And, because he did, he confused American politics. (That plenty of people wanted to see Stalin, roasted, on a platter with an apple in his mouth sure didn’t hurt.) “Why are folks so blind?” Peggy asked when she got back to Philadelphia after one of her politicking swings.
Herb looked at her. “ ‘No one in this world, so far as I know, has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people,’ ” he quoted with obvious relish.
“Is that Barnum?” Peggy asked.
“Nope.” Herb paused to light a cigarette. “Old Phineas Taylor said ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’ Same sentiment, different words. The other one’s from Henry Louis instead.”
“Oh. Mencken,” Peggy said with faint-or maybe not so faint-distaste. “Back in the day, I used to think he was the cleverest man alive.”
“That’s okay, sweetie. So did he,” her husband said.
Peggy snorted and went on, “But he started wearing thin when he went after Roosevelt like a stray dog chasing a car. And he’s one of the jerks who stand up and whinny when they play Deutschland uber Alles.” She shuddered. Whenever the Nazis announced a victory on the radio, they preceded it with the German national anthem and the Horst Wessel Lied, the Party’s song.
“He always has been. He left the Baltimore Sun for a while during the last war because he liked the Kaiser too well,” Herb said.
“Did he? I didn’t remember that,” Peggy confessed. “The other funny thing is, how come two of the snottiest so-and-sos the country’s ever seen both went by initials instead of their names?”
“Well, I kind of sympathize with Barnum,” Herb said. “If I got stuck with Phineas, I wouldn’t want the world to know about it, either. But there’s nothing wrong with Mencken’s monicker. Maybe he just needed a short waddayacallit.”
“Byline,” Peggy said.
“Yeah. One of them.” Herb nodded. “You’re right, though. It’s funny.”
“Looking back at things, the Kaiser wasn’t such a bad guy,” Peggy said. She watched Herb bristle, as she’d known he would. After all, he’d put on khaki and gone Over There to settle Wilhelm’s hash a generation earlier. All the same, she stuck out her chin and went on, “Well, he wasn’t, darn it. Compared to Hitler, he was a regular Rotarian, honest to God.”
“Compared to Hitler, Stalin’s a Rotarian, for crying out loud,” Herb said. “Unless you’re a Rotarian yourself, I mean.”
“Or unless you’re Mencken,” Peggy put in.
“Or unless you’re Mencken,” her husband agreed. “Of course, he doesn’t like Jews much, either. One more reason for him to root for the Nazis against the Reds.”
“I know Mencken doesn’t like Jews, but I don’t think he has any idea how much Hitler hates them,” Peggy said slowly. “You know who the luckiest people in the world are? All the Jews in Poland.”
Herb blinked. “How do you figure that?”
“Poland’s on Hitler’s side. If it weren’t, he’d be murdering the Jews there. I mean murdering, no two ways about it. The Poles don’t love Jews, either, but they don’t want to see them dead. Not like that, anyhow.”
Herb took a last drag on the cigarette, stubbed it out in a brass ashtray on the end table by his chair, and lit another one. A thin, straight whisper of smoke rose from the ashtray till he noticed and did a proper job of killing the butt. In a low, troubled voice, he said, “You see stories buried at the bottom of page nine in the paper: pieces where the Russians claim the Germans are massacring Jews.”
“Uh-huh. You do. You don’t see a heck of a lot of stories where the Germans deny it, either,” Peggy said.
“I know.” Herb smoked the new cigarette in quick, fierce puffs. “I’d always thought it was because claims like that weren’t even worth denying, know what I mean? Now I wonder.”
“I’ve wondered all along,” said Peggy, who’d seen the fun the Nazis had with Jews ever since the day they invaded Czechoslovakia. She’d done more than wonder, in fact. She’d believed every word.
“We should do something about that,” Herb said.
“Toss me your cigarettes, will you?” Peggy said, liking him very much. He was the best kind of American. Show him something wrong and he wanted to set it right. The only trouble was, Europe didn’t work that way. So much history piled up on the hatreds there that sometimes pinning the blame was impossible after all this time. Which didn’t stop people from slaughtering one another in carload lots to try to drown an ancient slight in blood.
Good American tobacco helped her not think about any of that for a little while. Maybe, if all the Europeans and the Japs were this prosperous, they wouldn’t want to smash in their neighbors’ skulls with pickaxes any more.
Or maybe they would, but they’d choose a fancier grade of pickaxe to do their dirty work. That struck Peggy as much too likely. She shook her head. The more you looked at this old world, the more fouled up it seemed to be. And she hadn’t even started drinking yet.
Chapter 14
Theo Hossbach knew the way to Smolensk. Whenever his Panzer III and the other machines in the regiment turned toward the Soviet stronghold, the Ivans fought twice as hard as they did the rest of the time. And, considering how much trouble they made any time at all…
He didn’t think the old Panzer II in which he’d gone through so much with Hermann Witt and Adi Stoss would have survived this campaign. No sooner had that gone through his head than he laughed at himself. Of course the old panzer wouldn’t have survived the campaign. It damn well hadn’t.
So now he’d had to get used to two new crewmen. All things considered, he would have been happier charging a Red Army machine gun with a Luger. The Russians could only kill him. They wouldn’t want to try to get to know him.
He had new duties, too, but that wasn’t so bad. Now he sat up front in the panzer, next to Adi, with the radio set between them. He could see out. He needed to see out, because he was in charge of the bow machine gun as well as the radio. He could use them both at once if he had to, controlling the gun with a padded mount that accommodated his forehead.
Getting used to two new people’s habits seemed much harder. Kurt Poske liked to sing and whistle to himself. Sometimes the loader didn’t even realize he was doing it. Theo wanted to reach back and smash his kneecap with a wrench. It might have been better had Poske managed to stay on key. On the other hand, it might not. He still would have been there.
Lothar Eckhardt, by contrast, cracked his knuckles. Everybody probably did that once in a while, but the gunner did it all the time. It sounded like gunfire coming from behind Theo. He could have come up with a million noises he would rather have heard.
A Panzer II’s turret had room for only one man. Sergeant Witt had had to command the panzer and load and fire the cannon and the coaxial machine gun. That left him as busy as a one-armed paper hanger with the hives, but he did it for a long time. He didn’t need to any more, not with this bigger, more modern machine. But everything seemed to come with a price.
Driver and bow gunner/radioman could talk to each other without their crewmates’ hearing. They could, but mostly they didn’t. Theo didn’t talk much no matter what. Adi made more noise, but he respected his comrade’s peculiarities. That was one of the things that made soldiering beside him a pleasure.
As they rattled along one morning, Theo found a question escaping him: “You all right with the new guys?”
Adi glanced over in surprise. A sentence from Theo was like a couple of chapters from anybody else. “Ja,” he answered, pitching his voice so it wouldn’t carry back to the turret. “Pretty much. We’d all be dead by now if they didn’t shoot straight.”
He had that right, no two ways about it. Eckhardt had been a pretty good gunner before he got this slot. The Reich ’s training centers took care of that. And Sergeant Witt, with his own wealth of experience, made the kid better than he had been. Except for singing and whistling, Poske did all right in action, too. Loader was the most junior position in the five-man crew.