West and East

Chapter 16

Julius Lemp felt happier about the world, or at least about how his little part of it worked. Now the U-boat skipper understood his orders. And he was pleased with himself, because he'd had a pretty good notion of what they were about even before the balloon went up.

If the Reich had decided to forestall the Western democracies by occupying Denmark and Norway before they could, of course France and especially England would try to do something about it. And one of the things they would try to do would be to rush as many warships as they could to Scandinavian waters. If they did that, they'd likely storm right through Lemp's patrol zone.

No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than one of the ratings on watch sang out: "Smoke to the southwest, Skipper!"

"Ha!" Lemp swung his own binoculars in that direction. "Now the game starts!" He peered and studied. "Looks like… three plumes."

"I think so, too," the sailor said, and then, after a moment, "They've got wings on their feet, don't they?"

"Ja." Lemp nodded. "Destroyers. They have to be. Nothing else will go that fast." By now, England had to know Germany was using her warships to move troops into southern Norway and fight the coastal forts. Destroyers could get to the battle in a hurry, and their crews were practiced with both guns and torpedoes. They were also quick and cheap to build, which made them more readily expendable than bigger, slower ships.

"Can we get to them?" another rating asked.

"We're going to try," Lemp answered. They couldn't make a surface approach, not unless they wanted to get blown out of the water long before their could loose their own eels. "Go below," he added. "We'll see how much help the Schnorkel can give us." He followed the men off the conning tower. As he slammed the hatch behind him and dogged it, he called, "Dive! Schnorkel depth! Change course to"-he calculated in his head-"to 195."

"Diving to Schnorkel depth. Changing course to 195," the helmsman said. Nothing flustered Peter. That was one of the reasons he was at the helm.

Lieutenant Beilharz appeared. The matte-black paint on his helmet had a fresh, shiny scratch. He really needed the protection to keep his skull from being gashed. Lemp pointed at him. "Just the man I'm looking for, by God! If we go all-out with your infernal device, how fast can we manage underwater?"

"They say thirteen knots, Skipper," the Schnorkel expert answered. "Everything shakes and rattles like it's coming to pieces, though."

"We'll try it anyway," Lemp declared. "Three destroyers are heading east as fast as they can go. Without the snort, we don't have a prayer of getting into firing range before they're past us. With it… Well, we've got a prayer. I think. We'll give it our best shot, any which way. You keep the damned gadget working the way it's supposed to, you hear?"

"Jawohl!" Beilharz said. Lemp had to hope he could deliver. The device was still experimental. And experimental devices had a way of going haywire just when you needed them most.

All he could do was try. He spoke into the voice tube to the engine room: "Give me thirteen knots."

"Thirteen, Skipper?" The brassy response didn't come right out and ask Are you out of your bloody mind?, but it might as well have.

"Thirteen," Lemp repeated firmly. "If that's more than we can take, we'll back it down. But our targets are making better than twice that. If we want to meet them, we have to give it everything we've got. Thirteen." He said it one more time.

"Aye aye, Skipper." The men who minded the diesels would do what you told them to. What happened afterwards wasn't their worry… unless, of course, it turned out to be everybody's worry.

They'd done eight knots submerged plenty of times, ten or eleven often enough. Above that, Beilharz had been reluctant to go. War sometimes forced you to do what you'd be reluctant to try in peacetime, though. If the U-30 could knock out one of those destroyers, how many soldiers' lives might that save? Hundreds? Thousands? No telling for sure.

The diesels surged. They had to work hard to push the U-boat through the resisting water. Lemp felt the power through the soles of his feet as he looked through the periscope. Without taking his eyes off the destroyers the optics displayed, he said, "You there, Klaus?"

"Sure am, Skipper," Klaus Hammerstein answered. Lemp hadn't expected anything else. Hammerstein might be a pup, but he was a well-trained pup. The exec's place in an attack run was at the captain's elbow. He'd have to do most of the calculating… if they could get close enough to the destroyers for it to matter.

Lemp fed him speed and range. He had to shout to make himself heard. As Beilharz had warned, everything inside the U-30 rattled as if it were getting massaged by an electric cake mixer. Lemp hoped his fillings wouldn't fall out. And that was no idle worry; every U-boat sailor dreaded a pharmacist mate's amateur dentistry.

