West and East

Chapter 3

Up atop the U-30's conning tower, Lieutenant Josef Lemp imagined he could see forever. No land was in sight. Ireland lay off to the north, Cornwall to the east, but neither showed above the horizon. Gray-blue sky came down to meet green-blue sea in a perfect circle all around the boat. The eye couldn't judge how wide that circle was. Why not believe it stretched to infinity and beyond?

Why not? Only one reason: you'd get killed in a hurry if you did. Three petty officers on the conning tower with Lemp constantly scanned air and sea with Zeiss binoculars. The U-30 had almost circumnavigated the British Isles to reach this position. As far as the Royal Navy and the RAF were concerned, she made an unwelcome interloper. They had ways of letting her know it, too.

But the U-boat needed to be here. Convoys from the USA and Canada and Argentina came through these waters. Without the supplies they carried, England and her war effort would starve. And British troopships ferried Tommies and RAF pilots and the planes they flew to France. Sink them before they got there, and they wouldn't give Landsers and Luftwaffe flyers grief.

One of the petty officers' field glasses jerked. He'd spotted something up in the sky. Lemp got ready to bawl the order that would send everybody on the tower diving down the hatch and the U-30 diving deep into the sea. Then the binoculars steadied. The petty officer let out a sheepish chuckle. "Only a petrel," he said.

"That's all right, Rolf," Lemp said. "Better to jump at a bird than to miss an airplane."

Rolf nodded. "You bet, Skipper."

The surface navy was all spit and polish and formality. There was no room for that kind of crap aboard U-boats. The men who sailed in them laughed at it. They were a raffish lot, given to beards and dirty uniforms and speaking their minds. But when the time came to buckle down to business, nobody was more dangerous.

Lemp had his own binoculars on a strap around his neck. The conning tower also carried a massive pair on a metal pylon, for times when a skipper needed to trade field of view for magnification.

Rolf stiffened again, this time like a dog coming to the point. "Smoke!"

"Where away?" Lemp asked, grabbing for his field glasses.

"Bearing about 270," the petty officer answered. "You can make it out just above the horizon."

Back and forth, back and forth. Moving the binoculars that way was second nature for Lemp. And sure as hell, there was the smudge. "Well, let's see what we've got," he said, excitement tingling through him. "Go below, boys," Down the hatch they went, shoes clanging on iron rungs. Lemp, the last man there, dogged the hatch. "Take us to Schnorkel depth," he ordered as he descended.

The U-30 slid below the surface-but not far below. The tube mounted atop the submarine let the diesels keep breathing even so. Lemp was not enamored of the gadget, which didn't always work as advertised. The shipfitters back in Kiel wouldn't have installed the Dutch-invented device on his boat if he'd been in good odor with the powers that be. After sinking an American liner while believing it to be a big freighter, he wasn't. He was lucky they hadn't beached him-maybe lucky they hadn't shot him. No one who remembered the last war wanted to see the USA jump into this one.

Lemp turned to Gerhart Beilharz, the engineering officer who'd come with the Schnorkel. "Is the damned thing behaving?" he asked.

"Oh, yes, sir," Beilharz said enthusiastically. He was all for his new toy. Of course he was-he wouldn't have been messing with it if he weren't. Normally, an extra engineering officer on a U-boat-especially one two meters tall, who wore an infantry helmet to keep from smashing his head open on the overhead pipes and valves-was about as useful as an extra tail on a cat, but, if they were going to have the Schnorkel along, having somebody aboard who knew all about it seemed worthwhile.

It did have its uses. With it in action, the U-boat could make eight knots just below the surface-better than twice her submerged speed on batteries. And she could keep going indefinitely, instead of running out of juice inside a day. Best of all, with the Schnorkel the U-30 could charge the batteries for deep dives without surfacing. That was good for everybody's life expectancy… except the enemy's.

Lemp could have gone twice as fast in approaching the ship or ships making that distant smoke plume had he stayed surfaced. Maybe it was a lone freighter: a fat, tasty target. Maybe, sure, but the odds were against it. Freighters in these waters commonly convoyed and zigzagged. They commonly had destroyers escorting them. And destroyers loved U-boats the way dogs loved cats-even cats with two tails.

