The Big Switch

Chapter 11

Luc Harcourt had just found a good place to crap when the sniper got him. It really was perfect. The bushes screened him from sight-or he’d thought so, anyhow. And the leaves were young and soft and green. This side of a goose’s neck, you couldn’t get a better substitute for paper.

He dug a little hole with his entrenching tool. He undid his belt, dropped his pants, and squatted. The shot rang out. “Aiii!” he howled, and sprang straight up. If the Olympics had a record for a high jump from a squatting position, he broke it by thirty centimeters.

At the same time, he clapped a hand to the wounded part. It came away bloody. Sure as hell, he’d got shot in the ass. Trousers still at half mast, he rolled behind a big, thick elm. Bullets could penetrate an amazing amount of wood, but he didn’t worry about that. All he wanted was to keep the lousy Boche from seeing him any more. Besides, that last bullet had penetrated him.

He pulled up the khaki trousers. He didn’t bother with the belt. Holding the pants up with one hand, he hobbled back to the encampment. He’d never tried walking with a wounded gluteus maximus before. It wasn’t one of the experiences you sought out for the sake of having it.

Lieutenant Demange greeted him with the sympathy he’d come to expect: “The hell’s the matter with you? You look like you just tried to hump a donkey, only the donkey didn’t like it.” Wordlessly, Luc turned around to display the bloody seat of his pants. Demange didn’t care. “If you’re on the rag, couldn’t you find a pad?”

“Fuck you!” Luc snarled. Enough was too much.

“That’s ‘Fuck you, sir!’ ” Demange said easily. “All right, go on back and have somebody patch you up. Welcome to the club, if it’s worth anything to you.” A German had shot him in 1918.

“Not a goddamn thing.” Luc made his slow way back to the aid station.

A male nurse who smelled of garlic and cologne gave him a shot of novocaine and a tetanus shot, then sutured the wound and bandaged him. “It’s only a crease, not through-and-through,” the fellow said. “You can go back to your unit. They’d skin me alive if I wasted a cot on you.”

“Thanks one hell of a lot,” said Luc, who’d hoped for some leave. “What do I do when the numbing wears off? It’ll hurt even worse then, on account of the stitches.”

Plainly, the male nurse was about to say it wasn’t his problem. Whatever he saw on Luc’s face made him think twice. Instead, he handed over a vial of white pills. “Codeine,” he said. “It won’t make things stop hurting, you understand, but it can take the edge off. And it constipates you. You won’t need to go into the bushes so often for a while.”

“Oh, hurrah,” Luc said in distinctly hollow tones. Then he asked, “You have any pants around here that aren’t all bloody?” If he waited for the quartermasters to issue him a new pair, he’d keep wearing these for God knew how long. But if he could manage things informally…

Sure as hell, the nurse said, “Some poor con stopped one with his face. I don’t know why they bothered bringing him back. He wasn’t breathing by the time he got here-I know that.”

The dead man had bled a little on his trousers, but nowhere near so much as Luc had on his. The pants were loose and too long, but a belt and some sewing would fix that. The people at the aid station, or maybe the stretcher-bearers, had already emptied the poor guy’s pockets. No surprise there. They’d missed an aluminum-bronze franc. Luc added the inheritance to his small store of cash.

When he got back, Lieutenant Demange said, “Fucking took you long enough. I thought they were cutting off your cheek, like the old lady in that story.”

Luc had run across Candide. He was surprised Demange had; the veteran seemed unlikely to read anything that didn’t have photos of naked girls in it. You never could tell.

“So you’ll sleep on your stomach for a while, eh?” Demange went on.

“I guess,” Luc answered. “Got any other good news for me, or are you through?”

“Well, I was gonna have you lead a raid on the Boches tonight…” Demange raised an eyebrow to see how that went over. Luc looked back at him without expression. He didn’t jump up and down and yell and scream, the way Demange obviously wanted him to. The older man made a disgusted noise. “Ah, fuck off. You’re no goddamn fun.”

“Poke somebody you’ve never nailed before, if you want to watch him pitch a fit. In the meantime, let me bum a butt off you.”

