Hitler's War (31 page)

A soldier stared stupidly at the spouting stump of his arm. Not three meters from him, the kid lieutenant stood there with his face white and twisted into a rictus of horror.
“Merde,”
Luc muttered. He scrambled to his feet and ran over to the maimed kid. A leather bootlace did duty for a tourniquet. The spout became a tiny trickle.

And the soldier came out of shock and started to shriek. Luc dug the
morphine syrette out of the fellow’s wound kit and jabbed him with it. The drug hit hard and fast. The soldier’s eyes closed and he passed out. Luc thought he would live if he hadn’t bled too much. Unlike most battlefield wounds, the amputation was almost as neat as if a surgeon had done it.

The poor lieutenant still hadn’t unfrozen. Some of his men were helping the veterans help their buddies, but he stood rooted to the spot. “You all right, sir?” Luc heard the rough sympathy in his own voice. This wasn’t the first freeze-up he’d seen. It was a bad one, though. He tried again, louder this time: “You all right?”

“I—” The officer shook himself like a dog coming out of cold water. Then, violently, he crossed himself. And then he bent over and was sick. Spitting and coughing, he choked out, “I regret to say I am not all right at all.”

“Well, this is pretty bad.” Luc held out his canteen. “Here. Rinse your mouth. Get rid of the taste.”

“Merci.”
The lieutenant did. As he handed the canteen back to Luc, he suddenly looked horrified and took off for the closest bushes at a dead run.

“He just realize he shat himself?” Sergeant Demange asked dryly.

“That’s my guess,” Luc said.

“He’s not the first. He won’t be the last, either,” Demange said. “I’ve done it in both wars, Christ knows. You?”

“Oui.”
If the sergeant hadn’t admitted it, Luc wouldn’t have, either. But since he had…Luc knew that was a big brotherhood, sure as hell. It probably included more than half the people who’d ever come under machine-gun or artillery fire. More than half the people who’d ever been up to the front, in other words. “War’s a bitch.”

“And a poxed bitch to boot,” Demange agreed. Luc found himself nodding.

•  •  •

SNOW FLEW AS NEAR HORIZONTALLY
as made no difference. The wind howled out of the north. Anastas Mouradian looked out the window of the flimsy hut by the airstrip and shuddered. “I wish I were back in Armenia,” he said in his accented Russian. “We have civilized weather down there.”

Another officer swigged from a bottle of vodka and then set it down. They weren’t going to fly today—why not drink? “Shit, this isn’t so bad.”

That was too much for Sergei Yaroslavsky “The Devil’s grandmother, it’s not!
Bozhemoi
, man! Where d’you come from?”

“Strelka-Chunya,” the other man answered.

“Where the hell is that?”

“About a thousand kilometers north of Irkutsk.”

“A thousand kilometers…north of Irkutsk?” Sergei echoed. Then he said,
“Bozehmoi!”
again. Irkutsk lay next to Lake Baikal, in the heart of Siberia. Go north from there and you’d just get colder. He hadn’t imagined such a thing was possible, which only went to show your imagination reached so far and no further. He made as if to doff his fur cap. “All right, pal. If you come from there, this
isn’t
so bad—for you.”

“But why would anybody want to go there in the first place?” Mouradian asked. That struck Sergei as a damn good question, too.

And the Siberian flyer—his name was Bogdan Koroteyev—had an answer for it: “My people are trappers. If you’re going to do that, you have to go where the animals live.”

Through the roaring wind, Sergei heard, or thought he heard, a low rumble in the distance. “Is that guns?” he asked.

“Or bombs going off.” The Siberian had put away enough vodka so he didn’t much care. “Damn Poles are stubborn bastards.” He shoved the bottle across the rickety table. “Want a slug?”

“Sure.” Sergei poured some liquid fire down his throat. “Damn Poles.”

Things in northeastern Poland weren’t going as well as they might
have. The radio and the newspapers didn’t say that, but anyone with a gram of sense could read between the lines. The Red Army kept attacking the same places over and over again. Every attack sounded like a victory. If they were victories, though, why weren’t the glorious and peace-loving soldiers of the Soviet Union advancing instead of spinning their wheels?

Not that wheels wanted to spin in weather like this. Supplies moved forward on sledges—when they moved forward at all. Bombers and fighters had long since traded conventional landing gear for ski undercarriages. Men wore skis or snowshoes whenever they went outside.

