Last Orders

CHAPTER 3

Summer days over Germany were long, summer nights short. In winter, when things reversed, the RAF and French bombers struck deep inside the country. At this time of year, they couldn’t hope to do that and fly back out of danger before the new dawn showed them to the Luftwaffe.

In summer, then, the raiders concentrated on the western part of the Reich. They could drop their bombs on towns like Münster and be landing at their distant bases before the sun came up again.

As it sank in the northwestern sky this evening, Sarah Bruck apprehensively eyed the stretching shadows and the red-gold lights streaming in through the dining-room window. “Do you think they’ll come tonight?” she asked.

Her father paused with a forkful of boiled potatoes and turnip greens halfway to his mouth. Samuel Goldman considered the question as gravely as if it touched on the death of Socrates or the assassination of Julius Caesar. He had been a professor of ancient history and classics at the university. Since he was a Jew, that didn’t matter once the Nazis took over. Because he was also a wounded veteran from the last war, he still found employment: he was a laborer in a work gang that cleared streets of rubble and tore down shattered houses and made repairs after the enemy struck.

Having considered, he nodded. “Ja, I think so. There will be plenty of moonlight to help show them the way.”

“Samuel!” Hanna Goldman said, as if he’d come out with something filthy. Well, in a way he had.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he told his wife. “She asked me what I thought. Should I have lied to her? Then, when the air-raid sirens start screaming, she’ll think My father is a stupid old fool!, and she’ll hate me.”

“What happens if the raiders don’t come tonight, though, and everything stays quiet?” Sarah’s mother sounded sure she’d won that one.

But she hadn’t. Father answered, “She’ll think My father is a stupid old fool! — and she’ll love me.”

They all laughed. The Nazis did everything they could to make life in the Reich as miserable for Jews as possible. They might have done a better job of it than any other gang of persecutors in the history of the world. Try as they would, though, they couldn’t wipe out every single happy moment. Some sneaked past in spite of them.

“If they come,” Sarah said, “maybe they’ll drop some on the Rathaus and on the square in front of the cathedral. That would be terrible, wouldn’t it?”

“Dreadful. Frightful,” Samuel Goldman agreed, his voice full of plummy, pious hypocrisy. When you couldn’t be sure the house wasn’t bugged, you didn’t want to give the authorities any excuse to cause you trouble. They could do it without an excuse, of course, but why make things easy for them?

A bomb hit on the Rathaus in daylight would blow the Burgomeister and the Nazi functionaries who ran Münster straight to heaven-or, more likely, to some warmer clime instead. A bomb hit on the Rathaus at any old time might destroy all the city records, including the ones of who was and wasn’t a Jew. Plenty of people in town knew, of course, but Sarah suspected few would squeal on her parents and her if they somehow found an excuse to take the yellow Stars of David off their clothes. The National Socialist regime was less popular than it had been before it led the Reich into an endless, unvictorious war.

Which was why a bomb hit on the square in front of the cathedral would bring few tears to anyone in town. Bishop von Galen had dared to protest against the Nazis’ policy of euthanizing mental defectives (though he’d said not a word about how they treated the Jews). The Gestapo had seized him, and the Catholics in town, backed by some Protestants, rioted to try to gain his release. They rose not once but twice. Sarah had almost got shot from accidentally being on the fringes of their second eruption.

These days, armed SS men held the cathedral and the square. If the RAF sent them some presents, wouldn’t that be a shame? Sarah was sure lots of Münsterites were just as worried about it as she was.

She really did worry about bombs coming down close to the house here. In their infinite generosity, the Nazis had decreed that Jews weren’t allowed in public air-raid shelters. They had to take their chances wherever they happened to be.

Her mouth tightened. She’d been married to Isidor Bruck for only a few months when he and his mother and father had to take their chances in the family bakery and the flat above it. She would have taken her chances with them if she hadn’t been out. A direct hit leveled the building and killed them all. Now she was a widow, living with her parents again.

