Two Fronts

Chapter 13

At sea. Julius Lemp had forgotten how beautiful those words could be. Yes, the U-30 was still a claustrophobe’s worse nightmare. Yes, it smelled like a rubbish tip crossed with an outhouse. But nobody on the U-boat gave him a hard time on account of his politics.

He made a sour face. He stood on the conning tower, hands raised to hold binoculars to his eyes, so chances were no one noticed. Somebody aboard the boat was bound to report to the people who worried about what snoops aboard submarines said.

His own view was that those people would serve the Reich better if they picked up Mausers and killed Russians till the Russians got lucky and killed them instead. He understood the worst thing he could do was to announce his view. People like that wouldn’t know what to do if they had to fight. Suggesting that they should would only scare them. And if you scared those people, they’d kill you. You couldn’t count on many things in this old world, but you could count on that.

The U-boat rolled. Of course it did. A U-boat would roll in a bathtub, and the North Sea made about the most unruly bathtub there ever was. A faint stink of puke rose from the hatch that led below. But up here, Lemp had some of the freshest, purest air in the world blowing into his face. It was cold, but warmer than it would be in a couple of months-or up in the Barents Sea. Probably warmer than it would be in the Baltic this time of year, too. Which, when you got right down to it, wasn’t saying one hell of a lot.

He wouldn’t have to worry about the Baltic or the Barents this time around. The U-30 was ordered out into the North Atlantic. He looked forward to that the way he looked forward to getting a tooth pulled by a drunken pharmacist’s mate. The Atlantic’s broad, tall swells made the North Sea seem like a wading pool, if not quite a bathtub, by comparison.

Somebody had to sink the ships from America that gave England the food and supplies she needed to keep fighting, though. This time, the Kriegsmarine handed him the job. He’d do it, too, or die trying. Too many officers he’d known at the start of the war had already died trying.

He wished he hadn’t thought of it like that. You felt the footsteps of a goose walking over your grave often enough as things were. When you might as well have invited the damn goose into the churchyard …

“Scheisse!” said one of the ratings up on the tower with him. A moment later, he amplified that with, “Plane-heading our way!” He pointed.

Lemp saw it even without his binoculars-not a good sign. He said “Scheisse!” too, most sincerely. “Go below!” he added, and shouted down the hatch: “Dive! Dive! Crash dive!”

Klaxons hooted inside the steel cigar as the sailors on the conning tower hurtled themselves down the ladder. Air hissed and bubbled from the U-boat’s tanks as she started down. She could submerge in less than half a minute. How much less? Enough to save them from the flying marauder? Well, they’d know pretty soon.

It was a Swordfish, a biplane that should have been obsolete-and was, except for flying off Royal Navy carriers and raising havoc in other people’s navies. The conning tower was already three-quarters of the way underwater when Lemp went below. He slammed the hatch and dogged it shut after him.

Being years out of date, the damned Stringbag couldn’t come on very fast. Not much in the way of good news, but Lemp cherished what he had. “Hard right rudder!” he ordered. “All ahead full!” Eight knots submerged would drain the batteries in an hour, but he didn’t intend to go on anywhere near that long. He guessed the Swordfish would drop its depth charge along his previous course, and wanted to get as far away from that as he could.

“Hard right rudder,” Paul the helmsman answered, sounding calmer than he probably was. “Down past twenty-five meters, now thirty …”

Wham! The first depth charge staggered Lemp. Light bulbs blew out with pops that sounded too much like gunshots. The U-boat shuddered as if it had just taken a body blow from Max Schmeling. Sailors swore when the explosion flung them into some of the boat’s many sharp projections.

Wham! There was another one-farther away than the first, and not quite so horrific. The U-Boat lost a few more bulbs, but only a few. Lemp dared breathe again. He’d guessed right. And he didn’t think a Swordfish carried more than two depth charges.

Now, would the pilot loiter to see if he could machine-gun a surfacing submarine? To say Lemp didn’t want the pressure hull colandered proved the power of understatement.

