West and East

Chapter 23

Sailors threw lines from the U-30 to the men waiting on the pier. The other ratings caught the ropes and made the U-boat fast. "All engines stop," Julius Lemp called through the speaking tube.

"All engines stopped," the reply came back, and the diesels' throb died into silence.

Lemp sighed. Especially since the Schnorkel had come to let the diesels run almost all the time, that throb had soaked into his bones. Doing without it felt strange, unnatural, wrong. He sighed again. "Wilhelmshaven," he said to no one in particular. "Home port."

"Sounds good to me," Gerhart Beilharz declared.

"Well, sure it does," Lemp said. "You won't have to wear your iron pot all the time."

"No, and I'll probably clonk myself a couple of times when I don't have it on," the tall engineering officer answered. "Too goddamn many doorways aren't made for people my size, and sometimes I forget to duck."

"That is a bad habit for a U-boat officer," Lemp said with mock severity.

"I'll try to unlearn it." Beilharz stretched. The space right under the conning toward was the only one in the boat where he could do that without clouting somebody. "Be good to get my feet on dry land again, even if it'll feel like it's rolling under me for a little while."

"They'll probably pin an Iron Cross First Class on you for the snort," Lemp told him. "It did us some good, no two ways about it."

"I'm glad you think so, Skipper. I know you had your doubts when the technicians installed it."

That was putting things mildly. Lemp didn't feel like rehashing it, though. All he said was, "We've earned some time ashore."

As the sailors trooped off the U-boat, a commander nodded to Lemp and said, "Admiral Donitz's compliments, and he would like to speak with you at your convenience. If you would care to come with me…"

At your convenience plainly meant right this minute. And if Lemp didn't care to go with the commander, he damn well would anyway. Two unsmiling sailors with rifles and helmets behind the officer made that obvious. "I am at the admiral's service, of course," Lemp replied, which meant just what it said.

Donitz sat behind a broad desk piled high with papers. He had a broad face that tapered to a narrow, pointed chin. But for a thin beak of a nose, his features were rather flat.

"Well, how do you like the Schnorkel?" he asked without preamble.

"Sir, it's more useful than I thought it would be," Lemp answered. "It's given less trouble than I expected from an experimental gadget, too. And Beilharz does a fine job of keeping it healthy. He's a good officer."

"He didn't fracture his skull inside the boat?" Donitz inquired with a smile. Lemp blinked. Did the admiral keep every junior lieutenant in his mental card file? Maybe he did, by God.

"A couple of flesh wounds. Nothing worse," Lemp said after a beat.

"That's good. And it's good you sank a Royal Navy destroyer. We're going to win the Scandinavian campaign, even if England and France haven't quite figured that out yet," the admiral in charge of U-boats said.

"I'm glad to hear it, sir. I know we've hurt the Royal Navy badly."

"Yes, mostly with U-boats and land-based aircraft, though the big ships did get that one carrier," Donitz said. "They've hurt our surface forces, too, and we have less to spare than they do. But we dominate the waters in the eastern North Sea, and that's the point." His telephone rang. "Excuse me." He picked it up. "Donitz here."

Someone gabbled excitedly in his ear. Lemp was astonished to see his jaw drop. Donitz was for the most part an imperturbable man. Not today.

"What?" he barked. "Are you sure?… What is the situation in Berlin?… Are you sure of that?… Well, you'd better be. Call me the minute you have more information." He slammed the handset into its cradle.

"What's up, sir?" Lemp asked. "Anything I need to know about?"

Donitz took a deep breath. He's going to tell me to get lost, Lemp thought. What the devil was going on? But the admiral didn't do that-not quite. "Maybe you and your men should stick close to barracks for the next couple of days," he said.

"Sir, we just got in after a cruise," Lemp protested. "The boys deserve the chance to blow off some steam. It's not as if-" He broke off.

"As if you'd sunk the Athenia again?" Donitz finished for him. Lemp gave back a miserable nod. That was what had been in his mind, all right. Admiral Donitz went on, "No, this isn't your fault. But they should do it anyhow, for their own safety. Things may get… ugly." He seemed to pick the word with malice aforethought.

"Can you tell me what's going on?" Lemp asked.

