The War That Came Early: West and East (63 page)

“Yes?” she said, and then,
“Ja?”
The word was the same in Swedish as in German, but she tried to make it sound different. Jut because she could speak some German didn’t mean she wanted to.

“Hello. My name is Gunnar Landquist,” the man standing in the hallway said in almost perfect English. “I am a reporter from the
Handelstidningen
, in Göteborg.” That was Sweden’s second-largest city, right across the Kattegat from Denmark. Landquist was about her own age, tall, with brown hair going gray, very fair skin, and blue eyes.

“Isn’t that the newspaper the Germans don’t like?” she said.

“One of them,” Landquist answered with a small-boy grin that made
him look much younger. No, the Nazis weren’t happy about freedom of the press, and the freer the press was to call them the SOBs they were, the less happy they got. The Swede went on, “You have seen of the war more than most civilians, or so my friends tell me. Our readers, I am sure, would be interested in the views of an intelligent American traveler.”

“That’s nice,” Peggy said. “Where do you think you’ll find one?”

The Swede blinked, then threw back his head and laughed. “Oh, it will be a pleasure to interview you!” he exclaimed. He was armed with a pencil and a spiral-bound notebook nearly identical to the ones reporters in the USA carried.

“I doubt it, but come on in anyway.” Peggy stood aside so Landquist could. He laughed again. When he perched on a chair, Peggy sat on the edge of the bed. “Okay. What do you want to know?” she asked.

“How do you feel about the Germans and their war?” He poised pencil above paper, waiting.

Peggy was about to rip Hitler for all she was worth. Then she wondered what would happen if she did and German troops suddenly appeared in Stockholm, the way they had in Copenhagen. Nothing good, not to her—and not to Sweden, either. The Nazis had long memories when it came to slights: at least, to slights aimed at them.

And so she was more prudent than she might have been: “What I want to do most is get back to the United States. The German diplomats have done everything they could to give me a hand. Even Hitler himself cleared up some red tape for me once. But”—she gave Gunnar Landquist one of her crooked smiles—“they won’t stop the shooting just to let me go back, darn it.”

He scribbled. “You have been under attack by the Germans and by England and France, is it not so? Which is worse?”

Her smile grew more crooked yet. “The one that’s going on right this minute is the worst attack ever. The one you lived through yesterday, you don’t need to worry about any more.”

“I see. Yes. That makes good sense.” Landquist wrote some more.

“Sorry. I’ll try not to let it happen again,” Peggy said.

He blinked again. Peggy got the feeling he had to put it into Swedish
inside his own head before he could realize it was meant for a joke. Once he figured it out, he didn’t hold back. He had a big, booming guffaw that made you want to like him. “You are wicked!” he said, plainly meaning it for a compliment.

“Thank you,” Peggy answered, deadpan, which produced another explosion of merriment from him.

“My, my,” he said. “How am I to write a story when I am laughing so hard? Let me ask you a more serious question: with all the rationing she uses, how long can Germany go on fighting?”

That was serious, all right. Peggy gave it the best answer she could: “A long time, at least by what I saw. The food isn’t so great, but there’s enough of it. Nobody’s going hungry. People can’t get many new clothes, but they can manage with their old stuff. Most of what’s new goes straight to the
Wehrmacht
. But I’ve heard there’s rationing in England and France, too. You’d know better than I would, and more about how tight it is.”

“I know it is there. Past that …” Landquist shrugged. “No one on either side seems happy to admit he has not got plenty of everything.”

“You’re bound to be right.”

Landquist lit a cigarette: an American Chesterfield. Seeing Peggy’s wistful stare, he offered her the pack. They hadn’t been her brand back in the USA, but they came closer than any of the European blends she’d been smoking. She sighed with pleasure after he gave her a light. Then he said, “With the fighting to our west, not many more of these will come through.”

“The war to the west is why I’m still here,” Peggy answered, floating on clouds of tobacco-flavored nostalgia. “I mean, Sweden is a nice country and everything, but I’d still rather go home. I want to, but I can’t.”

“I am sorry.” Unlike a lot of people who said that, Gunnar Landquist actually sounded as if he meant it. “If there were something I could do—”

That subjunctive was correct. Even so, most Americans would have said
If there was
. Sometimes you could tell foreigners because they spoke your language more accurately than you did.

