The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (49 page)

Peggy Druce was discovering that real life didn’t work out the way movies did. It was nothing she hadn’t suspected before. But, despite confessions,
she and Herb couldn’t seem to go back to the way they’d been before she sailed for Europe in late summer 1938. They could talk
about forgiving each other. Meaning it was harder—harder than she’d ever expected.

It wasn’t anything showy or dramatic. He didn’t haul off and belt her one. She didn’t smash crockery over his noggin. They still enjoyed each other’s company, at the dining-room table and
even in the bedroom. They weren’t going to end up in divorce court. Nothing like that.

But all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again. Peggy felt the lack, the way she’d felt it when she woke up from the ether without her wisdom teeth. She could still go back there with her tongue and remember when she’d had them. She could remember this other thing that was
missing now, too.

They’d given her codeine to keep the extractions from hurting so much. She wished there were also a pill for this. She tried bourbon, but that seemed to make matters worse, not better.

Herb was drinking more these days. He wasn’t drinking what anybody would call a lot, but he was drinking more. Peggy wondered if she should say something about it: at least let him know she’d
noticed. In the end, she kept her mouth shut. She also wondered whether she should have done that about their adventures while apart.

She didn’t think so. This was better than the looming thing in the room with them that neither had wanted to admit was there. The trouble was, she’d thought that better would turn out to be the same thing as what kids called all better. Nope. And the difference
between the one and the other was enough to tempt her back toward the Old Grand dad bottle again.

Then one dreary, rainy, early-darkening afternoon Herb came through the door with more bounce in his step than she’d seen since she got back from Europe. “Ha!” he said as he hung his topcoat on a peg so it would drip on the tile floor.

“Ha?” Peggy asked.

“Ha!” He said it again, even more emphatically.
For good measure, he added, “Hoo-hah!” Then he lit a cigarette.

“Okay, now I get it,” Peggy said. “You’re all excited because Glenn Miller just took you on as a scat singer.”

He coughed, blowing out ragged puffs of smoke. “Don’t do that,” he wheezed. “You’ll make me choke to death.”

“Sorry.” She did her best to sound properly contrite. It wasn’t easy; she still wanted to laugh. “Maybe I wouldn’t
need to if you’d tell me what’s really going on.”

“Well, I was going to.” Herb took another, cautious, drag on the coffin nail. This time, he didn’t try to explode when he exhaled. “Needed more finagling than I ever thought it would, but I finally did it.”

“That’s nice,” Peggy answered. “Did what?”

“Persuaded Uncle Sam I could do something that would help give the war effort a kick in the pants.”
Her husband looked proud enough to bust the buttons on his vest.

And well he might have. He’d been trying to do something for the country ever since Japan attacked the Philippines and tried to hit Hawaii the January before. The trouble—or at least part of the trouble—was, the government was deluged with middle-aged men offering their services. Most of them were too old and too far from war service
to be worth anything with weapons in their hands. Getting men to fight and giving them the tools they needed to fight with had to be Washington’s top priority.

Even that wasn’t going so well as people wished it would. Stories about waste and inefficiency and fraud and profiteering showed up in the papers almost every day and in the news magazines almost every week. But the War Department’s worries
about everything else ran only a distant second—when they ran at all.

“What will they want you to do?” Peggy asked. It might have been
Will I ever see you again?
That wasn’t even close to fair, not when she’d gallivanted all over Pennsylvania and beyond, telling eyewitness tales of how nasty Fascism was, so prosperous people—and those not so prosperous—would fork over the cash to let the government
take care of whatever it decided needed taking care of.

“Make things run smoother,” Herb said. “Efficiency expert, is what it boils down to. Only they’ll pay me more than a run-of-the-mill efficiency expert, ’cause I won’t be dealing with stuff on the shop floor. I’m supposed to make whole factory systems run better.”

