The War That Came Early: West and East (37 page)

The first crashing explosions came from a couple of kilometers behind the trench line. Fujita breathed easier. Let the quartermasters and cooks and the rest of the useless people get a taste of what war was like for a change! How would they like it? Not very much, not if he was any judge.

Then he said, “Uh-oh.” That didn’t seem enough.
“Zakennayo!”
he added. The bombs were coming closer. He’d seen that happen before. After the lead plane dropped, the others would use his bursts as an aiming point. But they wouldn’t want to stick around any longer than they had to. They’d drop too soon, and the ones behind them sooner still, and …

And Hideki Fujita cowered in his hole as the explosions crept nearer and nearer. “Mother!” someone wailed. “Oh, Mother!” That wasn’t a wounded man’s scream—it was just terror. Fujita had a hard time condemning the frightened soldier. He was about to shit himself, too.

He almost tore down his trousers so as not to foul them. Only one thing stopped him: the thought that the mosquitoes would feast on his bare backside if he did. He hadn’t got bitten too badly there. He clamped down as hard as he could and hoped for the best.

Crump!
That one was close.
CRUMP!
That one was closer—much closer. The ground shook, as if in a big earthquake. Fujita knew more about earthquakes than he’d ever wanted to learn. To their sorrow, most Japanese did.

But earthquakes didn’t throw razor-sharp, red-hot shards of steel through the air. Several of them wheeped and snarled by above Fujita’s head. Dirt kicked up by the explosions arced down on him. Blast tore at his ears and his lungs. He breathed out as hard as he could. It might not do much good, but he didn’t think it could hurt.

Then the bombs started going off farther away. Some of them had to be landing on Red Army positions. Instead of exultation, Fujita felt a kind of exhausted pity for the Russians huddling in their trenches. It wasn’t as if his own side hadn’t also tried to kill him.

Did blasts murder mosquitoes? He hoped so, but was inclined to doubt it. Nothing else did much good against the droning pests.

He couldn’t hear them now. Someone was shouting something. He had trouble making that out, too. Yes, the near miss had messed up his ears. It wasn’t the first time. He wondered how long they would need to come back to normal. Time would tell.

The shout came again, more urgent but no more understandable.
“Nan desu-ka?”
Fujita shouted back.
What is it?
He heard a little something the next time, but not enough to make sense of what the yelling soldier was saying.
“What
about Lieutenant Hanafusa?” he demanded.

“He’s dead.” This time, the key word came through very clearly. The other man added something else. Fujita caught the last part of it: “—left but his boots.”

The sergeant’s stomach did a slow lurch. He knew what happened to men who ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Lieutenant Hanafusa’s spirit would join the rest of Japan’s heroic dead at Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. His body … His body was probably splashed over half a square kilometer.

Somebody out there in the night said something else, something with Sergeant Fujita’s name in it. “I’m here,” Fujita called. “What was that? So sorry, but my ears are ringing like a bell.”

Ringing or not, he got the answer very clearly: “You’re in command of the platoon till we get a new officer. Sergeant Jojima got his hand blown off, and Sergeant Iwamura’s hurt, too. So you’re the senior noncom.”

“What do we need to do now?” Fujita asked. But the other soldier couldn’t tell him that. Only an officer could. And if any officers were left in the neighborhood, he wouldn’t find himself in charge of the platoon. So he had to figure it out for himself. One thing looked blindingly obvious: if he ordered the men to retreat, somebody would hang him. “Hold tight!” he yelled as loud as he could. “If the Russians come, drive them back.”

That sounded brave—braver than it was, probably. With any luck, the round-eyed barbarians would no more be able to attack than the Japanese were to defend.

So it proved. The rest of the night passed with hardly a shot fired by
either side. When morning came, Fujita could see what a mess the bombs had made of the platoon’s position and order his men to start setting things to rights. He didn’t need to be an officer to see that that needed doing. How much
did
you need to be an officer to see? Not for the first time, he suspected it was less than officers claimed.