"Skipper, there's no good solution if the numbers you fed me are anywhere close to right," Hammerstein said. "They're going to get past us before we close within three kilometers."

"Scheisse!" Lemp exclaimed. "Are you sure?" Here he'd done everything but tear his boat to pieces, and it hadn't done him a goddamn bit of good? That wasn't fair. That wasn't how life was supposed to work.

But sometimes life worked that way anyhow. The destroyers were making better than thirty knots. As Hammerstein had said, they raced past the U-30 before the sub could approach near enough to launch with any hope of success. You wanted to get inside of a kilometer if you could. Even the exec's three seemed optimistic.

"Scheisse," Lemp said again, resignedly this time. He spoke to the engine room again: "You did all you could, but we can't catch them. Bring us back down to six knots."

"Six knots. Aye aye." Even through the long metal tube, the skipper could hear the relief in the answer. All the same, the Schnorkel had paid its dues. Without it, he wouldn't even have tried the attack run: it would have been obviously hopeless.

"What do we do now?" Hammerstein asked, his voice falling as the boat stopped trying to come to bits around him.

"We stay submerged till those Royal Navy ships get farther away-I don't want them turning around and coming after us," Lemp said. "Then we surface and radio their position and speed to the Vaterland. We aren't the only U-boat in the sea. And the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe will have planes flying out of Germany-out of Denmark, too, by now, I suppose. Someone may pay them a call."

"All right." The exec still sounded unhappy, and explained why a moment later: "I still wish we could have done the job ourselves."

"So do I. If we could have made twenty knots submerged, we would have got them. But you can imagine what the boat would have been like at twenty knots. I don't think I've got the nerve to try thirteen again," Lemp said.

He went into his tiny cabin to prepare the encoded message he would send when the boat surfaced. The machine that filled most of his safe gave him the groups he needed. Experts assured him the code the machine generated was unbreakable, as long as the other side didn't get its hands on one of these machines. His orders were to sacrifice anything, including his own life, before he let that happen. He hoped-he prayed-he never had to make the choice.

He carefully scanned the whole horizon through the periscope before surfacing. As soon as he could, he sent off his carefully composed code groups. Then he ordered the boat down to Schnorkel depth again. However little he'd wanted to at first, he'd come to rely on the long, ugly stovepipe. It did what the Dutchmen who'd invented it said it would do. You couldn't ask for more.

Or could you? A U-boat that would make twenty knots submerged… That would be a weapon the likes of which the world had never known. With U-boats like that running around, how long could a surface navy survive? Days-weeks at most.

But how would you get such a weapon? Better streamlining came to mind right away. The U-30 wasn't made for high-speed underwater travel. The engineers who'd designed the boat had assumed such a thing was impossible. And it was-when they'd designed the boat. Was it now, with the Schnorkel and whatever other clever notions the boys with thick glasses could come up with?

"Not even slightly," Lemp murmured. "No, not even." He retreated to his cabin again. Once he got there, he started sketching and making notes. After a few minutes, he shut the curtain that gave him more privacy than anyone else on the boat enjoyed. He didn't want his men to think he'd gone round the bend. A TRAIN HAULED ALISTAIR WALSH and God only knew how many other English soldiers towards a port on the Atlantic or the western side of the English Channel. He didn't know exactly where he was going. He did wonder whether the officers who'd dragged him and his comrades away from the line in front of Paris knew where they were sending them.

Inside a cat carrier improvised from a lady's fancy hatbox, Pussy meowed. "Hush, there," Walsh said, and fed the cat a bit of bully beef. Pussy loved the stuff, which, to Walsh's way of thinking, only proved the little beast didn't have the brains God gave a flatiron or a General Staff colonel.

Rank had its privileges. Had Jock or Alonzo tried to bring a cat along when they got transferred to… somewhere, some officious corporal would have made sure it never got on the train. But a staff sergeant was allowed his little eccentricities.

And Pussy entertained the rest of the smelly, dirty, khaki-clad men shoehorned into the compartment with him. They vied with one another at finding little delicacies for her. And their weary, badly shaved faces softened when they stroked her. She wasn't a woman, but she was warm and soft-the next best thing, you might say. They laughed when she chased a bit of string over their forest of knees, and hardly swore at all if she slipped and dug claws into a leg to keep from falling.

