Two Fronts (31 page)

“No wonder at all,” Chaim agreed cheerfully. “Hey, but they haven’t gone and purged me yet. Long as I’ve got a rifle in my hands, I’m more dangerous to the fuckin’ Fascists than I am to my own side.”

This time, Mike looked around to make sure none of the seriously ideological Abe Lincolns could hear him through the rain’s plashing before he answered, “That’s what the anarchists and the Trotskyists thought, too.”

There still were anarchist outfits up in the Catalan and Basque country. People who didn’t much want to be part of Spain to begin with … Well, no surprise that they wanted damn all to do with any government whatever. The Republic quietly used those regiments for cannon fodder and gave them the oldest, most beat-up equipment it had. If you didn’t approve of government, you couldn’t very well expect government to approve of you, either.

Chaim was neither Trotskyist nor anarchist. He followed Moscow’s line … in his own way, when he felt like it. He might be sure he was more dangerous to Sanjurjo’s men than to the progressive forces in Spain. But Mike had a point, too. The longer the war dragged on—and it had already passed its second birthday and grown into a big, healthy boy when the main European brawl erupted—the less patience people here had with what they called deviationists.

He managed a ragged grin. “Hey, if La Martellita didn’t purge me, I’m good for a while longer, right?”

“If you hadn’t knocked her up, she would’ve,” Mike responded.

There, Chaim thought his buddy was wrong. La Martellita was never one to let sentiment get in the way of doctrine. And, no matter how much he missed her (missed sleeping with her, anyhow), she’d never felt much in the way of sentiment toward him to begin with. Which, when you got down to it, was a goddamn shame.

He was going to expound on that theme. Soldiers since the days of Hammurabi had wasted time when they weren’t fighting (most of the time, in other words) talking about women. But instead his head came up sharply. “Incoming!” he yelled, and dove for a muddy hole in the front wall of the trench.

Mike Carroll dove for the same hole at the same time. It wasn’t quite big enough for two people. That didn’t stop either one of them. They were pressed together at least as tight as Chaim had ever been with La Martellita when the Nationalists’ shells started bursting on their line.

Getting shelled wasn’t nearly so much fun as getting laid. Chaim suspected he might not be the first one to have made that particular discovery. Sanjurjo’s bastards hadn’t thrown this much hate at the Republicans for a while. He wondered where they’d come up with the ammo. Wherever it was, they sure didn’t worry about using it up.

Mike jerked and almost kneed him in the nuts. “Watch it!” Chaim said indignantly, trying to twist away.

“Fuck yourself.” Carroll hissed the words out through clenched teeth. “I’m hit, dammit.”

“Ah, shit.” Chaim tried to wiggle out of the hole to do what he could for his friend. That was harder than getting into it had been. Shells were still coming down when he finally slithered out into the trench. He ignored them—this was important.

A fragment had ripped up Mike Carroll’s calf. His trouser leg was dark with blood. Chaim yanked the wound bandage off his own belt and did what he could to stanch the bleeding. He yelled for stretcher-bearers at the top of his lungs.

Naturally, they didn’t show up as fast as he wanted them to. A bad time for
mañana
, but what could you do? Before they did, Carroll asked, “How bad d’you think it is?”

“Not too,” Chaim answered, telling more truth than not. He didn’t think it would kill Mike—as long as it didn’t go septic, anyhow. He also didn’t think the docs would have to amputate the leg, though he was less sure about that. But he was a hundred percent positive he wouldn’t have wanted his own leg furrowed like that. He yelled for the bearers again.

“About fucking time,” Mike said when the Spaniards finally showed up. One of them jabbed him with a syringe. Chaim was glad they had morphine.
Have to get my hands on some of that shit myself
, he thought.
Would have been good if I had a syringe, or if Mike did
. The drug hit hard and fast. The bearers almost poured Mike onto the stretcher and slowly lugged him down the muddy track toward a zigzagging communications trench that led back to the rear and to the aid stations there.

Meanwhile, the shells kept coming in. Chaim jumped into the hole again. He couldn’t believe he and Mike had both fit into it. It felt crowded with him in there by his lonesome. Well, it hadn’t quite fit all of poor Mike, had it?

