Coup d'Etat

Chapter 6

Coming back into port should have been a relief for Julius Lemp and the rest of the U-30’s crew. Most of the time, it was. Coming back meant they’d made it through another patrol. RAF bombs wouldn’t sink them. Russian shells wouldn’t tear through the U-boat’s thin steel hide and send it to the bottom. Slow-crawling crabs wouldn’t pick out Lemp’s bulging dead eyes with their claws… this time.

The men could shave their beards. They could take proper showers. They could eat food that didn’t come out of tins. They could go into town and drink and pick up barmaids and brawl. They could walk off by themselves, without someone else always at their elbow. Or they could lie on real mattresses and sleep and sleep.

It was wonderful. Most of the time.

Every once in a while, politics got in the way. And politics, in the Reich, turned bloody in a hurry. They’d just come back in to Wilhelmshaven when the generals tried to topple the Fuhrer. You didn’t want to hear machine-gun fire at the edge of the base, especially when you weren’t sure who was shooting at whom or why.

Now they were in Kiel-at the edge of the Baltic rather than the North Sea-and politics was rearing its ugly head again. Everyone should have been proud of them for sinking the destroyer and two Soviet freighters on their latest patrol. If Lemp’s superiors were, they had a gift for hiding their enthusiasm.

“ Ja, ja. Well done, I am sure,” said the graying Kapitan zur See who heard Lemp’s first report. The bare bulb above the senior officer’s desk gleamed off the four gold stripes on his cuffs. He scribbled a note or two, but only a note or two. “No doubt your log gives the full details.”

If he wasn’t a distracted man, Lemp had never seen one. “Yes, sir,” he said.

The captain looked up and seemed surprised to find him still there. “Do you require something else, uh, Lemp?” He had to remind himself who the squirt in front of him was. Considering some of the things that had happened to Lemp, he didn’t know whether to be relieved or alarmed-for better and for worse, he hadn’t had the kind of career that lent itself to obscurity.

“Require? No, sir. Of course not, sir.” Lemp lied with great sincerity, as a junior sometimes had to do with a superior. “But if it’s not too much trouble, sir, I would like to have some idea of what’s going on.”

He might have stuck the Kapitan zur See with a pin. “What makes you think anything out of the ordinary is going on?” the older man demanded. Lemp didn’t answer; he didn’t think that needed an answer. The four-striper’s sigh said he really didn’t, either. He lit a cigarette. It was only stalling, and he and Lemp both knew it. His sigh sent a stream of smoke up toward the lightbulb. “Tell me, Lemp-what is your religion?”

“My religion, sir?” The U-boat skipper would have been more surprised had the captain asked him which position he most fancied in bed, but not much more surprised. “I’m a Lutheran, sir, but I haven’t been to church in a while.”

The senior officer blew out more smoke, this time in obvious relief. “Well, I could say the same thing. As a matter of fact, I did say the same thing to my own superiors the other day.”

Lemp had to remind himself that even an exalted Kapitan zur See had men to whom he needed to answer. “Why on earth did they ask you, sir?” he said, in lieu of Why on earth are you asking me?

A brief spark in the captain’s gray eyes said he also heard the question behind the question. “There are certain… advantages to being away at sea, tending to the Reich ’s business,” he replied. “You won’t have heard that the Catholics are, mm, well, some of them are, mm, unhappy about the way things are going.”

“Sir?” Lemp said, this time in lieu of What the devil are you talking about?

“It’s the Bishop of Munster’s fault,” the four-striper said. He sounded like a man trying to convince himself. Or that could have been Lemp’s imagination, but he didn’t think so. The answer also explained next to nothing. The Kapitan zur See must have realized as much. He stubbed out the cigarette with a quick, savage motion. “He spoke out against the Fuhrer ’s policy. From the pulpit. Repeatedly. And so the security services decided they had no choice but to take him into custody.”

“I… see,” Lemp said slowly. You needed nerve to do something like that. You needed to have your head examined, was what you really needed.

“There are… demonstrations of unhappiness about this here and there in the Vaterland,” the Kapitan zur See said. “This is why I asked you, you understand.”

