Hitler's War (23 page)

A team of horses drew an antiaircraft gun down the street. The horses might have come straight out of the Civil War. The field-gray uniforms on the soldiers were modern, though. As for the gun, it might have appeared from the future. She didn’t think she’d ever seen a piece of hardware that looked more lethal.

Newsboys held up papers full of headlines about German triumphs. People walked past without buying. If the Berliners were enthusiastic about the war, they hid it well.

“English and French air pirates bombard German towns!” a boy shouted. “Many innocent women and children murdered! Read about the latest enemy atrocities!”

Peggy almost stopped at the street corner to argue with him. Only the thought that her husband would have told her she was crazy made her keep her mouth shut. She admired Herb’s common sense, most of the time without wanting to imitate it. And she’d seen the fun the Nazis had knocking Czechoslovakia flat. If they were on the receiving end for a change, if this wasn’t all just propaganda and nonsense, boy, did they ever deserve it!

But the kid wasn’t to blame for that. He was only doing his job. The ones who were to blame were Hitler and Goebbels and Göring and Himmler, and she couldn’t very well tell them where to head in. If she took it out on the newsboy, what would happen to her? Neutral or not, American or not, she didn’t want a visit from the
Gestapo
.

Because she looked as shabby as everybody else, the Berliners assumed she was a German, too. They’d nod and say,
“Guten Morgen.”
She could manage that. She understood German tolerably well, but she spoke French much better. When people here expected much more than
Good morning
from her, she stumbled badly.

She hated that. She also hated being so dowdy. She’d made a life of standing out from the crowd. No one would ever have noticed her if she didn’t make a point of getting noticed. If she disliked anything, it was invisibility.

A few minutes later, ambling along on a day as gray and gloomy as her mood, she found a way to get noticed. She walked past a place whose window said
ROTHSTEIN’S BUTCHER’S SHOP.
It wasn’t bigger or fancier or more run down than the shops to either side: a secondhand bookstore to the left, a place that sold wickerwork purses and baskets to the right. The wickerwork place was busy—wicker, unlike leather, didn’t eat up ration points.

Rothstein’s, however, had a large sign taped in the window:
GERMAN PEOPLE! DON’T BUY FROM DIRTY JEWS!

Next thing Peggy knew, she was walking through the door. Maybe a demon took hold of her. Only when the bell over the door jangled did she realize what she’d done. And she’d been so proud of herself for wanting to steer clear of the
Gestapo!
Well, so much for that.

Behind the counter, Rothstein looked astonished. “You aren’t one of my regulars!” he blurted. “You aren’t even—” He stopped, but
Jewish
hung in the air anyway.

“You’re right. I’m not. Give me a chicken leg, please.” Peggy had enough German for that. She could boil the leg on the hot plate in her room. It would make a better lunch—maybe lunch and supper—than she was likely to get in the hotel restaurant or a café. Not much good food left for civilians in Berlin.

Moving like a man in a dream, Rothstein weighed the leg.
He
was unmistakably a Jew, with a long nose and dark, curly hair. “It comes to 420 grams—almost a week’s ration for meat,” he said. “If you like, I will bone it, so it costs you fewer points.”

“Bitte,”
Peggy said.

Deftly, he did. “Now it is only 290 grams. I need coupons for so much, and two Reichsmarks fifty.” As he spoke, he wrapped the chicken in—what else?—butcher paper.

Sixty cents American money, more or less. That was a hell of a lot for a leg. Peggy paid without blinking. She also handed over the swastika-marked ration coupons. Those were part of the game, too.

Rothstein gave her a meticulously written receipt.
“Danke schön,”
he told her. “You are very brave. You are also very foolish.”

“I hope not,” Peggy said.
“Auf wiedersehen.” Till I see you again
, it meant literally. She wondered if she was brave enough—or foolish enough—to come back.

She got out fast, but not fast enough. Somebody’d squealed on her.
Two blackshirts were trotting up the street toward Rothstein’s. “What kind of
Dummkopf
do you think you are?” one of them roared. “How dare you go into that damned Jew’s place?”