They didn't know where they were going, either. Some guessed Russia. More plumped for Norway. "Me, Ah don't much care," Jock said. "Put a goddamn Fritz in front of me, and Ah'll shoot the bugger." When he came out with that, the rest of the men solemnly nodded. How could you sum things up better?

One fellow kept insisting they wouldn't see any more Fritzes-they'd done their bit, he insisted, and were going back to Blighty for good. The other soldiers humored him, as they would have humored any harmless maniac. Like them, Walsh would have loved to believe it. Like them, he couldn't. Once the army got hold of you, it didn't turn you loose till the war ended-which didn't look like happening any time soon-or till it used you up.

In Brest (which turned out to be their destination), they filed aboard what was called a troopship. By the way it smelled, it had hauled more cattle, or maybe sheep, than soldiers. Pussy found the symphony of stinks fascinating. Walsh lit a Navy Cut to blunt what it did to his nostrils. On that ship, he would have lit a Gitane, and he thought they smelled like smoldering asphalt.

They made it back to England without meeting a U-boat. He heartily approved of that. They came into port just after sunup, and got served huge helpings of bangers and mash and properly brewed tea. After British army rations, French army rations, and a lot of whatever he could scavenge, he approved of that, too.

"You see?" said the chap who was convinced they were going to be discharged. "They wouldn't feed us like this if they meant to keep us on." For the first time, Walsh began to wonder. That did fit in with the way the army mind worked.

Whether it did or not, it turned out not to be true. A captain with a really splendid red mustache stood up on a barrel and addressed the soldiers just returned to their native soil: "Well, lads, we'll be entraining you soon. Then it's Scotland, and then another little pleasure cruise." His wry grin said he knew what the troopship had been like. Maybe he'd been on it, though an officer would have had better accommodations than other ranks. He went on, "After that, it's Norway. If Adolf thinks we'll just sit by whilst he gobbles it up, he'd best think again, what?"

"Norway?" That astonished, dismayed bleat came from the luckless private who'd been so sure he would soon be set at liberty.

"Norway," the captain repeated. "The Norwegians are tough fighters-there just aren't enough of them to hold back the Fritzes on their own." His smile suddenly went broad and lickerish. "And the girls there are mighty pretty, and they'll be mighty glad to see the blokes who're helping to keep 'em free."

That might turn out to be true, and it might not. Most likely, it would be part truth, part stretcher. Some Frenchwomen enjoyed spitting in an English soldier's eye, while others were complaisant as could be.

Lorries growled up to take the troops from the dockside to the train station. Had the Germans sneaked a few bombers across the Channel, they could have worked a fearful slaughter. But everything went off smoothly. No one seemed to give a damn about Pussy. Walsh was probably breaking all kinds of laws by bringing her into the country, but he didn't care.

The train proved less crowded than the one in France that had hauled him away from the fighting there. Tinned rations were passed out. He sighed. They'd keep him full, which didn't mean he loved them.

As the train rattled through the north of England, Jock nudged him and asked, "You won't mind if me and my mates 'op it here, will you, Sergeant?" The Yorkshireman's grin said he didn't expect to be taken seriously.

"Oh, right," Walsh answered. "Desertion in wartime-they'll pin a medal on you for that, they will." He glanced over to make sure the private understood exactly what officialdom would do if he and his mates took off. The twinkle in Jock's eyes showed he did. Walsh gave him a cigarette and fired up one of his own. They smoked in companionable silence.

Scotland. Walsh had expected Edinburgh, but the train pounded on, north and east. "Aberdeen," guessed someone whose clotted accent said he knew the local geography pretty well. It made sense. Norway was pretty far north, and they wouldn't be sailing toward the part the Germans had already grabbed. Walsh hoped like blazes they wouldn't, anyhow.

Aberdeen seemed to come out of nowhere. It was a gray granite city, as if the bones of the countryside were carved into churches and shops and houses and blocks of flats. The North Sea lay beyond. Walsh hadn't seen it before. It looked colder and generally grimmer than the Channel. Who would have imagined anything could?

