Last Orders

CHAPTER 16

So this was what victory looked like. Vaclav Jezek had never seen it before, not in all the days since the Czechoslovakian Army conscripted him. He’d lost in his homeland, fought to a draw in France but then had to leave when the politics shifted under his feet, and now he’d spent a good long stretch in the trenches here in Spain.

No more. The war, what was left of it, was out in the open now. Here and there, the Nationalists would try to make a stand, but regiments seemed to distrust the men on either side of them even more than they hated the Republic. As often as not, they would surrender, especially when they saw they were facing foreign troops and not their vengeful countrymen.

Vaclav was glad when it was easy. He was especially glad when he didn’t have to do a lot of marching. Carrying upwards of ten kilos of antitank rifle in the trenches was one thing. He could take it off his shoulder or his back a lot of the time. When he sneaked out into no-man’s-land, he was down on all fours or on his belly. Tramping along with it from sunup to sundown he could have done without.

Benjamin Halévy watched a section of Nationalists stack their arms after giving up. The Czechs searched them, more to get rid of holdout weapons than in hopes of loot. The Spaniards were a poor and raggedy lot. They had nothing worth stealing, not any more.

“Poor bastards. They don’t know what they’re getting into,” Halévy remarked. “The Republicans will send them to reeducation camps, and who knows how many will come out, or when?”

“They would’ve been just as nasty if they’d won, or even worse,” Vaclav said.

The scrawny, dirty, shaggy Nationalist prisoners nudged one another. “Russos,” one of them said, pointing to Jezek and Halévy.

Even with his rudimentary Spanish, Vaclav got that. “They think we’re Russians,” he said, laughing.

“Czech has to sound as foreign to them as Spanish does to you,” Halévy answered. He didn’t say to us. He was fluent in Czech, French, and German, and could manage Catalan, Spanish, and Yiddish-and maybe other tongues, too, for all Vaclav knew.

Off the prisoners went, hands clasped on top of their heads. When they got to the rear, Republican Spaniards would take charge of them. Then their fun would really start, as Halévy had said. But the Republicans weren’t-for the most part-killing prisoners out of hand these days. Both sides had done too much of that. They meant it when they said they hated each other.

Vaclav hated Fascists and Fascism. He rather liked Spaniards. They were so different from people he’d known before he got here, they fascinated him. They sometimes drove him crazy, too, but he suspected that worked both ways.

As the Czechs started marching again, he said, “Remember how some of our guys went back to France again after the alliance against Stalin fell apart?”

“I’m not likely to forget,” Halévy replied. “The French Army tried to recall me, too, you know.”

“I was thinking, now that this war’s pretty much won, I’d like to get up there and give the Nazis some more.”

“I wouldn’t mind so much, either,” the Jew said. “Chances are I could tell them I never got their stupid recall letter.”

“Would they believe that?” Vaclav asked.

“I doubt it. But they couldn’t prove I was lying. That would be enough to keep them off my back,” Halévy said. He touched the lieutenant’s badge painted on his helmet. “I’d have to get used to being a sergeant again. My own country won’t let me stay an officer-God forbid!”

“Wasn’t that Dreyfus guy a captain back when?” Vaclav inquired, perhaps less cautiously than he might have.

He didn’t faze Halévy-or if he did, Halévy didn’t let on. “He sure was, and look what that earned him. Devil’s Island, no less! And when it was all sorted out at last and he got his rank back and everything, what then? Why, he won the right to get shot at in the last war. Lucky fellow, Dreyfus!”

“Some luck! Did he make it through? I never knew how the story came out,” Vaclav said.

“As a matter of fact, he did,” Halévy replied. “He ended up a lieutenant colonel. If he hadn’t been a Jew, he might have commanded a brigade.” He shrugged a very French shrug.

They passed a boulder that faced the road. A graffito in Spanish defaced the ancient gray stone. “ ‘Death to traitors,’ ” Vaclav said. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen that threat. Every Nationalist faction thought all the others were traitors.