Better to be a cat o' nine tails, Lemp thought. With all the torpedoes the U-30 carried, he could flog England even worse than that. If he could keep England from flogging back, he'd bring the U-boat home so he could go out and try it again. So the English have the chance to kill me again. As he did every time that thought surfaced, he made it submerge once more.

He peered through the periscope. Nothing but smoke, not yet. Eight knots was a walk, even if it wasn't a crawl.

He could come closer to the enemy with the Schnorkel than he could staying on the surface. He did have to give it that. An alert lookout who'd spot a light gray U-boat hull even against a gray sky wouldn't notice the hollow pole that kept the diesels chugging. If he did spot it, he might think it was a piece of sea junk and keep his big mouth shut.

"What have we got, Skipper?" somebody asked. The first time he put the question, Lemp heard it without consciously noticing it. Whoever it was asked the same thing again.

This time, Lemp did notice. "Convoy. They're zigzagging-away from us, at the moment." Even tubby freighters could go as fast as the U-30 did on the Schnorkel.

"What kind of escorts?"

"Warships. Destroyers, corvettes, frigates… I can't make that out at this distance. I see two-bound to be more on the far side of the convoy." Lemp muttered to himself. If he was going to get close enough to fire at the enemy ships, either they'd have to swerve back toward him or he'd need to surface and close the gap before diving again. He didn't much want to do that; if he could see the enemy, they'd be able to see him after he came up. Trouble was, you couldn't fight a war doing only the things you wanted to do.

"Can we sneak up on them, sir?" That was Lieutenant Beilharz, both more formal and more optimistic than most of the submariners.

Unhappily, Lemp shook his head. "Afraid not," he said, and then, "Prepare to surface."

Beilharz grunted as if the skipper had elbowed him in the pit of the stomach. The youngster wanted his pet miracle-worker to solve every problem the sea presented. Well, no matter what he wanted, he wouldn't get all of it. Lemp wanted to be taller and skinnier than he was. He wanted his hairline to quit receding, too-actually, he wanted it never to have started. He wasn't going to get everything his heart desired, either.

Compressed air drove seawater out of the ballast tanks. Up came the U-30. Lemp scrambled up the ladder and opened the conning-tower hatch. As always, fresh air, air that didn't stink, hit him like a slug of champagne.

He knew he would have to dive again soon no matter what. British binoculars weren't as good as the ones Zeiss made, but even so And he had ratings scan the sky to make sure they spotted enemy airplanes before anyone aboard the planes saw them. How close could U-30 cut it? That was always the question.

Then one of the petty officers yelped. "Airplane!" he squawked, sounding as pained as a dog with a stepped-on paw.

"Scheisse!" Lemp said crisply. Well, that settled that. "Go below. We'll dive." He knew the U-30 had no other choice. Shooting it out on the surface was a fight the sub was bound to lose. And if machine-gun bullets holed the pressure hull, she couldn't dive at all. In that case, it was auf wiedersehen, Vaterland.

The ratings tumbled down the hole one after another. Again, Lemp came last and closed the hatch behind him. The U-boat dove deep and fast. He hoped the plane hadn't spotted it, but he wasn't about to bet his life.

Sure as the devil, that splash was a depth charge going into the water. The damned Englishmen had a good notion of what a Type VII U-boat could do-the ash can burst at just about the right depth. But it was too far off to do more than rattle the submariners' teeth.

"Well, we're home free now," Lieutenant Beilharz said gaily.

"Like hell we are." Lemp had more experience. And, before very long, one of the warships from the convoy came over and started pinging with its underwater echo-locater. Sometimes that newfangled piece of machinery gave a surface ship a good fix on a submerged target. Sometimes it didn't. You never could tell.

Splash! Splash! More depth charges started down. Unlike an airplane, a destroyer carried them by the dozen. One burst close enough to stagger Lemp. The light bulb above his head burst with a pop. Somebody shouted as he fell over. Someone else called, "We've got a little leak aft!"

Lemp didn't need to give orders about that. The men would handle it. He waited tensely, wondering if the Englishmen up there would drop more explosives on his head. They were waiting, too: waiting to see what their first salvo had done. Only a little more than a hundred meters separated hunter and hunted. It might as well have been the distance from the earth to the moon.

Splash! Splash! Those sounded farther away. Lemp hoped he was hearing with his ears, not his pounding heart. The bursts rocked the U-30, but they were also farther off. Lemp let out a soft sigh of relief. They were probably going to make it.

