Hitler's War (45 page)

“I hope he’ll be all right,” Mother said worriedly. “You can tell he’s not an ordinary German, after all.”

Father followed that faster than Sarah did. “Jews aren’t the only ones who get circumcised,” he said. “Sometimes it’s medically necessary.
What I wonder is how
Frau
Breisach knew that letter was really for us.”

“Somebody must have recognized the handwriting.” Sarah had no trouble figuring that out. “Saul used to go over there all the time to help the Breisach kids with their homework—back when you could without getting into too much trouble, I mean. I think he was sweet on Hildegarde Breisach for a while, but…” She didn’t go on.

“Yes. But,” her father said heavily. “I wouldn’t have minded intermarriage very much. The all-wise, all-knowing, and all-powerful State”—you could hear the stress he gave the word—“is a different story. And Hildegarde would have been insane to take the chance.”

“If the State really were all-wise and all-powerful,
Frau
Breisach would have taken Saul’s letter straight to the
Gestapo,”
Mother said. “Some people still remember what human decency means.”

“Never mind human decency. The Breisachs know
us,”
Father said. “That counts for more, I’d say. I wouldn’t bet a pfenning that they’d help some strange Jew. But we’ve lived across the street from them since the last war. We aren’t strangers—we’re neighbors. People first, Jews second, you might say. All over Germany, gentiles are probably going, ‘Well, I don’t have a good word to say about most Jews, but Abraham down the street? He’s all right.’”

“I wonder how much good it will do,” Sarah said.

“Some, anyhow.” Father nodded toward the now anonymous ashes in the fireplace. “And I’m jealous of your brother.”

“For heaven’s sake, why?” Mother got that out before Sarah could.

“He made it into the
Wehrmacht,”
Father answered. “I fought for Germany before. I would have done it again. I
am
a German, dammit, whether the Nazis want to let me be one or not.”

“Isn’t getting shot once enough for Germany?” Mother asked pointedly.

“If I hadn’t, the goons would have treated us even worse than they did,” Father said. “Hitler says Jews haven’t got any guts—but he can’t say
that about front-line soldiers from the last war. So we have it better than most Jews—not good, but better.”

“Oh, joy,” Sarah said in a hollow voice. “If this is better, I don’t want worse.”

Father nodded solemnly. “You’d better not. The difference between bad and worse is much bigger than the difference between good and better. So when you think about the difference between better and worse…”

He sounded like someone who knew what he was talking about. Chances were he did. What
had
life in the trenches been like? Sarah had read
All Quiet on the Western Front
—who hadn’t? She’d seen the movie, too. But her father had really gone through all those things, and maybe more besides. It was probably like the difference between reading about kissing and kissing, only more so.

Mother started to laugh. “What’s funny?” Sarah asked.
She
sure didn’t see anything.

Still in a low voice to foil the microphones that might not be there at all, her mother answered, “Our only son’s just gone into the
Wehrmacht
. And I’m happy! Happy! He has a better chance of staying safe there than he would if he were still running around the countryside somewhere.”

Sarah laughed, too. When you put it that way, it
was
funny. Her father put things in perspective, the way he usually did: “If you have to go that far for a laugh, you’ve got more
tsuris
than you need.”

He hardly ever dropped a Yiddish word into his German. It would have made him seem less German, more openly Jewish. It might even have made him seem that way to himself. Sarah stared at him now. She understood
tsuris
, of course—understood what the word meant and, these days, also understood the thing.

“We do have more
tsuris
than we need,” Mother said. Neither Sarah nor Samuel Goldman tried to tell her she was wrong.

It could have been worse, though. If the
Gestapo
caught up with
Saul after he clouted that work boss…What would they have done to him? Whatever it was, Sarah made herself think about something else.

“Do you suppose the British bombers will come over tonight?” she said. That was something else, all right, but not a better something else.

“Let them.” Her father sounded almost gay. “Bombs don’t care if we’re Jews. Bombs can fall on
Gestapo
headquarters, too…
alevai.”
Two Yiddish words from him in two minutes. What was the world coming to?

“Of course, the
Gestapo
men can run into a shelter,” Sarah said.

“So what? Even that doesn’t always help,” Father said. And he was right. Sarah felt like a German, too, if not so strongly as Father did. But she had trouble believing any German would cry if a bunch of
Gestapo
men got blown up.

G
erman artillery crashed down on the French position. Luc Harcourt dug as hard as he could, trying to carve a cave into the front wall of his foxhole. If he could manage that, fragments would have a hard time biting him…barring a direct hit, of course. He wished he hadn’t had that last thought, but it did make him dig faster than ever.

The ground was muddy—almost too muddy to let him make the shelter he wanted. A cave-in could kill him, too, and much more ignominiously than a shell would have. But artillery was a worse risk. Five months of war had taught Luc to fear artillery more than anything but tanks. And what were tanks but artillery on tracks?

Luc almost had the hole he wanted when the shelling let up as suddenly as it had begun. He knew what that meant. His entrenching tool went back on his belt. He grabbed his rifle.

“They’ll be coming any second!” Sergeant Demange yelled from a trench near the foxhole, for the raw replacements and the idiots in his section. “Make ‘em pay for it, that’s all. We don’t have a hell of a lot of room to back up in.”

“Your sergeant is right.” That was Lieutenant Marquet—Luc thought that was his name, anyhow. He’d replaced the previous company commander a few days earlier, after Captain Rémond stopped some shrapnel with his chest. He’d been alive when he went off to the aid station. Now, who could say? The lieutenant seemed brave enough. He did like to hear himself talk, though: “Three times in a lifetime, the
Boches
have attacked Paris. They took it once, to our shame. We held them the last time, to our everlasting glory. Which would you rather have now, my friends?”