This house had been lucky. Most of the windows still boasted glass panes, not cardboard taped up in their place. But the Brucks had thought the bakery was lucky, too. And so it was … till it wasn’t any more.

The radio blared out saccharine music and Dr. Goebbels’ latest lies about how wonderfully things were going and how happy the German people were under the Führer’s divinely inspired leadership. Neither Sarah nor her mother and father felt like staying up late to listen to more of that. They slept as much as they possibly could, Samuel Goldman because he worked so hard in the labor gang and all of them because they didn’t get enough to eat to have much energy.

Sarah didn’t think she’d been in bed more than a few minutes before the warning sirens began to howl. All the dogs began to howl with them. The sirens scared the dogs, and the animals had learned what happened after those sirens shrieked. They had plenty of reason to be scared.

So did Sarah. Along with her parents, she stumbled down the stairs in the inky darkness and huddled under the sturdy dining-room table: the best protection they could get. Just because it was best didn’t mean it was good.

“Heil Hitler!” Samuel Goldman said dryly. That was the punch line to a bitter joke the Germans made about air raids. If you’d grabbed some sleep in spite of the bombers, the next day you greeted people with Good morning! If the raid had kept you from getting any sleep and you desperately needed some, you said Good night! And if you’d always been asleep, you said Heil Hitler!

How many thousand meters up there did the bombers fly? Not far enough to keep the drone of their engines from reaching the ground. Searchlights would be probing for them, trying to spear them and pin them down in the sky so the flak guns could get at them. The cannons’ quick-firing snarls punctuated that steady industrial drone.

Here came the bombs, whistling down. The first bursts were a long way off, but they kept getting closer and closer and.… Make them stop! Please, God, make them stop! Sarah wanted to scream it. She swallowed it instead, all but a tiny whimper. God would hear anyway. Or, by all the signs she’d been able to glean, more likely He wouldn’t.

Boom! Boom! Boomety-boom! The ground shook. The windows rattled. But the house didn’t fall down on top of them. The windows didn’t blow in and slash them. Their neighborhood had missed the worst of it again.

After twenty minutes or half an hour (or a year or two, depending on how you looked at things), the droning faded off into the west. The flak guns kept banging away, probably at nothing. Every so often, a falling fragment from their shells would smash a roof and start a fire or land on some luckless man’s head. A couple of guns went on even after the warbling all-clear sounded.

By then, Sarah was already back in bed. So were her folks. As soon as they decided nothing was coming down on their heads, they slowly and carefully climbed the stairs again. If you were tired enough, you could sleep after almost anything. They were. They could. They did.

Next morning, Father rolled a cigarette of tobacco scavenged from other people’s discarded dog-ends. A certain predatory gleam lit his eyes as he walked out the front door. “I wonder what we’ll be cleaning up today,” he said.

In smashed houses, the laborers stole whatever they could: real cigarettes, food, clothes. Once, Herr Doktor Professor Samuel Goldman would have been ashamed to do such a thing. Not Samuel Goldman the work-gang man. Sarah understood the change only too well. What Jew in Nazi Germany had any room left for shame?

Anastas Mouradian went through the preflight checklist in the cockpit of his Pe-2 with meticulous care. His copilot and bomb-aimer, Isa Mogamedov, sat in the other chair there. He helped Mouradian run down the list.

They spoke to each other in Russian, the only language they had in common. Each flavored it with a different accent. Their home towns lay only a hundred kilometers or so apart, but neither knew or wanted to know a word of the other’s native tongue. Mouradian was an Armenian, Mogamedov an Azeri. Their peoples had been rivals and enemies for a thousand years, ever since the Turkic Azeris invaded the Caucasus. Mouradian had been born a Christian, Mogamedov a Muslim. Now they both had to do their best to be New Soviet Men.

“Comrade Pilot, everything seems normal,” Mogamedov said formally when they got to the end of the checklist.

“Thank you, Comrade Copilot. I agree,” Mouradian replied with equal formality. New Soviet Men had no business quarreling with one another, especially when the Fascist enemy remained on Soviet soil.