He popped out again as soon as the bombardment stopped. Maybe the enemy was just being obnoxious, but maybe this was a real push, too. They’d fired off a lot of ammo. They wouldn’t do that for the fun of it, would they?

No. Here they came: men in yellowish khaki running and crawling and scrambling toward the wire. A couple of tanks were coming, too. They were little old German jobs, obsolete in the rest of Europe but plenty good if the guys on the other side had even less in the way of armor.

Concrete emplacements protected the Internationals’ machine guns. They started spitting death at Sanjurjo’s men. Spaniards of any stripe were recklessly brave. The Nationalists came on where more sensible soldiers would have gone to ground or run away. They fell, writhing or ominously still. Chaim finally drew a bead on one of the writhers. He fired. The Nationalist lay ominously still thereafter.

One of the concrete emplacements proved to protect an antitank gun, not a mere Maxim. An enemy tank spurted fire and smoke. Crewmen bailed out. Chaim didn’t think they got far. The other tank seemed to decide it had an urgent appointment somewhere else. It turned around inside its own length and got the hell out of there.

Without armor support, the attack bogged down, metaphorically and literally. No matter how brave you were, you couldn’t storm machine-gun nests with foot soldiers alone. The rest of Europe had bloodily learned that lesson a generation earlier. The Spaniards understood it by now.

Nationalist stretcher-bearers came out for their wounded. Remembering Mike and hoping he’d be okay, Chaim didn’t fire at them. Some of the other Internationals were less particular. Watching a bearer go down and the poor bastard he’d been helping to haul spill into the mud, Chaim reflected that it was a tough old war. Well, that was nothing he didn’t already know.

WILLI DERNEN AND
Adam Pfaff squatted in the ruins of what had been a Russian peasant family’s hut to get out of the chilly rain. It was better than being out in the open, but not a lot. One wall was mostly a memory, while what was left of the thatch on the roof hadn’t been tended to for a long time. It was almost as wet in there as it would have been in the street.

Pfaff was brewing ersatz coffee on his little aluminum stove. The fuel pellet didn’t boil water very fast, but it also didn’t show smoke or flame.

“How many times d’you suppose this village has changed hands?” he asked.

“Shit, I dunno. Two, three, maybe four,” Willi answered. Pfaff looked like hell. He hadn’t shaved for several days. His dirty, stubbly face showed nothing but exhaustion. His eyes … You didn’t want to look into his eyes. Willi would have said something about it, only he was sure he looked the same way himself.

Instead, he held out the tin cup from his mess kit. Pfaff took the pot off the stove and poured some of the coffee into the cup. Willi sugared it and drank it while it was still hot. The warmth was its main virtue. It bore about the same relationship to the real bean as dealcoholized beer did to the genuine article.

Pfaff also poured down some of the near-coffee. “Smolensk,” he said, in the way a knight-errant might speak of the Holy Grail. You could go after it, sure, but you didn’t really expect to find it shining in front of you.

“Smolensk,” Willi echoed. By contrast, he sounded bitter. He put the best face on things he could: “We aren’t any farther from it than we were this past spring.” After lighting a cigarette for himself and giving one to Pfaff, he added, “Of course, we aren’t much closer, either.”

“Too right we aren’t,” his friend said. His cheeks, already hollow, pulled in tighter yet on his bones as he sucked in smoke. “No wonder this lousy place keeps going back and forth between us and the Ivans.”

“No wonder at all.” Willi yawned till his jaw hinge cracked like a knuckle. “Christ, I could sleep for a year.”

“Tell me about it. We all could, every goddamn one of us,” Pfaff said. “Only if we all did, we’d wake up with our throats cut.”

“I know,” Willi said. What German in Russia didn’t know that? Ivan could be anywhere. You didn’t want to close your eyes unless a
Kamerad
close by kept his open. Sometimes you had to, but you didn’t want to.

Arno Baatz stuck his head into the hut through one of the big holes in the wall. His piggy eyes narrowed. “Oh, you two rotten bums,” he said, distaste clogging his voice. “Sitting around with your thumbs up your assholes. Why am I not surprised? Tell me why.”

“Take an even strain, Corporal,” Willi said. You couldn’t tell a superior to whip it out and play with it, no matter how much you wanted to. A guy like Awful Arno would make you pay.