“Aber naturlich,” Lemp said, which seemed safe enough. Demonstrations of unhappiness? What was going on in Germany? Was the whole country bubbling like a pot of stew forgotten on the stove? He wouldn’t have been surprised. You couldn’t just go arresting bishops. These weren’t the Middle Ages, after all. But the blackshirts didn’t seem to care. They were Hitler’s hounds. Do something they didn’t like and they’d bite.

“So that’s where we are. That’s why passes into town are limited,” the Kapitan zur See said. Schleswig-Holstein had been Danish till a lifetime before, and was solidly Lutheran. Even so… “The less trouble we stir up, the better for everyone.”

“The men won’t like being restricted to base, sir,” Lemp said. As the other officer had to know, that was an understatement.

“Yes? And so?” The Kapitan zur See sent him a hooded look. “They aren’t the only crew here, you know.”

“Jawohl, mein Herr.” Lemp knew a losing fight when he saw one. “I’ll tell them what they need to understand.” He rose, saluted, and got out of the four-striper’s office as fast as he could.

By the time he returned to the barracks, the U-30’s crew had already found that next to none of them would be able to go into town. They weren’t happy about it, which was putting things mildly. “What, the shitheads don’t think we deserve to blow off steam? They can blow it out their assholes, is what they can do.” That was Paul, the helmsman-a chief petty officer, and as steady a man as Lemp had ever known. If he was within shouting distance of mutiny, the rest of the submariners had to be even closer.

Lemp spread his hands in what looked like apology, even though U-boat skippers weren’t in the habit of apologizing to their men. “There’s nothing I can do about it, friends,” he said. “It’s politics, is what it is.” He summarized what the Kapitan zur See had told him. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the senior officer didn’t want ratings to know such things. Well, too damn bad for him if he didn’t.

Some of the sailors, naturally, were Catholics. Some were convinced Nazis. The largest number cared little for religion or politics. “So this bullshit is what’s keeping us confined to base?” one of them said. “That’s nothing but Quatsch. If we want to get into fights, we’ve got better things to brawl about than some stupid, loudmouthed bishop.”

“Do we?” another sailor said. “The government shouldn’t tell us how to be religious. They fought wars about that back in the old days.”

“A bishop’s got no business telling government what to do, either,” the first man retorted. “They fought wars about that in the old days, too.” By the way the two ratings glared at each other, they were both ready to square off on the spot. By the way their friends shifted toward one or the other, everybody knew which side of the fence he stood on.

“That will be enough of that,” Lemp said sternly. “As you were, all of you.” For a bad couple of seconds, he didn’t think they’d listen to him. That was the worst feeling an officer could get. Obedience sprang from consent, no matter how much the military tried to conceal that. When men stopped listening to their leaders… You got the end of 1918 all over again. No German in his right mind wanted to repeat that long fall into chaos.

But then one of the ratings said, “Ah, fuck it. It’s got nothing to do with crewmates.” After a moment, the other man nodded. Tension left the barracks hall like water leaving a dive chamber when a U-boat surfaced. The rating went on, “If we can’t go into town, the least they could do would be to bring some broads onto the base and set up a brothel here.” All the sailors nodded in unison to that.

It seemed like a good idea to Julius Lemp, too. “I’ll see what I can do,” he promised, and headed back toward the Kapitan zur See ’s office. A few girls, even homely ones who smelled of onions, would go a long way toward making sure the men remembered what they were supposed to be doing and why. They’d also go a long way toward making sure the men remembered their superiors cared about them. And that would help them remember what they should be doing and why, too.

Some of the streets in Bialystok had trees growing alongside them. The locals bragged about their tree-lined boulevards, and said they made Bialystok just like Paris. Only a bunch of provincial Poles and Jews could imagine that a Polish provincial town was anything like Paris, but try and tell them that.

Hans-Ulrich Rudel didn’t. For one thing, life was too short. For another, he’d never been to Paris himself. He’d bombed the place when the Wehrmacht fought its way to the suburbs, but that wasn’t the same thing. He’d promised himself leave in the French capital after it fell, but it didn’t.

So here he was two years later, on leave in Bialystok instead. At the moment, the trees were bare-branched, even skeletal. But the leaf buds were starting to swell. Spring was on the way. Before long, Bialystok would be green again, even if not Parisian.

