Hitler's War (3 page)

Hitler almost screamed wild laughter. He wanted war, yes. But to have the leaders of the democracies ready to fight him because they were sure he’d done something of which he was entirely innocent…If that wasn’t irony, what was?

“I must tell you, you are making a dreadful mistake,” he said. “That Czech, that Stribny, murdered
Herr
Henlein on his own. I had nothing to do with it. Germany had nothing to do with it. Henlein left Czechoslovakia and entered the
Reich
because he feared for his own safety. And now we see he had reason to fear. If anyone inspired Stribny, it was the wicked Slavs in Prague, just as the wicked Slavs in Belgrade inspired Gavrilo Princip a generation ago.”

Every single word of that was the gospel truth. But it fell on deaf ears. He could tell as much even while Dr. Schmidt was translating. Chamberlain and Daladier had made up their minds. If he told them the sun was shining outside, they would call him a liar.

Chamberlain murmured something in English. “What did he say?” Hitler asked sharply.

“He said, ‘And then you wake up,’
mein Führer,”
Schmidt replied.

“What does that mean?”

“It’s slang, sir. It means he doesn’t believe you.”

“Donnerwetter!”
Hitler could see the Allies’ propaganda mill spewing out endless lies. They would shout that he was a murderer, that he’d got rid of his own henchman to start a war. They would make him look bad to all the neutrals in Europe and Asia and the Americas. The Allies had trounced Germany and Austria-Hungary in the propaganda war during the World War. Now they had a great chance to do it again.

“If you are truly innocent of this crime, then do not assume the guilt of plunging the world into battle because of it,” Daladier said.

“This is madness!” Hitler cried. “If I had ordered Henlein killed, maybe a guilty conscience would keep me from taking advantage of it. But my conscience is clean.”
Of this, anyhow
he added, but only to himself.
He got angrier by the word as he went on, “Konrad Henlein must have vengeance. The Sudeten Germans must have vengeance. Germany, to which they were about to return, must have vengeance. Czechoslovakia must be punished. If you want to line up behind a pack of skulking, cowardly assassins, go ahead—and be damned to you!”

“Mein Führer—”
Göring began.

“No!” Hitler roared. He was in full spate now. Nothing could stop him, or even slow him down. “They want war? They can have war! They will have war! War!…War! War! War!”

He threw open the doors to his office. “Is everything all right,
mein Führer
?” one of the guards asked. “We could hear you shouting.…”

So even the thick oak doors hadn’t muffled him? Well, too bad! “It is war!” he bellowed. “Colonel Hossbach!”

“Ja, mein Führer?”
his adjutant said.

“Begin Case Green. Immediately! War with Czechoslovakia! Now!” Yes, Hitler had what he most wanted, handed to him by, of all people, a Czech.

GUNS THUNDERED ON BOTH SIDES
of the Ebro. General Sanjurjo’s Fascists had modern German and Italian pieces, guns that could put a shell on an outspread blanket five miles away. The Republic had a few Russian howitzers that weren’t bad. The rest were the artillery pieces the Republicans had started the fight with. After more than two years of civil war, they kept only vestiges of their original rifling—and they weren’t such hot stuff back when they were new.

Crouching in a foxhole west of the Ebro, Chaim Weinberg decided he feared his own side’s guns more than the Fascists’. When the enemy Spaniards or their German advisers opened up, at least you had a good notion of what they were shooting at. If it wasn’t you, you could relax.

But when the Republican artillery started shooting, you always
needed to be on the jump. Those shells might come down on the Fascists’ head…or they might come down on yours. You never could tell. Neither could the poor, sorry bastards firing the guns.

“Aren’t you glad we came from the States?” asked Mike Carroll, another volunteer from the Lincoln Battalion.

Before Chaim could answer, somebody’s shell burst much too close. Shrapnel and shards of shattered stone screamed through the air. He listened for shrieks, but didn’t hear any. Luck. Nothing but dumb frigging luck.

“Aren’t you?” Carroll persisted.

