Two Fronts (54 page)

“Hitler does,” Marcel said confidently.

“Well, for now the big shots back in Paris think you’re right,” Demange said. “But that doesn’t turn Stalin into a bargain. The only thing that could ever turn Stalin into a bargain is, mm, Hitler.”

He was lighting another fresh Gitane when the Germans started lobbing mortar bombs at the
poilus
in the trenches. If you had a good, thick parapet in front of you and you kept your head down, machine-gun bullets were just an annoyance. As long as you stayed in your hole, you had to be mighty unlucky to get hurt.

Mortars whispered up and whined down. If one landed beside you, it would slice you into dogmeat even if you stayed behind your parapet. Demange despised mortars. So did every foot soldier who’d ever been on the receiving end of an attack. You couldn’t hide from them, and the bastards on your own side wouldn’t let you run away from them, either.

Screams rose from the next job over in the trench. Somebody over there had caught it, all right—caught it pretty bad, by the horrible noises he was making. Rolled into a ball in the bottom of the trench, Demange wished the bearers would cart off the luckless bugger. His shrieks were plenty to demoralize a whole regiment.

At last, they fell silent. Maybe he’d passed out. Maybe he’d died. Whatever had happened, he couldn’t feel his tormented body any more. That was a mercy, and not such a small one. People could be so dreadfully wounded, they begged you to kill them and thanked you if you had the nerve to do it.

War movies didn’t show stuff like that. A wound in a war movie meant a clean, white bandage—where were the blood and the mud?—and a nurse with big tits to bat her eyelashes at you while you recovered. If only life worked out so neatly … especially for that sorry fool over there.

The next interesting question was whether the Germans were going to follow up all this ironmongery with an attack of their own. They hadn’t been doing that very often in Belgium. They were content to let the Tommies and
poilus
come at them, and to slaughter the Allies when they tried.

You never could be sure, though. Whenever you thought you knew what the
Boches
were up to, they’d let you figure you were right for a little while and then, when you were good and set up, they’d shove it right up your ass.

Regretfully, Demange unfolded from the fetal position. Even more regretfully, he got up on the firing step and peered over the top of the parapet. That brought the machine-gun bullets terrifyingly close to the top of the crest on his helmet. Why that stupid crest was there he’d never known, in the last war or this one. To give style? It didn’t seem reason enough. The Tommies and the Ivans got along fine without crests. So did the Germans, whose helmets were hands down the best in both wars.

“Up! Up, you shitheads!” Demange yelled. “They’re moving!” He unslung his rifle—no pissy officer’s automatic for him—and started banging away at the oncoming
Boches
.

He felt better when French machine guns began gnawing at the enemy. The German attack soon ran out of steam. The Fritzes didn’t have any tanks supporting their foot soldiers. The infantrymen sensibly decided there was no point to getting killed when they hadn’t a prayer of making any real advance. They trotted back to their start line or at most hung on in shell holes between the lines.

After a while, a German officer stood up waving a white flag: a bed-sheet nailed to a pole. Firing on both sides slowly died away. The officer strode forward, still carrying the flag of truce.

As soon as the German got within shouting distance, Demange yelled, “Far enough, pal!”

The
Boche
obediently stopped. “An hour’s cease-fire?” he shouted back in guttural French. “So we can pick up our wounded?”

“Send your guys hiding in the craters back to your start line and you can have it,” Demange answered.

“
D’accord
,” the German agreed after a short pause for thought. “We gain little advantage from them anyhow.”

Demange saw it the same way—for now. But the Germans might try to reinforce them under cover of darkness. Then they could make more trouble here tomorrow or further down the line. “An hour’s cease-fire, starting—now!” he called to his own men. “Don’t shoot at their stretcher-bearers, and let their troops go back out of no-man’s-land.” The German officer turned and bellowed
auf Deutsch
.

Out came the
Boches
with Red Cross vests and with Red Crosses painted inside white circles on their helmets. The effect, to Demange, was that of a wolf dyed pink. It still looked dangerous, but now it looked peculiar, too. The bearers hauled wounded men back toward German aid stations. Unwounded Germans scuttled away to their entrenchments. Demange guessed not all of them would abandon the ground they’d so painfully won, no matter what their officer promised. Nobody ever kept promises all the way. Demange wouldn’t have, in the German’s shoes. A night patrol would root out the ones who’d stayed behind, and then this stretch of front could get back to normal.

NO MORE FLYING
Fortresses had raided Münster, for which Sarah Bruck thanked the God in Whom she had ever more trouble believing. Maybe the daylight raid cost the RAF more than it wanted to pay. Other English bombers still hit the town by night, though.

Samuel Goldman seemed absurdly cheerful about it. “Well, I don’t lack for work, anyhow,” he said one evening over supper. “For a while there, when England and France were at peace with the government, I was afraid they’d want me as much as a laborer as they did when I was a professor.”

“Supper’s good,” Hanna Goldman said, which both wasn’t and was an answer. The Nazis hadn’t let Sarah’s father go on teaching at the university. Expelling him from the faculty had been a disaster. If they threw him out of the labor gang, that would be a catastrophe.

He nodded to Mother now. “Not too bad, if I say so myself.” He preened just a little. The spaetzle and the tinned fish that went with them had come from his inspired scrounging.

It wasn’t impossible for Jews to survive in the wartime
Reich
without such help, not quite. Life might be lived, yes, but it wasn’t worth living. Barely enough food, and almost all of it dreadful … They wanted you to know what they thought of you, all right.

When Father couldn’t steal better edibles than German Jews were legally entitled to, he stole clothes. Sarah had no idea how he’d managed to stuff a cashmere sweater into one of his inside jacket pockets, but he had. Even the yellow Stars of David she’d sewn onto it, front and back, didn’t seem to deface it too badly.