Part of Stas Mouradian wanted to believe all the Soviet propaganda that had bombarded him since he was very small. Part of him simply thought some personnel officer had played a practical joke on him by sticking an Azeri in his cockpit. But Mogamedov was plenty capable. With that being true, Mouradian could ignore the rest.

He could, and he had to. Russians didn’t officially dominate the Soviet Union the way they had in the Tsar’s empire. The leader of the USSR, after all, came out of the Caucasus himself-Stalin was a Georgian. But, even though he spoke the country’s chief language with an accent thick enough to slice, Stalin often acted more Russian than the Tsars. Any of the blackasses-Russian slang for the mostly swarthy folk of the southern mountains-who wanted to get ahead needed to do the same.

Mouradian not only wanted to get ahead, he wanted to get airborne. He shouted into the speaking tube that led back to the bomb bay: “Everything good for you, Fetya?”

“Everything’s fucking wonderful, Comrade Pilot,” Sergeant Fyodor Mechnikov replied. The bombardier was a Russian, all right: a foulmouthed thug dragged off a collective farm and into the Red Air Force. He was as strong as an ox-another reason his station was back there with the heavy packages of explosives-and not a great deal brighter.

But if everything looked good to him, too … Stas waved through the bulletproof glass of the windscreen to the waiting groundcrew men. They waved back and spun first one prop, then the other. Smoke and flames burst from the exhausts as the engines bellowed to life. Mouradian eyed the jumping needles on the instrument panel. Fuel, oil pressure, hydraulics … Again, everything seemed inside the normal range.

He waved to the groundcrew men once more. They pulled the chocks away from the Pe-2’s wheels. Mouradian eased up on the brake and gave the plane more throttle. It bounced down the dirt runway west of Smolensk. The runway was barely long enough to let a fully loaded bomber take off. Stas pulled back hard on the yoke. The Pe-2’s nose came up. If anything went wrong now, he’d be dead, and the bombs would make sure there was nothing left of him to bury.

But nothing went wrong. The Pe-2 climbed into the air. The ground fell away below it. The SB-2, the plane this machine replaced, had been a typical piece of Soviet engineering: homely but functional, at least till it went obsolete. Comrade Petlyakov’s bomber, by contrast, was slim and elegant. It had started life as a two-engined fighter, and still wasn’t helpless against Nazi 109s.

Mouradian took his place in the V of planes winging west to pound the Hitlerites’ positions somewhere east of Minsk. The Germans had fallen back a good deal since England and France started up the war in the West again. They didn’t have enough men or machines to do everything the Führer wanted.

A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for? Some foreign poet had said that. Stas couldn’t remember who. Hitler’s reach had exceeded his grasp, and a lot of Germans were going to hell on account of it.

Now I have to make sure they don’t send me to the Devil to keep them company, Mouradian thought. If you flew long enough, your number was bound to come up. He hadn’t flown long enough yet, the proof of which was that he was still flying. If I make it through the war, I won’t go any higher than the top floor of a three-story building.

He felt faintly embarrassed thinking about the Devil or making a wheedling bargain with God. There wasn’t supposed to be room for either in a New Soviet Man’s philosophy. But plenty of others acted the same way. When things went wrong, you’d hear Russians screaming about the Devil’s uncle over the radio. Their fathers would have let out the same curses in the last war, and their great-great-great-grandfathers while fighting Napoleon.

Antiaircraft fire came up at the Pe-2s. Stas did some cussing of his own: they hadn’t crossed the front yet, so that was their own side shooting at them. It happened about every other mission. Maybe the Pe-2 looked too slick-the dumb bastards down on the ground figured it had to be German. Or maybe that had nothing to do with anything. Red Army men had fired on Stas in an SB-2, too. Too many soldiers thought any airplanes flying over them had to be dangerous.

“Approaching the target!” The squadron commander’s voice blared in Stas’ earphones, and in Mogamedov’s as well. “Prepare for the bomb run.”

“Acknowledged,” Mouradian answered. Mogamedov slid down to the glassed-in bottom of the nose to man the bombsight.