“How much is ‘more’?” was Peggy’s natural next question. Herb named a number.
She whistled softly. That was pretty good, all right. Then she asked, “Are they going to draft you so you can do it?”

“Unh-unh.” He shook his head. “They’d have to make me a colonel or something to give me enough clout to do the job, and they don’t want to make colonels out of guys who were corporals the last time around and got out of the Army as fast as they could afterwards. Can’t say I blame
’em, either. So I’ll be a civilian with a fancy letter from the Secretary of War—or maybe from the President; dunno yet—that says I have the power to bind and to loose.”

Peggy looked suitably impressed. “Wow! Can I touch you?” She reached out as if to tap him gently with the very tip of her forefinger.

He grabbed her and squeezed her. “You darn well better, babe.”

She squeezed back. She liked
being in his arms. It felt like the right place to be. She only wished there weren’t that little something in the back of her mind. Once upon a time, Gladys the clerk-typist had been in his arms, too. And, once upon a time, Peggy herself had wound up in that American diplomat’s arms.

None of that would happen again. If she hadn’t been sure of it, she wouldn’t have liked being in Herb’s arms any
more. All the same, the shadow lingered.

Countries in Europe remembered slights and defeats at the hands of their neighbors that went back centuries. Sometimes, even in this day and age, they chose their allies—and their wars—on account of them. That had always struck a sensible, no-nonsense, apple-pie American like Peggy as insane. Once something was over, it was over.

Wasn’t it?

Well, as
things turned out, that depended. She and Herb were finding out for themselves that memories weren’t always so easy to shove aside. And if people who loved each other had trouble doing it, how much harder was it for countries that hated and feared and mistrusted one another?

Peggy started to tell Herb that all at once she understood why European nations went off the rails every generation or
two. But she didn’t go ahead and do it. It would have involved reminding him they’d gone off the rails themselves. They were both doing their best to forget that. Whose fault was it that their best didn’t seem to be good enough?

It probably wasn’t anybody’s fault exactly. It—

“Did you say something?” Herb asked, so she must have made a noise after all.

She shook her head. “Not me. Must have
been the goldfish.”

“We haven’t got a goldfish,” Herb pointed out. They grinned at each other from a distance of about six inches. How many times had one of them or the other—or, as here, both of them in collusion—made that same silly joke? It was one of the things they shared, one of the things that made them a couple.

Gladys wouldn’t have known how to finish it. Neither would Constantine Jenkins.
We’re like an old sock and a shoe, Herb and me
, Peggy thought.
We fit, and we’re comfortable together
. That wasn’t such a bad thing, not when you considered the alternatives.

Chapter 21

I
f anything was more fun than changing a panzer track in mud and rain, Theo Hossbach had trouble imagining what it might be. The job resembled nothing so much as a bout of all-in wrestling, with the added chance of getting squashed if you were careless.

Having a five-man crew instead of three did help.
More hands couldn’t make this work light, but they did make it a little lighter. And the gunner and loader complained just as much as the three men who’d come out of their little Panzer II together.

Which didn’t mean those three didn’t complain. “These fucking things better work, is all I’ve got to say,” Adi Stoss growled, plying spanner with might and main.

“This beast should have come with
them,” Lothar Eckhardt said. The gunner wiped a wet sleeve across his equally wet forehead and went on, “I mean, they knew all along what things in Russia would be like, right?”

Adi and Hermann Witt both laughed raucously. Even Theo snorted. Sergeant Witt said, “Lothar, they didn’t know their ass from their elbow. Highways on the maps are horrible dirt tracks on the ground. Secondary
roads on
the maps aren’t there at all. They didn’t realize we’d need wider tracks on our panzers till we screamed at ’em that the Russians could keep going where we bogged down. And it’s taken a fucking year to get the
Ostketten
out to us so we could dance like this.”

Ostketten:
East tracks. Panzers hadn’t needed wider tracks in Czechoslovakia or the Low Countries or France. They sure did here in Russia.
This wasn’t much of a civilized country, or much of a civilized war.