“Hell of a slogan, isn’t it?” Halévy remarked. “All it means is ‘Death to everybody who doesn’t agree with me.’ ”

“That’s what politics comes down to, isn’t it?” Vaclav said.

“No, no, no, no!” Benjamin Halévy said it in French, so it sounded even more negative than it would have in Czech. He went on, “Politics isn’t about killing the other fellow. It’s about getting him to go along with you so you can get rich off of him. You only kill him when you see he won’t go along with you.”

“Ah, thanks. Now I get it,” Vaclav said. They grinned at each other, for all the world as if they’d both been joking a moment before.

Planes buzzed high overhead. The Czechs looked up anxiously, ready to jump off the road and dive for cover if the fighters belonged to the enemy. But the planes were marked with the Republic’s red, gold, and purple, not the black X in a white circle the Nationalists used. They might have attacked by mistake-such things had happened before. This time, the fighters kept on flying north.

A woman in a long dress weeded a vegetable plot by a roadside farmhouse. She wasn’t a witch, but she was a long way from a beauty. If she had a pretty daughter, the younger woman stayed out of sight. Vaclav didn’t see any livestock, either. Maybe the animals were hidden, or maybe the Nationalists had already eaten them. Soldiers could be worse than locusts: locusts didn’t carry rifles.

A body hung from one of the higher branches of an olive tree half a kilometer farther on. He wore a yellowish khaki Nationalist uniform. Around his neck hung a placard. “What’s this one say?” Vaclav asked.

“ ‘I betrayed my friends,’ ” Halévy answered. His arched nostrils flared. The dead Spaniard had been hanging for a few days, by the way he smelled and looked. The carrion birds would go to work on him in earnest before long.

“Some friends,” Vaclav said. A moment later, he spoke again, this time in musing tones: “I wonder how many trees will sprout fruit like that when we clean up Czechoslovakia.”

“Quite a few. Lampposts will grow that kind of fruit, too,” Halévy said. “You may not want to do too much of that, though, or all the trees and lampposts will sprout again twenty years from now.”

“Huh,” Vaclav said. “Plenty of people back there deserve hanging. You do what the Nazis tell you, you suck up to the Germans who’re holding you down, what do you expect? A big kiss?”

“No, but people have to live with each other afterwards,” the Jew replied. “I don’t think the Republicans have figured that out yet. They want to pay back everybody who wasn’t on their side.”

Vaclav had seen Spanish notions of revenge. He said the worst thing about them he could: “These people are worse than Hungarians.” For people from his part of Europe, Magyars were the touchstone of touchiness.

He made Benjamin Halévy smile. “My mother comes out with things like that,” Halévy said.

“Well, good for her!” Vaclav exclaimed.

They tramped on. A few Spaniards fired on them from rocks up ahead. The Czechs spread out and moved forward in short rushes. The Spaniards fell back to keep from getting outflanked. The advance went on.

It was bloody cold. Snow and sleet fell together. Aristide Demange swore at the miserable weather in Belgium. It wasn’t so bad as it had been in Russia, but nothing was that bad, the last circle of Dante’s hell included. Before long, it would be Christmas, and then 1944.

A little farther east, the Germans were holed up in a village they’d held for years. They were comfortable there, and warm. Half the kids under four had probably come out of their mothers making the Nazi salute.

Crouching in a miserable, freezing hole in the ground wasn’t the same. Demange wanted either to take the village ahead away from the Fritzes or fall back to the last one the French had liberated.

His superiors didn’t feel like listening to him. Regimental headquarters lay a couple of villages back. The colonel there was plenty comfortable. “Your zeal does you credit, Lieutenant, but the weather militates against a successful attack, I fear,” he said, spreading his clean, well-groomed hands in regret. “It is a pity, isn’t it?”

“The Germans didn’t think this kind of weather was too shitty in 1938,” Demange pointed out.

“And they failed,” the colonel said placidly.