More khaki lorries waited at the station as the soldiers got off their trains. Some of the drivers smoked. One or two nipped from flasks unlikely to hold water. A raw wind blew down out of the north. Summer? Gray Aberdeen scoffed at summer. What would Norway be like? Walsh half wished he hadn't thought to wonder.

He clumped up the gangplank onto a freighter that had seen better days but didn't reek of livestock, Pussy still in her hatbox. As soon as he found his assigned place, he let her scurry around for a while. The cat had been very good about staying cooped up-she'd slept most of the way north. But she needed to get out while she could.

She rewarded him by dropping a dead mouse on his bunk. Aren't you proud of me? the green eyes asked. Isn't it a lovely present? Will you eat it right now or save it for later? Walsh took it by the tail and tossed it in a dustbin. He made much of Pussy afterwards and chucked her under the chin, but he could tell she was disappointed.

A small convoy pulled out of the harbor: troopships escorted by a destroyer and a pair of smaller warships. Frigates? Corvettes? Walsh was no sailor; he didn't know their right names. He did know he was glad to have them along.

A name began to drift through the freighter. Trondheim. It was somewhere up the Norwegian coast. Just where, Walsh couldn't have said. How far away from the place were the Germans? Somebody in the convoy probably knew. Walsh hoped so. Nobody admitted anything about it where he could hear, though. He did notice that abandon-ship drills came more often and were more thorough than any he'd seen before. He didn't take that for a good sign.

Daylight lingered long, and got longer as the ships zigzagged northeast. Walsh didn't take that for a good sign, either. U-boats and enemy airplanes had most of the clock's face in which to prowl. A sailor told him the last run in to Trondheim was planned for the brief hours of darkness. He hoped that would be long enough to shield them from prying eyes. Past hoping, he couldn't do anything about it but worry.

As twilight neared, an angular biplane with floats under the wings buzzed toward the convoy from the east. The warships opened up on it right away. It flew past them and dropped a small bomb that just missed one of the lumbering freighters. Then it sprayed that troopship with machine-gun bullets and went back the way it had come.

Two more German biplanes attacked the convoy an hour later. Gathering darkness or dumb luck kept them from doing much harm. All the ships made it to Trondheim. As he had before, Walsh filed off the freighter. Pussy meowed inside her makeshift carrier. Off in the distance, artillery rumbled. That answered one thing. The Germans weren't very far away after all. EVERYONE ON HIS SIDE had told Joaquin Delgadillo he would march into Madrid in triumph. Well, here he was, but not the way he'd had in mind. He'd heard the Republicans shot prisoners. That didn't seem to be true: he was still breathing. Maybe they thought he was too insignificant to be worth a bullet. If they did, he didn't want to change their minds for them.

He wasn't even in a proper jail. They housed him and their other prisoners in a barbed-wire enclosure in a park. They gave the captives tents of such surpassing rattiness that he would have thought it a deliberate insult had he not known they used equally ratty ones themselves (so did his side).

They fed him beans and cabbage and occasional chopped-up potatoes. It wasn't very good, and he always craved more than he got. But he wouldn't starve on these rations-not soon, anyhow. He'd been hungry often enough-too often-in the field to get excited about this.

Most of the Republican guards were men recovering from wounds. They couldn't move fast. But they carried submachine guns. If anyone tried to escape, they could send a hell of a lot of bullets after him.

Joaquin wasn't going anywhere, not right away. He was just glad to say alive after the disastrous raid on the Internationals. He was even more relieved to find himself untortured after being taken prisoner. Little by little, he started to realize not everything his superiors had told him about the Republicans was the gospel truth.

He didn't do anything about the realization, not yet. For one thing, it was still a newly sprouted seed pushing up through dead leaves and chunks of bark toward the light. For another, he was in no position to do anything about anything. He ate. He slept. He mooched around the camp, taking care not to get too close to the wire. Coming too close-or anything else out of the ordinary-would have made the guards open up on him without warning.

When flights of bombers droned over his foxhole to drop their deadly cargo on Madrid, he'd cheered. How not? Those bombs were falling on the enemy's heads. Well, so they were. One thing that hadn't occurred to him before he got captured was that those bombs were also liable to come down on the heads of prisoners of war.