“Bring us down to all ahead one-quarter,” he told Paul, who relayed the order back to the engine room. “And take us up to periscope depth. I want to see what’s going on upstairs before we come up for air.”

He swept the periscope around in a complete circle. At the very edge of visibility, he spotted the Stringbag flying away. It had done what it could do. The crew wouldn’t know whether they’d damaged the U-boat or not. They would know they had to get back to their carrier to rearm before they went out on another patrol.

That thought sparked another one in Lemp as the plane vanished over his short horizon. He noted its course. “Raise the Schnorkel,” he ordered. “I want eight knots at Schnorkel depth. Paul, turn us to course 320.” That was more or less northwest, and the direction in which the Swordfish had flown away. “Maybe they’ll lead us back to where they came from.”

“That’d be nice, eh, Skipper?” Paul swung the U-30 to the heading Lemp wanted. They exchanged sly grins. A U-boat couldn’t ask for a more important target than an aircraft carrier.

Sinking one just might get me promoted at last, or at least win me the Knight’s Cross, Lemp thought as the diesels roared to life and the familiar vibrations rose up through the soles of his shoes to fill him again. With the Athenia to blot his escutcheon, even sinking a carrier might not haul him up to lieutenant commander.

He knew he’d have to be lucky to get to launch a spread of eels. The carrier would have to be somewhere close by. And he’d have to find it in the vastness of the sea. Well, all he could do was try.

A rating brought him something from the galley: sliced tinned meat on sliced tinned bread. It was the body’s diesel oil. He fueled mechanically. The less he thought about what he was swallowing, the better.

He turned the periscope back and forth, back and forth, sweeping as wide an arc as he could. He didn’t expect to see anything for quite a while. (He didn’t really expect to see anything at all, but you had to go through the motions as if you did. They would have been in the soup for sure if that rating hadn’t spotted the Swordfish.) Patience paid. Patience always paid, even if it didn’t always get its reward.

No way to know what course the carrier was steaming. No way to know how far off it was. Darkness came early in these latitudes at this season. If it put paid to his search … I’ll go out into the Atlantic and hunt freighters. What else can I do?

Back and forth. Back and-Lemp stopped swinging the periscope. Something stuck up on the horizon. “I will be damned,” he whispered. Then he spoke aloud: “Change course to 295, Paul. And I want eleven knots from the engines.”

The engines weren’t the problem. When the U-boat made much over eight knots at Schnorkel depth, though, it shook as if it were coming to pieces. But if that was the carrier, and if he was going to have any chance at all to hit it … Things started rattling as speed picked up.

It was the carrier. It loomed out of the water like an enormous cliff. A pair of destroyers shepherded their charge. Both sent out pings from their dangerous new fancy hydrophones. Neither was close, though, and neither changed course as if catching an echo from the U-30.

Lemp wanted to sneak within a thousand meters of the carrier before firing his torpedoes. What you wanted and what you got turned out differently too damn often in this world. He had to shoot the eels from a kilometer and a half. Aiming got harder. The target was smaller. Travel time stretched. If the limeys were alert, they might be able to turn away.

They started to. One torpedo missed, but two struck home: one at the bow, the other back toward the stern. The carrier began listing and settling in the water right away. Lemp could see she wouldn’t stay afloat.

He didn’t need to see that the destroyers would do their best to pay him back for shooting their big friend. Their pinging picked up. They might have the torpedo wakes to guide them toward him. He dove deep and steered near the sinking carrier. Let all the noise coming from that shattered ship confuse their detecting gear.

It must have worked. The destroyers dropped depth charges, but none near him. When the U-30 surfaced after sundown, it was in the middle of a broad, empty ocean. Lemp ordered a bottle of beer for every crewman from the crates the boat carried for celebrations. The first depth charge had smashed some of the bottles, but there were still plenty left. And how the ratings cheered him!

Peggy Druce delicately turned the radio dial. All of a sudden, she heard Edward R. Murrow’s voice, and there was London, right in her living room. The wonders of living in modern times! A set that could get shortwave transmissions brought the whole world to your door.