"Only that it's political," Donitz replied. "Listen to the radio. You'll probably piece things together-as well as anyone can right now. Oh, and don't be surprised if you find the barracks under guard."

That raised more questions than it answered. Lemp chose the one that looked most important: "Political, sir? What do you mean, political?"

"What I said." Donitz seemed to lose patience with him all at once. "You are dismissed." Lemp saluted and got out. He hadn't closed the door before the admiral grabbed for the telephone again.

The commander was waiting in Donitz's anteroom. "What's up?" he asked when he got a look at Lemp's face.

"Ask your boss… sir," Lemp said. The commander looked impatient. As best he could, Lemp recounted what had gone on after the phone rang.

"Der Herr Jesus!" the other officer said after he'd finished. "Something's gone into the shitter, all right. You'd better do what the admiral suggested. Things are liable to get nasty in a hurry."

If he didn't know what was going on, he had his suspicions. "What do you mean?" Lemp inquired.

"Just sit tight. I hope I'm wrong," the commander said, which only frustrated Lemp more. Instead of giving him any answers he could actually use, the other officer hurried into Donitz's sanctum.

"Why don't you do what Commander Tannenwald says, sir?" one of the armed ratings said. Now Lemp had a name to go with the face. The fellow with the Stahlhelm and the Mauser should have had no business giving him orders. His muscle, and his friend's, and their weapons, were very persuasive. The two of them escorted Lemp back to his crew.

A few minutes after he got to the barracks, rifle shots and a short burst from a machine gun rang out not nearly far enough away. "What the hell is going on?" Peter demanded. No one answered. No one could-no one else knew, either. The helmsman turned on the radio in the barracks hall. Syrupy music poured out of it. That was no help.

When the tune ended, the announcer said, "Remain obedient to duly constituted authority." Then he played another record.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Lemp asked. He got no more answer than Peter had.

More gunfire came from the edge of the naval base. The lights outside the barracks hall suddenly went out. One of the guards stuck in his head and said, "The watchword is 'Heil Hitler!' Remember it." He shut the door before anybody could ask him any questions. Lemp wasn't sure what to ask anyway. And if people were running around with guns, the wrong question was liable to have a permanent answer.

Lieutenant Beilharz took him aside and spoke in a low voice: "Skipper, I think some kind of coup is going on. What do we do?"

The same unwelcome thought had crossed Lemp's mind. "What can we do? Go back to the U-30 and start shooting things up with the deck gun? We don't even know which side is which. Best thing is to sit tight and wait to see what happens. Or have you got a better idea?"

"Well…" What wasn't Beilharz saying? What were his politics? What did he think Lemp's were? Terrible for a fighting man to need to worry about things like that. The engineering officer sighed and nodded. "Ja, that's probably best. What else is there?"

"Nothing that won't put us in worse hot water," Lemp answered, and they were in plenty. A bullet shattered a window and buried itself in the opposite wall.

"Douse the lights! Get down!" Peter sang out. Somebody hit the switch. The hall plunged into blackness. Thumps and shuffling noises said quite a few men were hitting the deck anyhow. Lemp only wished he knew who was shooting at whom, and why. Wish for the moon while you're at it, he thought as he flattened out himself. WHEREVER PEGGY DRUCE WENT in Stockholm, she kept looking over her shoulder. Would Nazi soldiers suddenly come out of the woodwork like field-gray cockroaches, the way they had in Copenhagen? Germany loudly insisted she had no aggressive designs on Sweden. Of course, she'd said the same thing about Denmark and Norway. If she did end up invading, she would swear on a stack of Bibles that she'd been provoked. An oath like that was worth its weight in gold.

If you listened to the magazines and radio reports coming out of occupied Denmark, all the Danes were happy as could be with their Aryan brothers from Deutschland. If you listened to the people who'd got out of Denmark just ahead of the Gestapo, you heard a different story.

You could hear both sides in Sweden. You could pick up both Radio Berlin and the BBC. Papers printed reports from the Nazis and from the Western Allies (mostly in Swedish translation, which did Peggy no good, but even so…). You could buy the International Herald-Tribune and Signal, the Germans' slick new propaganda magazine. The Swedes took such liberty for granted. Well, so had the Danes. Sweden didn't know how well off it was, or so it seemed to Peggy.