And they did, even if they had to wait till after dark to surface. By then, of course, the convoy was long gone. The English had won the round, but the U-30 stayed in the game. VACLAV JEZEK POINTED to a loaf of bread. The French baker in Laon pointed to the price above it. The Czech soldier gave him money. The baker handed over the torpedo-shaped loaf. Jezek knew only a handful of French words, most of them vile. Sometimes you could make do without.

Off in the distance, German artillery rumbled. Vaclav started to flinch, then caught himself. If the Nazis were hitting Laon again, he would have heard shells screaming down before the boom of the guns reached his ears. They had plenty of other targets in these parts: a truth that didn't break his heart.

They hadn't got into Laon. Along with French, African, and English troops, most of a regiment's worth of Czech refugees helped keep them out. Vaclav had fought the Germans inside Czechoslovakia. He'd got interned in Poland, figuring that was a better bet than surrendering to the victorious Wehrmacht. And he'd gone to Romania and crossed the Mediterranean on the most rickety freighter ever built, just to get another chance to let the Germans kill him.

They hadn't managed that, either. He'd done some more damage to them, especially after he got his hands on an antitank rifle a Frenchman didn't need any more. The damned thing was almost as tall as he was. It weighed a tonne. But the rounds it fired, each as thick as a man's finger, really could pierce armor. Not all the time, but often enough. And what those rounds did to mere flesh and blood… Its bullets flew fast and flat, and they were accurate out past a kilometer and a half. Just the shock of impact could kill, even if the hit wasn't in a spot that would have been mortal to an ordinary rifle round.

The Germans hadn't got into Laon, but they'd knocked it about a good deal. Stukas had bombed the medieval cathedral to hell and gone. No using those towers as observation points, not any more. The Nazis had blasted the bejesus out of the ancient houses and winding streets up on the high ground, too. The lower, more modern, part of the city was in better shape-not that better meant good. Loaf under his arm, Vaclav trudged past a Citroen's burnt-out carcass.

He wore new French trousers, of a khaki not quite so dark as Czech uniforms used. His boots were also French, and better than the Czech clodhoppers he'd worn out. But his tunic, with its corporal's pips on his shoulder straps, remained Czech. And he liked his domed Czech helmet much better than the crested ones French troops wore: the steel seemed twice as thick.

He had the helmet strapped to his belt now. He didn't want that weight on his head unless he was up at the front. He smiled at a pretty girl coming past with a load of washing slung over her back in a bedsheet. She nodded with a small smile of her own, but only a small one. Vaclav was a tall, solid, fair man. When the French saw him, half the time they feared he was a German even if he did wear khaki. That he couldn't speak their language didn't help.

From behind Vaclav, someone did speak in French to the girl with the laundry. She sniffed, stuck her nose in the air, and stalked away. "Oh, well," the man said, this time in Czech, "they can't shoot me for trying. She was cute."

"She sure was, Sergeant," Jezek agreed.

Sergeant Benjamin Halevy was a Frenchman with parents from Czechoslovakia. Fluent in both languages, he served as liaison between the French and their allies. Parents from Czechoslovakia didn't exactly make him a Czech, though. His curly red hair and proud nose shouted his Jewishness to the world. Jew or not, he was a good soldier. Vaclav didn't love Jews, but he couldn't quarrel about that. And Halevy had even stronger reasons to hate the Nazis than he did himself.

Those German guns in the distance thundered again. Halevy frowned. "Wonder what the fuckers are up to," he said.

"They aren't shooting at me right now," Vaclav said. "As long as they aren't, they can do anything else they want."

"There you go. You're an old soldier, sure as shit," the sergeant said. Other guns started barking: French 75s. Halevy listened to them with a curious twisted smile. "I wish we had more heavy guns around Laon. We could hit the Nazis hard. They've got this long southern flank just waiting for us to take a bite out of it."

"That would be good," Vaclav said. Hitting the Nazis hard always sounded good to him. If only he were doing it in Czechoslovakia.

"Of course, by the time the brass sees the obvious and moves part of what we need into place for a half-assed attack, the Germans will have seen the light, too, and they'll hand us our heads," Halevy said.