“The British Admiralty has confirmed the loss of the Ark Royal northeast of Scotland,” Murrow said mournfully. “German naval authorities claimed the sinking yesterday, but the Germans, during this war, have claimed a good many things that later proved not to be true.”

That was slightly unfair. The Luftwaffe, from what Peggy had seen while she was in Europe, lied whenever its lips started moving. German land forces told lots of what they’d called stretchers in the old days, but you could usually tell what was in fact going on from what they said. And the Kriegsmarine, most of the time, stuck close to the facts.

“Loss of life on the torpedoed aircraft carrier is believed to be heavy,” Murrow went on. “Some sailors were killed while struggling in the water when the destroyers escorting the stricken carrier depth-charged the U-boat that had attacked it. There is no evidence the submarine was damaged.”

“Well, shit,” Peggy said. Alone in the big house, she could come out with whatever she pleased. For that matter, she could have come out with the same thing if Herb were home. The most he would have done was cluck. More likely, he would have laughed.

Static hisses and pops rode the shortwave signal. As long as Peggy could make out what Edward R. Murrow was saying, she didn’t mind. In fact, she liked the noise. It reminded her how far away the American broadcaster was.

“England eyes the American Congressional elections with more worry than usual,” Murrow said. “Gains by the isolationist wings of the two parties could make the USA concentrate on the war in the Pacific and slow efforts to keep Europe’s democracies supplied with the arms they need to boost the fight against the totalitarian powers.

“And that supply is vitally necessary if England and France are to continue the struggle. Many here and more across the Channel were happier with their stitched-up peace with Germany than they are at the moment.”

“Shit,” Peggy repeated, more sharply this time. She was worried about the elections, too. Who in her right mind wouldn’t be? Anybody who’d seen Hitler’s Germany with her own eyes knew the only thing you could do with it was squash it with the biggest rock you could find.

But most people in Arkansas and Nebraska and Wyoming-and Philadelphia-hadn’t seen the Third Reich with their own eyes. That was the trouble. It didn’t seem real to them. They couldn’t believe anyone would really do the kinds of things the Nazis did every day without even thinking about them. And so they didn’t care whether the English and French kept fighting. It wasn’t their worry.

Only it was. If somebody didn’t take care of Hitler now, before too very long he’d decide he could take care of the United States. The really scary thing was, he might turn out to be right.

It was rainy on election day. Peggy’s polling place was at a fire station a couple of blocks from her house. She squelched over in galoshes and under an umbrella. A bored-looking cop with a bigger bumbershoot stood watch. Every once in a while, a wardheeler would follow a voter toward the polling place.

“No electioneering within a hundred feet,” the cop would growl.

Of course the wardheelers bellyached. They were out there in the rain to snag votes any way they could. The cop ignored their complaints. He had the law on his side, and he knew it.

Peggy voted. She’d done more for FDR and his foreign policy than any of the Democratic wardheelers. She was as sure of it as the cop was about the electioneering statutes.

The fire station was warm. It smelled of tobacco smoke and something Peggy finally decided was brass polish. She didn’t want to go back out into the wet. At last, with a martyred sigh, she did.

Rain drummed down on her umbrella. The cop was going, “Louie, if you don’t knock it off, swear to God I’m gonna run you in.”

Louie, by then, had dogged a man almost to the fire-station door. “Have a heart, Walt,” he whined. Yes, he was enough of a wardheeler to know the cop by his first name. But he also must have known Walt wasn’t kidding, because he skittered away.

Tipping his fedora to Peggy as they passed, the man he’d been trailing remarked, “Those guys are harder to get rid of than the ringworm.”

“They’ve got a job to do, too.” Peggy did the same job, if at a different level. It gave her more sympathy for the wardheelers than most people felt. The man rolled his eyes and walked inside, closing his dripping umbrella as he did.

Peggy went home. The house still felt too big and too empty and too quiet. She still liked having Herb around, and she missed him when he rolled out of town on one of his hush-hush trips for good old Uncle Samuel.