They’d failed to take Paris. They’d sure taken everything from the Dutch border to the suburbs of the capital, though. Demange refrained from pointing that out; he could see it wouldn’t help. Instead, he said, “Well, how about letting us fall back a kilometer or two, then, to get into warmer quarters?”

“Give back even a millimeter of liberated Belgium? Give it up?” The colonel shook his head. “Pas possible! You will stay where you are and accommodate yourself to your circumstances.”

“Right, sir. I see you’ve accommodated yourself to your circumstances mighty well,” Demange said. He didn’t know this had been the mayor’s house before the colonel ensconced himself in it, but that was the way to bet. It was the biggest, most comfortable house in the village. He knew that, all right.

The colonel’s graying mustache quivered. “Why should I not demote you for insubordination?” he asked, no doubt thinking the mere idea would reduce Demange to a quivering slice of gelatin.

To the colonel’s unhappy amazement, Demange laughed in his face instead of quivering. “Because I’d thank you for it, that’s why,” he snarled. “I never wanted to be an officer in the first place. I got stuck with it, is what happened to me.”

He left without saluting. He also left without waiting for permission. If Monsieur le Colonel wanted reasons to demote him, now the stinking con had a whole raft of them.

But Monsieur le Colonel turned out to be made of subtler and more vindictive stuff than that. Not long after Demange came back to his cold, wet hole in the ground, a runner brought an order forward. Demange’s company was to attack and seize the village in front of them. By tomorrow. Or else. The order said nothing about artillery support or any other help from the rest of the regiment.

“Merde,” Demange muttered, and the Gitane in the corner of his mouth twitched as he spoke.

“Could it be that you succeeded in provoking our brave and aggressive regimental commander?” Lieutenant Mirouze asked-he was learning how to talk to Demange, all right.

“Yeah, I fucking provoked him,” the older man replied. “But I did too good a job. The old bastard doesn’t want to break me down to sergeant, dammit. Not even down to private. The con wants me dead. And if the rest of the company buys plots behind mine, he doesn’t give a fart.”

“What do we do, then?”

“I’ll think of something. Bastard’s cute, is he? I’ll show him.” Demange figured he would, too-or die trying. The colonel hadn’t left him any other choices.

Going straight at the village in broad daylight with the Boches watching and waiting would generate the slaughter the regimental CO had to expect. That would also be the kind of attack the unimaginative son of a bitch would make himself if someone ordered him to take the place.

So Demange gathered his men together and plotted a night attack instead. Then he asked, “Any of you dopes from Alsace or Lorraine?” As he’d hoped, a couple of soldiers were. He tried another question: “Can you talk enough German to get by?”

They both nodded. He’d hoped they would. Those provinces had been history’s football, kicked back and forth again and again between France and Germany. Most people knew some of both languages. He stuck the German-speakers up front with Stahlhelms on their heads and captured Nazi greatcoats on their backs. With luck, they’d fool the Fritzes’ sentries long enough. Without luck … Without luck, Monsieur le Colonel would get what he wanted no matter how cute Demange played it.

The men slithered forward an hour before midnight. It had warmed up enough to turn sleet into icy rain. You had to be crazy to try anything in weather like this. Demange hoped the Germans thought so, too, and that they were all busy screwing their Belgian whores.

Wire twanged as cutters snipped it. The plashing of the rain helped hide the noises. It also helped keep the sentries from spotting the approaching Frenchmen till they were almost on top of them. Then a German called, “Halt! Who comes?” Demange knew enough of the language to get that.

“Gott im Himmel! Is this the front?” His Lorrainer sounded convincingly surprised.

“You shithead!” the sentry said, and went on from there, telling the man what a jerk he was. He squawked when the Lorrainer’s bayonet went home, but not for long, and not loud enough to alert anyone else. The French soldier got his own helmet and greatcoat out of his pack and put them on in a hurry so his own side wouldn’t shoot him by mistake.

Somewhere not far off to one side or the other-no, to one side and the other-there’d be more sentries. Nobody raised the alarm, though. The other German-speaker must have done his job, too. Whispering in excitement, the French company sneaked into the village.