Still, Stockholm wasn't too bad. London or Paris (or Brest or Bordeaux) would have been even better. Peggy soon discovered, though, that the German major in Copenhagen had been right: she couldn't get there from here. Planes weren't flying. Ships weren't sailing. The Germans were driving English, French, and Norwegian forces up the long, skinny nation to the west, but Scandinavia and the North Sea did indeed remain a war zone.

She was so desperate to get out of Europe, she even visited the Soviet embassy to see if she could reverse Columbus and get to the west by heading east. None of the Russians at the embassy would admit to following English, but several spoke French or German. Peggy preferred French for all kinds of reasons. Once they saw she understood it, so did the Russians.

"Yes, Mrs. Druce, we can arrange an entry visa for you," one of their diplomatic secretaries said. "We can arrange passage to Moscow. There should be no difficulty in that. Once in Moscow, you may travel on the Trans-Siberian Railway as far east as, I believe, Lake Baikal. We would gladly ticket you through to Vladivostok, you understand, but the Japanese have a different view of the situation."

"Aw, shit," Peggy said in English. Just so the Russian official wouldn't feel left out, she added, "Merde alors!" Sure as hell, Columbus had got it right: the world was round. And a skirmish on the far side of the immense Eurasian land mass could screw up her travel hopes just as thoroughly as the one right next door. It not only could-it had.

"You have my sympathy, for whatever it may be worth to you," the Russian said.

"Thanks," Peggy answered, and left. His sympathy was worth just as much as the Germans' nonaggression pledge… and not a nickel more.

If you had to get stuck somewhere, plenty of places were worse than Stockholm. The weather was getting chilly, but Peggy didn't worry about any winter this side of Moscow's. There was plenty of food, as there had been in Copenhagen till the Nazis marched in. Plenty to drink, too-she needed that. The town was extraordinarily clean, and more than pretty enough. A lot of the buildings were centuries older than any she could have seen in America. For contrast, the town hall was an amazing modern building; the locals couldn't have been prouder of it. The south tower leaped 450 feet into the sky, and was topped by the three crowns the Swedes also used as the emblem on their warplanes.

Plenty of those flew over Stockholm. Maybe the Swedes were sending Germany a message: if you jump us, we'll fight harder than the Norwegians. Or maybe they were whistling in the dark. They certainly seemed serious. Men in rather old-fashioned uniforms and odd helmets positioned antiaircraft guns on top of buildings and in parks and anywhere else that offered a wide field of fire.

Peggy figured out the placement for herself. She needed no one to explain it to her. And when she realized what was going on, she went out and got drunk. She'd seen too goddamn much of war. She was starting to understand how it worked, the way she could follow a baseball game back in the States.

She woke the next morning with a small drop-forging plant pounding away behind her eyes. Aspirins and coffee-real coffee, not horrible German ersatz!-dulled the ache without killing it. Instead of going out and acting touristy, she went back to her room and holed up with the Herald-Trib.

The war news in the paper was often several days old: it had to clear God knew how many censors, get to Paris, get printed, and get to Stockholm before she read it. She turned on the massive radio that sat in a corner of the room. She wanted fresher stories. If things in Norway calmed down-no matter who won-she was six hours by air from London. And if pigs had wings…

"BBC first," she said. The English sometimes stretched the truth in their broadcasts. They didn't jump up and down and dance on it the way Berlin did. Or she hadn't caught them at it, anyhow, which might not be the same thing.

It was a few minutes before the top of the hour. She put up with the music till the news came on. The Nazis, who hated jazz, wouldn't broadcast it. The English thought they could play it themselves, and insisted on trying. Most of the results argued against them.

Then the music went away, so she could stop sneering at the poor sap who imagined he could make a sax wail. Without preamble, the announcer said, "Reports of a coup d'etat against Adolf Hitler continue to trickle out of Germany."

"Jesus H. Christ!" Peggy exploded.