To make some noise, she turned on the radio again. She sat there, not really listening, and read an Agatha Christie. She didn’t pay that much attention to the mystery, either. It was something that kept her eyes moving back and forth so she didn’t have to think about the miserable state of the world or the almost equally miserable state of her marriage.

Cigarettes were good for not thinking, too. She methodically went through them, almost the way Herb would have. At least smoking in the States was a pleasure. It had been a duty while she was stuck in Europe. You got the jitters and the jimjams if you quit. But Jesus God, the tobacco over there was awful! When it was tobacco, anyway. Maybe it was horseshit after all. Some of it sure tasted as if it was.

Bread crumbs. An egg. Chopped scallions. Salt. Pepper. A can of salmon. Some lard in the pan. A few minutes later, croquettes. Canned string beans heated in a little pot. Supper. A stiff bourbon-and-water kept her from noticing whatever deficiencies it had. After supper, she sent the bottle a longing look. A little to her own surprise, she put it back on the high shelf without opening it again.

When she turned on the radio this time, election returns were starting to come in. Her own Congresscritter got reelected handily. He was a Republican; no, her neighbors hadn’t seen the joys of the Reich for themselves, either, so they still thought of FDR as That Man In The White House. But she’d known he would win. The only way he could blow the election was by molesting a nun in the middle of the street at rush hour. Even that might not do it.

Before midnight, though, the prognosticators on NBC, CBS, and the Mutual Network agreed that the makeup of the next Congress wouldn’t be too different from this last one. “President Roosevelt does seem to have lost some ground,” Lowell Thomas intoned gravely. “Incumbents usually do in offyear elections. But it seems unlikely that the new Congress will upset his foreign-policy apple cart. In any case, the general working rule for the USA is that partisanship stops at the frontier.”

Peggy nodded to herself. She’d heard that rule before. It did seem true more often than not, no matter how little the isolationists liked it. And hearing a veteran reporter talk about it that way reassured her. Nobody was going to go and do anything stupid, anyhow.

She made a small, unhappy noise. Nobody was going to go do anything stupid? Was that the most you could hope for from government? She made the same noise again, louder now. More often than not, it was. And, a lot of the time, you couldn’t even get that much.

Rain came down on the trenches northwest of Madrid. Chaim Weinberg swore as he stumped along one. “My goddamn boots are gonna rot right off my feet,” he groused. “You think anybody’ll care? Not fuckin’ likely!”

Mike Carroll was properly sympathetic: “They’ll care, all right. The way your feet smell now, they’ll get you new boots in a minute if the stink leaks out through holes in the old ones.”

“Funny, man. Fun-ny. Har-de-har-har. See? I’m laughing my ass off.” Chaim laid on the sarcasm with an entrenching tool. “Funny like stepping on a land mine, you ask me. That’ll ventilate your boots, too. Better to venti late than never, right?”

“Right.” Mike’s tone suggested he meant anything but what he said. He went on, “We’ve been here long enough. We damn well oughta be used to living out in the rain when winter comes by now.”

“There is that,” Chaim admitted. “Man, when I got here I never figured I’d stay so long. Fight for a while, then go home and try and set things right in the States …” He shook his head. “But the Spaniards really meant it. You’re ashamed to show you don’t. And they’re in the fight till there’s two left on one side and one on the other. And when the two kill off the one, waddaya wanna bet they start fighting each other ’cause that’s all they know how to do any more?”

Carroll sent him a disapproving look. “No wonder you keep getting in trouble with the Party.”

“No wonder at all,” Chaim agreed cheerfully. “Hey, but they haven’t gone and purged me yet. Long as I’ve got a rifle in my hands, I’m more dangerous to the fuckin’ Fascists than I am to my own side.”

This time, Mike looked around to make sure none of the seriously ideological Abe Lincolns could hear him through the rain’s plashing before he answered, “That’s what the anarchists and the Trotskyists thought, too.”