Vaclav wondered if the Jew had been that cynical before he became a noncom. Whether Halevy had or not, what he came out with sounded all too likely to the Czech. "Maybe we ought to move up without waiting for the brass," Jezek said.

Halevy laid a hand on his forehead. "Are you feverish? No real, proper old soldier ever wants to move up. The bastards in Feldgrau have guns, you know." The way he pronounced the German word said he could sprechen Deutsch, as Vaclav could.

"Best way I can see to throw the Germans out of Czechoslovakia is to start by throwing 'em out of France," Vaclav said.

"Well, when you put it like that…" Sergeant Halevy rubbed the side of his jaw. "Tell you what. Talk to your Czechs-see what they think. I'll go chin with a couple of French captains I know, find out if they'll go with it."

Jezek found his countrymen had as many opinions as soldiers. That didn't faze him; as far as he was concerned, Germans were the ones who marched and thought in lockstep. But most of the Czechs were ready to give the enemy one in the slats as long as the odds seemed decent. "I don't want to stick my arm in the meat grinder, that's all," one of them said.

"Ano, ano. Sure," Vaclav said. "If there's a chance, though… Let's see what the Jew tells me."

Halevy came over to the Czechs' tents a couple of hours later. "The French officers say they want to wait two days," he reported.

"How come?" Vaclav asked. "We're ready now, dammit."

"They say they really are bringing stuff up to Laon," the sergeant replied.

"Yeah. And then you wake up," Vaclav said.

Halevy spread his hands. "Do you want to attack without any French support?"

"Well… no," Vaclav admitted. No artillery, no flank cover-sure as hell, that was sticking your arm in the grinder.

"There you are, then," Halevy said.

"Uh-huh. Here I am. Here we are: stuck," Vaclav said. "I'll believe your captains when I see the stuff."

"Between you, me, and the wall, that's what I told 'em, too," the Jew said.

But trains rolled into Laon after the sun went down. Rattles and rumbles and clanks declared that tanks were coming off of them. When morning rolled round again, some of the metal monsters sat under trees, while camouflage nets hid-Vaclav hoped-the rest from prying German eyes.

He asked, "Now that they're here, why don't we attack today instead of waiting till tomorrow?"

Benjamin Halevy shrugged a very French shrug. "If I knew, I would tell you. Even going tomorrow is better than retreating."

"I suppose so," Vaclav said darkly. "But if we attack today, maybe we'll still be advancing tomorrow. If we don't go till tomorrow, we've got a better chance of retreating the day after."

"I'm a sergeant," Halevy said. "What do you want me to do about it?"

Vaclav had no answer for that. A corporal himself, he knew how much depended on officers' caprices. "Tomorrow, then." If he didn't sound enthusiastic, it was only because he wasn't.

The French dignitaries with the power to bind and loose set the attack for 0430: sunup, more or less. The Germans would be silhouetted against a bright sky for a while. That would help-not much, but a little.

At 0400, big guns in back of Laon started bellowing: more big guns than Vaclav had thought the French had in the neighborhood. Maybe they'd moved those up the day before, too. If they had, maybe they'd had good reason to delay the attack till now. Maybe, maybe, maybe… Big, clumsy antitank rifle slung on his back, Vaclav marched north and east, into the rising sun.

WILLI DERNEN WAS SLEEPING the sleep of the just-or at least the sleep of the bloody tired-when the French barrage started. He'd dug a little cave (a bombproof, a veteran of the last war would have called it) into the forward wall of his foxhole. Now he scrambled into the shelter like a pair of ragged claws.

Shells kept raining down: 75s, 105s, 155s. He hadn't known the damned Frenchmen had moved so much heavy stuff into Laon. Life was full of surprises. The big blond private from Breslau could have done without this one.

Somebody not far away started screaming. The other Landser didn't sound hurt, just scared shitless. Willi wouldn't have blamed the other poor bastard if he was. He'd had to chuck his own drawers a couple of times. And he hated artillery fire worse than anything else war brought. While those packages kept coming in, you had no control over whether you lived or died. If one of them burst in your hole, you were strawberry jam, and it didn't matter one goddamn bit if you were the best soldier in your regiment. If you came up against a poilu with a rifle or even a bunch of poilus with rifles, well, hey, you had a rifle, too, and a chance. What kind of chance did you have against some arselick throwing hot brass at you from ten kilometers away? Damn all, that was what.

