Stalin and his henchmen had to be looking at the United States the same way. The USA and Canada put together posed the same problem for the USSR as Russia did for America. Truman only wished that were more consolation.
Then the telephone rang once more. He picked it up. “Truman.”
“It’s the Secretary of Defense again, sir,” Rose Conway told him.
“Thank you.”
“Mr. President…” George Marshall sounded even gloomier than he had before. Truman hadn’t dreamt such a thing possible. He could come up with only one reason why it might be. Before he could ask, Marshall went on, “I’m sorry, sir, but my call came too late. The British were on the point of ringing us-that’s how the First Sea Lord put it-to tell us to watch out for the Panama Canal, because they’d just lost Suez.”
“Oh,” Truman said: a sound of pain disguised as a word. “Well, this is a hell of a morning, isn’t it?”
–
Rain drummed down. The ground got muddy in a hurry. So did the soldiers on both sides fighting in Germany. Isztvan Szolovits wore his shelter half as a rain cape, the way you were supposed to. He got muddy anyhow, and wet, and uncomfortable. Maybe he was a little drier than he would have been without the shelter half, but he wasn’t dry enough to be happy about it.
He was happy that the rain had slowed down the fighting. Those dirty-gray clouds hung only a couple of hundred meters above the ground. Fighters couldn’t tear along shooting up anything they saw when a pilot was liable to fly into a tall tree or a church steeple before he had the chance to dodge. It was wet enough for wheeled vehicles to make heavy going of it when they left the road. Tanks could still manage, and so could foot soldiers, but the rain also cut down how far anybody could see to shoot.
Pickets and snipers on both sides of the front still banged away, just to remind everybody the war hadn’t gone on holiday. But if you were back a little way and you used some care and common sense, you could almost relax.
Isztvan sat with a smashed tree trunk between him and the fighting ahead. He leaned forward to get some extra protection from the brim of his helmet and kept his hands cupped as he lit a cigarette. Even so, he needed a couple of tries. Considering how wet it was, he didn’t think he’d done badly.
Other Magyars sprawled here and there amidst the wreckage of war. Some also smoked. Some ate. Some slept. Szolovits thought he might try that after the cigarette. He’d quickly learned you were more likely to be sleepy-tired to death, not to put too fine a point on it-at war than you were to be hungry.
More men with shelter halves worn as ponchos moved up to the Hungarians’ left. Isztvan saw they weren’t countrymen of his. Their uniforms were of deeper khaki, and their helmets had a slightly different shape. He guessed they were Russians and forgot about them.
He forgot about them, that is, till Sergeant Gergely burst out laughing. Half the Magyars in earshot sat up straight when that happened. A bear playing the piano might have been more astonishing. On the other hand, it might not.
“What’s up, Sergeant?” Somebody had to grab the bear by the ears. Szolovits took care of it for his comrades. Some of them would step up for him one day.
Gergely was laughing so hard, he needed a few seconds to check himself so he could talk instead. “Oh, the company we keep!” he said once words worked. “This stretch of Germany is turning into the slum of the war.” Then he started laughing again.
“What do you mean, Sergeant?” another Magyar asked, military respect and annoyance warring in his voice.
“I mean you’re a fucking idiot, Lengyel,” the noncom answered. “Can’t you see? No, I guess you can’t-no eyeballs. They’re pushing up a bunch of Poles alongside us.”
Urk, Isztvan thought. That could prove nasty all kinds of ways. The Hungarian and Polish People’s Republics were fraternal socialist allies against the capitals and imperialist forces opposing them. The governments of both countries would jail or kill anyone mad enough to have any different opinion. But…
Poland was the first country Hitler overran in 1939. Hungary fought on Hitler’s side during the war, though Magyar troops hadn’t invaded Poland. To say things might be touchy summed them up pretty well.
Isztvan could see other complications, too. Compared to Red Army soldiers, the Poles were as likely to be as underequipped as his own countrymen. That wouldn’t be so good when the fighting heated up again. And…“How the devil will we talk with them?” Magyar and Polish had nothing in common.
Well, neither did Magyar and Russian. Gergely found the same solution he would have used when he didn’t feel like ignoring Red Army officers. In his fluent German, he yelled, “Hey, you fucking Polack Arschlochen! C’mon over here and swap sausages with us!”
“Who’re you calling assholes, you stupid, stinking piece of shit?” The Pole who answered didn’t sound angry. He just sounded as if that was how he spoke German. Szolovits could understand him, but it wasn’t easy. And every word with more than one syllable, he stressed on the next to last.
Some of the Poles did come over to swap food and smokes and booze. Neither they nor the Magyars got the Soviet hundred-gram firewater ration, but neither nation’s soldiers had to do without. One of the Poles said, “Kind of fun to pay the Fritzes back for all the shit they dumped on our heads.”
Most of the Magyars looked at one another when they heard that. They didn’t have anything in particular against Germans or Germany. Isztvan thought he understood how the Pole felt better than his countrymen did. He was a Hungarian, yes. But he was also, forever and inescapably, a Jew. Even if there were times when he might want to forget that, the Magyars wouldn’t let him.
“So does it make you happy to screw the Germans for Stalin’s sake?” one of the Hungarians asked, perhaps incautiously.
Their new friends-well, comrades-muttered to themselves in their own language. Not surprisingly, the accent went on the next to last syllable of every word in Polish, too. After a moment, the fellow who’d spoken before said, “Screwing the Germans makes me happy any which way.” His buddies nodded. He went on, “Did you guys enjoy screwing the Russians for Hitler’s sake?”
Not even the incautious Magyar felt like answering that. Admitting you enjoyed screwing the Russians could only land you in deep shit, no matter how true it was. Poles didn’t love Russians, either; Isztvan knew that. Down through the centuries, the Russians had screwed them as hard as the Germans had. The Germans had done it most recently, though, and this latest screwing was a rough one. That was what the Poles got for living between nations bigger and stronger than they were.
“I still think it’s a kick in the head German’s the only language we can use to talk to each other,” Sergeant Gergely said.
One of the Poles pointed up toward the clouds, or toward the heavens beyond them. “Somewhere up there, old Franz Joseph is smiling in his muttonchops,” he said.
Until the end of World War I, southern Poland had belonged to Austria-Hungary. Franz Joseph, the Emperor of Austria, had also been King of Hungary. After the war, the victorious Entente stripped Hungary of all the lands it had ruled that didn’t actually have Magyars living on them, plus some that did. Wanting to regain that lost territory had helped push Admiral Horthy into Hitler’s arms.
“We may have one more language in common,” a Pole said in German. Then he switched to his other choice: “Do any of you know English?”
A couple of Magyars nodded, but only a couple. Szolovits didn’t speak the language. He would have liked to; his ignorance felt like a lack. But he’d never had the chance to learn.
Gergely recognized what tongue it was, even if he didn’t know it, either. He jerked a thumb toward the west. “You can take it up with the Yanks and the Tommies, if you want.”