Signs on shops and eateries were in incomprehensible Polish and just as incomprehensible Yiddish. The one had the right alphabet but alien words, the other pretty much familiar words in an alien script. Both added up to gibberish for him.

But he’d come here before, often enough to know where he was going from the train station. If he had got lost, spoken Yiddish made far more sense to him than the written kind, and Bialystok was full of Jews. He could have asked one of them. These days, the town also had its share of chain dogs-German Feldgendarmerie, their gorgets of office hung around their necks from chains. He was glad he didn’t need to talk to them. The less he had to do with them, the better.

A drunk Pole reeled out of a tavern. That would have been a cliche, except the Pole, in a uniform of dark, greenish khaki, was arm in arm with an equally plastered German in Feldgrau. They were both murdering the same tune, each in his own language. Drunken Germans weren’t such a cliche, which didn’t mean Hans-Ulrich hadn’t seen his share of them and then some.

As a matter of fact, he was heading for a tavern himself, though not this one. Another block up from the station, half a block over… He nodded to himself. He recognized the Polish sign out front, even if it made no sense to him. He walked in. The place smelled of tobacco and sweat and beer and fried food-and stale piss from the jakes out back.

Poles and Germans drank together here, too. So did Jews and Germans, which would have been unimaginable back in the Reich. The Poles didn’t like their Jews, but they didn’t hit them with the same legal restrictions the Germans did. Maybe they couldn’t; one person in ten in Poland was a Jew, only one in a hundred in Germany. Wehrmacht personnel here had orders to conform to local customs and laws.

A short, swarthy barmaid sidled up to Hans-Ulrich. She spoke in throaty Yiddish: “You may as well sit down, not that the boss’ll make a zloty off you if you keep on drinking tea.”

“Hello, Sofia. Won’t you at least tell me you’re glad to see me?” Rudel didn’t grab her or kiss her in public. She didn’t like that. Did she go with other men while he was in the East fighting the war? If she did, he’d never heard about it. The way things were these days, that would do.

“I’m at least glad to see you,” she answered, deadpan. She wasn’t exactly a Jew; she had a Polish father, which in the Reich ’s classification scheme made her a Mischling first class. But she thought of herself as Jewish, and she was snippy like a Jew. Back in Germany, Hans-Ulrich would have endangered his career by having anything to do with her. He could get away with it here-could, and did.

She took him to a corner and brought him a glass of tea. She found his teetotaling as funny as most of his service comrades did. She was also as nervous about seeing a German-and a Nazi Party member at that-as he was about going with a Jewess. In bed, everything was fine. The rest of the time… Hans-Ulrich sometimes thought they came from different planets, not just different countries.

Sofia was well informed about his planet, though. Along with the sweet, milkless tea, she gave him a mocking grin. “So even the Catholics in Germany say Hitler can’t get away with some of the stuff he’s trying to pull?” she said.

As a Lutheran minister’s son, his opinion of Catholics had never been high. “A lot of that is just enemy propaganda,” he said. None of it had come over the German radio or appeared in any army or Luftwaffe newspaper. That didn’t mean he hadn’t heard a few things, or more than a few. It did mean he wasn’t obliged to believe them-not officially, and not when Sofia tried to rub his nose in them.

She quirked a dark eyebrow. “Well, if you say so,” she answered, which meant she wasn’t obliged to believe him, either. She went on, “The big switch was good for something, anyhow. I got a card from my mother the other day, from Palestine.”

While England and Germany were at war, mail from Palestine-a British League of Nations mandate-didn’t travel to Poland because it was friendly to Germany. Now that England had joined the crusade against Bolshevism, things moved more freely. “There’s rather more to it than that, you know,” he said stiffly. He often was more literal-minded than might have been good for him. Sofia enjoyed getting under his skin. As if having a mother who felt strongly enough about being Jewish to go to Palestine after the Pole she’d married (a drunkard, if you listened to Sofia) walked out weren’t enough!

“If you say so,” Sofia repeated. Big things-like who would win the war-meant little to her. Or, if they did, she wouldn’t let on. A small thing-like getting a card from her mother after a long silence-counted for more.

“I think you’re trying to drive me crazy,” Hans-Ulrich said.