"Military leaders, dissatisfied with the course the war has taken, are said to have attempted to overthrow the Fuhrer," the suave, Oxford-inflected voice continued. "Whether the coup has succeeded is unknown outside the Reich, as are Hitler's whereabouts and fate. Nor does anyone but the disaffected generals as yet have the faintest notion of how, or whether, they will continue the war in the event they do succeed in overthrowing the German dictator."

"Son of a bitch!" Peggy added, in case her first exclamation hadn't been heartfelt enough.

"In the meanwhile, the fight continues," the BBC man continued. "Anglo-French forces have made new gains against the Wehrmacht north of Paris, while French sources indicate that their armies also continue their drive to the northeast that began east of the capital city. In the fighting in Poland, the two sides' claims and counterclaims appear irreconcilable. The situation there, accordingly, remains in doubt."

Peggy knew what that meant. The Russians were lying just as hard as the Germans and the Poles. "And they said it couldn't be done!" she said. She was mad at the Reds for losing their grip on Vladivostok. One more thing that conspired against her going home.

As if reading her thoughts, the newsreader went on, "Fighting in the Far East is similarly confused. The only things that can be stated with certainty are that the Trans-Siberian Railway remains cut in eastern Siberia, and that Vladivostok is still in Soviet hands. His Majesty's government has offered to mediate in this conflict, but the Empire of Japan unfortunately declined."

Of course England wanted to mediate. If the Russians weren't fighting Japan, they could throw their full weight against Germany. But London couldn't insist. How long would Hong Kong and Malaya last if Japan went to war against England? People said Singapore was the greatest fortress in the world, but people said all kinds of things that turned out not to be true.

Then there were the Dutch East Indies, which had to be upside down and inside out now that Germany had occupied Holland. And how much attention could France give to Indochina with a war right in her lap? England had excellent reasons for not wanting to antagonize the Japs. The only question was, would Japan head south regardless of what England did?

If Japan chose to jump that way, what would America do? There were the Philippines, way the hell out in the western Pacific. Could U.S. forces there make life difficult for the little yellow men? Peggy thought so. What was the point of holding on to land like that if you weren't going to use it?

"In British news, Prime Minister Chamberlain has named Winston Churchill the new Minister of War," the broadcaster said. "The P.M. praised Churchill's dedication and steadfastness. Churchill himself said, 'Let the Hun do his worst. We shall do our best, and God defend the right.'"

"Wow!" Peggy said. Chamberlain didn't talk like that-he talked like a greengrocer with too much education. If England had had somebody who talked like that from the minute Hitler started getting cute, maybe the war never would have got off the ground. She hoped it would go better now. CABBAGE. Potatoes. Turnips. A little sour cheese. A Jewish supper in Munster: no damn good, and not enough, either. Sarah Goldman was ashamed of the way she gobbled up her portion. She knew how bad it was, but that didn't seem to matter. Her body demanded fuel. If poor fuel was all it could get, she'd make the most of that.

Her father got more than she did. He worked harder than she did, too. There wasn't much between his skin and his bones these days, but what there was was all gristle and tough, stringy muscle. He was somewhere between the best shape of his life and starvation.

He inhaled his supper. Afterwards, he rolled a cigarette from the tobacco in his pouch. It was tobacco scavenged from fag ends picked up on the street. Before the war, only poor people would have scrounged like that. Now the ones who did were mostly Jews, because the Nazis had cut off their tobacco rations.

Samuel Goldman didn't seem to mind. After a couple of puffs, he remarked, "My gang was fixing a bomb crater just fifty meters or so down the street from Wehrkreis headquarters this afternoon."

"And?" Sarah asked. He wouldn't have used a gambit like that for no reason-he had a story to tell.

"And part of me was wishing the bomb would have come down on the headquarters," he said. The recruiters there wouldn't let him and Saul join the Wehrmacht. They'd been embarrassed to refuse, but they'd done it, all right. No wonder he despised the place.

"Only part?" Hanna Goldman said.

Sarah's father nodded to her mother. "Yes, only part. Some of the fellows there, they're not so bad. They have to do what their bosses tell them, or else they get it themselves. The army's not as nasty as the Party-nowhere near."

"Well, all right," Sarah said. "So what happened while you were filling in this crater?" Not long before, she would have been humiliated beyond words at her father's doing such menial work. So would he-he was an academic to the tips of his toes. He took hard labor for granted these days. As with gravedigging in Hamlet, familiarity lent it a quality of easiness.