“What? You get your own shot off, then you want a replacement?” But Demange pulled the ever-present pack of Gitanes out of his tunic pocket and handed Luc one.

In due course, the novocaine wore off. When it did, the wound started hurting worse than it had when Luc first got it. The spot where he got the tetanus shot was sore, too, and it made him feel feverish. He took two codeine pills, then two more. Instead of leaving him sleepy and dopey, they made him feel as if he’d just had four cups of strong coffee. He wanted to do something, even if he couldn’t figure out what.

The Germans solved that. They pulled a trench raid of their own, a couple of hundred meters off to the left of Luc’s position. He ran to the Hotchkiss gun and fired off strip after strip of ammo at the Boches as they fought and as they retreated. Joinville couldn’t feed the machine gun fast enough to suit him. The piece’s cooling fins glowed a dull red. But it was a reliable piece of machinery. No matter how hot it got, it kept working.

Luc stayed awake all through the night. When the sun came up the next morning, he saw five dead Germans not far in front of the French lines. The regimental commander was a lieutenant colonel named Jacques Soupault. He had a mean, skinny face, a hairline mustache, and greasy black hair combed straight back. His eyes were black, and cold as a corpse’s. All that notwithstanding, he folded Luc into an embrace, brushed cheeks with him, and made him a sergeant on the spot.

“Without your promptness, the enemy attack might well have succeeded,” he said. “Prisoners we took couldn’t talk about anything but ‘that damned machine gun.’ At least three men called it the same thing.”

By then, Luc was desperately tired. He’d already taken more codeine, to try to keep himself going and to ease the pain in his backside. “Thank you, sir,” he muttered, hoping Soupault would dry up and blow away. The drug wasn’t hitting him so hard this time.

At last, the officer left. Lieutenant Demange grinned at Luc. “See? You should get shot more often.”

“You’re trying to make me lose my temper again,” Luc said. “Take another crack at it after I grab some sleep.”

“Yeah, you were bouncing off the walls, all right,” Demange said. “I dunno what kind of dope the doc gave you, but whatever it was, I want some, too.”

“Wasn’t even a doc. Only a nurse,” Luc replied.

“She have big jugs, at least?”

“He needed a shave.”

“Boy, you had all the luck yesterday, didn’t you? Except for the dope, I mean.”

“Yeah. Except for the dope.” Luc yawned. “I am going to sleep. Why not? I’m a sergeant now-Soupault said so. What else do sergeants do?”

“Now you’re trying to get a rise out of me,” Demange said accurately. “I’d make you sorry, but you did a good job last night, even if you had some help from the pills.”

When was the last time Demange had said something like that to him? When was the last time Demange had said something like that to anybody? The veteran was far quicker to show scorn than praise.

“Since you are a sergeant, you may have to give up your precious gun,” Demange said. “You can tell more people what to do now.”

“Don’t want to.” Luc yawned again, wider. “I have a slot I like. I’m good at it, too. So why would they take it away?”

“Because you’re lucky, that’s why. That’s how you get promoted: do something cute while the officers are watching. Go on, curl up somewhere. They won’t yank you off the piece till you wake up.”

“The way I feel right now, that’ll give me another month. At least.” Luc headed off to find somewhere he could rest.

Lieutenant Demange’s laughter followed him. A sergeant! He wouldn’t just have to shorten his new trousers. Eventually, he’d get a yellow hash mark to replace the two brown ones he wore now. More work with needle and thread. After I sleep, he told himself. I’ve earned it.

“Something’s cooking,” Herman Szulc declared.

Pete McGill warily eyed his fellow Marine. He had to get along with Szulc. The number of Americans-and of leathernecks in particular-in Shanghai was too low to let what you thought about somebody show too much. But Pete hadn’t liked him or trusted him since he tried to say Vera was out for what she could get and that she hadn’t really fallen in love the way McGill had.

“You bet something’s cooking,” Max Weinstein said. “The proletariat is rising up against its imperialist oppressors.” How you could be a pinko and a Marine at the same time was beyond Pete, but Max managed. Pete didn’t know how good a pinko he was, but he made a damn good Marine, even if he drove other people nuts sometimes.