“It would be a short drive,” she retorted, which made him regret-not for the first time-getting into a battle of words with her. He was a good flyer, not such a great talker. But everybody knew Jews were born talking, and in that Sofia took after her mother. Rudel assumed as much, anyhow, without even thinking about it.

He tried to change the subject: “What time do you get off today?”

“Why? What have you got in mind?” She didn’t just answer a question with another question. She answered one with two.

“Whatever you want, of course,” Hans-Ulrich said. Bialystok’s nightlife consisted of a few movie houses, a dance hall or two, and a Yiddish theater. Even with trees lining the streets, Paris it was not.

Sofia laughed raucously. “Whatever you want, you mean. And what else does a man ever want?”

Rudel’s ears heated. “Well, what if I do? If I didn’t, you’d think I was sleeping with somebody else, and you’d give me trouble on account of that.”

“I wouldn’t give you trouble. I’d drop you like a grenade. No-I’d throw you like a grenade.” She cocked her head to one side. “You mean you don’t visit the officers’ whorehouse? I’m sure they’ve set one up somewhere not far from you. They always do things like that, don’t they?”

As a matter of fact, they did. An officers’ brothel-and one for other ranks-operated in a village a couple of kilometers from the airstrip. Hans-Ulrich knew Sergeant Dieselhorst had visited the one for enlisted men. He hadn’t called at the officers’ establishment. That gave his fellow flyers one more reason to think he was strange, though they knew about Sofia and didn’t think he was a fairy.

“The girls there would just be doing it because they were doing it,” he said slowly, trying to put what he thought into words. “They wouldn’t be doing it because they wanted to do it with me.”

And I do? He waited for the barmaid’s jeers. Rather to his surprise, it didn’t come. She eyed him as if she were seeing him for the first time. “That matters to you?”

“Yes, it matters to me.” He was in his midtwenties. He often risked his life several times a day. He gave Sofia a crooked grin. “Well, most of the time, anyhow.”

He wondered if she’d get mad. Instead, he startled a laugh out of her. “You’d better watch yourself. If you aren’t careful, you’ll make me think you’re honest.”

Hans-Ulrich prided himself on his honesty-he was a pastor’s son. He started to get angry, then realized she was teasing him. “You…” he said, more or less fondly.

She grinned at him, altogether unrepentant. “Did you expect anything different?” Before he could answer, the soldiers at another table yelled for her to fetch them another round of drinks. She fluttered her fingers at him and hurried away. Hans-Ulrich realized she never had told him when she got off. How much tea would he soak up before she finally did? He wasn’t even that fond of tea. But he was fond of Sofia, and so he waited and ordered glass after glass.

Alistair Walsh’s principal use to the Conservative conspirators against Sir Horace Wilson’s alliance with the Reich was that he knew soldiers. Some of them had put on the uniform after the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, but he’d worn it for more than twenty years-for his whole adult life, till his political unreliability led him to resign from the service and led the army to accept his resignation.

So he knew soldiers in ways the toffs didn’t. And he also knew soldiers-literally. At one time or another between the wars, he’d served under most of England’s prominent and high-ranking officers. Senior officers tended to remember senior noncoms. Those long-serving veterans were the army’s backbone. They counted for more in the scheme of things than lieutenants and captains and sometimes even majors because they knew all the things the junior officers were just learning-and more besides, especially if you listened to them.

And Walsh could do things in an unofficial capacity that would have raised eyebrows-to say nothing of hackles-had an MP gone about them. If the conspirators talked to a general, for instance, Sir Horace and his none too merry men would naturally suspect them of skullduggery. The Prime Minister and his henchmen would be right, too.

But if Alistair Walsh called on General Archibald Wavell-well, so what? He was only an out-to-pasture underofficer. For all Scotland Yard could prove, he was asking for a job, or maybe a loan.

That was also true for all General Wavell knew. He might not have had any idea of the company Walsh was keeping these days. He did know who Walsh was, though, and did agree to meet him at General Staff headquarters. In baggy civilian tweeds, Walsh felt dreadfully out of place in that sanctum of creased khaki, gleaming brass tunic buttons, shoulder straps, and swarms of the red collar tabs that showed officers of colonel’s rank and above. In uniform himself, he would have had to salute till his shoulder ached. As things were, his arm kept twitching as he fought down the conditioned reflex again and again.