One of the flyers wound up a phonograph and put on a record. It was Debussy. Sergei relaxed. Nobody listened to Chopin or Mozart or Beethoven any more. Nobody dared. Listening to music by a composer from a country at war with the USSR might be enough to make the NKVD question your loyalty. Who could say for sure why people disappeared? Who wanted to take a chance and find out? But Debussy, a Frenchman, was safe enough.

More explosions, these not so distant. The windows in the hut rattled. “Those
are
bombs,” Mouradian said. “The weather somewhere off to the west is good enough to let airplanes get up.”

“Fuck ‘em,” Koroteyev said. “They’re trying to rattle our cage, that’s all. They can’t find anything to hit, so they drop things anywhere and hope they’ll do some good. Fat chance!” He belched and lit a cigarette.

“Even when you can see it, hitting what you aim at isn’t easy,” Sergei said.

“Turn on the radio, somebody,” Mouradian said. “It’s just about time for the news.”

The flyer closest to the set clicked on the knob. The dial lit up. Half a minute later—once the tubes warmed up—music started blaring out of the speaker. It wasn’t quite the top of the hour. The march wasn’t to Sergei’s taste, but you could put up with anything for a couple of minutes.

“Here is the news,” the announcer said.

“Moo,” Koroteyev added irreverently. Chuckles ran through the hut. The announcer’s accent said he came from the middle reaches of the Volga: he turned a lot of
a
sounds into
o
’s. It really did make him sound as if he ought to be out in a field chewing his cud.

But what he had to say grabbed everybody’s attention: “Spreading their vicious campaign of terror ever more widely, the reactionary Polish junta under the thuggish leadership of Marshal Smigly-Ridz bombed both Minsk and Zhitomir yesterday. Casualties are reported heavy, because neither city was prepared for such treachery and murder. Numbers of innocent schoolchildren are among the slain.”

One of the pilots swore violently. He spoke Russian with a Ukrainian accent, so that some of his
g
’
s
turned into
h
’s. Sergei wondered if he was from Zhitomir or had family there.

“General Secretary Stalin has vowed vengeance against the evil Polish regime,” the announcer went on. “Our bombers have targeted Warsaw for retaliation.”

Our bombers taking off from where?
Sergei wondered. He would have bet piles of rubles that nobody could fly from anywhere near Minsk. Maybe things were better farther south, down toward the Ukraine. He supposed they must have been, or the Poles couldn’t have struck at it. In this blizzard, they must have been bombing by dead reckoning—and damned lucky to boot—to hit Minsk at all.

Then the man reading the news said, “Observers in Minsk report that some of the planes striking the capital of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic were German Heinkels and Dorniers. And so we see that the Hitlerites are indeed supporting their semifascist stooges in Warsaw. They too shall suffer the righteous wrath of the workers and people of the Soviet Union.”

Several flyers sitting around the table nodded. Sergei started to do the same thing. Then he caught himself. How the devil could observers in Minsk identify the bombers overhead? Minsk wasn’t far from here. It had to be as socked in as this miserable airstrip was.

Sergei opened his mouth to say something about that. Before he could, Anastas Mouradian caught his eye. Ever so slightly—Sergei didn’t think any of the other flyers noticed it—his copilot shook his head.

The newsman continued, giving more reports of the Poles’ atrocities and then going on to talk about the war news from Western Europe. Sergei ended up keeping quiet. Mouradian was bound to be right. If the authorities told lies and you pointed it out, who would get in trouble? The authorities? Or you?

Asking the question was the same as answering it.

Did the rest of the flyers see that the newsman was full of crap when he talked about Minsk? Or didn’t they even notice? Were they so used to believing everything they heard on the radio that they couldn’t do anything else?

Then something else occurred to Sergei. He grabbed the vodka bottle and took a good swig from it. But not even vodka could drown the subversive thought. If that newsman was lying about the weather in Minsk, what else was he lying about? Had the Poles really bombed the city at all? Had the Germans joined them? How much of what he said about the war in the West was true?

Was anything he said true? Anything at all?