IF COPENHAGEN WASN’T A MIRACLE
, Peggy Druce couldn’t imagine what one would look like. The lights were on. Cars ran through the streets amidst the swarms of Danes on bicycles. Somehow, nobody seemed to get clobbered. No one looked shabby. No one seemed to have even heard of rationing, let alone suffered under it. You could buy all the gas you wanted, and all the clothes you wanted, too.

And the food! My God, the food! Peggy gorged on white bread and butter, on fine Danish ham, on pickled herring—on everything she wanted. She poured down good Carlsberg beer. The only things with which she didn’t stuff herself were potatoes, turnips, and cabbage. She’d had enough of those in Germany to last her about three lifetimes.

She did her best not to think of Constantine Jenkins. She was back in touch with Herb. All the cable lines between America and Europe passed through England, and the English allowed no traffic with the continental enemy. But Denmark was a neutral, just like the USA. She and her husband could catch up on what had happened since last October.

On most of it, anyhow. Of course Peggy wouldn’t put anything about the embassy undersecretary in a wire, or even a letter. She didn’t think she’d ever be able even to talk about what happened with him.
I was drunk
, she told herself, over and over. And she had been. But she’d been horny, too, or she wouldn’t have gone to bed with him no matter how drunk she was.

That wasn’t the worst of it, either. Would Herb have got horny, too, there across the Atlantic? Sure he would; Herb was one of the most reliably horny guys she’d ever known. What would he have done about it, with her away for so long? What wasn’t he putting into his telegrams and letters? What wouldn’t he want to talk about after she got home?

Every time that crossed her mind, she muttered to herself. It wasn’t
that she’d mind—too much—if he’d laid some round-heeled popsy. But not being able to talk about things with him … That wasn’t good. That was about as bad as it could get, in fact. They’d always been able to talk about everything. If they had to put up walls against each other, something precious would have gone out of their marriage—part of the whole point of being married, in fact.

Before long, she’d have the chance to find out about all that. Travel between Denmark and the UK was more complicated than it had been before the war. Because of mines and U-boats, few ships cared to cross the North Sea. Airplanes flew between one country and the other, but they carried far fewer passengers. Peggy couldn’t book a flight to London any sooner than three weeks after she got to Copenhagen.

In the meantime … In the meantime, she made like a tourist. She rented a bicycle herself, relying on the polite Danish drivers not to run her down. She shopped. You could buy things in Copenhagen! The shop windows weren’t mocking lies, the way they were in Berlin. If you saw it on display, you could lay down your money, and the shopkeeper would hand it to you. He’d even gift-wrap it for you if you asked him to. Quite a few Danes knew enough English to get by. A lot of the ones who didn’t could manage in German. Peggy wasn’t fond of the language, but she could use it, too.

Danish radios picked up not only Dr. Goebbels’ rants but also the BBC. The
International Herald-Tribune
reported both sides’ war bulletins. After so long with only the German point of view dinning in her ears, that seemed almost unnatural to Peggy. She presumed Danish papers did the same thing, but she couldn’t read those.

The Danes might publish both sides’ war news, but they didn’t seem the least bit military themselves. She saw very few soldiers. Like so many other things, that reminded her she wasn’t in Berlin any more. At the heart of the Third
Reich
, more men wore uniforms than civilian clothes. And she had trouble imagining German soldiers pedaling along on bicycles, waving to pretty girls as they passed. German soldiers always looked as if they meant business. The Danes seemed more like play-acting kids in uniform.

At Amalienborg, off Bredgade, the royal guard changed every day at noon. The soldiers there looked a little more serious, but only a little. The cut of their tunics and trousers and the funny flare of their helmets still kept them from being as intimidating as their German counterparts. Or maybe that was because Peggy had seen
Wehrmacht
men in action, while only the oldest of old men remembered the last time Denmark fought a war.