“Since you cannot go, what will you do?” Landquist asked.

“Stay,” Peggy said, which made him laugh yet again. She went on, “If I have to stay somewhere that isn’t America, this is a nice place to be.”

“I am glad to hear it. I shall write it down and quote you.” Write it down he did. He tipped her a wink. “So you like us better than Germany, do you?”

“Oh, Lord, yes!” Peggy blurted. Gunnar Landquist wrote that down, too. Peggy wondered if she ought to ask him not to. If—no, when—the Germans read it, it would only piss them off. She’d been trying to avoid that, even in this interview.
Well, too goddamn bad this time
, she thought. It was nothing but the truth.

THEO HOSSBACH HADN’T MUCH ENJOYED
spending a winter in the field in the Low Countries and France. By the way things were going, spending a winter in the field in Poland would be even less fun. He came from Breslau, not that far west of where he was now. Winters got pretty beastly there, too. Not so beastly as this, though. He didn’t think so, anyhow.

Adi Stoss came from some lousy little town near Münster, way the hell over on the other side of Germany. He pissed and moaned about the cold and wind like you wouldn’t believe. “This weather ought to be against the Geneva Convention,” he said with an exaggerated shiver, huddling close to the fire the panzer crew had made of boards taken from a wrecked farmhouse. The peasant whose house it had been was in no position to complain; they’d found his body, and his wife’s, and a little boy’s, in the ruins.

“Screw the weather,” Hermann Witt said. The panzer commander didn’t get far from the fire, either, no matter what he said. He
wasn’t
one of the people who could light a cigarette in any weather. Finally giving it up as a bad job, he went on, “What ought to be against the fucking Geneva Convention are the Russians.”

A puff of fog escaped from Adi’s mouth as he grunted. Theo made some kind of small noise, too, but the wind grabbed it and blew it away. Neither of his crewmates paid any attention. Chances were they wouldn’t have even if they’d heard him. He didn’t worry about that. It wasn’t as if he
wanted
people paying attention to him, for God’s sake.

Adi looked east. He pounded his mittened hands together to try to get some blood flowing in them. “You suppose it’s true? What the damn foot soldiers were going on about, I mean?”

“That the Ivans cut the cocks off our guys in that patrol they caught? That they stuffed ’em in their mouths afterwards?” Gloomily, Witt nodded. “Yeah, I believe it. I went through basic with one of the guys who found ’em. I’m not saying Benno wouldn’t tell a lie, but he wouldn’t tell that kind of lie—know what I mean?”

“I only wish I didn’t,” the driver answered. He pounded his hands some more, staring down at the ground between his feet. When he looked up again, his face seemed ravaged and old. “Here’s hoping our guys were dead before the Russkis went to work on ’em.”

“Yeah. Here’s hoping.” Witt scowled. “If I thought they were going to do that to me, I’d shoot myself first.”

“Christ, who wouldn’t?” Stoss cupped his hands in front of his crotch. “Fun old war, ain’t it?”

“Fun … 
Aber natürlich.”
The corners of the sergeant’s mouth turned down even farther. “How the hell are you supposed to fight against people who do that kind of shit? They
aren’t
people, not really. Nothing but savages.”

“How do you fight ’em? You kill ’em, that’s how. And you make goddamn sure they don’t take you alive.” Adi slapped his hip. “I never let loose of my pistol these days.”

“Makes sense to me.” Witt turned to—turned on—Theo. “How about you, Hossbach?”

“Huh?” Theo said in surprise. A blush heated his face. He couldn’t leave it there. A few more words came out: “Adi usually makes sense.”

“Fat lot of good it does him, too,” Witt said. “Sorry son of a bitch is stuck in Poland just like the rest of us.”

“Oh, there are worse places,” Adi said lightly.

“Yeah?” Witt challenged. “Name two.”

“Dachau. Belsen.” All at once, Stoss’ tone wasn’t light any more. The names came off his tongue flat and hard as paving stones.

He didn’t just kill the conversation; he shot it right behind the ear. Witt got very busy—almost theatrically busy—heating meat-and-barley stew
in his mess tin. The cooks coyly declined to tell their customers what kind of meat it was. That made Theo suspect it would whinny if you poked it with a fork. He’d eaten horsemeat in the field before. This had the same strong flavor and gluey texture. He didn’t worry about it. A full belly beat an empty one any day of the week.

