried oleomargarine, which had a much more generous ration allowance than “the costlier spread” did. She’d tried it once, that is. To her, it tasted more like machine oil than butter.

“This is Douglas Edwards with the news,” the familiar voice announced. “The German Salvation Committee continues to make progress in its fight against diehard Nazis. There are reports of panzer battles in the Ruhr and others outside of Berlin pitting the
Waffen
-SS against
Wehrmacht
units loyal to General Guderian and the Committee. SS casualties are said to be very heavy.”

Peggy stubbed out the cigarette. Some of that was in the
Inquirer
, but not all of it. She thought about lighting another one, but decided to wait till after breakfast. She sipped her coffee instead.

“German Salvation Committee members are discussing peace terms in London, Paris, and Moscow,” Edwards went on. “Certain broad outlines have become plain. Germany definitely will evacuate the Low Countries and Denmark and Norway. Her forces will also leave the western areas of the Soviet Union that they still occupy. The Salvation Committee agrees to all of this without complaint.”

The Salvation Committee had agreed to all of that a couple of days earlier. The
Inquirer
had already reported about it. Peggy waited to hear some of the new news she’d been hoping for, or at least to hear there was no new news.

“There seem to be a few sticking points in seeking a general European peace. One involves Austria, another Czechoslovakia, a third the
district around the Polish city of Wilno, which is also claimed by the USSR, and the last the fate of the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

“German diplomats point out that the other great powers had accepted the
Anschluss
joining Austria to Germany in 1938, and that England and France were on the point of conceding the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland to Germany when the assassination of Sudeten German leader Konrad Henlein by a Czech nationalist touched off the Second World War. They also point out that the Slovaks are happier in an independent Slovakia than they were as, ah, country cousins in the former Czechoslovakia.

“These same German diplomats object to Stalin’s claims against Wilno and the Baltic states. They plainly don’t want to let down their Polish allies, who have also suffered severe losses against Russia. Stalin’s attitude seems to be that, if Germany can come out of the war with more than she began it with, the USSR should be able to do so, as well.

“Talks, then, continue. It seems as though neither England nor France is sure of how hard a line to take. It also seems that President Roosevelt has not yet made up his mind how hard to push them—or how hard he can push them, since America so recently entered the European war. More after these important messages.”

These messages were important only if you had dentures or were constipated. Peggy turned on the burner under the coffee pot to heat it up. Maybe Douglas Edwards would have more to say about the European situation after the commercials. She wanted to find out whether the Salvation Committee intended to start treating Jews like human beings again. If it did, and if it was willing to say it did, she figured she would have to take it seriously.

But the next story was about an American bomber raid against Jap-held Wake Island. There was also a story about a naval battle somewhere in the South Pacific where both sides claimed to have mauled their foes’ aircraft carriers. And there was a story about how all the American soldiers and sailors in Australia were popularizing baseball there.

As soon as that one started, Peggy realized she wouldn’t hear any
more serious war news. She poured herself the second cup of coffee and fixed her breakfast eggs and toast. After she did the dishes, she went after the
Inquirer
’s crossword puzzle. The guy who put the clues together thought he was cute. As far as she was concerned, he gave himself too much credit.
Gigantic trouble (2 words)
, for instance, turned out to be MELOTT. You wanted to throw something harder and heavier and pointier than a horsehide at somebody who did something like that.

She’d been in Czechoslovakia when the Germans invaded it, going on six years ago now. She didn’t think they deserved to keep any of it. They’d started doing horrible things to the Jews there as soon as they invaded, and as far as she knew they hadn’t stopped since. They didn’t exactly give the Czechs a great big kiss, either. As for Slovakia, the thugs running it were a pack of cheap imitation Nazis. One of them was a priest, but he still acted like a cheap imitation Nazi.

Of course, what she thought the Germans deserved had nothing to do with the price of beer. Great-power diplomacy was what it was, not what you wished it would be. As Douglas Edwards had pointed out, in 1938 England and France let Germany swallow Austria and were ready to sell Czechoslovakia down the river. Hitler attacked it without even giving them the chance. The world hadn’t seen peace since.

When Chamberlain and Daladier went to Munich to try to talk Hitler into letting them hand him the Sudetenland on a plate instead of running into the kitchen and grabbing it himself, Czechoslovakia’s diplomats hadn’t even been allowed in the room. They’d had to sit and wait while foreigners decided their country’s future.

Would anybody pay attention now to what the Czechs wanted? Peggy tried to hope so. Try as she would, she had trouble bringing it off. England and France hadn’t been eager to fight over Czechoslovakia to begin with. They’d done it, but with no great enthusiasm. They still had none for the war. Hitler had shown himself to be full of deadly dangerous ambition. If General Guderian and his friends didn’t want to lie down with the lamb and get up with lamb chops, the European democracies would deal with them.

By the same token, no one outside the area was likely to get excited
about which country the people in and around Wilno wanted to belong to. No, the question was, who got to have it? Right this minute, Stalin looked like the odds-on favorite. For that matter, who outside the Baltic region would notice or care if the USSR quietly gobbled up Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania? They’d belonged to the Russian Empire for a long time.

The Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians liked independence? They didn’t want to belong to the Soviet Union? What had Chamberlain called the 1938 Czechoslovakian crisis?
A quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing
. Yes, that was it. And that was how almost the whole world would feel about this quarrel, too.

After Peggy finished the crossword puzzle, she fixed herself a stiff bourbon on the rocks. She didn’t usually start off so early—that was for lushes. But she’d gone and thought herself sad. As long as you didn’t drink yourself blind, bourbon made a pretty good medicine for that.

Anastas Mouradian was trying to explain the current status of the war to Isa Mogamedov. “Suppose you have a cat in a box, a box where you can’t see or hear anything inside,” he told his copilot.

“I have a cat,
da
.” Mogamedov nodded agreeably. “Is it a good Soviet kitty or a nasty, hissing, biting Fascist fleabag?”

“Bear with me. Suppose you want to find out whether the cat in the box is alive or dead.”