Most of the Boches seemed to be in the church. Guttural singing came from it. Christmas carols. Wasn’t that sweet? Demange whispered to the Lorrainer: “If we bust in there, can you tell ’em to give up? Tell ’em we’ll kill ’em all if they fuck around?”

“You bet, Lieutenant,” the soldier answered.

“All right. That’s what we’ll try, then. And if the assholes do fuck around, we damn well will kill ’em,” Demange said.

It wasn’t quite so simple, though. Nothing was ever as simple as you wished it would be. A German sentry paced the streets. He was caroling, too, along with the men in church. He wasn’t doing it very loud. He might not even have known he was doing it. But he warned the French troops he was there before he came around the corner. They slid into cover. With the rain, it didn’t have to be great.

That was the last mistake he ever made. Demange hid in a doorway, knife in his right hand. As soon as the German walked past, Demange silently slipped up behind him, clapped his left hand over the sentry’s mouth, and pulled his head back. He drew the knife across the Fritz’s throat. If you did it right, the guy you were killing hardly let out a peep. Demange had practice. He did it right. The German slumped to the cobbles with no more than a muffled grunt.

On to the church. Demange’s men surrounded it. In case of trouble, they could shoot through the windows and chuck in grenades once they broke the glass.

Demange and the Lorrainer and a couple of squads of his toughest men went up the stairs. The rain helped dull their footfalls. So did the racket the carolers were making. He tried the door and grinned nastily. It wasn’t even locked.

He threw it open. They rushed inside. The Lorrainer gave forth with his spiel in German. The Fritzes were staring in horror. The candlelight in there exaggerated shadows and made them look all the more appalled. “Hände hoch!” the Lorrainer finished. If any French soldier knew the tiniest bit of German, that would probably be it.

One by one, the Germans raised their hands. Demange and his men took charge of them. Their officer-a captain, by his shoulder boards-glared at Demange. “On such a night, this is not sporting,” he said in fair French.

Demange was inclined to agree with the Fritz, but so what? “We get orders, too,” he answered with a shrug. After a beat, he added, “Joyeux Noël.”

Poilus led the Germans out of the church and into captivity. A few Boches in the houses came out to see what was going on. They got scooped up, too; the French had to shoot only one of them. A pretty blond Belgian woman wept for him. Too bad, Demange thought. You’ll be blowing someone else soon enough.

He sent a message back to the colonel: Village captured. No casualties on our side. With luck, the messenger would wake him up delivering it. An ordinary officer would win a medal for this. Demange hoped the colonel wouldn’t try to kill him again for a little while. Past that, he expected nothing.

Theo Hossbach had heard that the RAF wasn’t bombing Münster any more. German radio and newspapers claimed England was going easy on the place because it was full of traitors to the Reich.

The RAF hadn’t come over the first few nights after the panzer regiment camped outside of Münster. But then the bombers did show up. Maybe they were striking at Münster itself. Maybe they were going after the troops sent there to restore order instead. Bombs fell on both impartially.

Inside a panzer, or in a foxhole under one, you were safe from anything short of a direct hit. That didn’t mean the bombing was fun. The Panzer IV rocked on its tracks again and again. Twenty-plus tonnes of steel tried to rear up once. “Even more fun than Katyushas!” Adi said as bombs burst all around.

“And they said it couldn’t be done!” Theo was dismayed into a complete sentence. If this was the beating he took inside so much armor plate, what were things like for civilians and their homes? How did they go on through pounding after pounding like this? They were the ones who deserved the Knight’s Cross, not the men who’d actually been trained for war.

“I hope my family are all right,” Adi said tightly. Most of the regiment might come from Breslau and its Wehrkreis, but he’d grown up around here.

And, of course, he had more to worry about with his family than most people did. Theo didn’t know what to say about that. He didn’t know anything he could say that wouldn’t make Adi think his secret was under assault. So he did what he did best: he kept his mouth shut.