"We'd just about got things fixed when we heard motors coming up the street towards us-and toward Wehrkreis headquarters," Samuel answered.

That was enough to make Sarah sit up and take notice. Horses and donkeys-and sweating men-hauled goods through Munster's streets these days. Gasoline and motor oil went straight to the front. Except for ambulances, doctors' cars, and fire engines, the city might have fallen back into the nineteenth century. All of Germany might have.

"What were they?" Mother asked, as she was surely meant to do. "Was it connected to… to the trouble on the radio?"

There was a safer way to talk about things than Sarah could have come up with. Any time the announcer told you to follow duly constituted authority, you started wondering what duly constituted authority was and why you should follow it. That was the opposite of what the announcer had in mind-but that was his worry, not yours.

Father nodded impressively. "You'd best believe it was. There were four trucks, and shepherding them along fore and aft were brand new half-tracked armored personnel carriers. Very nasty machines to be on the wrong end of." He spoke with a veteran's trained judgment.

"What did they do?" By the way Mother looked at her, Sarah got the question out first by no more than a split second.

"What did they do? I'll tell you what," Father said. "They stopped right in front of the recruiting headquarters, and SS men started jumping out of them and running inside."

"The Gestapo?" Mother's voice quavered. You didn't have to be a Jew in Germany to quaver at the thought of the secret police-although it sure didn't hurt.

But this time Samuel Goldman shook his head. "No. These fellows belonged to the Waffen-SS-the fighting part. Hitler's personal bodyguards, I guess you could call them. Much as I hate to say it, they were very impressive men." Again, he delivered the verdict with the air of a man who knew what he was talking about.

"There were regular soldiers at the headquarters, right? What did they do? Did they shoot these Waffen-SS men?" Sarah hoped the answer would be yes. She thought shooting was too good for the SS, but it would do in a pinch.

Her father shook his head again, though. "No. The SS took them by surprise. The regular soldiers never had a chance to fight. They don't keep many weapons at the headquarters, anyhow. The SS men stormed in with rifles and machine pistols. They came out again a few minutes later. Colonel Ziegler-the head of the Wehrkreis-came out with them, with his hands high. They seized a couple of his aides, too. They threw all of them into one of the personnel carriers, and then they drove away."

"What will they do with them? To them?" Mother asked.

"Nothing good." Father had smoked the hand-rolled cigarette down to a tiny butt. He stubbed it out and put the little bit of leftover tobacco back into the leather pouch. It wouldn't go to waste. Once he'd finished, he looked up again. "No, nothing good," he repeated. "You don't grab someone that way to pin the Ritterkreuz on him. Ziegler must have been involved in the plot against the Fuhrer-or the SS must have thought he was."

"It doesn't seemed to have worked, does it?" Sarah said. Her father pointed to corners of the room. For a second, that meant nothing to her. Then she remembered the house still might have hidden microphones. If she talked about Hitler's overthrow, she shouldn't sound disappointed because it hadn't happened. She fluttered her fingers to show she got it.

When Samuel Goldman said, "I don't think so. We would have heard by now if it had," he sounded glad the Fuhrer remained in power. Whether he was might be a different story, but he sounded that way.

Mother found a different question-or rather, the same one she'd asked before, but on a larger scale: "What will the Party do to the officers who violated their oath to strike at the Fuhrer?"

"It won't be pretty." Again, Father spoke with what seemed like grim satisfaction. "To do such a thing in wartime…" He shook his head like a judge passing sentence. That really might have affronted him. His desire to be German sometimes showed in peculiar ways.

"Would the officers have tried to make peace?" Sarah wondered.

Her father's chuckle was desert-dry. "You might have done better to ask Colonel Ziegler. I have no idea whether those people wanted to end the war or to fight it better than the Fuhrer was doing. It isn't likely to matter now."

"What did the other men in your labor gang think of-of what you saw?" Mother asked.

"Most of them were all for it. They're loyal Germans, after all." Yes, Father was speaking for the benefit of the microphones that might not be there. After a small pause, he went on, "But there were a couple who wanted to take their shovels and clout the SS men. They were behind me, so I couldn't see who they were."