Wavell was an erect, thin-faced man in his early fifties. “I can give you fifteen minutes, Walsh,” he said as he closed his office door to let them talk privately. Scotland Yard might be able to plant microphones in many different places, Walsh judged, but not here.

“Thank you, sir,” the ex-serviceman said. “I appreciate it, and so do my friends.”

One of Wavell’s bushy eyebrows rose an eighth of an inch. “Your… friends?” He let the word hang in the air. By the look on his face, he might have taken a bite of fish that was slightly off.

“Yes, sir,” Walsh said stolidly. “You may or may not have heard I was the bloke who had the bad luck to bring in Rudolf Hess after he parachuted from his Messerschmitt 110.”

“Were you, now?” The general’s gaze sharpened. “Yes, that’s right. You were. I remember seeing the report, now you remind me of it.

And so?”

“And so I wish I’d had a pistol with me and plugged him instead,” Walsh answered. “Then maybe we wouldn’t be in bed with Hitler now. My friends”-he deliberately reused the word-“still wish we weren’t.”

Wavell snorted. “They aren’t the only ones, I’m sure.” But he checked himself. “It’s up to the politicians to set policy, of course. The military’s here to back their play when the usual peacetime methods fail.”

“Invading Russia, sir?” Walsh said. “Isn’t that going a bit far?”

“If your friends are of the pink persuasion, Walsh, I don’t think we have much more to say to each other.” Twenty degrees of frost crisped up Wavell’s voice.

“They’re Tories almost to a man. Churchill was one of them, till he met that Bentley,” Walsh replied. Winston Churchill hated the idea of helping Hitler, not that Neville Chamberlain cared a farthing what Churchill thought. People still wondered whether the rich young man behind the wheel of the auto that ran Churchill down was truly as drunk as the bobbies claimed.

“That was a bad business,” Wavell said quietly, so he might have been one of those wondering people. He studied Walsh. “So you’re in with that lot, are you? No, they’re not pinks, no doubt of that.”

“I am, sir. It seems the best way to honor Churchill’s memory-and, to my mind, he was dead right about the Nazis.” Walsh hadn’t used the phrase with malice aforethought. But he quite fancied it once it was out of his mouth. “Dead right,” he repeated.

“I can’t imagine what you or your friends expect me to do about it, though,” Wavell said. “This isn’t Argentina or Brazil or one of those places. The army doesn’t interfere in politics here. It would be unthinkable.”

Walsh just sat there and waited. If General Wavell was talking about it, he was thinking about it. What he was thinking about it… Walsh would discover in due course.

The general glanced at his wristwatch. “Well,” he said with forced briskness, “I’m afraid I’ve given you all the time I can spare at present. There is a war on, you know, and someone does have to run it, or at any rate to try.”

“Certainly, sir.” Walsh got to his feet. “Is there anything you’d particularly like me to tell my friends?”

“Tell them… Tell them they don’t know what they’re playing at, dammit.”

“I think they do, sir. I think it’s the Prime Minister and his lot who’ve gone off the rails, not these other fellows.”

“You can say that. You’ve taken off the uniform. No, I don’t hold it against you-no denying you had your reasons,” Wavell said. “But I still wear it. If I were to speak in the same fashion, or to act in addition to speaking, it would be treason, nothing less.”

“General, I don’t know anything about that,” said Walsh, who knew far more about it than he’d dreamt he would before he watched that lone parachutist descend on the Scottish field. Taking a deep breath, he continued, “I do know we can’t go on the way we’re going. It would ruin the country forever. Anything would be better, anything at all. Or do you think I’m wrong?”

“I think-” Wavell broke off, shaking his head like a horse pestered by gnats. “I think you’d best go, Walsh, is what I think. And deliver my message to your associates.”

Walsh did, at a pub not far from Parliament. They kept no favorite table: that would have made it too easy for Scotland Yard, or perhaps the PM’s less savory associates, to arrange to listen in. Walsh didn’t think they could bug every table in the place. The noise from the rest of the crowd-more politicos, solicitors, newspapermen, and other such riffraff-drowned out the conspirators’ conversations. He hoped like blazes it did, anyhow.