Poilus were coming. Willi was mournfully sure of that. The froggies wouldn't lay on a bombardment like this without following it up. They might not have been eager when this war started. Eager or not, they were fighting hard now. The Germans had done their damnedest to take France out in a hurry. Their damnedest hadn't been quite good enough. Now it looked like the Frenchies' turn.

Another voice shouted purposefully through the din: "Stand by to repel boarders!"

That had to be Corporal Arno Baatz's idea of a joke. Talk about arselicks… Awful Arno didn't just qualify. He had to be in the running for the gold medal. Every soldier in Willi's section hated Baatz's guts. If the French were going to blow somebody sky-high, why couldn't it be him?

The barrage kept up for what seemed like a hundred years. In fact, it was half an hour. That crazy kike scientist who'd fled the Reich one jump ahead of National Socialist justice had a point of sorts. Everything was relative.

As soon as the artillery let up, Dernen popped out of his hole in the ground like a jack-in-the-box. Awful Arno might be-was-an arselick, but he was bound to be right. The French would be coming.

Willi wouldn't have been surprised if the drastically revised landscape in front of Laon slowed them down. He didn't fancy crossing terrain full of shell holes, some as small as a washtub, others large enough to swallow a truck. You had to pick your way through and past the obstacles. That gave the fellows who'd lived through the barrage a better chance to punch your ticket for you.

"Panzers!" The cry rang out all up and down the German line. Willi's mouth went dry just looking at the armored murder machines. He couldn't remember so many French panzers in the same place at the same time. Sure as the devil, the French high command had finally learned something from the way the Germans handled their armor.

Being on the receiving end of the lesson was an honor Willi could have done without. He nervously looked back over his shoulder. Where were the German panzers to stop this onslaught? They'd always been thin on the ground in this part of the front. The generals had concentrated them on the other wing. It almost worked, too… but almost was a word that got a lot of soldiers killed.

One of the French panzers started spraying machine-gun fire toward the German line. Idiotically, a couple of German MG-34s fired back. Their bullets spanged harmlessly from the panzers' thick iron hide. And, as soon as they showed themselves, other enemy panzers gave them cannon fire till they fell silent. It didn't take long.

Then flame spurted from the first French machine. It stopped short. Hatches flew open. The driver, radioman, and commander bailed out. One of them, his coveralls on fire, dove into a shell hole. The other two got shot before they could find cover. Willi didn't know for sure whether one of his bullets found the panzer crewmen. If not, though, it wasn't for lack of effort.

The German antitank gun knocked out another enemy machine a moment later. Then the surviving French panzers shelled it into silence. On they came, poilus loping along among and behind them. After snapping off a couple of more shots, Willi ducked for cover. He knew what was coming. And it came: a burst of machine-gun bullets cracked past less than a meter above his head.

Then he heard one of the sweetest noises ever. There were German panzers around here after all. One of them fired at the French machines. Clang! That was a hit. Willi thought it came from a 37mm gun, too. He really hadn't known there were any Panzer IIIs in the neighborhood.

Fire from the French panzers paused. They had to traverse their turrets to bear on the new threat. And their commander was also the loader and gunner. They couldn't shoot fast no matter how much they wanted to. The German Panzer I and II suffered from the same problem. Not the III. Commander, loader, and gunner all fit within its angular turret.

Because of that edge, the Panzer III knocked out two more French vehicles in quick succession. Its hull machine gun sprayed death at the advancing foot soldiers and made them sprawl for cover. But then the froggies started shooting back, damn them. Some of their panzers mounted 47mm cannon. The III was armored better than the I and II, but Willi didn't know of a panzer in the world that could stop 47mm AP rounds. The German machine showed smoke, and then flame. Willi hoped some of the crewmen got out.

A few Panzer Is and IIs still tried conclusions with the French armor. Willi could see how that would play out, even if it took a while. He didn't like the ending on the movie that ran in his mind. He didn't like retreating, either, but… He just hoped he could do it without getting shot in the back.

Then Corporal Baatz yelled, "Fall back through Etrepois!" That was the tiny village behind the stretch of line the section was holding. Willi had heard the Frenchies who lived there pronounce the name. Awful Arno made a horrible hash of it.