“Let me see your papers,” the other one yelled. “Immediately!”

“Sure.” Peggy took out her American passport and brandished it like a priest turning a crucifix on a couple of vampires.

The SS men recoiled almost the way vampires would have, too. “Oh,” one of them said disgustedly. “All right. We can’t give you what you deserve for buying there. But we can make the Jew sorry for selling to you.”

“And we will,” the other added, gloating anticipation in his voice.

“He didn’t know I was an American.” If Peggy sounded appalled, it was because she was.

“He knew you weren’t one of his regular kikes. He’ll pay, all right.” The SS men stormed into the butcher’s shop. A moment later, Rothstein cried out in pain. Peggy burst into tears. Dammit, you couldn’t win here.

P
eople were saying the Maginot Line would save France. People were saying it would have to save France. Luc Harcourt didn’t give a damn about what people were saying. All he knew was, he was getting sick of being marched backward and forward and inside out.

He’d been bombed and shelled and shot at in the retreat from the German frontier. He’d been bombed in the encampment behind the Maginot Line where raw reinforcements filled out the regiment. Fortunately, those little
billets-doux
had fallen from planes flying high above, not from the
Boches’
nasty dive-bombers. They landed all around the camp, but hardly any on it.

Now he and his surviving buddies and the strangers in their clean uniforms who’d just joined them were moving up toward the front again. This time, from what Sergeant Demange said, they’d end up in southern Belgium.
If we get there in one piece
, Luc thought.

That wasn’t obvious. Hell, whether they’d get there at all wasn’t obvious. They’d started out from the transit camp in trucks. Luc hadn’t much cared for that—as if his opinion mattered a sou’s worth. But if
German planes shot up your truck, wouldn’t you roast like a pork loin in the oven? Of course you would—and your meat would end up smelling like burnt pork, too.

No German planes harried the trucks. That didn’t mean they carried Luc and his comrades very far toward the front. German bombers had done their worst to the roads leading north and east. If a truck couldn’t get through, if it sank to the axles when it tried to use the muddy fields instead of the cratered roads…

If all that happened—and it did—you got out and you damn well walked. “Here we are, back in 1918,” Sergeant Demange said, the cigarette in the corner of his mouth twitching as he talked.

“This isn’t so bad, Sarge,” Luc said. “Back then, you wore horizon-blue. Now you’re in khaki.”

“Oh, shut up, smartass. Once they get muddy, all uniforms are the same color,” Demange said. “The only thing you know about a guy in clean new clothes is that he doesn’t come up to the front much, so you can’t trust him.”

Ahead, the rumble of artillery got steadily louder. The Frenchmen were heading its way—and it was heading theirs. And behind them came a rumble of engines—
something
had got past the unholy mess the Nazis had made of the roads. “Move to one side, damn you!” someone yelled.

When Luc saw French tanks, he was only too glad to stand aside and let them go by. The officer who’d shouted, a tall colonel with a small mustache and a big nose, stood very straight in the cupola of the lead machine. The French tanks were larger and had smoother lines than the German machines Luc had already seen too closely. By the determined look on the colonel’s face, he didn’t want to stop till he got to Berlin.

“He’s a fishing pole, isn’t he?” Luc remarked.

“Two fishing poles,” Sergeant Demange answered. That was what Luc thought he heard, anyway:
deux galles
. But Demange went on,
“Colonel de Gaulle knows more about tanks than anybody else on our side, I think.”

“Is that who he is?” Luc had heard of de Gaulle, though he hadn’t known him by sight. The tall officer did indeed advocate tanks so tirelessly—and tiresomely—that he infuriated his superiors. “Did you serve under him last time?”

“Nah. Wish I would have.” Sergeant Demange spat out a tiny butt and ground it into the mud with his boot. He lit another Gitane, then continued, “If I remember straight, he got wounded and captured early on last time around, and sat out most of the war in a POW camp.”