That last sentence, surely, was also for the benefit of the hypothetical microphones. Sarah would have bet Father knew just who'd hooted the Waffen-SS. She also would have bet more than a couple of laborers wanted to go after the men in black with their shovels. Backing the Nazis was easy when Hitler led the Reich from one triumph to another. But when he took the country into a war that wasn't going so well, wouldn't the "Sieg heil!"s start to ring hollow?

She also wondered whether Father was smart to mention the carpers at all. If the Gestapo was listening, its minions were also liable to decide he knew more than he was letting on. That wouldn't be good-for him or for any of the Goldmans.

Sarah wasn't used to worrying that her father might have missed a trick. He didn't miss many, and she was sure she hadn't noticed most of the ones he had missed. But she'd noticed this one. Realizing your parents could make mistakes-realizing they were as human as anybody else-was part of growing up. All the same, it was a part she could have done without right now.

She didn't get a choice, not on things like that. Any Jew in Germany after the Nazis took over, young or old, could have given chapter and verse on not getting choices. You had to go on, and to hope you could go on going on. VACLAV JEZEK HAD FORGOTTEN just how heavy his antitank rifle was. On the march, the damn thing was ponderous as hell. It wasn't as if he weren't lugging another tonne and a half of soldierly equipment. In the trenches, where the front wasn't moving and where he could set the piece down whenever he felt like it, it wasn't so bad. With the Allied armies advancing, he couldn't do that.

But he was advancing. That made the antitank rifle seem lighter-when he wasn't too tired, anyway. Advancing against the Wehrmacht! Ever since the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, he'd dreamt of the moment when he could do that. Now it was here.

It was here, and he was scared. The trenches were pretty safe, as far as war went. He was out in the open, vulnerable to bullets and fragments and potato-masher grenades and all the other tools German ingenuity had crafted for maiming other human beings. (And, if his luck went bad, French ingenuity could do him in, too.)

He didn't hurry. Everything he was carrying made sure he couldn't very well hurry, but he wouldn't have even if he could. The Germans might be falling back. They hadn't given up. They rarely did. They skirmished, yielded a few hundred meters, set up their mortars and machine guns, and skirmished some more. Vaclav had no doubt that they dealt out more casualties than they took.

Whenever one of their MG-34s started firing, he hit the dirt. He might have been a dog, salivating at the sound of a bell. But he wasn't the only one who did. The Germans who manned those vicious machine guns might have thought they worked even more slaughter than they did in truth. They didn't even have to point their weapon at a man to get him to fall over. But if they didn't, he was liable to get up again and go on trying to kill them.

"Yes, you just can't trust us, can you?" Sergeant Halevy said when Vaclav remarked on that as they sprawled in a shell hole. "We do keep fighting."

"Every now and then. When we can." Vaclav remembered his dreary weeks in the Polish internment camp. If he'd stayed there, he would have ended up a German prisoner of war after Marshal Smigly-Ridz jumped into bed with Hitler.

"Enough to make the German generals sick of us," Halevy said. "That's how it looks to me, anyhow."

"Too bad they didn't do what they set out to do," Vaclav answered. "Trust a German to do things right most of the time and fuck it up when it really matters."

"True. No Nazis in Paris," the Jew agreed.

"I didn't mean that."

"I know. It's still true, though."

A French tank clattered past them. Several soldiers trotted behind it almost in Indian file, using its steel bulk to shield them from the slings and arrows of outrageous MG-34s. As machine gunners often did, the one in front of them concentrated on the tank. Bullets spanged off the armor one after another. They chipped its camouflage paint but did it no other harm.

"That's a fool," Halevy said. "There-you see? The Germans can screw up the ordinary stuff, too."

"I only wish the cocksuckers would do it more often," Jezek answered.

No sooner were the words out of his mouth than a 37mm armor-piercing round from an antitank gun slammed into the French machine. That made the 13mm slugs Vaclav fired seemed door-knockers by comparison. The tank slewed to a stop, smoke and fire spurting from every hatch. Inside the doomed machine, ammunition started cooking off. Nobody got out.