German artillery came to life then, pounding the ground in front of the line. That would make the poilus take cover if anything did. Trying not to think about short rounds, Willi scrambled out of his hole. He ran hunched-over and zigzagged. Maybe it did a little good, maybe not.

He dove into a crater a 155 round must have dug. A moment later, another Landser joined him. "Boy, this is fun," Wolfgang Storch panted. "Fun like getting all your teeth pulled out."

They'd gone through basic together. They still argued about who hated Awful Arno worse. Wolfgang was more apt to speak his mind than Willi, who usually had a sunnier disposition. But there wasn't anything to be sunny about, not right now there wasn't. "Fun. Yeah. Sure." Those were all the words Dernen had in him.

Storch fired a couple of rounds from his Mauser. "That'll make 'em keep their heads down," he said in some satisfaction. "C'mon. You ready to do some more moving?"

"I guess." Willi hoped he'd find reinforcements rushing up through Etrepois. He didn't. The village was only a few houses and a tavern marking a crossroads. Frenchwomen with impassive faces watched the Germans retreat. A few weeks earlier, their own men had been the ones giving ground.

The Wehrmacht was on the move then. Willi'd had his pecker up. Now… Now he was discovering what the Frenchies had known ever since December, when the German blow fell in the west. If you had the choice between advancing and retreating, advancing was better.

Now there was a profound bit of philosophy! Shaking his head, Willi left Etrepois behind him. AFTER SO LONG on the Ebro front, Madrid was a different world for Chaim Weinberg. It was different for everybody in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, for everybody in all the International Brigades.

That didn't make the embattled capital of Spain (though the Republican government had been operating out of Barcelona for quite a while now) an improvement over the trenches in the far northeast. Looking at the devastation all around him, Chaim said, "They had to destroy this place in order to save it, didn't they?"

Mike Carroll only grunted. The hand-rolled cigarette in the corner of his mouth twitched. "Fascists destroyed this fuckin' place to destroy it," he answered. "That's what Marshal Sanjurjo's assholes do."

He talked slow, like a foul-mouthed Gary Cooper. He looked a little like him, too: he was tall and fair and lean and rugged. Chaim, short and squat and dark, fit in fine in Spain. People stared at Mike, wondering if he was a German. Better to be thought a Gary Cooper lookalike. No one in Republican Spain loved Germans.

Grimacing, Chaim shook his head. That wasn't true. No one in Republican Spain admitted to loving Germans. That wasn't the same as the other. Just as Republicans had to lie low in land Sanjurjo's Nationalists held, so the jackals of Hitlerism needed to smile and pretend wherever the Republic still ruled. One side's firing squads or the other's took care of fools who slipped. As far as Chaim was concerned, the Nationalists massacred, while the Republic dealt out stern justice. That somebody on the other side might see things differently bothered him not a peseta's worth.

Somebody on the other side wouldn't have seen what the Fascists had done to Madrid. Spanish bombers-and those of their Italian and German allies-had been working the city over for two and a half years. Buildings looked as skeletal and battered as a bare-branched forest at the tag end of a hard winter. Spring would clothe the forest in green. Spring was here in Madrid, but this town still smelled like death. It would be a long time recovering, if it ever did.

Well, that was what the International Brigades were here for. They were the best fighters the Republic had. Chaim would tell people so, at any excuse or none. Few Spaniards seemed to want to argue with him. They knew they had no military skill to speak of. That shamed a lot of them. Maybe it should have made them proud instead-didn't it argue they were more civilized than most?

Many Internationals, including some of the Abe Lincolns, had fought in the last war. Chaim and Mike were both too young for that. But, like the rest of the Marxist-Leninists and fellow travelers who'd come to Spain to battle Fascism, they were motivated. They hadn't stood on the sidelines when reaction went on the march here. They'd come to do something about it.

"Funny, y'know," Chaim said, looking away from a skinny dog snapping at something disgusting in the gutter. "They were set to take us out of the line six months ago, when the big war fired up." He jerked a thumb toward the northeast toward the rest of Europe, the world beyond the Pyrenees.

"Yeah, well…" Mike paused to blow a smoke ring. He owned all kinds of casual, offhand talents like that. "Bastards back there finally figured out we knew what we were doing down here."

"Better believe it!" Weinberg had his full measure of the New York City Jew's passionate devotion to causes. How could you not be enthusiastic about putting a spike in Hitler's wheel? Plenty of folks, even Jews, seemed not to get excited about Fascism. Dumb assholes, Chaim thought scornfully.