There still were anarchist outfits up in the Catalan and Basque country. People who didn’t much want to be part of Spain to begin with … Well, no surprise that they wanted damn all to do with any government whatever. The Republic quietly used those regiments for cannon fodder and gave them the oldest, most beat-up equipment it had. If you didn’t approve of government, you couldn’t very well expect government to approve of you, either.

Chaim was neither Trotskyist nor anarchist. He followed Moscow’s line … in his own way, when he felt like it. He might be sure he was more dangerous to Sanjurjo’s men than to the progressive forces in Spain. But Mike had a point, too. The longer the war dragged on-and it had already passed its second birthday and grown into a big, healthy boy when the main European brawl erupted-the less patience people here had with what they called deviationists.

He managed a ragged grin. “Hey, if La Martellita didn’t purge me, I’m good for a while longer, right?”

“If you hadn’t knocked her up, she would’ve,” Mike responded.

There, Chaim thought his buddy was wrong. La Martellita was never one to let sentiment get in the way of doctrine. And, no matter how much he missed her (missed sleeping with her, anyhow), she’d never felt much in the way of sentiment toward him to begin with. Which, when you got down to it, was a goddamn shame.

He was going to expound on that theme. Soldiers since the days of Hammurabi had wasted time when they weren’t fighting (most of the time, in other words) talking about women. But instead his head came up sharply. “Incoming!” he yelled, and dove for a muddy hole in the front wall of the trench.

Mike Carroll dove for the same hole at the same time. It wasn’t quite big enough for two people. That didn’t stop either one of them. They were pressed together at least as tight as Chaim had ever been with La Martellita when the Nationalists’ shells started bursting on their line.

Getting shelled wasn’t nearly so much fun as getting laid. Chaim suspected he might not be the first one to have made that particular discovery. Sanjurjo’s bastards hadn’t thrown this much hate at the Republicans for a while. He wondered where they’d come up with the ammo. Wherever it was, they sure didn’t worry about using it up.

Mike jerked and almost kneed him in the nuts. “Watch it!” Chaim said indignantly, trying to twist away.

“Fuck yourself.” Carroll hissed the words out through clenched teeth. “I’m hit, dammit.”

“Ah, shit.” Chaim tried to wiggle out of the hole to do what he could for his friend. That was harder than getting into it had been. Shells were still coming down when he finally slithered out into the trench. He ignored them-this was important.

A fragment had ripped up Mike Carroll’s calf. His trouser leg was dark with blood. Chaim yanked the wound bandage off his own belt and did what he could to stanch the bleeding. He yelled for stretcher-bearers at the top of his lungs.

Naturally, they didn’t show up as fast as he wanted them to. A bad time for manana, but what could you do? Before they did, Carroll asked, “How bad d’you think it is?”

“Not too,” Chaim answered, telling more truth than not. He didn’t think it would kill Mike-as long as it didn’t go septic, anyhow. He also didn’t think the docs would have to amputate the leg, though he was less sure about that. But he was a hundred percent positive he wouldn’t have wanted his own leg furrowed like that. He yelled for the bearers again.

“About fucking time,” Mike said when the Spaniards finally showed up. One of them jabbed him with a syringe. Chaim was glad they had morphine. Have to get my hands on some of that shit myself, he thought. Would have been good if I had a syringe, or if Mike did. The drug hit hard and fast. The bearers almost poured Mike onto the stretcher and slowly lugged him down the muddy track toward a zigzagging communications trench that led back to the rear and to the aid stations there.

Meanwhile, the shells kept coming in. Chaim jumped into the hole again. He couldn’t believe he and Mike had both fit into it. It felt crowded with him in there by his lonesome. Well, it hadn’t quite fit all of poor Mike, had it?

He popped out again as soon as the bombardment stopped. Maybe the enemy was just being obnoxious, but maybe this was a real push, too. They’d fired off a lot of ammo. They wouldn’t do that for the fun of it, would they?

No. Here they came: men in yellowish khaki running and crawling and scrambling toward the wire. A couple of tanks were coming, too. They were little old German jobs, obsolete in the rest of Europe but plenty good if the guys on the other side had even less in the way of armor.