The only spades the Republicans allowed inside the wire perimeter were the ones the captives used to lengthen their latrine trenches and shovel lime into them to fight the stink. The guards counted the spades before they doled them out, and made sure they got them all back every time. Joaquin had no trouble seeing why: they didn't want the prisoners tunneling under the barbed wire. But it meant the captured Nationalists had nothing but a few mugs and tin mess kits to dig scrapes in which to shelter when the bombers came by.

Joaquin had borne up when Republican planes bombed his positions. He'd always consoled himself by thinking his side had more planes with which to punish the godless foe. And he'd been right. The Nationalists did have more bombers… and they concentrated them against Madrid.

He'd always thought of bombing as a pinpoint business. That wasn't how Marshal Sanjurjo's flyers went about it. Madrid belonged to the Republicans. As far as the Nationalists were concerned, they could put their bombs anywhere and still hurt their opponents.

They could-and they did. Maybe they didn't aim as well as Joaquin thought they could. Or maybe they just didn't care. With antiaircraft guns shooting at them from the ground, with Republican fighters sometimes tearing into them, the pilots and bombardiers wanted nothing more than to get back to their airstrips in one piece.

Either they didn't know the camp for their comrades lay right in the middle of the city they were flattening or they didn't care. Joaquin would have bet on the latter.

You could watch the bombs fall from the planes' bellies. You could watch them swell as they grew nearer. You could listen to the rising whistle as they clove the air on their way down. You could watch fire and smoke and dust leap up and out as they burst.

You could, yes-if you were stupid enough. You could get smashed or chopped by flying fragments and rubble, too. Artillery fire and those earlier bombings from the Republicans had rammed one lesson into Joaquin: when things started blowing up, you got as low and as flat as you could. Even that might not be enough, but it gave you your best chance.

Most of the prisoners knew as much. They lay down in whatever tiny dips in the ground they could find. Those who had anything to dig with scraped at the hard, dry dirt as fiercely as they could. Some of those who didn't broke fingernails and tore fingertips in the animal urge to burrow.

Joaquin screamed when bombs went off nearby. That was as much instinct as the prisoners' frantic scrabbling at the dirt. Odds were the thunderous explosions kept other men from hearing his cries. And odds were his weren't the only shrieks rising up to the uncaring sky.

Were the guards on the other side of the wire screaming, too? Of course they were. Terror conquered Nationalists and Republicans with equal ease. And if some of the Republicans weren't calling out to their mothers or to God, Joaquin would have been amazed. You could tear the cassock off a priest or torch a church, but tearing the beliefs you grew up with out of your heart wasn't so easy.

Then two bombs smashed down inside the perimeter, and Joaquin stopped caring about anything but staying alive longer than the next few seconds. He got picked up and slammed down, as if by a wrestler the size of a building. Blood dribbled from his nose; iron and salt filled his mouth. He spat, praying the blast hadn't shredded his lungs. Were his ears also bleeding? He wouldn't have been surprised.

More bombs burst-mercifully, farther away. As if from a long way off, he heard screams full of anguish, not fear. He knew the difference; he'd heard both kinds too often. Whoever was making noises like that wouldn't keep making them very long-not if God showed even a little kindness, he wouldn't.

If the bombs had blown a hole in the barbed wire, the camp might empty like a cracked basin. Then again, it might not. The thought flickered through Joaquin and then blew out. He was too stunned to do anything but lie there with his sleeve pressed to his face to try to stanch the flood from his nose. How many others in here would be in much better shape?

The guards wouldn't, either… That thought also flickered and blew out. To try to escape, Joaquin would have needed more resolution than he owned right this minute. He imagined running this way and that, trying to find a gap in the perimeter. Imagining was easy. Doing wouldn't be. Even telling his rosary beads took as much as he had in him.

Guards came into the prisoners' enclosure to take away men who'd been killed or wounded. They didn't seem to treat the injured Nationalists any worse than stretcher-bearers and medics who fought for Marshal Sanjurjo would have. Seeing that, Joaquin decided the Republicans weren't just fattening him for the slaughter, so to speak.

He got another surprise a few days later: the International who'd captured him came to see how he was doing. He wouldn't have known the man by sight, not when the ill-fated raid came off in the middle of the night. But the fellow's slow, bad Spanish and the timbre of his voice were familiar. "Here I am!" Joaquin called from his side of the wire.