“Lucky stiff,” muttered somebody in back of Luc. He almost turned around to find out who let his mouth run ahead of his brain like that. A tiny bit louder, and Sergeant Demange would have heard it, in which case God help whoever it was. On second thought, Luc didn’t want to know. If he didn’t, the ferocious little sergeant couldn’t squeeze it out of him.

The last tank growled past. None of the other commanders looked to be within ten centimeters of Colonel de Gaulle. Maybe that was just as well for them. They couldn’t have much room inside the turret when they needed to duck down and fight.

Luc’s company stopped at a field kitchen as daylight leached from the sky. A cook with a double chin—cooks never went hungry—shoveled potatoes and cabbage and stewed pork into his mess tin. He stared at his supper with resigned dismay. “Which side are we on, anyway?”

“Funny guy,” the cook said. “I’ve only heard that one five times in the past half-hour. You don’t want it, you can go hungry. You think I give a rat’s ass?”

Luc prodded a pale piece of pork with a forefinger. “I thought that’s what this was.” The cook swore at him in earnest then.

Washed down with
vin
extremely
ordinaire
, the stew wasn’t bad. Luc
smoked a cigarette, then wrapped himself in a blanket inside what had been somebody’s house till a bomb blew out most of one wall. His buddies had a makeshift brazier going: a bucket half full of hot coals hung from a scrap-metal tripod so it didn’t set the floor on fire. It gave off less heat than Luc wished it would, but it was better than nothing.

He slept like a hibernating animal. Not only were nights endlessly long, but he’d never been so worn in his life. Some of the guys in his company fell asleep while they marched—and they kept going, too. He envied them—he didn’t seem able to do that himself.

Some time in the middle of the night, a hard hand shook him awake. He groped for his belt knife. Sergeant Demange’s low-voiced chuckle stopped him. “Take it easy,” the noncom said. “If I wanted you dead, you’d be holding a lily by now. But no. Go out and stand watch for a couple of hours.”

“Do I have to?” Luc asked around a yawn.

“Damn right you do. Suppose German parachutists came down out of the sky? What would we do without a warning?”

“At night?” Luc didn’t believe it. But the Fritzes had done all kinds of nasty things with parachutists. Maybe they’d make a night attack behind the French line. And no maybe about what Sergeant Demange would do if Luc gave him any more lip. With a martyred sigh, Luc got out of the blanket and put on his boots and his helmet. He was already wearing everything else, including his greatcoat.

His breath smoked inside the battered house. It smoked more when he stepped outside. The night was mostly clear. Stars glittered frigidly in a sky blacker than dried blood. Carolers would have loved a night like this. Right now, Luc would have bet nobody in Europe loved anybody else.

The war hadn’t gone to bed. Off to the northeast, the thunder of artillery went on. He could see flashes against the horizon.
Ours or theirs?
he wondered. After a moment, he decided it was probably both.

Just ahead lay towns whose names brought back thunderous memories of the last war’s early days: Charleroi and, a little farther east, Namur. The Germans were swarming this way again, like field-gray ants towards an enticing picnic feast. They’d fallen short of Paris the last time around. Either they would again or…

Luc didn’t want to think about
or
. He didn’t want to think about anything. He wanted to go back to sleep, or to fall asleep out here. Fear of the
Boches
didn’t hold him back. Fear of Sergeant Demange did.

After what seemed like forever but probably wasn’t, another soldier stumbled out of the house. “Go back to sleep,” he said. “I’ve got it.” A moment later, he added, “Damn Sergeant Demange anyway,” under his breath.

“Sure,” Luc said. He went back inside, wondering whether Demange ever slept. On all the evidence, he seemed a piece of well-made machinery rather than a man. Maybe he ran on cigarette smoke and coffee.

Come to think of it, maybe I do, too
. Luc found the blanket he’d so sorrowfully abandoned. He took off boots and helmet and lay down again. The blanket didn’t seem to do a thing to get him any warmer. He wondered if he’d lie there till dawn finally came. Next thing he knew, he was asleep.