She supposed that was her vanity talking. After so long in the altered old clothes she’d got from the rabbi, anything nice seemed extra wonderful. With the wretched clothing ration Jews got, she might have been able to buy a sweater like that around the turn of the twenty-first century—provided she didn’t need anything else in the meantime.

The only reason she had that sweater was that some Aryan woman had got blown to gory smithereens. Father and the other laborers in his gang, Jews and petty criminals alike, robbed the dead whenever they saw the chance. The people the RAF killed didn’t need their things any more. The laborers who cleaned up the mess the bombers left behind did, desperately.

Sometimes Sarah salved her conscience by thinking that the woman who had owned her sweater was a raging anti-Semite, and that it served her right for the sweater to pass to a Jew. But she had no way of knowing that. The Nazi big shots who ran Münster did everything they could to make life miserable for Jews, sure. So did some ordinary folk. Most people in the town, though, were just trying to get by from one day to the next and hoping their relatives in the
Wehrmacht
were all right. They didn’t have the time or the energy to run around screaming “The Jews are our misfortune!”

Sarah hoped her brother in the
Wehrmacht
was all right, too. That was all she could do. If anything did happen to Saul, she wouldn’t find out about it. He had—she hoped he still had—his assumed name and identity. Whatever happened to him, wherever he was, he was bound to be better off than he would have been had the authorities grabbed him after he smashed in that gang boss’s head when the vicious man hit him once too often for no reason.

Saul hardly ever got mentioned in the Goldman house. When he did, it was always in the past tense. Sarah and her mother and father never said a word about his hiding in plain sight of the National Socialist authorities.

Father didn’t always scavenge goodies when the RAF hit Münster. Sometimes nothing was left to scavenge: houses and shops and blocks of flats often went up in flames. Sometimes younger, sprier men beat him to the goodies. And sometimes the firemen and police who were also on duty kept laborers from grabbing the way they wanted to.

“I’d mind that less if they didn’t steal for themselves,” he said after being thwarted by a fireman. “But they do. I’ve watched them.”

“Not fair!” Sarah said in angry sympathy.

He smiled crookedly. “Yes? And so?” She had no comeback for that.

When his scrounging was bad, the luck she had shopping mattered more. That luck would never be good, of course. Jews were allowed in stores only just before closing time, after Aryan customers had picked over whatever happened to be available. But sometimes what she could get was truly awful, while sometimes it was only wretched. Like everything else, misery had its degrees.

Since the trams were also denied to those who wore the yellow star, she walked all over Münster trying to find this, that, or the other thing. She often thought she used as much energy getting food as she took in when she finally ate it. She didn’t know what she could do about that, either. She and her parents were all much thinner than they had been before the Nazis took over. She doubted there were any German Jews who weren’t.

Late one afternoon, she was coming home with a kilo and a half of flour she’d got across town. Despite the long trip, she was pleased with herself. For what you could get hold of these days, the flour looked pretty good. It had some peas and beans and dried potatoes ground into it, but everybody’s flour these days was like that. People old enough to remember did say the bread in the last war had been even worse, stretched with sawdust and maybe even clay. Sarah could hardly believe it, but there you were.

And here she was, coming up to the square that fronted on Münster’s Catholic cathedral. The square was about half full of people: women, boys, old men. Most of the men of military age were either wearing one uniform or another or working long hours in factories to give the
Reich
’s soldiers and flyers and sailors the murderous tools of their trade.

Some men wore police uniforms, not military ones. Some of them were in the square, too, between the crowd and the cathedral. They clutched truncheons. Two or three of them carried Schmeissers instead. They all looked nervous.

Sarah felt nervous. A crowd not organized by the state was astonishing in Hitler’s Germany. Sarah scuttled along the walls of the buildings on the far side of the square, as far from the crowd and the police as she could get. She felt like a mouse who’d walked into a gathering of cats by mistake. Maybe they wouldn’t notice her—or the yellow stars she wore.

The crowd began to move toward the cathedral, and toward the thin line of police in front of it. Voices rose: “Give us back the archbishop! Give us back the archbishop!”

Archbishop von Galen had presumed to protest the way the
Reich
disposed of mental defectives (though he’d never said a word about the way the
Reich
treated its Jews). The
Gestapo
had grabbed him and hustled him off to prison or a concentration camp. And Münster’s Catholics had rioted. The authorities put them down and made more arrests. But that they’d risen once was a prodigy.

That they’d been put down and were rising again was whatever went two steps past a prodigy.
And that I’m here right now is whatever’s two steps past a calamity
, Sarah thought. She hurried along as fast as she could without running and drawing notice to herself.

“Give us back the archbishop! Give us back the archbishop!” The crowd’s chant swelled ever louder.

A police official with a megaphone shouted through the chorus: “Disperse this criminal assembly, in the name of the
Grossdeutsches Reich
!”

“Give us back the archbishop, in the name of God!” The chant changed.

When Sarah heard the harsh crack of gunfire then, she could scarcely believe it. Some people in the crowd screamed and ran away. Some fell, injured or killed. And some roared and charged the police. They roared louder when they got their hands on a few of the uniformed men. Sarah made her escape. For once, no one paid any attention to a Jew.

Arno Baatz had always wished the soldiers who served under him would like him better. But he’d always assumed it was their fault they didn’t. And, working from that assumption, he’d always wound up disappointed.

He’d always wished his superiors liked him better, too. Before the war started, he’d gone through the six-week training course that lifted him out of the teeming swarm of private soldiers and into the more glorious ranks of those with the authority to tell that teeming swarm what to do.