“Thank you, Josef Stalin,” Szulc said. Weinstein flipped him the bird. Ignoring it, Szulc went on, “Nah, what I heard was that the Chinamen were gonna make things hot for the Japs here in Shanghai.”

“That’s what I told you,” Max pointed out. “Whoever said Polacks were dumb knew what he was talking about.”

“Same guy who said sheenies were cheap, I bet,” Szulc said, which shut Max up with a snap. Into the sudden silence, Szulc continued, “What people are sweating about is, the Chinks’re gonna give white people the most grief, see if they can get us or England or France mad enough to jump on Japan.”

“You think that’s true?” Pete asked, interested in spite of himself.

“All I know is what I read in the newspapers.” Herman Szulc was about as far removed from Will Rogers as a human being could be. And none of this was in the Shanghai papers, whether in Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, or Japanese. Japan censored everything. Editors crossed the military government at their peril. For public consumption, everything in Shanghai was just fine.

Max tried again: “I believe it. We’re the ones who cause trouble around here, so we’re the ones the oppressed proletariat’s gonna go for. Only stands to reason.”

“ We’re the ones? White men are the ones?” Szulc said incredulously. “How about all the slanty-eyed shitheads who bow down to Hirohito?”

“They’re only imitating what the Europeans and Americans taught ’em,” Weinstein answered.

“We cause trouble? How about vaccination? How about newspapers?” Pete said.

“I think the first one was discovered here. I know goddamn well printing got invented here,” Max returned.

Pete couldn’t have said whether that was true or not. Max would bluff when he talked, the same way you’d bluff playing poker. Do it every so often and it helped your game. Do it too much and you looked like an asshole. But Pete had more cards to play: “Chinks didn’t invent steamboats or railroads or cars or movies or phones or planes or the stuff that goes with ’em. They didn’t invent your Commie bullshit, either. What’s-his-name-Groucho Marx-did.”

“Karl, for Chrissake.” That crack genuinely pained Max, where the rest rolled off his back. His ears turned pink. Thinking about Marx, Pete found that funny. The Jewish Marine went on, “The Chinese proletariat has the sense to see what a good thing Marxism-Leninism is-which is more than I can say for a couple of dumbfuck leathernecks.”

“More than a couple. You’re about the only Red Marine God ever made,” Pete said. “What are you doing in the Corps, anyway? Boring from within? Is that what they call it?”

“He’s boring, all right,” Herman Szulc said. They looked at each other in surprise-they weren’t used to agreeing.

Two days later, the Chinese bombed a movie theater full of Japanese soldiers. Maybe the Chinese had invented gunpowder, but a Swede came up with dynamite-Pete did happen to know that. As for who first found the idea of taking swarms of hostages and slaughtering them, well, it had to be as old as the hills.

The Japs were good at it, though. The flat cracks from firing squads’ rifles went on day and night. Soldiers didn’t just kill with rifles, either. They used swords and shovels and picks and iron bars and whatever else they could get their hands on. People who knew about the Rape of Nanking a few years earlier said this wasn’t so bad as that, but it sure wasn’t good.

Wailing and moaning and shrieking from the Chinese who made up the vast majority of the people in Shanghai filled the air. Everything at the American consulate went straight to the devil. It didn’t pass go. It didn’t collect two hundred dollars Mex. All the cooks and maids and laundry men and sweepers stayed home. You couldn’t blame them, not when they were liable to get murdered if they were dumb enough to show their faces on the street.

You didn’t have to be Chinese to buy a plot, either. A Japanese soldier bashed in two French businessmen’s brains with a spade and broke three ribs on another Frenchman before his friends could drag him off. The way Pete heard the story, the friends didn’t try very hard to stop him. He believed it; that sounded like the Japs he thought he knew and didn’t love.

“So now what’ll happen?” Pooch Puccinelli wondered out loud. “The Japanese government gonna pay France an indemnity, like they did with us after they blew up the fuckin’ Panay?”

“That’ll make the dead guys happy, all right. Fuckin’ A it will,” Pete said. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about a couple of Frenchmen. He was worried about Vera. He hadn’t been able to get word to her since the Japanese clamped down, and he hadn’t heard from her. He hadn’t heard that anything bad had happened to her dance hall, but he didn’t know that he would. For the time being, the Marines were confined to barracks. He’d never been so tempted to go AWOL.

