Hitler's War (57 page)

Nigel passed around the packet of Navy Cuts again. Bill found a bottle of wine the French family had forgotten. They passed that around, too. It didn’t take long to empty. Once it ran dry, Walsh set it aside. If he got the chance, he’d make a petrol bomb out of it. He opened a tin of steak-and-kidney pudding—the best ration the Army made. A smoke,
some wine, a tin of food…He was happy as a sheep in clover. A soldier could be satisfied with next to nothing, and often was.

•  •  •

WHEN MILT WOLFF WENT DOWN
, Harvey Jacoby took command of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. He’d been a labor organizer in Seattle before he came to Spain. Chaim Weinberg thought he was a pretty good guy. He was brave and smart. But nobody would ever call him anything like
El Lobo
. He had neither the name nor the personality for it—he ran things with brains and common sense.

He came back from a meeting of International Brigade officers muttering to himself. “They’re going to pull us out of the line here,” he announced, his tone declaring that it wasn’t his idea and he didn’t like it for hell, but he couldn’t do anything about it.

He must have known the news would bring a storm of protest, and it did. “What for?” Chaim yelped, his voice one among many. “We can hold the Ebro line forever!
¡No pasarán!”

“The Republic is going to transfer the International Brigades to where they need us more,” Jacoby said, picking his words with obvious care.

That only made the Abe Lincolns hotter than ever. Next to Chaim, Mike Carroll called, “They can’t do that! The Party wouldn’t like it!” Again, he was far from the only man with the same thought.

“They can. They are.” Jacoby held up a hand, which slowed but didn’t stop the torrent of vituperation. At last, something resembling quiet except for being much noisier prevailed. It was enough to satisfy Jacoby, anyhow. “Listen to me,” he said, and then again, louder,
“Listen to me
, goddammit! Things aren’t the way they used to be, and we’d better get used to it.”

“What’s so different?” Chaim challenged.

“Here’s what—the Republic doesn’t have to worry about the Party
line any more,” Jacoby answered. “Back when we were getting most of our stuff from the Soviets, the government had to pay attention to what the Party wanted. But when’s the last time a Russian ship tied up in Barcelona?”

Chaim knew the answer to that: just before the big European war started. Since then, that supply line had dried up. All the supply lines for both sides had dried up. Nationalists and Republicans were fighting with what they had left from before and with what they could make for themselves. That that might affect policy hadn’t occurred to him up till now.

But it did. “The Party isn’t the tail that wags the dog any more,” Harvey Jacoby said regretfully. “Russian officers can’t tell the Spaniards what to do and how to do things.” His grin was crooked. “Well, they can, but the Spaniards have quit listening.”

Chaim’s chuckle sounded forced. In his time with the Internationals, he’d seen that Russians could be as obnoxious and arrogant as Germans. Firmly convinced they were the wave of the future, they ordered people around to suit themselves and had as much give as so many snapping turtles. Somebody—Chaim had forgotten who—had said, “If the fuckers weren’t on our side, there’d be a bounty on ‘em.” That about summed things up.

“We’re tougher’n any outfit the Republic has,” someone told Jacoby. “If we don’t want to move, they can’t make us.”

“They want us to move
because
we’re tough,” the new leader said. “Way it sounds to me is, they’re going to push the Fascists back from Madrid, and they want troops who know what they’re doing.”

A different kind of murmur ran through the troops who’d volunteered to come to Spain. There was a time, early in the civil war, when Marshal Sanjurjo could have taken Madrid easily. But he chose instead to rescue Colonel Moscardó, besieged in the fortress at Toledo with a small garrison. He succeeded, but he gave the Republic time to fortify
the capital. The Internationals had taken gruesome casualties keeping it in Republican hands. Getting on toward three years later, it still was.

Mike turned to Chaim. “Think we can move the bastards?”

“Damned if I know—depends on just where we go and what we’ve gotta do,” Chaim answered. “Even getting there’ll be a bitch kitty—know what I mean?”