“Chinga tu madre,”
Chaim told him. He wouldn’t have said anything like that even in English before he sailed to Spain. Well, he was a new man now. That new man needed a shave (at the moment, he also needed a razor). He was scrawny and hungry. He was filthy. He was lousy. But damned if he wasn’t new.

He’d never fired a rifle before he got to Spain. Hell, he’d never even handled a rifle. He could field-strip his Mauser blindfolded now. He’d started out with a crappy French piece, and got this much better German one off a dead Nationalist soldier. Keeping it in cartridges was a bitch. But keeping the French rifle in ammo would have been a bitch, too. Logistics was only a bitter joke to the Republicans.

The shelling went on, but none of the other rounds burst close enough to make him pucker. He lit a cigarette. The tobacco was allegedly French. It smelled like horseshit. It tasted the way he imagined smoldering horseshit would taste, too.

“No pasarán,”
Mike said, and then, “Gimme one of those.”

“Here.” Chaim handed him the pack.

Mike took a smoke from it. He leaned close to Chaim to get it going. After his first drag, he made a face. “Boy, that’s rotten.”

“Uh-huh.” Chaim held out his hand, palm up. Reluctantly, his buddy returned the cigarettes. Chaim stuck them back in the breast
pocket of his ragged khaki tunic. “Only thing worse than rotten tobacco’s no tobacco at all.”

“No kidding,” Mike said.

Chaim took a cautious look out of the trench. Nothing special was going on in the Nationalist lines a few hundred yards away—everybody here talked about meters, but they seemed like play money to him. The shelling was just…shelling. A few people on both sides would get maimed or killed, and it wouldn’t move the war any closer to the end, not even a nickel’s worth.

“No pasarán,”
Chaim echoed. “They’d fucking better not pass, not here, or we’re butcher’s meat.” He sucked in more smoke. “Hell, we’re dead meat anyway, sooner or later. I still hope it’s later, though.”

“Yeah, me, too.” Mike Carroll sounded like Boston. Before he came to Spain, he’d worked in a steel mill somewhere in Massachusetts. That was what he said, anyway. A lot of guys had stories that didn’t add up. Chaim didn’t get all hot and bothered about it. He didn’t tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth about himself, either. The only thing that really mattered was that you hated Fascism enough to hop on a boat and try to do something about it.

“Amazing thing is, the Republic’s still in there kicking,” Chaim said. Mike nodded. General Sanjurjo and his pack of reactionary bastards must have thought their foes would fall apart in nothing flat. Who could have blamed them? They had the trained troops, and they had Mussolini and Hitler—which meant Italian and German matériel and soldiers—on their side.

But it didn’t pan out that way. The brutal farce of noninterference kept the Republicans from getting munitions and reinforcements. Like the rest of the men in the Lincoln Battalion, Chaim and Mike had to sneak over the border from France, dodging patrols every step of the way. Russia sent arms and advisers, though not enough to offset what the Fascists fed Sanjurjo.

And the Republicans squabbled among themselves. Did they ever! Anarchists and Trotskyists didn’t like admitting that, since Stalin was paying the piper, he could call the tune. They also complained that Communist units got the best weapons. Chaim was a Party member, even if he’d left his card in New York City when he sailed. Most (though not all) of the foreign volunteers—men from every corner of the Earth—were. But the Spaniards themselves did the bulk of the fighting and dying.

An airplane buzzed by overhead. Chaim automatically started to duck; German and Italian aircraft ruled the skies. But this was a Republican plane: a Russian biplane fighter. Its blunt forward profile made the Spaniards call it
Chato
—flat-nosed. It dove to shoot up the Nationalists’ trenches, then scooted off to the east.

“‘Bout time those mothers caught it for a change,” Mike said.

“Yeah,” Chaim agreed doubtfully. “But now we’ll get it twice as hard to make up, you know?” The Spaniards on both sides thought like that and fought like that. It made for a rugged kind of combat.

Mike started to answer. Before he could, a runner came up from the rear yelling, “War! War!”

Mike and Chaim started laughing like maniacs. “The fuck ya think we’re in now?” Chaim said. “A ladies’ sewing circle?”