Ronald Cartland slammed his pint mug down on the tabletop in disgust when Walsh finished. It wasn’t empty; some best bitter slashed out. “Good Lord!” the MP exclaimed. “The man has no more spine than an eclair! One of you, Walsh, is worth a thousand of him.”

Cartland had volunteered for service when the war broke out, and fought in France as a subaltern. That, to Walsh’s mind, gave his opinions weight and made his praise doubly warming. But Walsh thought his dismissal of General Wavell was premature. “I don’t know about that, sir,” he said. “He didn’t have the military police arrest me for treason, the way he might have done. He didn’t even chuck me out of his office. He listened to me. He may not be ready to move yet, but he doesn’t half fancy the way things are heading.”

“Who in his right mind would?” said Bobbity Cranford, another leader of the anti-alliance crowd. “But if he listened to you, old man, he’d better watch out for Bentleys the next time he crosses the road.”

That produced a considerable silence around the table. Walsh broke it by loudly calling to a barmaid to fill up his pint again. He needed the fresh mug. Cranford had reminded him they weren’t playing a game here, nor was the government. If it felt itself seriously threatened, it would lash out. Anyone who didn’t believe that had only to remember Winston Churchill.

Luc Harcourt unslung his rifle and carried it instead of leaving it on his shoulder. His regiment was heading up to the front again, and he wanted to be ready if they ran into any Russians. Besides, fronts here were far more porous than they’d been in France. Some enemy soldiers were bound to have leaked through what was supposed to be the line.

His boots squelched as he tramped up the road, but only a little. The mud didn’t try to pull off his footgear, as it would have a couple of weeks earlier. Pretty soon, both sides would be able to start moving again. There were prospects Luc relished more.

Up ahead, Lieutenant Demange was singing obscene lyrics to the tune of a peasant song about spring. Luc had known Demange since before the shooting started. Not many others from the old company survived, and even fewer in one piece. Knowing Demange as he did, Luc also knew those foul verses were a way for the reluctantly promoted officer to hide his own nerves about what lay ahead.

Anyone who didn’t know Demange so well would assume he owned no nerves. Luc had, for a long time. But underneath the chrome-steel salaud lay a human being. A nasty human being, but even so, Luc thought.

One thing Demange didn’t believe in was taking needless chances; a soldier had to take too many that were necessary. He carried a rifle instead of the more usual and less useful officer’s pistol. And he carried it, like Luc. He was ready for anything. And things needed to be ready for him.

“Halt! Who goes there?” a sentry called in nervous, German-accented French. “Give the countersign!”

“Your mother on a pogo stick,” Demange snarled. He might be here, but he still despised the Boches.

“Qu’est-ce-que vous dites?” the sentry said: a reasonable enough question. He added, “Give the countersign, or I fire!”

Demange did, which confirmed Luc’s thought about not taking chances he didn’t have to. The German passed him and the men he led. Well, why not? They were doing some of Hitler’s work so the rest of the Fritzes wouldn’t have to.

The trench system was well enough organized and shored up to show the lines hadn’t moved much for a while. What with the way Russia turned to mud soup as the snow melted, the lines couldn’t very well move.

Which didn’t mean the Reds were asleep behind their rusting barbed wire. The regiment hadn’t been in place for half an hour before an Ivan with a megaphone shouted at them in much better French than the German sentry spoke: “Here they are again-Colonel Eluard’s little darlings.”

How did the bastard know? Luc wouldn’t have thought any of the handful of Russian peasants he’d seen had paid the least attention to the Frenchmen tramping up to the front. He really wouldn’t have thought they could tell one regiment from another. And he really wouldn’t have thought that, even if they could, they’d be able to pass the word on to their countrymen so fast.

That only went to show how much he knew. With noxious good cheer, the French-speaking Russian went on, “Now that you’re back, we should welcome you the way you deserve!”

“Jump for the bombproofs, boys!” Demange shouted, a good twenty seconds before mortar bombs started raining down on the trenches.

His instincts saved lives. Luc had already curled up in a place where fragments couldn’t get him when the shooting started. But not everybody was so lucky. Machine guns and German artillery kept the Russians at bay. Stretcher-bearers hauled off the wounded Frenchmen.