Next morning, the radio net crackled with reports of fresh unrest inside Münster. Some of the gray-haired sausage-makers and bookkeepers and mill hands still seemed to remember the stunts they’d learned when they went to war a generation earlier. Some of them had pistols and hunting rifles, too, toys they’d managed to keep hidden in spite of all the searches the security services had made.

They’d managed to pin down some foot soldiers. They fired from upper stories and rooftops, and slipped away before the troops could pay them back. One exasperated infantry captain complained, “The bastards might as well be Ivans, the way they disappear!”

Before long, the panzer regiment got orders to move out. “We have to put the fear of God in them,” the CO declared.

Theo relayed the command. “They make a desert and call it peace,” Adi said. Theo recognized the quotation, though he doubted anyone else in the panzer would have. The name people usually called him by was short for Theodosios; his father had been wild about Edward Gibbon. He knew more Roman history than he knew what to do with.

Back in the turret, Lothar Eckhardt said, “These people could be our fathers and mothers and sisters. I don’t know that I want to shoot at them.”

“Is that mutiny, Lothar?” Hermann Witt asked.

“I don’t know, Sergeant,” the gunner answered unhappily. “Do you want to shoot at them?”

“Do I want to? Of course not,” Witt said. “But I’ve done all kinds of things I didn’t want to since I put on these coveralls. That’s what war’s about.”

“You’ve never done any of that stuff to Germans, though,” Eckhardt said. “Only to the enemy.”

“If these people are enemies of the government-” the panzer commander began.

“Then maybe the government is the one with the problem, not the people,” Adi broke in.

Several seconds’ worth of silence followed. Then Witt said, “Adi, I understand why you’re saying that, but-”

Adi interrupted again: “I’m not saying it because I’m a Jew, Sergeant.” Theo’s jaw dropped all the way down to his chest, and he would have bet everyone back in the turret was just as gobsmacked. Adi’d never called himself a Jew before. He’d never come close. Now he went on, “Besides, it’s not Jews in Münster rising up against the stupid Nazis. It’s Germans, like Lothar said.”

“We swore an oath to the Führer. All of us did. Even you, Adi,” Witt said.

“I know. But we didn’t swear to be lemmings and follow him over the cliff,” Adi answered.

“He’s right,” Theo put in. He knew that might win him the attention of the SS and the SD. He didn’t care now, though he also knew he might care very much later. He felt like a free man. He hadn’t remembered how good that felt.

He looked out through his vision slits. Some of the other panzers around them were starting up. Some weren’t. If that didn’t mean the same argument was raging inside of them, he would have been amazed.

Witt saw the same thing. Since he could look out through the cupola, he was bound to see more of it than Theo. Plaintively, he said, “Do you want us to start shooting at each other right here in the encampment?”

“No, Sergeant.” Adi kept military respect, which made him more persuasive, not less. “The other poor conscript bastards aren’t the enemy. Himmler’s blackshirt goons are.”

“Adi, start the engines. We can go into Münster,” Witt said. “We’ll see what kind of orders they give us when we get there. If we can honorably carry them out, we will. If we can’t … We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it. We don’t have to burn it yet.”

That sounded more like a plea than an order, but Adi said, “Zu Befehl!” and stabbed the starter button with his forefinger. The engine roared to life. He put the panzer into gear and rolled out of the encampment. He didn’t go very fast, and Witt didn’t try to hurry him.

Maybe Witt thought that, once people started shooting at them, he could get his crew to shoot back. Maybe he was right, but Theo wouldn’t have bet on it. He knew he didn’t intend to fire on any of the locals no matter what happened.

They’d just reached the outskirts of town when the radio crackled to life again. “All panzers! All panzers! Halt and return immediately to your encampment!” a sharp, unfamiliar voice ordered.

“On whose authority?” someone asked-probably a captain in charge of a company.

“I am Colonel Joachim von Lehnsdorff, of the General Staff. I have relieved your regimental commander because he has issued orders beyond his competence. Return to your encampment at once, I tell you!” That Prussian-accented voice carried the snap of command.

