Two Fronts (3 page)

Not all of his men were so lucky. The iron tang of blood suddenly warred with the rest of the stinks. One of the bridge players was down. With most of the left side of his head blown off, he wouldn’t get up again, either. The
poilu
beyond him clutched at his leg and howled like a wolf. The same bullet might have got them both.

Other wounded men added their shrieks to the din. At least one other poor bastard looked to be dead, too. And, to add insult to injury, a bullet had holed one of the honey buckets below the waterline. Only the goddamn thing didn’t hold water.

The train slowed, then stopped. At first, Demange swore at the engineer. Why wasn’t he going flat out, damn him? But that was a question with an obvious answer. If the German Stuka—Demange thought it was a Stuka, anyhow—had shot up the locomotive along with the cars behind it, the train wasn’t going anywhere because it couldn’t.

And if it couldn’t … Demange knew what he would do if he were flying that ugly, ungainly bastard. “We’ve got to get out of here, dammit!” he yelled. “That cocksucker’ll come around again for another pass now that he’s got a target he can’t miss.” That he hated Germans didn’t keep him from giving them the professional respect they were due.

There was a seal on the door. The Ivans didn’t want their guests wandering around. They just wanted them out. He’d been told there would be hell to pay if that seal got broken. Well, too bad. There was already hell to pay, and his men were doing the paying. He broke the seal and slid the door open. He supposed he should have counted himself lucky that some subcommissar hadn’t nailed it shut.

“Out!” he ordered. “Grab your rifles, too. Maybe we can fuck up the lousy Nazi’s aim if we make him flinch or something.”

Out went the French soldiers. The hale helped the wounded. Demange waited till everybody else had left the cattle car before he jumped down himself. He still carried a rifle. No officer’s pantywaist pistol for him. If he spotted something half a kilometer away that needed killing, he by God wanted the proper tool for the job. He was damned nasty with the bayonet, too, and didn’t flinch from using it: more than half the battle right there.

Here came the Stuka again, machine guns winking malevolently. It flew low enough and slow enough to let Demange see the pilot’s face for a couple of seconds. He fired two shots, neither of which did any perceptible good. The plane’s bullets kicked up puffs of snow. They thocked into the train. A couple hit with the soft, wet splat that meant they were striking flesh.

Some of the
poilus
fired at the Ju-87, too. It buzzed off toward the southwest. Demange looked around. Nothing to see but the shot-up train, snowy fields, and distant, snow-dappled pines. If he wasn’t in the exact middle of nowhere, he sure as hell wasn’t more than a few centimeters away.

And how long would the Russians need to figure out that this troop train was well and truly fucked? Would they get it before the French soldiers stranded here within a few centimeters of the middle of nowhere started freezing to death? All Demange could do was hope so. In the meantime, he lit a new Gitane and bent to bandage a man with a bullet through his forearm.

“MERRY CHRISTMAS, SERGEANT!”
Wilf Preston said, and handed Alistair Walsh a tin of bully beef.

“Well, thank you very much, sir,” the staff sergeant said, surprised and more touched than he’d dreamt he could be. The young subaltern was a decent enough sort. He might even make a good officer once he got some experience to go with all his Sandhurst theory.

Till he acquired that experience, he had Walsh as his platoon staff sergeant. Walsh had been in the Army since 1918, around the time Preston was born. The junior lieutenant had the rank, but men higher up the chain of command were more likely to hearken to Walsh. At a pinch, the British Army could do without subalterns, but never without sergeants. So it had been for generations. So, the admittedly biased Walsh suspected, it would be forevermore.

He hadn’t thought to provide himself with a Christmas present for Preston. Truth to tell, he hadn’t remembered it was Christmas. Well, there were ways around such difficulties. He took an unopened packet of Navy Cuts out of a breast pocket of his battledress tunic.

“Here you go, sir,” he said. “A happy Christmas to you, too.” He’d scare up more smokes somewhere. He could always cadge them from the men. They knew he didn’t welsh on such small debts.