"Bueno." The International-the American, the Jew, he'd said he was-nodded back. "They treat you all right?"

Joaquin considered. "Not too bad. Could be worse." Lord knew that was true. They might have decided to see how many small chunks they could tear off him before he died. He'd feared they would do exactly that. And they still might, if he annoyed them enough.

"Here. Catch." The International tossed an almost-full pack of Gitanes over the barbed wire. Joaquin grabbed it eagerly. He could smoke some of the harsh cigarettes and trade the rest for… well, for anything you could get here. On this side of the wire, cigarettes were as good as pesetas, maybe better.

"Muchas gracias," he said. "You didn't have to do this. You must be a gentleman."

To his amazement, he saw he'd flustered the fellow from the other side. The Jew was ordinary, or a little homelier than that: short, kind of pudgy, with a big nose and not a whole lot of chin. "I don't want to be a gentleman," he said. "I don't want anybody to be a gentleman. Everybody ought to be equal, si?"

"Then how does anyone decide what needs doing?" Joaquin asked. "Once he does decide, how does he get them to go along?"

"Ah!" The International leaned forward till he almost pricked that formidable nose on the barbed wire's fangs. "Here's how…" Like an airplane climbing from a runway, the talk took off from there. MIKE CARROLL EYED CHAIM WEINBERG in mingled amusement and scorn. "You came here to fight the fucking Fascists, man. You didn't come here to convert 'em."

"Bite me," Chaim answered. "The more of those guys we win over, the better."

"You know what Mencken said about that kind of shit," Mike persisted. He quoted with relish: "'I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.'"

Chaim didn't want to listen, especially since Mike hardly ever read anything that didn't follow the Party line. Why now? "Who cares what a reactionary says?"

"He may be a reactionary, but he's a damn fine writer." The other American sounded a little defensive, or more than a little.

"For an enemy of the people." Chaim trotted out the heavy artillery.

Mike breathed heavily through his nose. "Okay. Fine. Have it your way. But if you're back at that camp blabbing about dialectical materialism when you're supposed to be up here fighting, Brigadier Kossuth'll skin you alive. He'll call it desertion, not conversion."

He was right, which didn't make Chaim any happier with him. If anything, Chaim only got angrier. "Hey, you know better than that. When did I ever miss action?"

"That time just after you got here, over near the Ebro."

"Oh, give me a break! I was down with dysentery, for cryin' out loud. You never got a case of the galloping shits?"

"Not to where I couldn't grab my rifle."

"Terrific," Chaim said. "Grab it and shove it up your ass-bayonet first." He was ready for a brawl. Mike was bigger than he was, and looked to have more muscles, but all that mattered only so much. Land a guy one in the pit of the stomach or in the nuts and all the muscles in the world wouldn't do him a goddamn bit of good.

But instead of pissing off the other American, Chaim made him laugh. "All right, already," Carroll said, as if he were a Landsman himself. "But watch yourself, okay? You really are making like this one Nationalist is more important than the rest of the struggle."

"Nah," Chaim said, even if Mike was right, or nearly right, again. He'd come to see the effort to reeducate Joaquin as a representation of the larger fight against Fascism. He realized that, just because he saw it that way, other people wouldn't necessarily do the same thing. Some of those other people were officers who could tell him what to do and land him in hot water if he didn't do it or if he wasn't around to do it.

"What do you see in the guy, anyhow?" Mike pressed. "He's nothing but a dumb kid off the farm. If he came from the States, he'd be a hayseed from Arkansas or Oklahoma or somewhere like that. He'd be a hardshell Baptist, too, instead of a Catholic."

Chaim's knowledge of Arkansas and Oklahoma was purely theoretical. So was his knowledge of the differences between one brand of Christianity and another. Catholics went to fancier churches, and their bishops dressed the way rabbis would if rabbis were crazy faggots. What more did you need to know?

(Thinking of rabbis reminded him of his brief fling with starting a shul. Just as Kossuth had predicted, he hadn't stuck with it. Now he had this new cause instead. Always something, but never the same thing for very long.)