There it was, all right: a big supply dump by a railroad spur, with trucks and wagons hauling munitions up to the troops who banged heads with their Soviet counterparts. Mouradian pushed the yoke forward, and the bomber’s nose went down. He used the dive brakes to control and steepen his descent. The Pe-2 couldn’t stand on its nose like a Stuka, but it was a far better all-around aircraft.

“Bombs away, Fetya!” Mogamedov yelled.

“Bombs away!” Mechnikov echoed. “The whores are fucking gone!” And they were. Mouradian heard them tumble out of their racks and felt the plane, suddenly a tonne lighter, get friskier under his hands.

He needed all the friskiness he could find, too. Bf-109s tore into the squadron, pouncing from on high and pounding the bombers with heavy machine guns and cannon shells. A pair of Pe-2s tumbled out of the sky, both burning, one with half a wing shot away. Stas didn’t see any parachutes open. He hoped the flyers died fast and without too much pain.

He hoped he didn’t die in the next few minutes. The machine gun in the dorsal turret spat out a long burst, and then another one. Mechnikov was on the job. He probably wouldn’t shoot down a 109 attacking from above and behind. He might make the pilot pull up and spoil the bastard’s aim.

He must have, because the Pe-2 didn’t crash. Half the needles on the gauges were at the edge of the red, but that was because Stas had mashed the throttle hard against the panel wall. The needles didn’t leap crazily into the danger zone, the way they would have if the Nazi had shot the engines full of holes.

Most of the time, Stas would have tried to gain altitude. Now he stayed down on the deck, hoping the German fighters would have a hard time spotting his brown and green plane against the ground below. It must have worked-no Messerschmitt shot him down.

Isa Mogamedov climbed back into the copilot’s seat. “Well, we got through another one-I think.”

“I do, too, now.” Stas allowed himself the luxury of a nod. “Only five thousand to go till peace breaks out.” He laughed, pretending to be joking. So did Mogamedov, pretending to think he was.

A nurse cut off the latest set of bandages that swaddled Chaim Weinberg’s left hand. Dr. Diego Alvarez leaned forward to get a better look. Chaim didn’t, but then the hand was attached to him. He tried to remember how many times Alvarez had carved him up, working to repair the damage a mortar round did. He tried, but he couldn’t be sure if it was seven or eight.

When the bandages came off, the hand stopped looking like one from Boris Karloff in The Mummy and started looking like one from Karloff in Frankenstein. It had more scars and sutures and what-have-you than a merely human hand had any business possessing.

But when Chaim said, “It looks good, Doc,” he wasn’t being sarcastic. He counted himself lucky not to be auditioning for Captain Hook in a road company of Peter Pan. That mortar bomb had smashed his hand to hell and gone-and had killed his longtime buddy, Mike Carroll. When the other Internationals from the Abe Lincoln Brigade brought Chaim back to the aid station, the surgeon there almost decided to amputate on the spot. Then he remembered Dr. Alvarez, back in Madrid. Alvarez specialized in repairing such wounds.

“How does it feel?” the doctor asked now. His English, though flavored by Castilian Spanish, was more elegant than Chaim’s. A street kid from New York City, Chaim quit school after the tenth grade to go to work. Dr. Alvarez, by contrast, had studied medicine in England. Except for his lisp and the occasional rolled r, he sounded like a BBC newsreader.

“Not … too bad,” Chaim answered after a pause to consider. He’d found out more about pain the past few months than he’d ever wanted to know. He’d also found out more about morphine than he’d ever dreamt he’d learn. He was off it now, and hoped he wouldn’t need to go back on.

“Can you move your thumb so the tip touches the tip of your index finger?” Dr. Alvarez asked. He’d concentrated his work on Chaim’s thumb and first two fingers. The other two would never be good for much, no matter what he did. But those-especially the thumb and index finger-were the ones that mattered most.

“Let’s see,” Chaim said. He hadn’t been able to do it yet. That hand was one hell of a mess before the surgeon got to work on it. Christ, it was still a hell of a mess. But it wasn’t-quite-a disaster any more.

