Two Fronts (13 page)

Maybe La Martellita took up with him not because he was built like a hydrant but because he was a Russian Communist. Did it feel better because you were getting shtupped by somebody from Marxism-Leninism’s holy land? If you expected it to, then it probably did. Women worked that way. Chaim thought it felt great all the goddamn time.

The Nationalists’ loudspeakers came to life then. “You should all come over to our side. You’re just helping the atheistical Russians!” The man at the microphone stumbled a little over
atheistical
, but he managed to bring it out.

He got nothing but laughs, though. The Nationalists were so wrapped up in the Catholic Church, they thought their enemies were, too. That screwed up their propaganda, especially when they aimed it at the Internationals. “Us, we’re the atheistical Americans, by God!” Chaim said, and laughed harder than ever.

Then the Nationalist propaganda announcer said, “And half the filthy Bolsheviks—more than half—are Jews! Do you want to do what the disgusting Hebrews tell you to do? Of course you don’t!”

Some of the Spaniards who filled out the Internationals’ ranks these days might take that seriously. So few Jews lived in Spain—they couldn’t do it legally till the Republic came along—that the locals believed a lot of the anti-Semitic bullshit the Fascists put out. They’d been hearing the same kind of nonsense their whole lives.

“No wonder the Republic shot so many priests,” Mike Carroll said.

“No wonder at all,” Chaim agreed. “Shame they couldn’t have shot that braying jackass, too.”

After the braying jackass finally shut up, one of the young Spaniards in the Abe Lincolns came up to Chaim and said, “You’re the one they call
el narigón loco
, right?”

“The crazy kike, that’s me.” Chaim nodded, not without pride. He’d earned the nickname the hard way, with his go-to-hell, no-holds-barred style of cantina fighting. “What about it, Rodrigo?”

“Well …” Rodrigo, by contrast, sounded almost shy. “Are you a Marxist, then, or are you a Jew?”

“
Absolutamente
,” Chaim declared, clearly enunciating each of the six syllables.

For some reason, that didn’t seem to help the Spanish Abe Lincoln. “But which?” Rodrigo asked.

“I sure am,” Chaim replied. Rodrigo started to ask him another question, then plainly decided it was a losing fight. The kid mooched off, hands thrust into the pockets of his revolutionary coveralls.

Mike Carroll laughed, but softly, taking care that the proud Spaniard couldn’t hear him do it. “That wasn’t fair, man,” he said.

“Hey, neither was the question. You can be a Jew and a Marxist at the same time. Look at all the Old Bolsheviks,” Chaim said.

“Yeah, and look what happened to them, too,” Mike said, which made Chaim wince. An awful lot of the Jews who’d helped bring off the Russian Revolution ended up starring in Stalin’s show trials or going to the camps or to the wall without benefit of any trial, show or otherwise. The Soviet Union was a rugged place. As far as Chaim was concerned, it still beat the hell out of the
Reich
.

Alistair Walsh couldn’t stand Germans. The war in North Africa had been going so well. No matter what Mussolini said, no matter how far he stuck out his breakwater of a chin, the Italians mostly didn’t want to fight. The ones who did have some pluck didn’t have the tanks or lorries or planes they needed to do anything with it.

But with the
Wehrmacht
and the
Luftwaffe
in the game, everything changed. Tobruk hadn’t fallen. The road to western Libya hadn’t opened. As a matter of fact, the English in Egypt were more worried about keeping the bloody Fritzes—and the Italians along for the ride—away from Alexandria, the Nile, and the Suez Canal.

Lose the canal and we’ve gone a long way toward losing the war
, Walsh thought glumly. It hadn’t come to that. It hadn’t even come close to that—yet. But he watched the skies with a grim earnestness he hadn’t needed till Hitler came down to give Musso a hand. He’d met Stukas in France and in Norway. He didn’t much fancy them.

Hurricanes buzzed above the English army. Walsh approved. Hurricanes could give a good account of themselves even against 109s. And they were death on Stukas. Any planes that could hack dive-bombers out of the air seemed absolutely wizard to him.