Eckhardt stared at Hermann Witt. “But hasn’t the General Staff come out and looked at this ground?”

“Don’t bet anything you can’t afford to lose,” Adi said.

“Son of a bitch!” Eckhardt said with feeling. “If they haven’t, somebody ought to stick ’em in a penal battalion. Maybe they’d learn some sense if they lived through that.
And if they didn’t, who’d miss ’em?”

Penal units were a Soviet idea the
Wehrmacht
had borrowed. Take a bunch of guys who’d disgraced themselves by cowardice or some other mortal sin. Give them a chance at redemption—throw them in where the fighting is hottest. If they try to retreat, shoot them yourself. If they die in action, oh, well. Chances are they’ll shake the enemy doing it. And if they
happen to live, you can turn them back into ordinary soldiers again. Or, if you’re so inclined, you can fill up the holes in the penal battalion with new fuckups—there are always new fuckups—and throw it into action somewhere else.

The system had an elegant simplicity. Theo was surprised the Nazis hadn’t thought of it for themselves. But then, they’d never been shy about stealing ideas from other
people. Instead of talking about that—which might have made him learn more about penal battalions than he’d ever wanted to know—Theo went on manhandling the
Ostketten
into place on the road wheels and the idlers and, most important of all, the drive sprocket.

After close to two hours, they finished. A couple of them had vodka in their canteens instead of water. Say what you would about vodka,
but it didn’t give you dysentery. The haves shared with the have-nots. Socialism was real at the front. Everywhere else, as far as Theo could tell, it was only a sour joke.

Smacking his lips, Adi said, “No dumb cop’s gonna write me a ticket for drunken driving, not today.”

“If anybody tries, mash him like a potato,” Hermann Witt said. He eyed their backbreaking handiwork. “Let’s see if we can
go mash some Ivans now.”

Ostketten
wouldn’t keep out shells from a T-34 or a KV-1, of course. But the panzer crew had lashed the old, narrow tracks to the glacis. They might help turn an enemy round there. Or, of course, they might not. But it was worth a try. Theo had seen several other Panzer IIIs similarly decked out. More and more crews would improvise improved armor as more
Ostketten
arrived.

At least the panzer’s engine started up right away. Hard freezes hadn’t begun yet, let alone the kind of weather that made a mockery of German antifreeze and motor oil. Mechanics swore this year’s antifreeze and lubricants were better than the stuff the
Wehrmacht
had used the year before. Theo hoped that meant they wouldn’t have to build a fire under the engine compartment to thaw things out enough
to start. He hoped … but he didn’t really believe it.

He dripped on his seat when he took his place inside the panzer. The radioman and bow gunner was as far from the engine compartment as he could get. In the Panzer II, Theo’s station had been right on the other side of the fireproof—everyone hoped!—bulkhead. He’d warmed up in a hurry there. No such luck in this machine.

Over on the other side
of the centrally positioned radio sat the driver. At Sergeant Witt’s command, Adi put the Panzer III in gear. It rattled and clanked ahead. The engine’s grinding growl seemed a long way off to Theo, who’d been used to listening to it right at his elbow.

Theo glanced over at his comrade, but Adi was paying attention to what he was doing. “How does it seem?” Theo asked. If he wanted to find out,
he had to spend some words.

“Feels … a little better, maybe,” Adi answered after a judicious pause. “I don’t want to charge into the thickest slop I can find, you know, just to see if the
Ostketten
’ll pull us through it. They’re liable not to, and then you’d have to call a recovery vehicle to fish us out. Everybody’d love me for that.”

If by
love
he meant
scream at
, he was right. Otherwise …
 Otherwise, he was a sarcastic, cynical veteran panzer man, just like thousands of others in the
Wehrmacht
. Well, almost just like thousands of others. As
long as the authorities didn’t notice the difference, everything was fine. It had been fine for quite a while now. Theo hoped it would stay that way.