Even thinking the word made him swallow a snort. He
was
Welsh, as his last name suggested. He proved as much every time he opened his mouth; to English ears, his consonants buzzed and his vowels were strange. If he hadn’t stayed in the service after the last war ended, he would have gone down into the mines instead. Chances were he’d been safer in uniform than he would have been had he taken it off with most of the Great War conscripts.

For all he knew, he was still safer here in North Africa than he would have been grubbing coal out of rock. As long as the Italians were England’s only foes on this side of the Mediterranean, he’d reckoned his odds pretty good. Musso’s boys made a feckless lunge into British-held Egypt, then retreated into Libya. Tobruk, their main base in the eastern part of the colony, had looked like falling soon.

But it hadn’t fallen, and now it wouldn’t—not in any kind of future Walsh could see, anyhow. The main reason Mussolini’d tried pushing forward was to punish England for backing out of its alliance with Germany against the Russians. With
il Duce
in trouble, Hitler had sent in planes and tanks and men to pull his chestnuts out of the fire. Who would have guessed that the
Führer
, always so ready to double-cross most of his neighbors, would prove loyal to this strong-jawed son of a bitch who didn’t come close to deserving it?

At this season of the year, Libya wasn’t so bad. Rain made the hillsides and even the desert green up a little. It wasn’t blazing hot, the way it had been and the way it would be again before long. Even the flies and mosquitoes and gnats and midges were only annoying, not pestilential.

The Fritzes, now, the Fritzes were pestilential the year around. Walsh had fought them in France in two wars, and in Norway this time around as well. He didn’t love them, but they knew their business in temperate climes and in the snow.

They knew it here in the desert, too. As always—and as dauntingly as always—they were very much in earnest. A lot of Italian units fired a few shots for honor’s sake and then gave up, the men smiling in relief because they hadn’t wanted to go to war to begin with. Not all the Eyeties were like that, but plenty were. Who could blame them? Fighting when you were short of aircraft and armor was suicidal, and they never had enough.

Tell a platoon of Germans to hold a hill no matter what and they damn well would, as long as flesh and blood allowed. And if the survivors did finally have to surrender, they’d spit in your eye when they came down from the hilltop, as if to say you’d only whipped them by fool luck. Bastards, sure as hell, but tough bastards.

Walsh wasn’t the only soldier to feel the Royal Navy should have kept the Germans—and the Italians, for that matter—from reinforcing Tobruk. Say that any place where both sergeants and petty officers bought their pints, and you’d get yourself a punchup.
If we had Gibraltar, now …
the sailors would go.

They had a point—of sorts. Gibraltar had fallen to Marshal Sanjurjo’s men way back in 1939. Without it, the Royal Navy had to run a formidable gauntlet to get into the western Mediterranean, and an even more formidable one to go farther east. These days, most naval support went all the way around Africa, through the Suez Canal, and over to Alexandria. Even there, the Italians had sunk a heavy cruiser with a limpet mine attached by a raider who rode a man-carrying torpedo (or maybe a one-man submarine; the stories wafting through the veil of secrecy varied).

With France back in the fight against Hitler and Mussolini, maybe things would get better. The Mediterranean was the froggies’ natural naval province. They’d done a decent enough job in the narrow waters the last time around. Of course, Italy had been on their side the last time around.

Nowadays … Nowadays Musso was liable to grab Malta before England could take Tobruk away from him. That would hurt almost as much as losing Gibraltar had.
Well, I can’t do a bloody thing about it
, Walsh thought. He might be able to help in some small way with the seizure of Tobruk—if Lieutenant Preston let him, anyhow.

A moment too late, he realized the subaltern had just said something more to him. Unfortunately, he hadn’t the least idea what. “I’m sorry, sir. You caught me woolgathering there, I’m afraid,” he confessed.

“I
said
”—Preston let his patience show—“that some doctors are telling us we’d be better off if we didn’t smoke. As far as health goes, I mean.”