“Fuck! I don’t want to think about that,” Mike said with feeling. The Republic’s railway net had more holes than a cheap sock. The roads might have been in worse shape yet, even assuming the quartermasters could scrape together enough trucks to move all the Internationals and enough gas to keep them moving. Chaim wanted to march from the Ebro to Madrid like he wanted a hole in the head. He’d signed up to give Sanjurjo a black eye, not to walk his own legs off.

“Madrid!” Jacoby said again, as if the name carried magic all by itself. And damned if it didn’t. He went on, “Do you want to keep on fighting for chicken coops and frozen hills here, or do you want to fight for a place that really counts?”

Madrid had magic, yes. Another thoughtful murmur rose from the Abe Lincolns. But even magic was worth only so much to veterans. “Cut the crap, Harvey!” said a guy who could only have come from New York City. “Fighting’s fighting. It’s all shitty, no matter where you do it.”

“You can cry if you want to,” Jacoby said. “You can go home if you want to—and if the commissars and border guards let you get away with it. But if you stick with the Abe Lincolns, you’re damn well going to Madrid. So what’ll it be, Izzy?”

“Oh, I’ll go,” Izzy answered. “I still want to kick these Fascist assholes around the block, same like the rest of us. But you got to let us blow off steam first.”

“What do you think I’m doing?” Jacoby said. “I know how hot the boilers run on some of you guys.”

Chaim found himself nodding. The new CO’d hit that nail right on
the head. A meeting of the Abe Lincolns—a meeting of any group from the International Brigades—was more like a workers’ soviet than a typical military gathering. Or such meetings always had been like that, anyway. Not everybody who came to Spain to fight for the International Brigades was a Red, but most of the men were. And the Reds had always dominated the way things went.

They had, yes. How long could they keep on doing it? As Jacoby had said, the Party’s stock was down. Chaim snorted. There was a capitalist figure of speech for you! Well, everybody else’s stock in Spain was down, too. The war still mattered to the people who had to fight it. The rest of the world cared only for what was happening near Paris.

Spanish anarchist militiamen came forward to take the International Brigades’ place on the Ebro line. They had a sprinkling of foreigners with them, too; as Chaim trudged toward the railhead down in Tortosa, he exchanged nods with a tall, pale, skinny fellow with a dark mustache and hair who had to come from England or Ireland.

The Internationals were a raggedy bunch: Americans (many of them Jews), anti-Nazi Germans, anti-Fascist Italians, Frenchmen who remembered the ideals of the Revolution, Englishmen, Magyars who hated Horthy, and Poles and Romanians and Greeks and God knew who all else who couldn’t stand their local strongmen. There were even a couple of Chinamen and a Jap. They were raggedy, all right, but they could fight.

Bombs cratered the approaches to the bridge across the Ebro. Plenty of bombs must have gone into the river, too. But the bridge still stood. Aerial bombardment was no fun, but it wasn’t the war-winning monster people had feared it would be. There weren’t enough bombs, and the planes couldn’t place them accurately enough to do everything the generals wanted.

The train that chuffed into Tortosa for the fighters had seen better days, better years, better decades. The locomotive wheezed asthmatically The cars seemed to be missing half their windows. Once Chaim
squeezed inside, he discovered the compartments had nothing but hard benches. He was lucky to get to sit down at all; the Internationals were packed in tight as sardines, without the benefit of olive oil to grease the spaces between them.

“Boy, this is fun,” he said to nobody in particular.

“Scheisse,”
declared the tall, skinny, blond German wedged in beside him. “My ass.” The guy looked as if he ought to belong in the SS, but his heart was in the right place. He took a pack of Gitanes from his breast pocket and offered it to Chaim.
“Zigarette?”

“Thanks,” Chaim said. He shared the red wine in his canteen with the young blond fellow. They talked in a weird mixture of English, German, Yiddish, and Spanish. The German’s name was Wladimir—he insisted on the W at the front, even if it sounded like a V—Diehl. Chaim could think of only one reason why a German his age would be called Wladimir. “Your folks name you for Lenin?”