“Zu Befehl, Herr Oberst!” The man who’d questioned him gulped before getting his acceptance out.

Hermann Witt said, “I never heard of the General Staff canning a regimental CO before.”

“What do you want me to do, Sergeant?” Adi asked.

“Oh, go back. Go back. I’m not sorry to get an order like that, not even a little bit,” Witt answered. “But it’s like even the Wehrmacht can’t make up its mind what it wants to do.”

“It’s probably just like that,” Theo said. After that sentence, he spent another one: “The Wehrmacht has to decide whether it belongs to the Nazis or to Germany.”

Beside him at the front of the panzer, Adi grinned crookedly. “What you mean is, the Wehrmacht has to decide whether Germany belongs to it or to the Nazis.”

That was the question, all right, much more than To be or not to be. Theo found himself nodding. But it was more complicated than Adi made it out to be. The armed forces were divided against themselves. A good-sized chunk of the Wehrmacht, from the rank and file up into the officer corps, favored the Nazis.

Hermann Witt said, “I wonder what the Führer will do when he finds out about this.”

“We’ll all find out,” Adi said. By then, the panzer was clanking away from Münster. Theo was content with that. He’d worry later about whatever came next.

The man in the white coat-the doctor, Pete McGill supposed he was-shook his head. “No, I’m sorry, Sergeant, but no one who retook Midway will be leaving the island right away.”

“That’s a crock … sir,” Pete said. He had to remind himself that military doctors carried officer’s rank. “I’m healthy as a horse. All the guys who were gonna get sick, they’ve gone and done it by now.”

“We don’t know that for sure,” the man in the white coat replied. “We won’t know that for some time to come. If it makes you feel any better, I’m stuck here along with you.”

“It doesn’t make me feel one goddamn bit better,” Pete said. “Uh, sir.”

And yet, however little he wanted to admit it, he had to grant that the sawbones had a point of sorts. Leathernecks on Midway had died of plague and of anthrax. One poor bastard had died of smallpox. Pete had never seen that before, and hoped to heaven he never saw it again. It was a hell of a nasty way to cash in your chips.

“This island may never be safe for human habitation again-certainly not for anyone who hasn’t been thoroughly immunized,” the doctor said. “We can give it back to the gooney birds. They don’t seem to come down with any of the human diseases here.”

“So what did we go and take it back for, then?” Pete growled. “Way you sound, the Japs would’ve dropped dead by themselves pretty damn quick.”

“Anyone who wasn’t thoroughly immunized, I said,” the doctor answered. “The Japs were. So were you men. So am I. Things would have been much worse if that weren’t true.”

“It’s 1944 now,” Pete said. “When do we get turned loose? In 1946? Or 1950? Or 1960? Or is this a waddayacallit-a life sentence?”

“I’m sorry, but I have no idea,” the doc said. “Can you imagine the stink if you guys leave Midway and start an epidemic somewhere?”

Pete could imagine it, all right. What he couldn’t do was care. He scowled. “Terrific … sir. Least people could do for us is bring in some broads who’ve had all their shots. By the time they could leave, they’d be richer’n anybody else on the island. Bet your ass they would.”

“Good for morale but bad for morals, I’m afraid,” the doctor said primly. “You’ll just have to imagine you’re on a warship on an extended cruise. In effect, you are.”

The Japs had been stuck out here without any whores, too. That was probably one of the reasons they’d fought almost to the last man. They’d got so mean, they hadn’t cared whether they lived or died. And die they had. On an island with no place to hide, everybody on one side or the other was going to. The Japs didn’t surrender, and the Marines didn’t try to get them to.

“It’s all a bunch of crap, you ask me,” Pete said. “And if we’re here till summer, we’re gonna have half the landing craft in the Navy.”

He exaggerated, but not by much. C-47s flying off Tern Island delivered some supplies to Midway by airdrop. More, though, came by sea. A freighter would fill up a landing craft with food and fuel and whatever else the leathernecks needed. The crew would hop into a launch and go back to the mother ship. A motorboat would bring a replacement crew out from the island to bring in the landing craft. The scheme worked, but more and more big square boats crowded the beach.