“Bunch of ruddy killjoys, far as I’m concerned … sir.” Walsh added the honorific in case Preston happened to believe the tripe he was spouting. “I might have better wind if I tossed out my Navy Cuts, but I’d be a hell of a lot grouchier, too. Can’t get too many big pleasures at the front. Are they going to start begrudging us the little ones now? Wouldn’t surprise me a bit.” Doctors were natural-born wet blankets.

“I don’t believe they’re just speaking of wind,” Preston replied. “If I understand this correctly, they say tobacco is bad for the health generally, and hard on the lungs in particular.”

“Hmp,” Walsh said: an eloquent bit of skepticism, even if unlikely to show up in the
Oxford English Dictionary
. “It’ll be best bitter next, or I miss my guess.” He eyed his young superior. “I don’t notice
you
chucking your fags into the closest sand dune, either.”

“Er … no.” Preston had the grace to look shamefaced. “It’s a funny thing. I never smoked much before I first went into combat. But in a tight spot a cigarette will steady your nerves better than almost anything, won’t it?”

“Anything this side of a couple tots of stiff rum, any road.” Walsh held up a hand before the subaltern could answer. “And yes, sir, I know what you’re going to say. A smoke won’t leave you stupid the way a tot or two will.”

“Quite.” Preston nodded. Then he chuckled wryly. “Doesn’t seem to bother the Russians, by all accounts.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Walsh agreed. By all accounts, the Russians drank like fish. “But then, by all accounts they’re stupid to begin with.”

German artillery, or maybe it was Italian, opened up just then. Walsh and Preston dove for holes in the sandy ground. As 105s burst around him, Walsh lit a cigarette. He would sooner have had the rum, but you took what you could get. And Preston was right—a smoke
did
steady your nerves.

A medal. Kisses on the cheek from a Spanish Republican brigadier who smelled of garlic. A three-day pass for Madrid, and a fat wad of pesetas to spend there. Vaclav Jezek couldn’t have cared less about the first two. The medal was gilded, not gold; it clanked instead of clinking. The brigadier was just another Spaniard with a graying mustache.

The pass and the roll, though, those were worth having. The Czech sniper could hardly wait to go hunting for more Fascist generals. The Republic promised the sun, moon, and little stars for Marshal Sanjurjo, the
Caudillo
of the enemy’s half of Spain. The payoff on General What’s-his-name—Franco, that was it—wasn’t half bad, either.

Vaclav didn’t speak much Spanish. The only foreign language he did speak was German. Seeing as the Nazis backed the Spanish Fascists, in the Red Republic that was more likely to land him in trouble than to help him. But he could order drinks. He could get at least some food. And, eked out with gestures, he could let a whore know what he wanted her to do. The
putas
liked him fine: he didn’t want anything fancy, and he had plenty of money to spend. As far as they were concerned, that made him the perfect customer.

Being a stolid, thrifty, solid man, he still had a little cash in his wallet when the leave, like all other good things, came to an end. A bus took him back up toward the stretch of front the soldiers of the Czechoslovakian government-in-exile held northwest of Madrid. Almost everything on the way was smashed by bombs, pocked with bullet holes, or both together. For a while, Sanjurjo’s men had pushed into the capital’s outskirts. Slowly and painfully, a few meters at a time, the Republicans had forced them back.

If France hadn’t hopped into the sack with Hitler, the Czechs would have stayed there, making sure the Germans advanced only over their dead bodies. The cynical politicos in Paris thought they were generous to let the Czechs cross the Pyrenees instead of interning them. Maybe they were even right.

Now, though, Daladier and his cronies must have decided old Adolf made a lousy lay. They weren’t in bed with him any more. That meant the on-and-off supply spigot between France and the Spanish Republic was on again. It also meant the Germans and Italians had trouble keeping
their
Spanish pals in toys for a while. If the Republican officials and officers didn’t stow their brains up their asses, they’d try to take advantage of that.