“What’s to do, anyway?” Pfaff was more inclined to try to reason with Baatz. “We’re here. The Reds aren’t, not right this minute. We don’t have sentry duty. Why not relax while we’ve got the chance?”

“Lazy fuckoffs, that’s what you are. Both of you.” But Awful Arno went away to inflict himself on someone else.

Once Willi was sure the underofficer had got out of earshot, he said, “Why couldn’t the Russians have shot him in the head, not the arm?”

“Bullet would’ve ricocheted,” Pfaff answered. Willi laughed till he almost pissed himself, a telling measure of how tired he was.

A field kitchen—a goulash cannon, in the
Landsers’
slang—made it into the village. The unit was horse-drawn, and not much different from the ones that had served the men who’d fathered this crop of soldiers. A motorized oven probably would have got stuck in the mud fifty kilometers back.

It wasn’t goulash in the big pot. There were Hungarians in the fight against the Ivans. Willi wondered whether their field kitchens really did dish it out, all red and spicy with peppers. What he got was kasha and onions and meat, all boiled together till they turned into something halfway between stew and library paste.

He’d had worse. He’d had nothing, too, and nothing was much worse. “Do I want to know what the meat is?” Adam Pfaff asked the potbellied, gray-mustached
Feldwebel
dishing out the stuff. It was a standard soldier question.

It didn’t get a standard soldier answer. “Why? Is your sister missing, or something?” the noncom returned.

He didn’t faze Pfaff. Not much did, from what Willi’d seen. All Adam said was, “I think Ilse would cook up greasier than this.”

One corner of the cook’s mouth twitched. Then he chuckled. He made a face, as if he was mad at himself, but he couldn’t help it. “All right. You’re a funny guy,” he said gruffly. He might have accused Adam of carrying a social disease.

“He’s funny like a truss,” Arno Baatz declared.

The
Feld
just looked at him—no, looked through him. Unlike the men in Awful Arno’s section, he didn’t have to put up with the
Unteroffizier
’s guff. He outranked Baatz, too, so nothing held him back from speaking his mind, which he did with more than a little relish: “I want to know what you think, sonny boy, I’ll blow my nose and check the boogers on my snotrag.”

A slow flush mounted from Baatz’s thick neck all the way to his hairline. The
Feldwebel
couldn’t have cared less. He’d seen real action in his career. He wore a wound badge of his own, the ribbon for an Iron Cross Second Class so faded that he might well have won it in the last war, and, on his left breast pocket, an Iron Cross First Class.

Behind Awful Arno, somebody said, “Let’s give three cheers for Booger Baatz!”

The
Unteroffizier
jumped straight into the air, as if someone had jabbed him in the ass with a hat pin. He whirled around before he came down. Had anyone else done it, Willi might have admired the performance. As things were … Admiring Awful Arno—no, Booger Baatz—was more trouble than it was worth.

“Who said that?” Baatz shouted furiously. “Who said that? Out with it, you gutless son of a bitch!”

Naturally, no one said a word. All the
Landsers
spooning up their stew might have been little angels. Willi knew Awful Arno would have blamed him had he been standing over there. He only wished he would have been clever enough to stick Baatz with the new handle.

“You bastards! You miserable, stinking turds!” Awful Arno was really working himself up into a first-class snit. “You—”

“Shut up.” The middle-aged cook’s quiet voice cut through his bluster like a hot knife slicing lard. “They don’t hang names like that on guys who haven’t earned ’em.”

Baatz’s jaw dropped. The last thing he’d looked for was a surprise attack from a fellow noncom. The private who served the goulash cannon with the
Feldwebel
snickered. He could afford to; he wasn’t under Baatz’s orders.

“I’ve run across pukes like you before,” the
Feld
with the gray mustache went on. “You’re just lucky nobody’s shot you in the back yet. You keep on the way you’re going, you’ll find out.”

Willi looked down at the muddy ground. It wasn’t as if plugging Baatz hadn’t crossed his mind. He didn’t want that to show on his face, though. Next to him, Adam Pfaff was eyeing his scuffed boots, too. Odds were half the men in the section were doing the same thing for the same reason. And odds were, after the field kitchen rolled away to feed the next German detachment, Awful Arno would make more soldiers want to murder him.