Moving his thumb hurt. So did moving his first finger. Too much in there had been repaired too many times for any of it to work smoothly now. But he could move both digits. A good Marxist-Leninist, he didn’t believe in miracles. If he had, he would have believed in that one.

Not only did they move, but, after effort that made sweat pop out on his forehead, the tip of his thumb met the tip of his forefinger. “Kiss me, Doc!” he exclaimed. “I did it! Look! I did it!” Those seven or eight operations had finally led to this: a hand that might work half as well as it had before it got smashed.

And damned if Dr. Alvarez didn’t kiss him on both cheeks. Chaim hardly even resented it, though he would have liked it better from the nurse. She wasn’t gorgeous, but she was definitely cuter than the surgeon.

“Now you need to gain strength,” Alvarez said.

“No kidding,” Chaim agreed. He thought he might be able to pick up a dime with his reconstructed thumb and first finger, but a half-dollar would be too much for him.

“You are not my first case of this sort, though I think your injuries are among the most extensive I have succeeded in repairing,” the doctor said. “I have developed a series of exercises that will help your digits approach the power they had before you were wounded.”

“Approach it, huh?” Chaim said. Dr. Alvarez nodded. After a moment, so did Chaim. “Okay, Doc. You level with a guy. I give you credit for that. You never promised anything you didn’t deliver. How long do I have to do these exercises, and how bad will they hurt?” He assumed they would hurt. It was a pretty safe bet. Everything that had happened to his left hand since the mortar bomb whispered down had hurt like hell.

“You will have to do them for several weeks. Your muscles need strengthening. Your tendons need to work more freely. I have done everything I could to assist that process, but time and practice are also necessary.”

“And after that, I go back to the Internationals?” Chaim asked.

Dr. Alvarez looked unhappy. “After we have spent so much time and effort getting you to this point, it seems a shame to send you back to where you are liable to be wounded again.”

“Doc,” Chaim said, as patiently as he could, “if I hadn’t wanted to take those kind of chances, I never would’ve come to Spain to begin with.”

“I suppose not.” Alvarez sounded unhappy, too. He didn’t want all his hard work gurgling down the drain if Chaim stopped a slug with his face.

“You can take it to the bank I wouldn’t have,” Chaim said. “And you can take it to the bank that there’s a bunch of Sanjurjo’s putos who wish I would’ve stayed in the States. You with me so far?”

“Oh, yes,” Alvarez said dryly. What were his politics? He’d never said much about them. He was here in Madrid, on the Republican side of the fence. If he preferred the Nationalists, the only way he could hope to stay alive was to keep his big mouth shut.

Chaim wasn’t about to push him, not when he’d been gifted with an almost-working hand instead of a hook. “When I get as strong as I’m gonna get, will I be able to handle a rifle, or at least a Tommy gun?” he asked.

“I think it is possible,” the surgeon said carefully. “I also think it is on the very edge of what you will be able to do. For your thumb and those two fingers, the exercises will get you back most of your fine motor skills. The hand has had too much damage to be as strong as it was. I’m very sorry, but that seems to be the situation.”

“Well, it gives me something to shoot for.” Chaim grinned crookedly. He was short and squat and not too handsome. That kind of grin suited him, in other words. “Shoot for! Get it, Doc? It’s a joke.”

Dr. Alvarez, by contrast, was slim and elegant. “Amusing,” he said. A slight twitch of one eyebrow delivered his editorial verdict. With a verdict like that, Chaim was lucky Alvarez wasn’t a judge.

The exercises hurt, all right. As far as Chaim could tell, everything that had anything to do with getting wounded hurt. Funny how that works, isn’t it? he gibed to himself. At first, he couldn’t do everything with the hand that the surgeon wanted him to. Everything? He could barely do anything, and the effort left him more worn down than hauling a sack of concrete should have.

“Patience. Patience and persistence,” Alvarez told him. “You must have both.”

