Hitler's War (6 page)

Something
had blown out part of one wall. Now the French soldiers over there scurried around like ants in a disturbed hill. Luc saw one man lying in the roadway. Even from this distance, he would have bet the poor bastard wouldn’t get up again.

“Lesson number one,” the sergeant said. “If it looks like they want you to pick it up, they probably do. Wouldn’t be surprised if there are mines in these fields, too.”

“Merde alors!”
Luc muttered. The very ground under his feet might betray him. He tried to walk like a ballerina, on tippytoe. It didn’t work very well in army-issue clodhoppers with a heavy pack on his back. Feeling foolish, he gave up after a few steps.

A belt of trees lay ahead. Did Germans lurk there? Sure as hell, they did. A spatter of rifle fire came from the woods. After the first bullet cracked past him, Luc needed no urging to flatten out. Prone, he fired back. His MAS36 slammed against his shoulder. In between rounds, he dug a scrape for himself with his entrenching tool.

Very cautiously, the French advanced. They took a few casualties, which made them more cautious yet. The Germans didn’t make much of a fight, though. They melted back toward their fancy Westwall. It wasn’t supposed to be as good as the Maginot Line—nothing was, not even the Czech forts—but everybody said it was tough even so.

When Luc finally reached the woods, he found several countrymen exclaiming over a dead German. The redheaded guy in field-gray had taken one in the chest. He didn’t look especially unhappy—just surprised. Luc wondered if he’d killed the
Boche
himself. Not likely, but not impossible, either. He felt like a warrior and a murderer at the same time.

I
t was six in the morning in Peking, which meant it was yesterday afternoon back in New York City. Corporal Pete McGill and several of the other Marines at the American Legation clustered in front of a shortwave set, listening to the World Series. The Yankees were up on the Cubs, two games to none. They were leading in game three, too. Joe Gordon had already singled with the bases loaded and homered, and Hoot Pearson was cruising along on the mound.

“Cubs are history,” McGill said happily—he was from the Bronx. “Three straight Series for the Yanks, it’s gonna be. Nobody’s ever done that before.”

None of the other leathernecks argued with him. He would have liked to see them try! When the Cubs got done losing today (or yesterday, or whatever the hell day it really was), they would have to sweep four to take the championship. Nobody did that, not against the Bronx Bombers!

A Polack named Herman Szulc—which he insisted was pronounced
Schultz
—said, “I bet they won’t be as good next year.”

“Oh, yeah, wise guy? How come?” McGill had brick-red hair, freckles, and the temper that went with them. And if you affronted his team, you affronted him, too.

“Only stands to reason. Shit, look at Gehrig,” Szulc said. “He didn’t even hit .300 this year. He’s getting old, wearing out.”

“Nah, he’ll be back strong. You wait and see,” McGill said. “Sheesh! A little bit of an off year for one guy, and you want to write off the ball-club.”

Before the argument could go any further, a Chinese servant brought in a tray with coffee and sausages and rolls stuffed with this and that for the Marines. None of it except the coffee was what McGill would have eaten in the States, but it would all be tasty. Duty at the Legation was as sweet as it got.

“Sheh-sheh
, Wang,” Szulc said as the servant set the tray down on a table. That meant
thank you
in Chinese. McGill had learned a few phrases, too. They came in handy every once in a while.

Wang grinned a toothy grin. Several of his front teeth were gold. A twenty-four-carat smile meant you were somebody here. “Eat,” he said—he knew bits of English, the way the Marines knew bits of Chinese. He waved at the tray.
“Hao.”
That meant it was good.

And it was. “Wonder what’s in the sausages,” somebody said with his mouth full.

“Your mother,” somebody else came back, which almost made Pete squirt coffee out his nose.

“The Missing Link,” Szulc suggested. That wasn’t even so far-fetched. They’d found prehistoric human bones in these parts that were God only knew how old.