Max Weinstein also didn’t sympathize with the dead Frenchmen, but he had different reasons: “You’re a capitalist, the only reason you come to China is to exploit the local workers and peasants. You do that, you deserve whatever happens to you, far as I’m concerned.”

“You’re a sweet old boy, Max-yeah, a real SOB,” Pooch said. “Wasn’t the Chinks who did for ’em, remember. It was the Japs.”

“They got it on account of they came out here. If they’d stayed home where they belonged, they wouldn’t have,” Max said stubbornly.

“No, the Nazis would’ve blown ’em up instead,” Pete put in.

“If you want to see everything that’s wrong with capitalism, and I mean everything, all you gotta do is look at Hitler’s Germany and the Moose’s Italy,” Weinstein said. “There it is, naked.”

“You start talking about naked, I don’t want to talk about Nazis,” Szulc said. “I want to talk about broads.”

“That’s ’cause you’re a dickhead,” Max told him. “You think with your dick, and now you’re talking with it, too.”

Had anybody said that to Pete, he would have tried to murder the guy. Herman Szulc puffed out his chest and looked proud of himself. “I’d sooner talk with my dick than with my Red asshole like you any day,” he said.

Max surged to his feet. “You stupid fuckin’ Polack-”

“Yeah, Yid?”

There they went again. Other Marines got between them. Everybody was as jumpy as a cat in a bar full of Dobermans. The Marines were only a symbolic presence in Shanghai, as they had been in Peking. The real action in these parts was between the Japs and the Chinese. When they started going at each other hammer and tongs, it reminded the Americans of their futility. Nobody liked having his uselessness exposed.

Pete wasn’t even sure he could protect his woman. If anything in the world felt worse than that, he didn’t know what it would be. Other Marines had had to keep him from going after Herman Szulc, too. Herman had a big mouth, and liked to hear himself talk. One of these days… But not yet. Not yet, dammit, Pete thought, not without regret.

Alistair Walsh had his own opinions about politics. He was the staunchest of Tories: a Winston Churchill supporter who put up with Neville Chamberlain only because he might be marginally better than whatever Labour put up to oppose him.

Of course, Walsh was also a soldier. He was actively discouraged from doing anything about his views. The last thing Britain wanted was Bonapartism, and soldiers doing anything about their political opinions seemed to the powers that be a long step in the wrong direction. And so, but for mouthing off in barracks and barrooms and foxholes, Walsh had stayed as politically innocent as his superiors could have wanted.

Staying politically innocent after Rudolf Hess almost literally fell into his lap wasn’t easy, though. You couldn’t keep a thing like that secret. The Army and the government did their best, and failed. Too many people saw and recognized the German big shot when Walsh brought him back into Dundee. And Hess’ Bf-110 crashed into a barn farther inland, killing several cows and a horse and just missing the farmer himself, who’d tended the animals in there a few minutes earlier.

They took Hess down to London, presumably to tell the government about what he’d already told Walsh. They brought Walsh along, presumably because they didn’t know what else to do with him. After all, he already had the vision of Landsers and Tommies and poilus marching into Russia shoulder to shoulder implanted in his brain. If they didn’t get him out of sight, he might start telling people about it before they decided what the people ought to think.

He knew what he thought, not that anyone asked a staff sergeant’s opinion. Walsh would have been shocked had the tight-lipped young officers from the Ministry of War and their even tighter-lipped colleagues from the Foreign Ministry done any such thing. The way they kept eyeing him made him wonder if he would suffer an unfortunate accident before he made it to the capital.

He didn’t. But he worried when they put him up in a posh hotel instead of with his mates. “You may do as you please, so long as you don’t leave your room,” one of the tight-lipped captains said.

“Meals?” Walsh asked.

“They’ll be sent in. Order what you please from room service,” the officer replied, an extravagance Walsh had never enjoyed before. But he didn’t really enjoy it now, either. It came at too high a price: four armed guards outside the room made sure he wouldn’t amble down the corridor. It was six floors up; he couldn’t very well leave by the window, either.