That left the men who'd followed the tank in a horrible spot. If they pushed on, the machine-gun bullets that had hit armor plate would go after their soft flesh instead. If they stayed where they were, they might as well have been out of the fight. They were no more thrilled about taking chances than Vaclav would have been. They started digging foxholes behind the burning tank carcass.

"Some sergeant will come along in a while and make them get moving, poor saps," Benjamin Halevy said.

"You're a sergeant. What about you?" Vaclav asked.

"Nah." Halevy shook his head. "I saw why they're holing up. And I know that goddamn gun is waiting for them to show themselves. Some other sergeant who comes along in a couple of hours won't care. And by that time the machine gunners will be thinking about something else, so these guys should be able to go forward again."

"Huh," Vaclav said. "You better be careful, or people will start thinking you're a human being or something."

"Don't be dumber than you can help, Jezek. I'm a sergeant, and I'm a Jew. How can I be a human being with all that shit piled on my shoulders?"

"Sergeant's a problem, yeah. I didn't say anything about you being a Jew," Vaclav answered uncomfortably.

"No, but you were thinking it," Halevy said without rancor, putting a finger on why the Czech felt uncomfortable. "If it weren't for the fucking Nazis, you wouldn't want anything to do with me."

"Of course I wouldn't. You are a sergeant," Vaclav said, which made Benjamin Halevy laugh. But it wasn't as if the Jew were lying. Back before Vaclav got drafted, he'd had little use for Jews. Czechs didn't despise them as thoroughly as, say, Poles did, but all the same… Even after he got drafted, he'd preferred Jews to Slovaks or Ruthenians only because they were more likely to stay loyal to Prague and fight the Germans.

"Well, you're a corporal yourself," Halevy said.

"A Czech corporal in France! That's worth a lot," Jezek returned.

He still couldn't get a rise out of the Jew. "If Czechoslovakia hadn't gone to pieces, you'd be a sergeant for sure. They aren't exactly equipped to promote people here."

"If I hadn't got out, I'd be a dead man by now, or else wounded, or sitting in a POW camp somewhere-I was just thinking about that a minute ago," Vaclav said. "And those all sound better than being a goddamn sergeant. What do you think of that?"

"I felt the same way till they promoted me," Halevy answered easily. "Now I see that sergeants are the salt of the earth. It's the officers who're silly clots."

"Shows what you know." Vaclav dug a grubby pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. Benjamin Halevy looked hopeful. The Czech gave him one. It wasn't as if he hadn't bummed butts from the Jew.

After a while, Vaclav cautiously peered over the lip of the shell hole. There in the distance, between a couple of tree trunks… Was that the painted shield on the Germans' antitank gun? Something-no, somebody-moved behind it. Yes, the son of a bitch wore Feldgrau. Grunting, Vaclav heaved his heavy piece up onto the dirt lip. He flipped off the safety and stared down the sights. The Nazi had crouched down again. Maybe Vaclav could put a round through the shield; it wasn't made to stop anything more than ordinary ammo. But he might get a better target if he waited.

And he did. The German stood up and looked out through field glasses to try to spot the trouble heading his way. The worst troubles, though, were the ones you didn't see. Vaclav exhaled slowly to steady himself. He pulled the trigger. The antitank rifle slammed his shoulder. The German threw his hands in the air and fell over.

Vaclav worked the bolt as fast as he could, chambering a fresh round. As he'd guessed, another German jumped up to find out what had happened to his buddy. Vaclav fired again. The second Fritz's head exploded into red mist.

"Two?" Halevy asked.

"Two," Vaclav agreed. "One dead for sure. The other I don't know about." Any hit from the antitank rifle might kill. Rubbing, he added, "They ought to requisition me a new shoulder, too."

"Talk to the French quartermasters," the Jew said.

"Fuck 'em," Jezek replied with great sincerity. "Maybe the Germans have a supply dump in Laon. If we can chase 'em out of there, I'll go through it and see."

"If we can chase them out of Laon, we really are doing something," Halevy said. "They took it early on. Maybe we can push on up to the coast and cut them off."

"Maybe we'll get out of this shell hole in a while," Vaclav said. "One goddamn thing at a time." Halevy nodded and scrounged another smoke.