Like Adalbert Stoss, he preferred Poland to a concentration camp inside the
Reich
. That didn’t mean bad things couldn’t happen to you here. The Russians announced that they weren’t shutting down for the Christmas season by shelling the hell out of the position the
Wehrmacht
and the Poles were holding. Shouts of
“Urra!”
and the rumble of enemy panzers coming forward said they weren’t kidding around, either.

As soon as the first shells burst, all the German panzer crewmen raced for their machine. Theo slammed his hatch shut behind him. A moment later, fragments clanged off the Panzer II’s hull. Theo gave the interior wall a happy pat. He pitied ground-pounders.

“Why aren’t you starting this lousy cocksucker?” Witt shouted at Adi.

“What the fuck do you think I’m trying to do?” the driver shouted back. Behind Theo, the starter motor clicked and whined. The main engine didn’t want to catch. “It’s cold outside,” Stoss added.

“Well, the Ivans sure as shit have theirs going,” Witt said. That wasn’t good news, which was putting it mildly. Sitting in a panzer that didn’t want to move made Theo stop envying the infantry.

“Fine, Sarge,” Adi said with what sounded like patience stretched very thin. “You can go jump in a Russian panzer, if that makes you happy.” He didn’t say
You can go jump in a lake
, but if Theo could hear the words hanging in the air the panzer commander was bound to be able to hear them, too.

“If you don’t get us started, we’d better bail out, because one of those assholes is heading our way.” Witt’s patience was also pretty frayed. “We don’t want to be here when he starts shooting.”

“Right,” Adi said tightly, and then, to the Panzer II, “Come on, you—!” He hadn’t been in the army very long, but he cussed like a twenty-year veteran. The starter motor ground once more—and then, with a coughing roar, the main engine caught.

“There you go!” Witt yelled. “Get us moving! Make for those bushes. And for God’s sake step on it!”

Adi must have stepped on it, because the Panzer II jumped forward. Theo couldn’t see what was going on outside. How far away was the Russian panzer the commander’d been having a fit about? How soon before it opened up? The Ivans weren’t great gunners, but a hit from anything bigger than a machine-gun round would hole this thin armor.

The Panzer II’s little turret traversed. The 20mm gun fired three rounds in quick succession. These Russian panzers weren’t so tough, either. Unlike this one, their cannon could fire useful high-explosive shells and give foot soldiers something new to worry about, but the 20mm could get through their armor as easily as they could penetrate a German machine’s.

“Ha!” Witt said. “Nailed
that
fucker, anyhow. Now go forward. We’ll see what kind of friends were keeping him company.”

“Forward,” Adi agreed.

Forward they went. Theo’s inner ears and the seat of his coveralls would have told him so much, even absent the order. So would the radio traffic dinning in his earphones. Through the voice tube, he told Witt, “Scads of Ivans. This looks like a big push.”

“Happy day,” the panzer commander said, and then, “Thanks, Theo.” He sounded grateful that Theo was talking at all, even to relay the tactical situation. That he did announced that he was getting to know his radioman pretty well. A moment later, he told Adi, “Put us behind that stone fence. We can give them plenty of grief from there.”

“Will do,” Stoss said. The panzer stopped a few seconds later, so he’d presumably done it. The turret traversed. The main armament fired several rounds. Witt’s exultant whoop said one or two of them had done what he wanted. Then the coaxial machine gun chattered. Witt knew how to handle the MG-34: he squeezed off one short burst after another, giving the barrel time to cool between them.

More urgent shouts in Theo’s earphones. He said, “Sergeant, we’re ordered to pull back. They’re breaking through.”

“My ass they are!” Witt said indignantly. “I’ve wrecked two of their
panzers and scared off the foot soldiers. And we’ve got enough infantry of our own—well, Poles, too—to keep them from flanking us out.”

“We’re ordered,” Theo repeated. “They’ve already torn a hole in our position south of here. We’ve got to retreat so we can organize the counterattack.”

“All right. I’ll do it. I’m only a fucking sergeant—I have to follow orders.” Witt couldn’t have sounded more disgusted. He added, “I sure wouldn’t want to be the dipshit officer who gave those orders, though. When the
Führer
finds out about it, that sorry sucker’ll be lucky if he’s still a corporal. Put it in reverse, Adi—somebody with embroidered shoulder straps has the vapors.”