“Gets a bit dull here, all by my lonesome,” Walsh hinted. The captain only shrugged, as if to say that wasn’t his worry. Walsh decided to be more direct: “If you’re spending all that filthy lucre on room service, can you lay out a bit more and get me a girl? I’ll have better things to talk about with her than Rudolf bloody Hess, by God-I promise you that.”

The officer’s lips got tighter, and paler, than ever. “I shall have to take that under advisement,” he said, and got out of there as fast as he could.

No girl knocked on the door. Walsh hadn’t really expected one would, but asking didn’t hurt. The food was pretty good, and room service would send up beer and whiskey when he asked for them. Things could have been worse. He kept reminding himself of that. They could have stuck him in a cell somewhere and lost the key.

But he couldn’t talk to anybody. That was why they kept him here. They didn’t want reporters asking him questions. They didn’t want other soldiers asking him anything, either. They knew how news flashed through the military. Soldiers and sailors were worse than women when it came to gossip.

He could step out into the hall. The guards would only shake their heads if he spoke to them, though. And, while he could go into the hall, those guards wouldn’t let him take more than a couple of strides along it. They had old-fashioned bayonets-the long ones-fixed to their rifles. By all appearances, they were ready to use them if he looked like getting out of line. He didn’t; he owned a well-honed sense of survival.

Like any prisoner, he suspected changes in routine. What were they going to do to him now? Find that cell and drop him into it? Or bump him off as if he’d never existed to begin with? They could do that, if they decided to. They could do anything they damn well pleased. Who’d stop them?

What would happen if the Nazis sent bombers over London? Would the guards escort him to the cellars, perhaps with a gag on his mouth so he couldn’t blab to anyone? Or would they leave him up here, staying themselves to share his fate? He didn’t want to find out, and was glad the Luftwaffe seemed to be staying away.

Even if the alarms outside didn’t go off, the ones inside his head did when somebody knocked on the door one night at half past eleven. His heart pounded as he walked over to it. Was this the moment? Had they decided to imitate the Fascists and the Reds and dispose of him at midnight?

If they had, he could do damn all about it. Defiantly, he threw the door wide. There in the hall stood a short, portly man in his mid-sixties, with a round red face-a wrinkled, irascible baby face, it was, although he smoked a large and decidedly unbabyish cigar.

Walsh recognized him right away. Few Britons wouldn’t have, of course. “Winston!” he blurted.

“At your service,” Winston Churchill replied, his voice familiar from the wireless but more resonant now that he was here in the flesh. “May I come in?”

“How can I say no?” Walsh stepped back to let the politician enter, then closed the door behind him. He pointed to a whiskey bottle on the sideboard. “I could use a drink, sir. Would you care for one?”

“How can I say no?” Churchill repeated, blue eyes twinkling. Moving as if in a dream, Walsh poured for them both. He gestured toward the siphon-equipped soda bottle beside the whiskey: a silent question. Churchill shook his head. Walsh was just as well pleased. He wanted something potent himself.

Churchill raised his glass. “The King!” he said. Walsh echoed the toast. They both drank. Churchill smacked his lips. “Not bad. They are treating you satisfactorily?” The six-syllable word sounded natural in his mouth, though more often than not he was the most plainspoken of politicos.

“Yes, sir.” Walsh finished his whiskey at a gulp-he needed it. “Did you come here to ask me that?”

“I did not,” Churchill rasped. “I came to ask you this: how would you and your comrades in arms like to march with the Germans and against Russia?”

That was as plainspoken as a man could get. Walsh poured himself a refill. Churchill held out his glass, and Walsh filled it as well. “I don’t care to speak for anyone but myself, sir…”

“Then by all means do that. Your reluctance does you credit.”

Shrugging, Walsh said, “I don’t know anything about that. What I know is, I’m damned if I want some Nazi general giving me orders. And that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? We’d be helping Hitler do what he already wants to-hell, what he’s already started doing. He couldn’t lick us, so now he wants us to join him. I’ve fought against Fritz twice now. I don’t want to be on his side. He makes a fine enemy, but I doubt he’d prove such a good friend. If he’s after the Russians now, there’s more to Stalin than I looked for.”

