“It could be worse,” Walsh said. “The Army could be feeding us.” The bloke with two stripes on his sleeve had no comeback to that. Walsh added, “I bet it’s worse on the German side of the line, too. The estaminets there likely dish up turnip sausages and sawdust chips.”
“How do you know these ain’t?” the corporal asked, which was a better question than Walsh wished it were.
This wasn’t one of those estaminets with pretty barmaids, or even homely barmaids, available pour l’amour ou pour le sport. The landlord’s two strapping sons brought food and drink and took away dirty dishes. They weren’t in uniform. They were ready to fight for their country’s liberation to the last drop of English blood.
Well, it could have been worse. They weren’t fighting in Hitler’s Walloon Legion, either. The Fascist Belgians fought harder than the Germans did. They knew what the Allies would probably do to them if they got captured, so they made sure they didn’t.
With a sigh, Walsh set a shilling and a little silver threepence on the table, grabbed his greatcoat, and walked out. English coins were valuable all out of proportion to the official rate of exchange. For all the veteran knew, the Belgians melted them down and made ingots out of them. He didn’t care, as long as he could cheaply buy whatever he needed.
He shrugged on the greatcoat before he’d gone more than a few steps back toward the line. The wind blew out of the north, and warned that winter was on the way. For good measure, he pulled a khaki wool muffler out of his pocket. It was scratchy as all get-out-the Army worried as little about things like comfort as it could get away with-but it kept his neck warm.
Only a few trees still stood. As in the last war, hard fighting had smashed most of them to matchsticks and toothpicks. Leaves on the survivors were going, or had mostly gone, yellow. That sharp wind would soon blow off the ones that still clung to the branches.
Walsh hated bare-branched trees. Those skinny sticks thrusting up toward the sky put him in mind of bones with the flesh rotted off them sticking up from hasty, badly dug graves. You saw things like that after artillery tore up one of those burial plots. Walsh wasn’t the kind to worry about unquiet ghosts, but he also saw those bones in his nightmares.
There was one stretch of ground on the way up to his position that the Germans could get a glimpse of. If they saw you, they’d fire a burst from one of their machine guns. The range was extreme. No one bullet was likely to hit you. That was why they fired the burst-they’d spend a dozen bullets, or a couple of dozen, in hopes of the hit.
When Walsh came to the couple of hundred yards where he might be in danger, he got down on his hands and knees and crawled so the Feldgrau sons of bitches wouldn’t spot him. A couple of men were walking the other way. They didn’t laugh at him-they did the same thing. The Fritzes were too good at hurting you even when you didn’t give them any extra chances.
He sighed when he traveled up the zigzag communications trenches to the front line. The Germans had a better chance of hurting him up here, of course. But it was also a very familiar place. He’d spent a lot of time in trenches like this, through two wars and in training stints between them. He knew how to make himself at home, or as much at home as anyone could be in this low-rent district of hell.
At least it hadn’t rained for a few days. The trenches were muddy. You couldn’t get away from mud during a war, any more than you could get away from blood. But there weren’t any reeking puddles or pools; the water had soaked into the ground. That made a difference. You hated to roll into a puddle in your sleep and soak yourself. The stench wasn’t so bad after things had dried out a little, either.
He nodded to Jack Scholes, who took to this life the way any tough little creature would. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“Not bloody much,” Scholes said. “Germans must ’ave packed it in, loike.”
“And then you wake up!” Walsh exclaimed. “That’ll be the day. Chances are they’re plotting something instead. Do you believe anything different, even for a minute?”
“Believe it? Nar.” The young cockney shook his head. “But Oi can ’ope, roight, loike anybody else?”
“Should never take hope away from anyone,” Walsh said, more seriously than he’d expected to. “Just don’t get your hopes up too high for no reason, or they’ll come crashing down, and you with ’em.”
“That’s the times when the Fritzes got tanks wiv ’em,” Scholes said shrewdly. “Ain’t seen none. Ain’t ’eard none, neither.”
“Well, good,” Walsh said. It wasn’t that he wanted the Germans to strike somewhere else along the line. He didn’t wish that on any of his countrymen. He didn’t even wish it on the French, not unless some froggy had gone out of his way to provoke him.
He wished the Germans would just turn around and go home. He was ready to follow them till they crossed over the border between Holland and their own country. He was ready to stop there, too, and wave good-bye as they vanished back inside Hunland. And as long as they stayed there and didn’t bother anybody else, he was ready to let them stay there and go to hell in their own way.
The trouble with them, of course, was that they had the nasty habit of not wanting to stay there. Every so often, they burst out like locusts and tried to send everybody else to hell their way. They’d almost brought it off twice now. If they went back into Hunland now, would they decide third time was the charm along about, oh, 1962?
If they did, he wouldn’t be the one who had to drive them back. He wouldn’t be a Chelsea pensioner by then, one of the ancient, doddering soldiers who sometimes went to the football club’s matches, but he wouldn’t be ready to pick up a Lee-Enfield or even a Sten gun like the one he had now and go charging across a weedy field whilst machine-gun bullets cracked past him.
No, by then Jack Scholes would be a top sergeant, if he lived and if he stayed in. An East End street rat made as good a career soldier as a Welshman who chose the trade in place of going down into the mines till something caved in and smashed him flat. Both of them understood their other choices were worse. Why else would you want to soldier?
To kill things, people who weren’t soldiers thought. But not even the Germans killed for the fun of it most of the time. It was part of the job, that was all. Only not right now, thank God.
The President of the Spanish Republic had breath like … Vaclav Jezek didn’t know what he had breath like. He’d never smelled anything like that coming from a human being’s mouth before. Coffee and harsh Spanish tobacco and brandy and rotten teeth and God only knew what all else. If you were digging a trench and you dug through a corpse that had been in the ground for only a couple of weeks, the stench from it would come pretty close to this.
If something like that happened, though, you could shovel dirt over the thing and go on about your business. Here, Vaclav had to stand next to the dignitary and take it. Señor Azaña was making a speech about what a wonderful chap he was, after all.
So Benjamin Halévy insisted, anyhow. The number of people reasonably good in both Spanish and Czech was severely limited. Halévy had come to Barcelona with Vaclav so he could explain what the President and the rest of the big shots were saying, and so he could also translate Vaclav’s replies.
Photographers snapped pictures of the Czech and the Jew-not that the papers would say what Halévy was-standing next to the President as Azaña went on and on. “You did not despair of the Republic,” Azaña declared, smacking one fist into the other palm. “After Rome was invaded from North Africa, that was the highest praise she could give her soldiers. After we too were invaded from North Africa, so it is with us as well.”