Concrete emplacements protected the Internationals’ machine guns. They started spitting death at Sanjurjo’s men. Spaniards of any stripe were recklessly brave. The Nationalists came on where more sensible soldiers would have gone to ground or run away. They fell, writhing or ominously still. Chaim finally drew a bead on one of the writhers. He fired. The Nationalist lay ominously still thereafter.

One of the concrete emplacements proved to protect an antitank gun, not a mere Maxim. An enemy tank spurted fire and smoke. Crewmen bailed out. Chaim didn’t think they got far. The other tank seemed to decide it had an urgent appointment somewhere else. It turned around inside its own length and got the hell out of there.

Without armor support, the attack bogged down, metaphorically and literally. No matter how brave you were, you couldn’t storm machine-gun nests with foot soldiers alone. The rest of Europe had bloodily learned that lesson a generation earlier. The Spaniards understood it by now.

Nationalist stretcher-bearers came out for their wounded. Remembering Mike and hoping he’d be okay, Chaim didn’t fire at them. Some of the other Internationals were less particular. Watching a bearer go down and the poor bastard he’d been helping to haul spill into the mud, Chaim reflected that it was a tough old war. Well, that was nothing he didn’t already know.

Willi Dernen and Adam Pfaff squatted in the ruins of what had been a Russian peasant family’s hut to get out of the chilly rain. It was better than being out in the open, but not a lot. One wall was mostly a memory, while what was left of the thatch on the roof hadn’t been tended to for a long time. It was almost as wet in there as it would have been in the street.

Pfaff was brewing ersatz coffee on his little aluminum stove. The fuel pellet didn’t boil water very fast, but it also didn’t show smoke or flame.

“How many times d’you suppose this village has changed hands?” he asked.

“Shit, I dunno. Two, three, maybe four,” Willi answered. Pfaff looked like hell. He hadn’t shaved for several days. His dirty, stubbly face showed nothing but exhaustion. His eyes … You didn’t want to look into his eyes. Willi would have said something about it, only he was sure he looked the same way himself.

Instead, he held out the tin cup from his mess kit. Pfaff took the pot off the stove and poured some of the coffee into the cup. Willi sugared it and drank it while it was still hot. The warmth was its main virtue. It bore about the same relationship to the real bean as dealcoholized beer did to the genuine article.

Pfaff also poured down some of the near-coffee. “Smolensk,” he said, in the way a knight-errant might speak of the Holy Grail. You could go after it, sure, but you didn’t really expect to find it shining in front of you.

“Smolensk,” Willi echoed. By contrast, he sounded bitter. He put the best face on things he could: “We aren’t any farther from it than we were this past spring.” After lighting a cigarette for himself and giving one to Pfaff, he added, “Of course, we aren’t much closer, either.”

“Too right we aren’t,” his friend said. His cheeks, already hollow, pulled in tighter yet on his bones as he sucked in smoke. “No wonder this lousy place keeps going back and forth between us and the Ivans.”

“No wonder at all.” Willi yawned till his jaw hinge cracked like a knuckle. “Christ, I could sleep for a year.”

“Tell me about it. We all could, every goddamn one of us,” Pfaff said. “Only if we all did, we’d wake up with our throats cut.”

“I know,” Willi said. What German in Russia didn’t know that? Ivan could be anywhere. You didn’t want to close your eyes unless a Kamerad close by kept his open. Sometimes you had to, but you didn’t want to.

Arno Baatz stuck his head into the hut through one of the big holes in the wall. His piggy eyes narrowed. “Oh, you two rotten bums,” he said, distaste clogging his voice. “Sitting around with your thumbs up your assholes. Why am I not surprised? Tell me why.”

“Take an even strain, Corporal,” Willi said. You couldn’t tell a superior to whip it out and play with it, no matter how much you wanted to. A guy like Awful Arno would make you pay.

“What’s to do, anyway?” Pfaff was more inclined to try to reason with Baatz. “We’re here. The Reds aren’t, not right this minute. We don’t have sentry duty. Why not relax while we’ve got the chance?”