The words poured out of him, fueled more by nerves than by whiskey. Once he ran dry, he wondered whether he’d just doomed himself. If the government had already decided to throw in with Adolf…

But the wrinkles smoothed out of Churchill’s face as he smiled. “God bless you, son. I thought you’d say that-I hoped you would-but I was far from sure. Even if you’re too modest to say so, I feel sure you spoke for most British fighting men. And, most eloquently, you spoke for me as well.”

“Good Lord!” Walsh did not expect ever to win the VC. Aside from that, he couldn’t imagine a finer honor. He dared a question of his own: “Is it decided? What we’ll do, I mean?”

“Decided?” Churchill snorted and shook his head. “Not likely! Neville Chamberlain couldn’t decide to change his drawers if he shat in them.” That made Walsh blink. Then he remembered Churchill had fought in the Boer War and commanded a battalion on the Western Front in the last big go-round. Some of it must have stuck-he knew how soldiers talked, all right. He went on, “No, Sergeant, it’s not decided. But I daresay you’ve helped put a spike in Herr Hess’ wheel. That you have.” This time, he poured the whiskey. He raised his glass. “Down with Hitler!”

“Down with Hitler!” Alistair Walsh had never heard a toast he was gladder to join.

Rumors always rumors. Vaclav Jezek didn’t like the ones he was hearing lately. “That’s what they’re saying,” Benjamin Halevy told him. “There’s supposed to be talk in Paris about throwing in with the Germans.”

“They can’t do that!” Vaclav exclaimed in dismay verging on horror.

“Tell me about it,” the Jewish sergeant said. “But the trouble is, they damn well can. And the poilus think they’re going to.”

Most of the time, Vaclav found speaking next to no French an asset. If he didn’t understand an idiot officer, he didn’t have to follow idiotic orders-unless the fellow knew German, as some of the bastards did. Now, though, he wished he could pick up the trench rumors at first hand instead of relying on Halevy to pass them along.

“Some of the poilus want to fight. Some of them don’t, though.” Vaclav put that as politely as he could. He didn’t want to offend the sergeant, who was at least as much Frenchman as Czech (and, to Jezek, more Jew than either).

He needn’t have worried. Because Halevy was more Jew than anything else, or Jew first and everything else later, he was all for giving the Nazis one in the nuts. “Too right they don’t. How’d you like to take on the Russians instead?”

“Oh, so it works like that, does it?” Vaclav said. Halevy nodded. Vaclav didn’t need to think it over. “No, thanks. Not me. Russia tried to help Czechoslovakia when Hitler jumped us, and that’s more than anybody else can say-France included.”

Once more, the challenge turned out not to be one. “Yes, I know,” Benjamin Halevy answered. “We did as little as we could to technically honor our treaty.”

“Aren’t there a lot of Reds in the French Army?” Vaclav said. “What’ll they think about fighting for Hitler and against Stalin?”

That made Halevy pause, at any rate. “Interesting question,” he said at last. “I’m not sure. We’ll just have to find out, if that’s what the big wheels decide to do. Most of them would sooner throw in with the Nazis-you can bank on that.”

“Oh, sure,” Vaclav agreed. “France really would have done something when Germany invaded us if your government didn’t halfway wish you were in bed with Hitler.”

He wondered if that would make Halevy angry, but the redheaded noncom took it in stride. His only response was “I’m glad you said ‘halfway.’ ”

“What are we supposed to do while the boys in the cutaways and the striped pants figure out which way to jump?” Jezek asked.

“Ha! That I can tell you: same as we’d do any other time. We keep on killing the assholes in Feldgrau and do our goddamnedest to keep them from killing us.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Vaclav allowed.

The Germans wanted to kill him in particular. They knew too much about him, too: they knew he was a Czech, not a Frenchman. Their imported sharpshooter (or maybe he was homegrown-Vaclav didn’t know for sure) started singling out men who wore the domed Czech helmet rather than the crested Adrian style that made poilus look as if they were still fighting the last war. This was a better Adrian helmet than the old model. It was stamped from a single piece of manganese steel instead of being built up from two pieces of lower-quality ironmongery. But it still looked old-fashioned. And it still was made of thinner metal than the Czech pot.