To Chaim, they sounded like a couple of round-heeled Puritan girls. Patience and Persistence Mather: something like that. He imagined himself in bed with both of them at once, because he had an imagination like that-especially after he’d been stuck in the hospital for so long without any friendly female company.

A few days later, as he healed more, he started being able to do things he couldn’t at first. That made him feel better. It also made him think-again-that the doctor might know what he was talking about after all. And, a couple of days after that, La Martellita paid him a rare visit.

The Little Hammer-that was what his ex-wife’s nom de guerre meant. Communist activist, drop-dead gorgeous woman with a mane of blue-black hair, mother of his son … Even a glimpse of her made his dreams of wicked Puritan maids pop like pricked soap bubbles.

“I heard you might be able to take up arms again for the cause after all,” she said gravely. “That’s good news-better than I expected when they brought you here.”

“Better than I expected, too, querida.” Chaim’s Spanish wasn’t smooth or grammatical, but it got the job done. “Wish I could take you in my arms.”

“No.” Her voice went hard and flat. “It’s over. Don’t you see that?”

“I see it. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.” Chaim sighed. “How’s Carlos Federico?” He’d never expected to have a son named for Marx and Engels, especially not in Spanish.

“He’s well. Maybe I will bring him here again. It is good to see you are doing better, too. Now I must go.” And La Martellita did. Five chilly minutes-that was all he’d got. He could count himself lucky … or he could go back to daydreaming about Patience and Persistence.

German 105s pounded the trench line in which Staff Sergeant Alistair Walsh crouched-well, cowered, if you wanted to get right down to it. In the last war, the Germans would have-had-shot 77s at him. Those were a lot less dangerous; they didn’t fly as far, and, because they came from flat-shooting guns rather than higher-trajectory howitzers, they had a smaller chance of coming down into the trench with you and going off.

He hadn’t thought in the last war that he’d still be soldiering in this one. But the other choice was going back into the Welsh coal mine from which the Army had plucked him. A soldier’s life, especially in peacetime, seemed better than that. So did anything else, hell very possibly included.

So he’d stayed in. He’d risen in the ranks, as far as a lad plucked from a Welsh coal mine could hope to rise. Staff sergeants saluted subalterns and first lieutenants. They called them sir. But, with their years of experience, they mattered more than the junior officers nominally set over them. A smart regimental colonel would sooner trust a senior sergeant than any lieutenant ever hatched, and would back him against quite a few captains, too.

All of which was fine when there were choices to be made and courses to be plotted. When Fritz was throwing hate around, all you could do was hunker down and hope it missed you. No, you could do one more thing besides. Walsh fumbled in the breast pocket of his battledress tunic, pulled out a packet of Navy Cuts, and stuck one in his mouth. The shelling hadn’t made his hands shake too much to keep him from striking a match.

He sucked in smoke. Logic said that couldn’t make anything better. Logic be damned, though. A cigarette relaxed him to some small but perceptible degree. He wasn’t the only one, either. Nobody in the front-line trenches ever quit smoking. Plenty of people who’d never had the habit before picked it up when the Germans started trying to kill them, though.

Sure as hell, the Cockney who’d pushed up against the muddy front wall of the trench next to him nudged him and said, “ ’Ere, Sarge, can I bum a fag orf yer?”

“Here you go, Jack.” Walsh handed him the packet.

“Fanks.” Jack Scholes took one and gave it back. He was young enough to be the staff sergeant’s son. He had close-cropped blond hair, a tough, narrow face with pointed features, and snaggle teeth. He looked like a mean terrier. He fought like one, too. He was the stubborn sort of soldier who took a deal of killing.

Walsh leaned close so Scholes could get a light from his cigarette. Most of the German fire was a couple of hundred yards long. That was about the only good news Walsh could find.

He’d just ground the tiny butt of his latest smoke under the heel of his boot when the barrage stopped. Beside him, Scholes flipped off the safety on his Lee-Enfield. “Now we see if the buggers mean it or not,” he said.

That was also how things looked to Walsh. If the Germans did mean it, they’d throw men and tanks into the attack and try to push the British forces back toward the border between Belgium and France. Otherwise, they’d sit and wait and make the Tommies come to them.