“Lazy fuckoffs, that’s what you are. Both of you.” But Awful Arno went away to inflict himself on someone else.

Once Willi was sure the underofficer had got out of earshot, he said, “Why couldn’t the Russians have shot him in the head, not the arm?”

“Bullet would’ve ricocheted,” Pfaff answered. Willi laughed till he almost pissed himself, a telling measure of how tired he was.

A field kitchen-a goulash cannon, in the Landsers’ slang-made it into the village. The unit was horse-drawn, and not much different from the ones that had served the men who’d fathered this crop of soldiers. A motorized oven probably would have got stuck in the mud fifty kilometers back.

It wasn’t goulash in the big pot. There were Hungarians in the fight against the Ivans. Willi wondered whether their field kitchens really did dish it out, all red and spicy with peppers. What he got was kasha and onions and meat, all boiled together till they turned into something halfway between stew and library paste.

He’d had worse. He’d had nothing, too, and nothing was much worse. “Do I want to know what the meat is?” Adam Pfaff asked the potbellied, gray-mustached Feldwebel dishing out the stuff. It was a standard soldier question.

It didn’t get a standard soldier answer. “Why? Is your sister missing, or something?” the noncom returned.

He didn’t faze Pfaff. Not much did, from what Willi’d seen. All Adam said was, “I think Ilse would cook up greasier than this.”

One corner of the cook’s mouth twitched. Then he chuckled. He made a face, as if he was mad at himself, but he couldn’t help it. “All right. You’re a funny guy,” he said gruffly. He might have accused Adam of carrying a social disease.

“He’s funny like a truss,” Arno Baatz declared.

The Feld just looked at him-no, looked through him. Unlike the men in Awful Arno’s section, he didn’t have to put up with the Unteroffizier’s guff. He outranked Baatz, too, so nothing held him back from speaking his mind, which he did with more than a little relish: “I want to know what you think, sonny boy, I’ll blow my nose and check the boogers on my snotrag.”

A slow flush mounted from Baatz’s thick neck all the way to his hairline. The Feldwebel couldn’t have cared less. He’d seen real action in his career. He wore a wound badge of his own, the ribbon for an Iron Cross Second Class so faded that he might well have won it in the last war, and, on his left breast pocket, an Iron Cross First Class.

Behind Awful Arno, somebody said, “Let’s give three cheers for Booger Baatz!”

The Unteroffizier jumped straight into the air, as if someone had jabbed him in the ass with a hat pin. He whirled around before he came down. Had anyone else done it, Willi might have admired the performance. As things were … Admiring Awful Arno-no, Booger Baatz-was more trouble than it was worth.

“Who said that?” Baatz shouted furiously. “Who said that? Out with it, you gutless son of a bitch!”

Naturally, no one said a word. All the Landsers spooning up their stew might have been little angels. Willi knew Awful Arno would have blamed him had he been standing over there. He only wished he would have been clever enough to stick Baatz with the new handle.

“You bastards! You miserable, stinking turds!” Awful Arno was really working himself up into a first-class snit. “You-”

“Shut up.” The middle-aged cook’s quiet voice cut through his bluster like a hot knife slicing lard. “They don’t hang names like that on guys who haven’t earned ’em.”

Baatz’s jaw dropped. The last thing he’d looked for was a surprise attack from a fellow noncom. The private who served the goulash cannon with the Feldwebel snickered. He could afford to; he wasn’t under Baatz’s orders.

“I’ve run across pukes like you before,” the Feld with the gray mustache went on. “You’re just lucky nobody’s shot you in the back yet. You keep on the way you’re going, you’ll find out.”

Willi looked down at the muddy ground. It wasn’t as if plugging Baatz hadn’t crossed his mind. He didn’t want that to show on his face, though. Next to him, Adam Pfaff was eyeing his scuffed boots, too. Odds were half the men in the section were doing the same thing for the same reason. And odds were, after the field kitchen rolled away to feed the next German detachment, Awful Arno would make more soldiers want to murder him.