All Luc wanted was to come through alive and in once piece. The only shame he worried about was letting his buddies down. They mattered to him. Paris? Next to the dirty, smelly, frightened men alongside of whom he fought, Paris wasn’t so much of a much.

Small-arms fire picked up. The Germans knew what was going on as well as the Frenchmen they were trying to murder. They wanted to get into the French fieldworks as fast as they could, while the
poilus
were still woozy from the barrage.

If they do that, I’m dead
. The thought was enough to make Luc stick his head up and bring his rifle to his shoulder. A bullet cracked past, too close for comfort. He wouldn’t have had to worry about that if he’d stayed all nicely huddled in his young cave.

No, but then he would have had to worry about other things. Sure as hell, the Germans were loping forward. The men who ran straight up and down had less experience than the ones who folded themselves as small as they could. Most of the
Boches
did know enough to hit the dirt or dive behind something when French machine guns started chattering.

The Germans never got to Meaux the last time around. That meant all the damage in town was brand new. The thirteenth-century cathedral lay in ruins a couple of kilometers behind Luc. Guns and Stukas cared nothing for antiquities—and the French weren’t shy about placing observers in the steeples. If the bastards in field-gray kept pressing
forward, pretty soon French guns would start shelling Meaux—and the
Boches
would have put men with binoculars up in high places.

As if thinking of French guns had called them up, several batteries of quick-firing 75s started banging away at the Germans. They’d slaughtered the
Boches
by the thousands in 1914, and all through the last war. Things were tougher now. German 105s outranged them and delivered bigger shells. The enemy knew better than to advance in tight-packed ranks, too. But when you needed to drop a lot of artillery on some unlucky place in a hurry, 75s were still hard to beat.

German medics in Red Cross smocks and armbands ran around gathering up the wounded. Luc left them alone as much as he could. War was tough enough without making it worse.

He thought so, anyhow. A medic fell, and then another one. Another German wearing the Red Cross emblem pointed angrily toward the French line…right about toward where Sergeant Demange was lurking. A moment later, that medic ducked, which meant a bullet hadn’t missed him by much. He could take a hint—he dove behind a battered stone wall.

“Naughty, Sergeant,” Luc called.

“So’s your mother,” Demange answered, which wasn’t exactly a ringing denial of anything.

Luc was in no position to tell him what to do. He had other things on his mind, anyway: “Have we got any tanks in the neighborhood? Do they?”

“Sure haven’t seen any of ours,” the sergeant said.

Since Luc hadn’t, either, he asked the next important question: “Have we got any antitank guns?”

“Sure as hell hope so,” Demange answered. That was also less encouraging than Luc wished it were.

Meaux lay in a loop of the Marne. Maybe the Germans were having trouble getting their armor across the river. They’d managed farther east with far fewer problems than he wished they’d had—probably far
fewer than they should have had. With luck, the Allies were figuring out how to make those crossings tougher. Without luck, the
Boches
were feinting here so they could knock the crap out of the French and English defenders somewhere else.

Even without tanks, they hadn’t given up in front of Meaux. More artillery came in, this barrage precisely aimed at the French forward positions. Luc cowered in his hole while hell fell all around him.

“Up!” Sergeant Demange screamed. “Up, you gutless assholes! They’re coming!”

Luc didn’t want to come up. Shell fragments did dreadful things. But he didn’t want to get shot or bayoneted in his foxhole, either. The Germans aimed to make the French keep their heads down so they’d make easy meat. The French couldn’t let them impose their will on the combat…Luc supposed.

He came up firing. A German had crawled to no more than thirty meters away. He had a potato-masher grenade in his right hand. Luc shot him before he could fling it.
“Heilige Scheisse!”
screamed the soldier in the coal-scuttle helmet. He clutched at himself. He must not have pulled the grenade’s fuse cord, because it didn’t go off after he dropped it.

Then French machine guns opened up, one of them from a spot where Luc hadn’t known his side had a machine gun. The
Boches
hadn’t known it was there, either. Several of them fell. Others ran back toward the river. Luc would have done the same thing in their boots. Flesh and blood had limits, and facing machine-gun fire out in the open went beyond them.

The German Luc had shot lay where he’d gone down. He wasn’t dead; he kept thrashing around and yelling and swearing.

“Make him shut up,” Sergeant Demange called. “Either blow his head off or go out there and bring him back.”

Neither possibility appealed to Luc. Killing a wounded man in cold
blood felt like murder. If he were lying there wounded, he wouldn’t want the Germans taking pot shots at him.

But if he went out there to get the
Boche
, other soldiers in field-gray might nail him. He knew he had only a few seconds to make up his mind. Demange wouldn’t hesitate longer than that before shooting the German himself. He wouldn’t have second thoughts about it afterward, either.

“Je suis dans le merde,”
Luc muttered. Up shit creek or not, he had to do
something
. He climbed out of the foxhole and crawled toward the wounded
Boche
.

Firing had slacked off. That could end any second, as he knew too well. None of the few rounds flying about came close—the Germans weren’t aiming at him, anyway.

“I’ll take you in,” he called to the soldier in field-gray, hoping the fellow understood French. “We’ll fix you up if we can.”

“Merci,”
the man answered in gutturally accented French. “Hurts.”

“I bet,” Luc said. The bullet had torn up the German’s left leg. “Can you climb up on top of me?”

“I’ll try.” The
Boche
did it. He felt as if the fellow weighed a tonne—he was a bigger man than Luc, and weighted down with boots and helmet and equipment. Slowly—the only way he could—Luc crawled back toward the French line. Seeing what he was doing, the Germans paid him the courtesy of aiming away from him.