He remembered again that he’d actually volunteered for this.
I could have stayed back in good old Blighty
, he reminded himself.
Spring would just be coming into the air
.

That was a good joke, or would have been if only it were funny. With no apparent effort, Egypt got hotter not long after the equinox than England did at the height of summer. Every time the wind stirred the desert, it was as if your eyes got sandpapered. He had goggles, but they didn’t help much. And the flies, which were merely bad during the winter, turned horrific as the blast furnace heated up.

Tinned bully beef wouldn’t have been inspiring in Norway in the middle of a snowstorm. Having choked it down in just those circumstances, Walsh could take oath on that. But it was worse when you always had to be shooing flies away from it, and when you couldn’t shoo off all of them.

Like all his comrades in khaki, he ate some bugs along with his beef. They didn’t improve the flavor. Anything that could make bully beef taste worse than it did to begin with went straight into Walsh’s black book.

He blamed a case of the galloping shits on swallowed flies. A lot of the men in his company had the same complaint. About half of them blamed the flies for it, too. The rest pointed an accusing finger at the water. It was brackish and stagnant and sulfurous to begin with. Heroic doses of lime chloride only made it taste worse. They were supposed to kill the germs lurking in it, but Walsh wouldn’t have bet on that. Some of those germs, land mines wouldn’t have killed.

Another sergeant had an antidote in mind for the dicey water: “We need to drink best bitter all the bloody time. Or Guinness, by God! ‘Guinness is good for you,’ the adverts go.”

“Got to be better than this fetid cow piss.” Walsh was a great admirer of bitter. Guinness he could take or leave alone.

Sadly, no beer lorries rumbled west from Alexandria. More tanks did. They were newer models than the English armored fighting vehicles Walsh had seen in France. They seemed as nimble as their German counterparts; the others hadn’t been able to go any faster than an infantryman could trot. And they mounted cannon rather than a machine gun or two.

Still and all … Walsh studied them with a certain air of discontent. German tanks, like German helmets, looked as if they meant business. He wasn’t so sure about these. They were full of funny angles that might catch shells, and their armor plates were riveted together, not welded. He asked a corporal commanding one of the tanks about that: “What happens if you get hit? Don’t the rivet heads break off and rattle about inside like shrapnel?”

“Well, myte, Oi ’ope not. ’Ope like ’ell not, in fact.” The corporal was a scrawny Cockney with bad teeth: a nasty little terrier of a man, and one who’d take a deal of killing if Walsh was any judge. He added, “Fritz won’t fancy stoppin’ a two-pounder round, neither, not ’arf ’e won’t.”

He was bound to be right about that. Walsh did like the idea of fighting with as much armor on his side as the other buggers could throw at him. He hadn’t done much of that, not against the Germans he hadn’t.

He didn’t need to wait long, either. The bright fellows with the red collar flashes laid on an attack “in the direction of Tobruk.” By the way that read, they didn’t expect to get there, and would be content with pushing the Germans back a bit.

Tanks and foot soldiers went forward together. Each helped protect the other. The Germans had figured that out straightaway. They’d used combined-arms operations even when they jumped Czechoslovakia. English generals had needed longer to work it out. They might never have got it if they hadn’t watched the Fritzes in action.

Forward Walsh went. He carried a Sten gun, an English submachine gun. It was much uglier than a Schmeisser, and so cheaply made it was liable to fall to pieces if dropped. But it sprayed a lot of bullets around, and that was what he wanted.

Incoming German artillery whistled toward Walsh. “Down!” he yelled—he knew the sound of those damned 88s and 105s much better than he’d ever wanted to. The 88 was an antiaircraft gun by trade, and a fine one. But the Fritzes, being thoroughgoing buggers, also made armor-piercing and high-explosive rounds for it, so it could kill you in any of several different ways.