They’d done a lot of sitting and waiting lately. With positions hardened by reinforced concrete, with MG-42s waiting to turn any enemy attack into a charnel house, with tanks that had bigger guns and thicker armor than anything the Allies boasted, why shouldn’t the Nazis wait? The Western Front was narrow. Their foes had to come at them head-on. They could bleed them white without paying too high a butcher’s bill of their own.

But trusting the Germans to do the same thing every time didn’t pay. Several English Bren guns started shooting all at nearly the same time. A mournful shout spelled out what that meant: “Here they come!”

Scholes popped up onto the firing step, squeezed off a couple of rounds, and quickly ducked down again. Alistair Walsh stuck his head up for a look, but only for a look. In place of a rifle, he carried a Sten submachine gun, one of the ugliest weapons ever invented. The stamped metal pieces were more botched together than properly assembled. Some of them looked as if they’d been cut from sheet metal with tin snips; for all Walsh knew, they had. If you dropped a Sten, chances were it would either fall apart or go off and shoot you in the leg.

At close quarters, though, it spat out a lot of slugs in a hurry. A Lee-Enfield could kill out past half a mile. Inside a couple of hundred yards, the Sten was the horse to back.

The Germans weren’t inside a couple of hundred yards yet. They had to work through the gaps in their own wire, cross the space between their stuff and the stuff the English had put up, and get through that before they could start jumping down into the trenches.

Their machine guns made it dangerous for any Tommy to stick his head up over the parapet and shoot at them. Twenty feet down the trench from Walsh, an Englishman bonelessly toppled over backwards. A bullet had punched a neat hole in his forehead. It had probably blown half his brains back into his tin hat, but Walsh couldn’t see that-a small mercy.

Possibly a bigger mercy was that he hadn’t seen any German tanks moving up with the foot soldiers. He especially dreaded the fearsome Tigers, which smashed British armor as if it were made to the same shoddy standards as the Sten gun.

He popped up again and squeezed a short burst at the oncoming Germans, more to encourage his own men than to put the fear of God in the Fritzes. “Keep your peckers up!” he called to the soldiers in dirty khaki. “Stand firm and they’ll turn tail. Wait and see!”

They did, too. Some of them lurked in no-man’s-land for a while. A few machine-gun teams set up in shell holes so they could rake the English line from shorter range. You could do that with an MG-42. No other gun-certainly not the Bren, fine weapon though it was-combined mobility and firepower so well.

But MG-42s that came out of their concrete machine-gun nests were MG-42s that trench mortars could reach. The mortar bombs weren’t noisy leaving their tubes, and flew almost silently. They went bang only when they burst. One by one, the Fritzes’ gun crews either died or pulled back toward their own line.

As things quieted down, Jack Scholes turned to Walsh and asked, “ ’Ow’d you know they was bluffin’, loik?”

“No armor,” Walsh answered.

“Ah. Roight.” Scholes nodded. What trade would he ply if he weren’t a soldier? Sneak-thief was Walsh’s first guess. “They’d’ve been roight up our arse’ole wiv a few tanks along, eh?”

“Too right, they would,” Walsh said. “But without ’em they were just yanking our chain. They killed a few of us, we killed a few of them, and none of it will change the way the war turns out even a ha’penny’s worth.”

“Wot would?” Scholes sounded interested and intrigued, as if he weren’t used to thinking this way but found he liked it. “Droppin’ a bomb on ’Itler’s ’ead?”

“That ought to do something,” Walsh agreed.

“Too many back in Bloighty like the bastard, though,” Scholes said. “We never would’ve gone in wiv ’em if Winston ’adn’t bought ’imself that plot.”

“No. We wouldn’t,” Walsh said tightly. The Cockney kid couldn’t know he’d met Winston Churchill. He remained convinced Churchill’s death hadn’t been an accident. Afterwards, it had taken what amounted to a military coup to oust the let’s-pal-with-the-Nazis appeasers. And, if the war didn’t start going better, another coup might put them right back in.