Artillery rumbled, off to the northwest. The Nationalists were closest to the heart of the city there. In fact, they'd pushed into Madrid in the northwest. Most of the university lay in their hands. It had gone back and forth for the past couple of years. Whenever one side felt strong, it tried to shove out the other. Now it looked as if both sides had decided to shove at the same time, like a couple of rams banging heads. Only time would tell what sprang from that.

The university was less than two miles north of the royal palace. Chaim had been by the palace, just to see what it looked like. Marshal Sanjurjo had declared he would restore the King of Spain if his side won. That sure hadn't kept the Nationalists and Germans and Italians from knocking the snot out of Alfonso XIII's digs. If he ever came back, he could live in the ruins or in a tent like everybody else.

When Chaim said as much, Mike Carroll made a sour face. "If the reactionary son of a bitch comes back, that means we've lost."

"Yeah, well, if we do we probably won't have to worry about it any more," Chaim said. He didn't mean they would get over the border to France, either. The Nationalists didn't take many prisoners. Come to that, neither did the Republicans. Chaim didn't know which side had started shooting men who tried to give up. That didn't matter any more. The Spaniards might not make the world's greatest professional soldiers, but when they hated they didn't hate halfway.

He listened anxiously to find out whether any of the newly launched shells would gouge fresh holes in the rubble right around here. In that case, they might gouge holes in him, which was not something he eagerly anticipated. But the bursts were at least half a mile off. Nothing to get hot and bothered about-not for him, anyhow. If some poor damned Madrilenos had just had their lives turned inside out and upside down… well, that was a damn shame, but they wouldn't be the first people in Spain whose luck had run out, nor the last.

Republican guns answered the Nationalist fire. Those were French 75s. The sound they made going off was as familiar to Chaim as a telephone ring. The Republicans had a lot of them: ancient models Spain had bought from France after the last war, and brand new ones the French had sent over the Pyrenees when the big European scrap started. All at once, the neutrality patrol turned to a supply spigot when the French and English realized Hitler was dangerous after all.

And then, after the Wehrmacht hit the Low Counties and France itself, the spigot to Spain dried up. The Republic would have been screwed, except Sanjurjo also had himself a supply drought: the Germans and Italians were using everything they made themselves.

One of the explosions from the 75s sounded uncommonly large and sharp. Weinberg and Carroll shared a wince. Chaim knew what that kind of blast meant. The French guns mostly fired locally made ammunition these days. And locally made ammo, not to put too fine a point on it, sucked. Chaim carried Mexican cartridges for his French rifle. He didn't trust Spanish rounds. German ammunition was better yet, but impossible to get these days except by plundering dead Nationalists.

A barmaid stepped out of a cantina and waved to the two Internationals. "?Vino?" she called invitingly.

Chaim surprised himself by nodding. "C'mon," he told Mike. "We can hoist one for the poor sorry bastards at that gun."

"Suits," Carroll said. You rarely needed to ask him twice about a drink. Very often, you didn't need to ask him once.

The cantina was dark and gloomy inside. It would have been gloomier yet except for a big hole in the far wall. It smelled of smoke and booze and sweat and urine and hot cooking oil and, faintly, of vomit-like a cantina, in other words. Mike did order wine. Chaim told the barmaid, "Cerveza." He tried to lisp like a Castilian.

She understood him, anyhow. Off she went, hips working. She brought back their drinks, then waited expectantly. Chaim crossed her palm with silver. That made her go away. He raised his mug. "Here's to 'em."

"Here's to what's left of 'em, anyway," Carroll said. They both drank. Mike screwed up his face. "Vinegar. How's yours?"

"Piss," Chaim answered. Sure as hell, the beer was thin and sour. But, save for a few bottles imported from Germany, he'd never had beer in Spain that wasn't. You could drink it. He did.

And Mike got outside his vinegary red. He raised his glass for a refill. The barmaid took care of him and Chaim. He paid this time. Outside, the not-distant-enough enemy guns started booming again. Again, nothing came down close enough to get excited about. That was good enough for Chaim. He'd go back up to the line PDQ. Till he did… What was that line? Eat, drink, and be merry, he thought, and deliberately forgot the rest of it.