It also wasn’t so far-fetched for another reason. Chinamen would cook and eat damn near everything. You could get snake. It was supposed to be good for your one-eyed snake. You could get dog, which
was also supposed to make John Henry perk up. You could get fried grasshoppers. McGill had eaten one once, on a bet. It wasn’t even bad, and he picked up five bucks crunching it.

Out went the Cubs again. A singing commercial came on. Szulc fiddled with the radio dial. “What the hell you doing?” McGill asked.

“Seeing if I can find some news between innings,” Szulc answered. “Check what’s up with the war.”

“Oh. Okay,” McGill said. The war was as important as the Series. Back in the States, people wouldn’t have believed it. McGill was sure of that. But back in the States, people weren’t right around the corner from the Japanese Legation and its garrison of tough bastards—not as tough as Marines, McGill was sure, but tough. Back in the States, people were doing their best to forget the Japs had bombed the crap out of the
Panay
the December before, even though she was flying the American flag.

Japan apologized, didn’t she? She paid an indemnity, didn’t she? That made everything all right, didn’t it? Maybe so—back in the States. Not in Peking. Not even close.

Back in the States, people forgot the Japs had a zillion more soldiers sitting in Manchuria. Manchukuo, they called the puppet state there these days. If they decided they wanted a war with the USA, how long would this garrison last? Hell, back in the States, most people didn’t know it existed.

If the balloon goes up with the Japs, it’s my ass
, McGill thought.

Szulc got a couple of bursts of static. Then he found the BBC. The announcer had a much posher accent than most of the Royal Marines at the British Legation. They called themselves leathernecks, too, and they made damn fine drinking buddies even if they did talk funny.

“—vakia continues to offer stout resistance to Hitler’s aggression,” the announcer said. “Russian volunteers and aircraft have begun appearing
in Ruthenia and Slovakia. Both Poland and Romania deny consenting to their crossing.”

“Fuck, I would, too,” Szulc said. “Picking between Hitler and Stalin’s gotta be worse’n the devil and the deep blue sea.”

“Shut up already, if you want to listen to the news,” somebody told him.

That supercivilized-sounding BBC announcer was continuing: “—another day of fierce air raids against Prague. Civilian casualties are said to be very heavy. The Czechoslovak government has condemned what it calls ‘the barbarous German onslaught against defenseless non-combatants.’”

“Nice war,” McGill muttered. Blasting the crap out of anything that got in your way wasn’t anything the Marines hadn’t heard about and seen before. The Japs did it all the time here, now that their war against China had heated up. But you expected better from Europeans, somehow. Then again, the difference between what you expected and what you got made a pretty good measure of how fucked up the world was.

“Czechoslovakia insists that reports of unrest in Slovakia are greatly exaggerated. Uprisings by the so-called Hlinka Guard”—the announcer read the name with fastidious distaste—“are being suppressed in Bratislava, Radio Prague declares, and elsewhere in that area.”

“C’mon—put the ballgame back on,” said a big, burly PFC named Puccinelli and inevitably called Pooch.

“In a second,” Szulc said. “He’ll get to the rest of the shit, and then we’ll go back.” Pooch muttered to himself, but didn’t reach for the tuning dial himself.

“France continues its advance into Germany. German resistance is termed light,” the BBC newsman said. “France has occupied the Warndt Forest, and seized the towns of Lauterwald and Bübingen.”

“Wherever the hell those are,” McGill put in. He’d never heard of
either one of them before. That probably meant you could piss across them.

The limey’s voice grew stern. “For the second night in a row, air pirates from Spain bombed Hendaye and Biarritz in southwestern France. It is not yet known whether the bombers were flown by native Spanish Fascists of the Sanjurjo junta or by Nazis of the Condor Legion mercenary group. In any case, French aid to the rival Spanish Republican government, including men, munitions, aircraft, and tanks, continues to flood across the Pyrenees.”

“Yeah, it floods now, after the frogs and the limeys spent years keeping it out.” Max Weinstein was a rare duck: a pink, almost Red, Marine. He wasn’t real big, but he was tough. With politics like his, he had to be. He got into more than his share of brawls, and won more than his share, too.