“We can afford that,” the guy in the white coat said. “As far as the whole war goes, it’s just pocket change.”

“Yeah, that’s what they treat us like, sure as hell,” Pete said. “Pennies, maybe nickels if we’re lucky. Not dimes. Dimes are worth a little something.”

The doctor shrugged and walked away. If being marooned here bothered him, he didn’t show it. Maybe he couldn’t get it up. Maybe he played with himself all the time. Or maybe he was a fairy, and spending months on an island with a bunch of Marines was hog heaven for him.

Pete had no way of knowing about that. All he knew was how much he wanted to get back to Honolulu and Hotel Street. Any place with no booze and no babes wasn’t worth living in. None of the landing craft had brought in hooch yet, not even the horrible unofficial stuff that got cooked up on every warship ever launched. Life wasn’t fair, dammit.

It was warm. It was a little humid. Every so often, it rained for a while. Pete didn’t need long to get bored. He smoked like a chimney-they did have enough sense to send plenty of coffin nails. He fished in the lagoon and on the beach. What he caught tasted better than the rations they brought in.

He played poker. Everybody played poker except for the guys who shot dice and the handful of eggheads who played bridge instead. The eggheads insisted bridge stayed interesting even when you didn’t bet on it (though they did). Pete thought playing cards where no money changed hands was about as much fun as kissing your mom.

He won a little more than he lost. He was no human slide rule, able to figure odds like an insurance salesman. But he’d played a lot. He knew good hands, not-so-good hands, and hands that looked good but would let you down like a cheating cocktail waitress. And, most important of all, he knew how to lie with a straight face.

“Fuck you, McGill,” another leatherneck grumbled when Pete raked in a pot. “I can’t tell when you’re bluffing, and I’m sick of getting my ass burned on account of it.”

“Aw, gee, Edgar, you say the sweetest things,” Pete lisped in shrill falsetto. He batted his eyelashes at his victim. That broke up the whole table (though actually they were sitting on a couple of blankets). For some reason, nothing on God’s green earth seemed funnier than an unshaven, smelly Marine mincing like a fruit.

Even Edgar laughed, though he looked pained when he did it. “Whose deal is it, anyway?” he asked, trying to shift attention away from himself and Pete.

The game went on. Pete didn’t win all the time-nowhere close. The cards wouldn’t let you. The trick was to win as big as you could when you won and not to throw away too much when you lost. And Edgar might have been disgusted, but Pete disguised the truth when he delivered it fairy-style. If Edgar admitted he couldn’t read Pete, that gave Pete a serious edge.

Not everybody came equipped with a poker face. Pete had played against one guy whose eyebrows jumped every time he got a hand worth betting. The guy didn’t know he was doing it, which didn’t help him. Good cards made another fellow turn pink, as if he’d got caught peeking down a girl’s blouse. Pete didn’t think even a doctor could keep anyone from blushing. But that fellow’s color changes cost him money.

You studied the people you played against. You tried not to show you were doing it, but you did. You knew they were casing you, too, casing you like a bank vault. You gave away as little as you could by the way you acted and by the way you played.

If you were a sucker, if you bled money the way a bayoneted Jap gushed blood, the smartest thing you could do was get the hell out of the game. Some guys had the sense to see that. They threw a baseball around or read magazines. Others wondered where this month’s pay had disappeared to, and last month’s, and next month’s, too.

No Japanese planes bombed them. Bettys from Wake Island could have reached them, but the slanties didn’t bother. They had to realize they might not hang on to Wake much longer, either.

Then what? Not back to where they’d started, not with Guam and the Philippines still in Japanese hands to shield the Home Islands and the Dutch East Indies. But at least Honolulu would be able to take a deep breath and not worry so much about coming down with anthrax if it did.

No. The Marines on Midway were the ones who had to worry about that. Which was one big reason they couldn’t get off Midway, dammit.