Fragments whined and snarled through the air. A couple of wounded men wailed. Either they hadn’t started scraping the sand soon enough or their luck was just out. Walsh hoped they’d caught Blighties—wounds that would let them go back to England for a while, or at least to Alexandria, but that wouldn’t kill them or ruin them for life. Stretcher-bearers with Red Cross armbands lugged the injured soldiers away from the fighting. Whether shell fragments or machine-gun bullets would respect those armbands was no doubt something the bearers tried not to think about.

Up ahead, the tanks were mixing it up with their German opposite numbers. Officers’ whistles shrilled, ordering the foot soldiers forward to join them. Sods with Sten guns were what kept the Fritzes from chucking Molotov cocktails onto English tanks’ engine compartments, or from lobbing potato-masher grenades through open hatches.

Walsh captured a German by literally catching him with his pants down. The luckless fellow was squatting behind a spiky thorn bush when Walsh trotted past it. “
Hände hoch!
” Walsh yelled, aiming the tin Tommy gun at the German’s pale backside.

With a yip of fright, the German sprang in the air and yanked up his pants before raising his hands. He wore an officer’s peaked cap and a first lieutenant’s pips on his shoulder straps. Walsh relieved him of his pistol and of a map case. The Intelligence wallahs might eventually get some use from that. Then the sergeant gestured to the rear with the barrel of his Sten. Gratefully, the German went on his way, making sure he kept his hands up. So far here in North Africa, both sides seemed to be playing by the rules.

While Walsh was making his capture, the German tanks in the distance turned tail and rumbled back toward a ridgeline a couple of miles to the west. Like hounds after fleeing foxes, the English tanks raced in pursuit, their tracks kicking up clouds of abrasive dust.

“They’re on the run!” Lieutenant Preston shouted exultantly. He blew his whistle with might and main, trying to get his men to keep up with the tanks.

For a few minutes, Walsh thought he was right: not a thought about the young subaltern he was used to having. Then the 88s on the ridgeline opened up on the approaching English tanks. Not even the fearsome Soviet KV-1 owned armor that would keep out an 88mm AP round. These machines didn’t come close. One after another brewed up. Each rising plume of greasy black smoke, each burst of fireworks as ammunition cooked off, meant horrendous deaths for five men.

The English advance sputtered and stalled like a lorry with no air filter in the desert. Surviving English tanks turned and trundled out of range of the 88s as fast as they could go. The multipurpose guns knocked out several more before they could escape. Then the German armor nosed forward again. Now the Fritzes had the edge in numbers. An English advance turned into an English withdrawal.

How many times have I seen that before?
Walsh wondered. More than he cared to recall: he was sure of that. Gloomily, he trudged back to the east. So did Lieutenant Preston. The enthusiastic youngster wouldn’t meet his eye—and a good thing for him, too.

AS THEO HOSSBACH
had discovered before, the spring mud time in Russia was even worse than the one in autumn. In spring, all the accumulated snow melted, seemingly all at once. Wheeled vehicles bogged to the axles—if they were lucky. Even Panzer IIIs with
Ostketten
, special wide tracks made for war in the east, had a devil of a time going anywhere when the mud was worst. Hell, even Soviet T-34s had trouble with it. Where a T-34 couldn’t go, nothing could.

Well, nothing mechanized. Horse-drawn
panje
wagons brought things to the front for both the Ivans, who’d been building them since time out of mind, and the Germans, who commandeered as many as they could get their hands on. With their big wheels and almost boat-shaped bodies,
panje
wagons did better in snow and mud than anything with tracks.

A
panje
wagon brought a sack of mail to Theo’s panzer company. Theo got a letter from his mother. Hermann Witt got several from relatives and friends. So did Lothar Eckhardt and Kurt Poske. Adi Stoss, as usual, got nothing from anybody.

None of his crewmates said a word. By now, they were used to his being the man the world had forgotten. When that thought went through Theo’s mind today, he found himself shaking his head. It wasn’t quite right. Chances were some of the world remembered Adi perfectly well. It just didn’t want to get hold of him, for fear of endangering him or itself or both.