Not without regret, Vaclav switched to a French helmet. He’d done that before; doing it again didn’t bother him too much. He wanted to hang on to the Czech helmet he was abandoning, but he didn’t. The antitank rifle meant he lugged around extra weight as things were. He didn’t need another kilo or kilo and a half.

Somewhere over there, off to the east, that German sniper lurked in the trenches. Or maybe he wasn’t in the trenches any more. Maybe he sprawled in a shell hole between the lines, or inside the carcass of a dead automobile, or under a smashed-up rubbish bin. You could sneak out under cover of darkness. One shot would be all you needed. Odds were nobody would see where it came from. When night came, back you’d go. In the meantime, you could amuse yourself by carving another notch into your rifle’s stock.

You could if you were a nice, thorough German, anyhow. Vaclav wouldn’t have cared to be captured carrying a rifle that bragged that way. If you were, your chances of seeing the inside of a POW camp ranged from slim down toward none. He chuckled sourly when that crossed his mind. The weapon he carried was a hell of a lot more conspicuous than any ordinary rifle, notched or not.

He began looking with a new eye at possible hiding places out in no-man’s-land. The way he went about it made him laugh once more, on as dry a note as he’d used earlier. Was this how ducks scouted for hunters’ blinds in the marshes at river’s edge as they flew down to land and feed?

There was a difference, though. Unlike the ducks, he could shoot back.

He suddenly laughed again, this time in real amusement. He imagined flocks of mallards or pochards or smews with machine guns under their wings and cannon in their beaks. By God, you’d think twice-three times, if you had any sense-before you went after one of those!

“All right. What’s so funny?” Benjamin Halevy asked. Vaclav explained his conceit. The Jew gave him a peculiar look and found another question: “Are you sure you’re a Czech?”

“Damn straight,” Jezek answered proudly. “How come you’re asking such a stupid thing?”

“On account of Czechs aren’t usually crazy like that. Even Frenchmen aren’t usually crazy like that. You sure you’re not a Yid in disguise?”

“Damn straight,” Vaclav repeated, still proudly. Had someone not a Jew asked him that, he would have decked the son of a bitch. As things were, he added, “Nobody’s gonna get near my dick with the gardener’s clippers.”

“That’s not how it’s done,” Halevy said. “Or I don’t think it is. I was only eight days old when it happened to me, so I wasn’t taking notes.”

“No, huh? Doesn’t it bother you not having a foreskin?”

“Why would it? Does having one bother you?”

“Nope,” Vaclav said. “What bothers me is that Nazi shithead. He’s out there somewhere, and he wants to punch my ticket for me.”

“Do unto others before they do unto you,” Halevy said. “It may not be just what Jesus said, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad advice.”

It was, in fact, damn good advice. Vaclav had already been following it, even if he hadn’t phrased it so well. He decided he’d better head out into no-man’s-land himself. If he didn’t nail the sniper, he’d have a better shot at other German soldiers.

Maybe they’d pick the same nook. Wouldn’t that make for a cheery meeting in the dark?

He spent the rest of the day scouting places to hide. Some of the ones that looked best lay several hundred meters in front of the line Czech and French troops shared. The very best one, or so it seemed, was behind or perhaps under a rusted-out French armored car that had probably been sitting there since the big German advance a year and a half before. The Fritzes would have taken whatever parts and weapons and tires they could use and left the shell to gather dust… and, now, snipers.

When he told Halevy of his plan, the Jew said, “Well, you can do that if you want, but I sure wouldn’t.”

“How come?” Jezek yelped indignantly.

“You already answered your own question: it’s been sitting there the past year and a half. You think the Germans haven’t noticed it? You think they haven’t booby-trapped it six ways from Sunday?”

Vaclav paused to find out what he did think. After a few seconds, he said, “Aw, shit.” After a few more, he added, “Thanks.” Nothing came harder than admitting the other guy was right. But Halevy was, sure as hell. The sergeant nodded back. Vaclav started looking for a different place to hide.