How could you know? How could you even begin to guess? Oh, some things were bound to be true, because what point would there be to lying about them? But others? Had the top ranks of the Soviet military really been as full of traitors and wreckers as the recent purges left people believing? If they hadn’t…

Even with the fresh slug of vodka coursing through him on top of everything else he’d drunk, Sergei recognized a dangerous thought when he tripped over one. You couldn’t say anything like that, not unless you wanted to find out exactly what kind of weather Siberia had.

Or would they just shoot you if they realized you realized they didn’t always tell the truth? He wouldn’t have been surprised. What could be more dangerous to the people who ran things?

Anastas watched him from across the table. Did the Armenian know what he was thinking? Did Mouradian think the same things, too? Then Sergei stopped worrying about himself, because the Russian newsman went on, “Since German planes were used in the terror bombings of peaceful Soviet cities, justice demands that we also retaliate against the Fascist Hitlerite swine. This being so, Red Air Force bombers have struck at the Prussian city of Königsberg. Damage to the enemies of the people is reported to be extremely heavy. They richly deserve the devastation visited upon them!”

“Bozhemoi,”
whispered somebody down the table from Sergei. It sounded too reverent to be conventional cursing. Nobody reprimanded the flyer, though—not after that news!

No matter what Sergei had been thinking, he didn’t doubt this for a moment. The USSR wouldn’t claim to have bombed Germany if it hadn’t really done it. And if the USSR bombed Germany…In that case, the war against Hitler had just gone from the back burner to the front.

Maybe those
were
Heinkels and Dorniers up there, inaccurately bombing the airstrip. Maybe Germans in field-gray would join Poles in greenish brown (although the Poles, like the Soviets, had the sense to wear white camouflage smocks in the wintertime). Maybe Hitler and Smigly-Ridz would show the world what the USSR already knew: they’d been in bed with each other all along.

A different announcer exhorted his listeners to buy war bonds. “Help make farmers and workers safe from the threat of Fascism!” he boomed. “Subscribe to the latest war bond program!”

Sergei already bought war bonds. So did everyone else in the Red Air Force and Army and Navy. Contributions came out of their pay
before they ever set eyes on it. Losing the money didn’t hurt nearly so much that way as it would have if Sergei’d had to dig into his own pockets.

“As long as the Nazis stay busy in the West, we’ll do fine against them,” Koroteyev said.

Several men nodded. Sergei was one of them. Then Anastas Mouradian said, “Sure we will—just like we did in the last war.”

Silence slammed down around the table. Germany had been busy against France and England and Belgium in 1914—everybody knew that. And everybody also knew the Kaiser’s armies had smashed the Tsar’s again and again. If not for one disaster after another on the front, the Revolution might never have started, much less succeeded.

The Siberian looked at Anastas. “One of these days, you’ll open your mouth so wide, you’ll fall right in.”

“No doubt, Comrade,” Mouradian replied. “If it can happen to the whole country, why can’t it happen to me?”

That only brought more silence. People stared at the Armenian, then quickly looked away. They might have been gaping at a car wreck.
“How
much have you drunk?” Sergei asked. Sometimes you could get out of trouble by blaming it all on the vodka. He’d done that himself a time or three.

His copilot gave the question his usual serious—if not sober—consideration. “Either too much or not enough,” Mouradian said at last. “And it’s not too much, so.…” He grabbed the vodka bottle, raised it, and tilted his head back.

Sergei reached out and grabbed it away from him. “To each according to his needs,” he said, and got rid of what was left. With the air of a man performing a conjuring trick, the Siberian produced another bottle. Loud applause greeted it. The drinking went on. With any luck at all, by this time tomorrow nobody would remember what one mouthy Armenian was going on about.

•  •  •

SOME OF THE MEN IN
Hideki Fujita’s squad were from Hokkaido. The northern island was notorious for winter weather that blew straight down from Siberia. Fujita had been through some rotten winters himself before they shipped him off to the border between Manchukuo and Mongolia.

Or he thought he had, anyhow.

Now he had to admit that what he’d known about winter was about the same as what an eleven-year-old knew about love. The kid could imagine he understood what was what. And a jackass could suppose it was a nightingale, too. That didn’t make it sound like one when it opened its mouth, though.

Fujita wore a fur cap—the earflaps, at the moment, down. He wore a thick, heavily lined, fur-collared greatcoat. It was double-breasted, to make it harder for drafts to sneak in. He had stout gray felt mittens and knee-high felt boots with leather uppers. He had on two pairs of wool socks and two pairs of long woolen underwear.