“I have cousins in America. They mine coal there,” the Pole said. “We haven’t heard from them since the war, but they’re still around.” He scowled. “Not like their country got invaded.”
Sweden. Switzerland. Portugal. Spain. Those were the countries on the European mainland that hadn’t been invaded during the last war…and Spain had just finished its own civil war when the bigger fight exploded. Even so, Isztvan trotted out his own indifferent German to say, “Now they have A-bombs falling on them instead.”
“So do the Russians. So do we. So do you,” the Pole said. “It’s a fucked-up world, is what it is.”
If it weren’t a fucked-up world, Magyars and Poles wouldn’t have squatted in the German rain, filling space the Red Army couldn’t in its fight against the Americans, English, and French. Isztvan got another cigarette going, but the rain put it out in short order. That was fucked up, too.
19
Gustav Hozzel used a hand-held mirror to peer through a broken window in a house on the outskirts of Schwerte. Schwerte itself lay on the eastern outskirts of Dortmund, while Dortmund was at the eastern edge of the Ruhr. The Russians were getting too damn close to the Rhine, in other words.
This bottom floor of the house was fortified, with bricks and rubbish piled up to waist height by the east-facing wall to hold off incoming bullets. Emergency militiamen had knocked out the wall between this house and the next one farther west. They could retreat to that one when they had to.
More emergency militiamen had dug a corridor from the cellar under this house to the one next door. Gustav had been one of them. His back still grumbled. He wasn’t so young as he had been the last time he played these house-to-house games. He grimaced. The fee hadn’t changed, though.
The Russians, as a matter of fact, were masters at this kind of combat and field fortification. The Wehrmacht had learned a lot from them, and paid a monstrous price in blood for the instruction.
That mirror didn’t show him any Russians or other pests. Some of the Soviet satellites’ forces were in action on this stretch of the front along with their Red Army big brothers. Hitler had used allies like that, too: Hungarians and Romanians and Slovaks. From what Gustav had seen, they were like bread crumbs in a sausage mix. You used them to stretch out the real meat.
They’d fought bravely-sometimes. But bravery wasn’t always enough. No matter how brave you were, if you had only rifles and machine guns and the enemy came at you with tanks and truck-mounted rocket launchers and heavy artillery, you might slow him down a little but you wouldn’t stop him. And sometimes the puppet troops wanted nothing more than to bail out of the fight without getting killed.
Max Bachman chuckled when he said that out loud. “I don’t much want to get killed myself,” the printer replied.
“Well, neither do I,” Gustav said. “But I’m still here, same as you are. We haven’t bugged out.”
“And does that make us heroes or jerks?” Max asked. Gustav only shrugged; he had no answer. His boss went on, “I was looking at things from a different angle.”
“Why am I not surprised?” Gustav said. Max made a face at him. Hozzel added, “Tell me what your angle is, then. You know how much you want to.”
“Ah, kiss my ass,” Bachman said without heat. “I was just wondering whether we’d run into any Hungarians we knew.”
“Ha! That’s funny! It could happen, couldn’t it? They hung in there longer than almost anybody else.” Gustav didn’t bother mentioning that the Hungarians had hung in for so long because Hitler occupied their country and installed his own pet Magyar Fascists to run things there for him.
That Stalin was their other choice had no doubt kept them compliant, too. They’d had time to see how he treated other countries that yielded to him. Seeing it kept them in the Führer’s camp. So, instead of surrendering to Stalin, they’d got overrun by him. And now they were Russian cannon fodder, not the German kind.
“The guy who’ll probably know some of the Hungarians is Rolf,” Gustav said after a little thought. “He fought there till the end-till the Ivans drove us back toward Vienna.”
Max made a production of opening a ration can. “I still think chow ought to come in tinfoil tubes, not these stupid things,” he muttered. After a couple of bites, he continued, “Rolf’s a pretty good soldier-for a Waffen-SS puke.”
“There is that,” Gustav said. Rolf lived up to, or down to, the Wehrmacht’s stereotypes about Himmler’s rival service. He was recklessly brave. But he was also inclined to kill anybody on the other side who got in his way. For him, the laws of war were something out of a fag beautician’s imagination. The Wehrmacht hadn’t kept its hands clean on the Eastern Front. Nobody had, on either side. But the Waffen-SS hadn’t just fought dirty. It had reveled in fighting dirty. That made a difference.
Not quite out of the blue, Max said, “I wonder what Rolf thinks of Israel.”
“Matter of fact, I can answer that one,” Gustav said. “He told me the bomb that blew up the Suez Canal should have gone off a little farther northeast.”
“Ach!” Max pulled a face. “I never jumped up and down over Jews, but only an idiot would take the Nazi Quatsch about them seriously. An idiot or an SS man, I mean, if you can tell the one from the other.”
“Sure.” Gustav nodded. “You couldn’t tell those people they were full of crap, not unless you wanted them to bust your balls. But I didn’t go out of my way to give Jews grief.”
“Me, neither.” Max’s head bobbed up and down, too.
As long as things outside seemed quiet, Gustav also opened a ration can. He shoveled pork and beans into his chowlock. It was nothing he would have eaten had he had a choice; as far as he was concerned, the Americans kept their taste buds in a concentration camp. Even a lousy ration, though, beat the hell out of going hungry.
As he ate, he remembered SS Einsatzkommandos leading scared-looking Jews out of a Russian village back in the early days, the days when victory looked sure and soldiering still seemed as if it could be a lark. He didn’t know what happened to those Jews, or to others later on. He didn’t want to know. It was none of his business.
Had Max seen things like that? He probably had. If he hadn’t, he would have been looking away as hard as he could. Not impossible, but it didn’t seem to be his style.
They’d hardly got done talking about Rolf before he poked his head up out of the cellar. “Anything going on?” he asked.
Gustav had found falling back into the military life easier than he’d expected. Rolf might never have left it. Gustav had heard that some old sweats went straight from the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS into the French Foreign Legion: one of the few outfits that didn’t worry about where its soldiers came from. They really hadn’t quit soldiering. Now they fought in meaningless little wars in places like Senegal and Indochina, places that could never matter to anybody in a million years.
“Not much,” Gustav said. Afterwards, he had a hard time making himself believe he hadn’t jinxed things. It was quiet. Then, without warning, it wasn’t any more. A series of descending shrieks in the air made him yell “Down!” even as he threw himself flat.
The heavy shells slammed into the houses in Schwerte. Pieces of the houses started falling down. Gustav scuttled like a crab-arms and legs every which way, belly on the ground-toward a heavy table. He huddled under it. So did Max. They hugged each other, as much to keep from being knocked out of that problematic safety as for friendship and reassurance.
Something slammed into the top floor like a giant’s kick. Big chunks of roof crashed down onto the table. Gustav sniffed anxiously for smoke. If the place started burning, he’d have to leave in spite of the barrage. He hoped he didn’t shit himself before then. Lying under artillery fire was the worst thing in the world, as far as he was concerned.