“Those fucking stovepipes are bad news,” Demange said, lighting one more in his endless chain of Gitanes.

“How did the Russians know who we were?” Luc asked.

“How doesn’t matter. But they knew, all right. That jeering prick… He sounded just like a captain I served under in the last war. That asshole stopped a 77-or maybe it was a 105-with his face. Hardly enough left of him to bury. I hope the same thing happens to this son of a bitch, too.”

“He was just the mouthpiece,” Luc said. “It’s the ones who told him what to say who need killing.”

“They all need killing,” Demange said. “And they think we all need killing. And if everybody gets his way, nobody’ll be left when this stupid war’s done, and you know what? The world’ll be a better place after that. For a little while, till the cats or the rats learn how to lie.”

“Heh,” Luc said uneasily, not at all sure the older man was kidding. He decided to change the subject: “What are we going to do now?”

“I don’t know about you, but I’m going to shore up these works the best way I know how.” Demange stopped, an evil smile lighting up his face. He shook his head. “No. Fuck that. I’m an officer now, right? I’m going to have a bunch of sorry-ass privates shore this shit up for me.”

“Sounds good, Lieutenant.” Luc grinned. With a sergeant’s hash marks on his sleeve, he wouldn’t have to thicken up the calluses on his palm with an entrenching tool so much, either.

“And then,” Demange went on, “and then, what I’m going to do is sit right here on my ass and not move a centimeter forward till some cocksucker in a fancy kepi makes me do it.”

“That sounds good, too,” Luc agreed. “But what about the crusade against Bolshevism?”

“What afuckingbout it?” Demange retorted. “I’m here, aren’t I? You’re here, aren’t you? As much as you’re ever anywhere, I mean.”

“I love you, too, sir,” Luc put in.

Demange ignored him, not for the first time and no doubt not for the last. The veteran went on, “We’ve both shot Russians. If they come at us again-no, when they do-we’ll shoot some more of them so they don’t shoot us. I’ll do whatever I’ve got to do to stay alive. But if you think I’m enough of a jackass to give a fart about any of that political horseshit, you’re even dumber than I give you credit for.”

“Mmp.” Luc left that right there. He looked up and down the trenches. No one was paying special attention to him and Demange, except perhaps to see what kind of nasty orders the lieutenant and sergeant doled out next and who’d get stuck with them. Lowering his voice, Luc continued, “Some of the guys in the ranks are still Reds, you know. They didn’t come close to weeding all of ’em out before they sent us east.”

“Oh, sure.” Lieutenant Demange nodded. “But so what? Most of ’em’ll shoot Ivans to keep from getting killed themselves, and that’s all they’ve really got to do. A few of ’em’ll desert.”

“A few of them have already deserted,” Luc pointed out.

“Uh-huh.” Demange nodded again. “And you know what? I bet the fucking Russians ate ’em without salt. We’re only here because Daladier’s got his head up his ass. Those miserable Russkis, they’re here on account of the Nazis and Poles and us, we’re in their country. It makes all the fucking difference in the world. Even a sorry turd like you didn’t fight too bad when the Fritzes invaded France.”

“That’s the nicest thing you ever said about me.” Luc tried to sound sarcastic. He did less well than he would have liked, mostly because he meant it. That was about the nicest thing Demange had ever said about him.

“Yeah, well, you didn’t know your ass from your elbow when you started out. But you were luckier than most of the other poor stupid new fish: the Nazis didn’t nail you or blow you up right away, so you got the chance to learn,” Demange said. “By now, you know what you’re doing. One more time, you’d be even dumber than I figure you for if you didn’t.”

“Thanks a bunch,” Luc said, deflated. He’d been cut and scratched and bruised, but he never did get badly hurt. Was that all it took to make a good soldier? Staying in one piece long enough to learn the ropes? The more he thought about it, the likelier it seemed.

Even a good soldier, though, had to stay lucky all the time. Things had to keep missing him. Superiors had to steer clear of idiotic orders that put him in a place where things couldn’t help hitting. Otherwise, he’d go down and thrash and scream just as loud as any clodhopper fresh out of training. He knew that, too.