Between two and half past five every afternoon, young people promenaded from Frederiksberggade past the best shops to Kongens Nytorv, near the palace. Peggy found the parade oddly charming. It was something she would have expected in Madrid (before Spain went to hell, anyhow) or Lisbon, not Scandinavia.

Days slid off the calendar, one by one. Getting her exit visa from Denmark and an entry visa cost some money, but not a speck of stomach lining. Examining the Czechoslovak and German stamps, the minor official at the British embassy who issued the entry visa remarked, “Seems as though you’ve had a bit of a lively time, what?”

If that wasn’t a prime bit of British understatement, Peggy had never heard one. “Oh, you might say so,” she answered—damned if she’d let the American side down.

She wondered if the functionary would ask her about what things were like in the enemy nation, but he didn’t. He took her money, plied his rubber stamp with might and main, and used mucilage to affix the visa in her passport. “Safe journey,” he told her.

“Much obliged,” Peggy said. The phrase was a polite commonplace. Suddenly, though, she felt the words’ true meaning. “I
am
much obliged to you—everybody who’s finally helping me get home.”

“I am here to assist travelers, ma’am,” the official said, a trifle stiffly.

“Yes. I know. That’s why I’m obliged to you,” Peggy replied. He didn’t get it. He was an Englishman, but maybe the war and all the accompanying madness seemed no more real to him than they did to the Danes. How long had he worked here?

Well, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she had the documents she needed. Nothing would keep her off that airplane. Nothing!

She sent a wire to Herb:
EVERYTHING SET. FIRST ENGLAND, THEN USA. WHOOPEE! LOVE, PEGGY.
The clerk at the telegraph office had to ask her how to spell
Whoopee
. She was happy to tell him.

Herb’s answer was waiting at the hotel when she finished spending money for the day:
WHOOPEE IS RIGHT, BABE. SEE YOU SOON! LOVE, ME
. She smiled. He always signed telegrams to her like that. And, like her, he’d stayed under the ten-word minimum-rate limit. They were nowhere near poor. When you’d been through the Depression, though, you watched every penny from habit. When you weren’t shopping, of course. Well, sometimes even then, but not always.

She ate another splendid Danish breakfast the next morning. One day to go. She was all packed. The only thing she’d have to do tomorrow would be to put the clothes she had on now into her suitcase. What she’d wear then was already draped over a chair in her room. She intended to go to the airport very, very early. She didn’t care how bored she’d get waiting for the plane. As with the train out of Germany, she wasn’t going to miss it. She wasn’t, she
wasn’t
, she
WASN’T
!

She had lunch at the Yacht Pavilion. A guidebook called it delightful, and she agreed. She could see the statue of the Little Mermaid staring out into the sound. The smorrebrod was good, the aquavit even better.

Men started getting off a couple of freighters in the harbor and forming up in long columns on the piers. Peggy’s eye passed over them, then snapped back. “No,” she whispered. But yes. She’d never mistake the color those men were wearing. She grabbed a passing waiter by the arm and pointed across the almost waveless water. “Those are German soldiers! You’re being invaded!”

He looked at her, at the troops in
Feldgrau
and beetling
Stahlhelms
, back to her again. Laughing, he shook his head. “No. It cannot be. Someone is making a film, that’s all.”

Briskly, the German soldiers marched off the piers and into Copenhagen. They looked as if they were heading straight for the royal palace. Well, where else would they be going?

A few rifle shots rang out, then a sharp burst of machine-gun fire. Faint in the distance, Peggy heard screams. Blood drained from the waiter’s face, leaving him pale as vanilla ice cream. All over the Yacht
Pavilion, people started exclaiming. “But it cahn’t be!” someone said in clear British English.

More gunfire. More screams. It could be, all right. And it damn well was. That plane wouldn’t fly to England tomorrow, or anywhere else. Peggy burst into tears.

Chapter 16