“Prime Minister Chamberlain was in Manchester today, reassuring anxious citizens that, despite the long, difficult road ahead, victory will inevitably—”

Herman Szulc turned back to the World Series. The Cubs had one out in the seventh. They were going down the drain, all right, the same way the Giants had in ‘36 or ‘37.

“Wonder whether the Japs are listening to the Series or the BBC,” McGill said. It wasn’t obvious. Japan was crazy for baseball. On the Fourth of July in ‘37—three days before the fighting between Japan and China broke out for real—a Marine team had played a doubleheader against a squad from the Japanese garrison. They’d split two games rougher than any John McGraw’s Orioles played back in the ‘90s.

“Wonder whether Japan will go after Russia like she means it if the Russians start going at it hot and heavy with Hitler,” Szulc said.

“That would be just like the damn Japs,” Max said, and for once nobody wanted to argue with him. Japan and Russia had been banging heads for a couple of years now, up on the border between Manchukuo
and Mongolia. Most of the official bulletins talked about Manchukuan and Mongolian soldiers, but anybody who knew anything knew better. The puppets wouldn’t dance that way without their masters pulling the strings.

“Hey, I hope the Japs do go north,” Pete said. Weinstein gave him a furious look. Before the champion of the Soviet workers and peasants could start screaming, McGill went on, “If they don’t, they’ll hit the USA, and everybody here is fucking dead meat if they do.”

Max opened his mouth. A moment later, he closed it again. Nobody could say Pete was wrong there. Japan occupied northern China these days. She occupied all of Peking except the Legation Quarter. If she went to war with the United States, the few hundred Marines in the garrison wouldn’t last long.

Japanese soldiers were little and scrawny. Their equipment was nothing to write home about. But they were rugged sons of bitches, and there were swarms of them. Oh, America would eventually kick the snot out of them. Eventually, though, was way too late to do anybody here any good.

SERGEANT HIDEKI FUJITA HATED MANCHUKUO.
He hated Mongolia even more. And getting sent to the border between the Japanese puppet state and the one the Russians propped up combined the worst of both worlds.

Japan claimed the border between Manchukuo and Mongolia lay along the Halha River. The Mongolians and Russians insisted it belonged a good many kilometers farther east. Japan and Russia had banged heads along Manchukuo’s borders before: here, and along the Amur River, and near Korea, where Russian territory dipped down as far as Vladivostok.

The Mongolians had found a new game to get on their neighbors’ nerves. They would light grass fires near the frontier—wherever the hell
it was—and let the prevailing westerlies sweep the flames into Manchukuan territory. Naturally, that made the locals come running to the Japanese, screaming that they should do something. When you set up a puppet, you had to hold him upright or else he wasn’t worth anything.

Not that Fujita thought the Manchukuans
were
worth anything. But their country—to give it the benefit of the doubt—had more timber than anybody knew what to do with. It raised lots of rice and wheat and millet, too. And it drew ever more Japanese colonists, people who wanted more land and a better chance than they’d ever get in the overcrowded home islands. Whether the Manchukuans did or not, real Japanese people needed protecting.

Trouble was, even if the border lay on the Halha, the way Japan said it did, the Mongolians and Russians still had the better of it. The land west of the Halha, on the Mongolian side, stood fifty or sixty meters higher than it did over here. High ground counted, same as always.

Only a couple of days earlier, on October 4, the Mongolians had fired from the high ground at two dozen Japanese surveyors riding through what was plainly Japanese territory…if you accepted the Japanese view of the frontier, anyhow. Sergeant Fujita did, of course.

One of the other men in his little detachment, a corporal named Masanori Kawakami, asked, “Excuse me, Sergeant-
san
, but would the Mongolians harass us if the Russians didn’t want them to?”

“Not bloody likely,” Fujita said with a snort. He was short and squat and tough—the kind of noncom whose men hated and feared him but couldn’t help respecting him, too. “The Mongols can’t wipe their raggedy asses unless some Russian commissar says they can.”