“No, goddammit—a big war,” the runner said. “The Munich giveaway just fell apart. A Czech murdered some Sudeten Nazi big shot inside Germany—that’s what Hitler says, anyway. And he’s gonna jump on Czechoslovakia, and England and France can’t back down now. And if they get in, the Russians do, too.”

“Holy Jesus!” Mike said. Chaim nodded. If the gloves came off in the rest of Europe, they’d have to come off in Spain, too…wouldn’t they? No more noninterference? Hot damn! Maybe things here just evened up.

C
orporal Vaclav Jezek crouched in a hastily dug trench just in front of Troppau. If the Germans came—when they came—this was one of the places they’d hit hardest. Slice through here in the north, push through from what had been Austria till a few months ago down in the south, and you would bite Czechoslovakia in half. Then you could settle with the Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia—the important part of the country, as far as Vaclav was concerned—at your leisure.

The Czechoslovakian General Staff wasn’t blind, or stupid. Some of the heaviest fortifications in the whole country lay along this stretch of the border. If Vaclav stood up in the trench, he could see them: big, rounded, squarish lumps of reinforced concrete that had good fields of fire from high ground and plugged valleys through which tanks might otherwise charge freely.

He didn’t stand up. His khaki uniform and brown, bowl-shaped helmet offered good camouflage, but they weren’t perfect. Somewhere on
the other side of the border, some bastard in a field-gray uniform and a black coal-scuttle helmet would be sweeping the area with heavy-duty field glasses. Vaclav didn’t want him marking this position.

Trucks and teams of horses rushed machine guns and cannon and ammunition to the Czechoslovak forts. Not all of them were done yet. The government hadn’t really got serious about them till the
Anschluss
. But with Nazi troops in Austria, Czechoslovakia was surrounded on three sides. Without fortifications, it wouldn’t last long. It might not last long with them, but they gave it the best—likely the only—chance it had.

Maybe the German with the field glasses wouldn’t be able to see too much. It was cool and overcast, with a little mist in the air: autumn in Central Europe, sure as hell. But some of the Sudeten shitheads were bound to be sneaking over the border to tell their cousins on the other side what was going on here. If Vaclav ran the world, he would have shipped them out or shot them to nip that crap in the bud. But would the big shots listen to a corporal who drove a taxi in Prague before he got called up? Fat chance!

The air might be cool and moist, but he smelled burning bridges all the same. Diplomats were going home by plane and train. Armies that hadn’t been mobilized were getting ready for the big plunge. The Poles, damn them, were concentrating opposite Teschen (spelled three different ways, depending on whether you were a German, a Czech, or a Pole). Didn’t they see they were the next course on Hitler’s menu? If they didn’t, how stupid were they?

“Got a smoke on you, Corporal?” asked Jan Dzurinda, one of the soldiers in Vaclav’s squad.

“Sure.” Jezek held out the pack. Dzurinda took a cigarette, then waited expectantly for a light. With a small sigh, Vaclav struck a match.

Dzurinda leaned close and got the cigarette started. He took a deep drag, then blew out two perfect smoke rings. “Thanks a bunch. Much obliged.”

“Any time,” Vaclav said. Dzurinda puffed away without a care in the world, blowing more smoke rings. Just hearing his voice made Corporal Jezek worry. Jan was a Slovak, not a Czech. Czech and Slovak were brother languages, but they weren’t the same. Czechs and Slovaks could tell what you were as soon as you opened your mouth.

And Czechs and Slovaks weren’t the same, either. Czechs thought of Slovaks as hicks, rubes, country bumpkins. Before the World War, Slovakia had been in the Hungarian half of Austria-Hungary, and the Hungarians made a point of keeping the Slovaks ignorant and down on the farm. Things had changed since 1918, but only so much. The Czechoslovakian Army had something like 140 general officers. Just one was a Slovak.

If Slovaks were rubes to Czechs, Czechs were city slickers to Slovaks. A lot of Slovaks thought the Czechs, who were twice as numerous, ran Czechoslovakia for their own benefit. They thought Slovakia got hind tit, and wanted more autonomy—maybe outright independence—for it.