Besides, he was sick of soldiering. He'd seen enough, done enough, lived through enough, to have its measure. If the Internationals needed someone with a rifle to get up on a firing step and shoot at Sanjurjo's men, the Republican equivalent of a fellow like Joaquin Delgadillo would do. Chaim had discovered the joys of… well, of preaching. If it was a smaller moment than the one St. Paul had on the road to Damascus, the difference was of degree, not of kind.

He might have preached better with more fluent Spanish. But he might not have. He had to keep his ideas simple and direct, because he couldn't say anything fancy or highfalutin. Even staying simple, he fumbled for words and verb endings. Joaquin-and, soon, other Nationalist prisoners who'd started listening to him for no better reason than to pass the time of day-threw him a line whenever he needed one. If anything, that made him more effective. His audience was, and felt itself to be, part of the show.

And changing minds-winning converts-turned out not to be that hard, no matter how little H. L. Mencken might have cared for the process. Chaim had a solid grounding in the doctrines of Marx and Lenin. The men to whom he preached seemed to have no ideology at all.

"Well, why did you keep fighting for Sanjurjo, then?" he asked a Spaniard who wore a patch over his right eye socket. He knew the fellow would have fought with desperate courage, too. The Nationalists might serve a vile cause, but they served it bravely.

"Why, Senor?" A Spanish shrug was less comic, more resigned, than its French equivalent. "I was in the army. We had an enemy. What else was there to do but fight?"

"You were oppressed, in other words. That's why you fought," Chaim said. No matter how lousy his Spanish as a whole was, he knew words like oppressed. "How do you get rid of oppression?" He answered his own question: "You have to struggle against it, not for it."

"But how, Senor?" the soldier asked. "If we didn't do what our officers told us, they would have shot us. And if we tried to come across the line, chances are you Republicans would have shot us. It is a bad bargain."

It was a bad bargain. The natives on the two sides hated each other too much for it to be anything else. Their higher-ups did, anyhow. Ordinary soldiers sometimes had a more sympathetic understanding for the poor sorry bastards who filled out the ranks on the other side. Sometimes.

"Officers who oppress can have accidents," Chaim said. "Officers who oppress ought to have accidents. They deserve them."

The Nationalists listened to him without surprise. Things like that had happened in every army since the Egyptians went to war against the Assyrians. Anybody who made his own men despise him needed eyes in the back of his head. Even those weren't always enough to save him.

"Your real problem was, you never wondered if Sanjurjo's officers had the right to give you orders," Chaim said. "Who set them over you? God?" He smiled crookedly. "They want you to think so."

"Who makes officers for the Republicans?" Joaquin asked.

"Mostly, the men choose them. We do in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion," Chaim answered. "Just about all the Spanish Republican units do the same thing." He told the truth-for the most part. Sometimes the Party wanted certain men in certain slots… but the will of the Party was the will of the people. Wasn't it?

The Nationalist prisoners muttered among themselves. Finally, one of them asked, "But what if these men make bad leaders?"

"Then we get new ones," Chaim replied. "What if your officers make bad leaders?" None of the prisoners tried to give him an answer. He and they all knew what the answer was. If a Nationalist officer made a bad leader, his men were stuck with him. Most armies worked that way. Chaim pressed the advantage: "You see how much better the Republican way is?"

They didn't say no. They weren't in an ideal position to say no, but Chaim didn't let that worry him.

Neither did his own superiors. As Mike had prophesied, he got a summons from Brigadier Kossuth. The Magyar eyed him impassively. "So," he said. "Now you are a propagandist instead of a soldier?"

"No. And a soldier," Chaim said, wondering how much trouble he was in.

Kossuth's lizardy tongue flicked in and out. "Soldiers we can always find," he observed. "Propagandists are harder to come by. Do you want to go on reeducating the Nationalist prisoners? That might be useful."

By which he could only mean You'd better want to go on reeducating them. Since Chaim did, he answered, "If that would help the Republic, sure I'll do it."

"Good. We understand each other." Kossuth was dry as usual. Chaim wondered what would have happened to him had he said he'd rather stay at the front. Nothing he would have enjoyed: he was sure of that. The brigadier seemed surprised to find him still standing there. "Dismissed," he said, and Chaim beat it. Moscow or Barcelona might replace Kossuth, but an ordinary lug could only obey him. Maybe Chaim wasn't so different from the Nationalists who needed reeducating after all.