“You betcha,” Diehl answered, a phrase he must have picked up from an American. “They tried to help the Red revolution in Bavaria. My father, I think, was lucky to live. They fought Hitler’s goons in the streets when the Nazis were new and no one thought they would ever amount to anything. My father and mother have been fighting the Nazis longer than almost anyone.” He spoke with somber pride. And well he might: among the Internationals, that was something to be proud of.

If anything, the locomotive seemed even wheezier pulling out of Tortosa than it had coming in. Chaim knew why: it was pulling all these cars stuffed with soldiers. And it had to take the long way to Madrid. If the Republicans hadn’t recaptured the corridor to the sea from the Nationalists, there would have been no direct route through their territory from the upper Ebro to the city. They would have had to go to Barcelona, take ship, land in Valencia or some other port, and then head west from there. And they probably would have arrived just too late to do the cause any good.

Nobody bothered to feed the Internationals on the train. Along with the wine in his canteen, Chaim had enough bread and garlicky sausage to keep from getting too hungry for a couple of days. He’d been in Spain long enough to assume inefficiency would rear up and try to bite him in the ass. Wladimir carried stewed beans and smoked herrings instead. They swapped some of their iron rations. What Chaim got was no better than what he gave away, but at least it was different.

They didn’t go very fast. Again, he was anything but surprised. It wasn’t all the poor spavined engine’s fault. The Spanish railroad net had been ramshackle to begin with, at least by American standards (and German ones—what Wladimir had to say put out more high-pressure steam than the locomotive’s boiler; Harvey Jacoby’d known what he was talking about, all right). Two and a half years of war, two and a half years of bad maintenance—often of no maintenance—did nothing to improve matters.

Everybody had to get out and walk a couple of miles outside the little town of Villar. Jacoby and other International Brigade big shots promised that another train would be waiting at the depot. Chaim marched past a break in the track. Fascist saboteurs? Or just an ancient railroad line coming apart at the seams? He couldn’t tell. He wasn’t sure it mattered. Any which way, the line was fucked up.

And sleepy Villar might never have seen a train since the beginning of time. A few small boys stared at the Internationals as they slogged up to the yawningly empty depot. None of the other locals seemed to want to show their faces. Chaim would have been angrier had he believed the officers’ promises to begin with. He’d been in Spain too long to trust anybody or anything any more.

The train did show up…fourteen hours later, in the middle of the night. The locals had emerged by then, to offer food and drink at inflated prices. The Internationals proposed a different bargain: if they got fed, they wouldn’t sack the town. Upon hasty consideration, the
people of Villar agreed. “God protect us from our friends,” Wladimir said, and Chaim nodded.

When somebody shook him awake, he didn’t want to get up. He really didn’t want to get on another train. As usual, nobody cared what he wanted. He managed to snag another seat. It was hard and cramped and uncomfortable, but inside of ten minutes he was snoring again.

He dozed till an hour past sunup. Not even artillery bursts around the station as the Internationals disembarked in Madrid got him very excited. It was a big city, and it already looked like hell. The Nationalists had battered it with guns and bombs ever since the war was young.

But the International Brigades were here to do what they’d done before—to help make sure Madrid stayed with the Republic. And, somewhere, Chaim would find a warm place to sleep.

J
oaquin Delgadillo didn’t know what to make of Major Bernardo Uribe. His new battalion commander was recklessly brave. You had to be, to keep going forward into the shelling the British laid down in their defense of Gibraltar. Uribe hadn’t hung back. He’d even won Sergeant Carrasquel’s grudging respect—and Carrasquel gave no other kind.

But if the major wasn’t a
maricón
, Joaquin had never seen anybody who was. Uribe smelled of rose water regardless of the hour. He was always shaved smooth as a woman—this among soldiers for whom scruffiness was a mark of pride. And he exaggerated the Castilian lisp into something beyond both effeminacy and self-parody.