“Wasn’t that Dreyfus guy a captain back when?” Vaclav inquired, perhaps less cautiously than he might have.
He didn’t faze Halévy-or if he did, Halévy didn’t let on. “He sure was, and look what that earned him. Devil’s Island, no less! And when it was all sorted out at last and he got his rank back and everything, what then? Why, he won the right to get shot at in the last war. Lucky fellow, Dreyfus!”
“Some luck! Did he make it through? I never knew how the story came out,” Vaclav said.
“As a matter of fact, he did,” Halévy replied. “He ended up a lieutenant colonel. If he hadn’t been a Jew, he might have commanded a brigade.” He shrugged a very French shrug.
They passed a boulder that faced the road. A graffito in Spanish defaced the ancient gray stone. “ ‘Death to traitors,’ ” Vaclav said. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen that threat. Every Nationalist faction thought all the others were traitors.
“Hell of a slogan, isn’t it?” Halévy remarked. “All it means is ‘Death to everybody who doesn’t agree with me.’ ”
“That’s what politics comes down to, isn’t it?” Vaclav said.
“No, no, no, no!” Benjamin Halévy said it in French, so it sounded even more negative than it would have in Czech. He went on, “Politics isn’t about killing the other fellow. It’s about getting him to go along with you so you can get rich off of him. You only kill him when you see he won’t go along with you.”
“Ah, thanks. Now I get it,” Vaclav said. They grinned at each other, for all the world as if they’d both been joking a moment before.
Planes buzzed high overhead. The Czechs looked up anxiously, ready to jump off the road and dive for cover if the fighters belonged to the enemy. But the planes were marked with the Republic’s red, gold, and purple, not the black X in a white circle the Nationalists used. They might have attacked by mistake-such things had happened before. This time, the fighters kept on flying north.
A woman in a long dress weeded a vegetable plot by a roadside farmhouse. She wasn’t a witch, but she was a long way from a beauty. If she had a pretty daughter, the younger woman stayed out of sight. Vaclav didn’t see any livestock, either. Maybe the animals were hidden, or maybe the Nationalists had already eaten them. Soldiers could be worse than locusts: locusts didn’t carry rifles.
A body hung from one of the higher branches of an olive tree half a kilometer farther on. He wore a yellowish khaki Nationalist uniform. Around his neck hung a placard. “What’s this one say?” Vaclav asked.
“ ‘I betrayed my friends,’ ” Halévy answered. His arched nostrils flared. The dead Spaniard had been hanging for a few days, by the way he smelled and looked. The carrion birds would go to work on him in earnest before long.
“Some friends,” Vaclav said. A moment later, he spoke again, this time in musing tones: “I wonder how many trees will sprout fruit like that when we clean up Czechoslovakia.”
“Quite a few. Lampposts will grow that kind of fruit, too,” Halévy said. “You may not want to do too much of that, though, or all the trees and lampposts will sprout again twenty years from now.”
“Huh,” Vaclav said. “Plenty of people back there deserve hanging. You do what the Nazis tell you, you suck up to the Germans who’re holding you down, what do you expect? A big kiss?”
“No, but people have to live with each other afterwards,” the Jew replied. “I don’t think the Republicans have figured that out yet. They want to pay back everybody who wasn’t on their side.”
Vaclav had seen Spanish notions of revenge. He said the worst thing about them he could: “These people are worse than Hungarians.” For people from his part of Europe, Magyars were the touchstone of touchiness.
He made Benjamin Halévy smile. “My mother comes out with things like that,” Halévy said.
“Well, good for her!” Vaclav exclaimed.
They tramped on. A few Spaniards fired on them from rocks up ahead. The Czechs spread out and moved forward in short rushes. The Spaniards fell back to keep from getting outflanked. The advance went on.
It was bloody cold. Snow and sleet fell together. Aristide Demange swore at the miserable weather in Belgium. It wasn’t so bad as it had been in Russia, but nothing was that bad, the last circle of Dante’s hell included. Before long, it would be Christmas, and then 1944.
A little farther east, the Germans were holed up in a village they’d held for years. They were comfortable there, and warm. Half the kids under four had probably come out of their mothers making the Nazi salute.
Crouching in a miserable, freezing hole in the ground wasn’t the same. Demange wanted either to take the village ahead away from the Fritzes or fall back to the last one the French had liberated.
His superiors didn’t feel like listening to him. Regimental headquarters lay a couple of villages back. The colonel there was plenty comfortable. “Your zeal does you credit, Lieutenant, but the weather militates against a successful attack, I fear,” he said, spreading his clean, well-groomed hands in regret. “It is a pity, isn’t it?”
“The Germans didn’t think this kind of weather was too shitty in 1938,” Demange pointed out.
“And they failed,” the colonel said placidly.
They’d failed to take Paris. They’d sure taken everything from the Dutch border to the suburbs of the capital, though. Demange refrained from pointing that out; he could see it wouldn’t help. Instead, he said, “Well, how about letting us fall back a kilometer or two, then, to get into warmer quarters?”
“Give back even a millimeter of liberated Belgium? Give it up?” The colonel shook his head. “Pas possible! You will stay where you are and accommodate yourself to your circumstances.”
“Right, sir. I see you’ve accommodated yourself to your circumstances mighty well,” Demange said. He didn’t know this had been the mayor’s house before the colonel ensconced himself in it, but that was the way to bet. It was the biggest, most comfortable house in the village. He knew that, all right.
The colonel’s graying mustache quivered. “Why should I not demote you for insubordination?” he asked, no doubt thinking the mere idea would reduce Demange to a quivering slice of gelatin.
To the colonel’s unhappy amazement, Demange laughed in his face instead of quivering. “Because I’d thank you for it, that’s why,” he snarled. “I never wanted to be an officer in the first place. I got stuck with it, is what happened to me.”
He left without saluting. He also left without waiting for permission. If Monsieur le Colonel wanted reasons to demote him, now the stinking con had a whole raft of them.
But Monsieur le Colonel turned out to be made of subtler and more vindictive stuff than that. Not long after Demange came back to his cold, wet hole in the ground, a runner brought an order forward. Demange’s company was to attack and seize the village in front of them. By tomorrow. Or else. The order said nothing about artillery support or any other help from the rest of the regiment.
“Merde,” Demange muttered, and the Gitane in the corner of his mouth twitched as he spoke.
“Could it be that you succeeded in provoking our brave and aggressive regimental commander?” Lieutenant Mirouze asked-he was learning how to talk to Demange, all right.
“Yeah, I fucking provoked him,” the older man replied. “But I did too good a job. The old bastard doesn’t want to break me down to sergeant, dammit. Not even down to private. The con wants me dead. And if the rest of the company buys plots behind mine, he doesn’t give a fart.”
“What do we do, then?”
“I’ll think of something. Bastard’s cute, is he? I’ll show him.” Demange figured he would, too-or die trying. The colonel hadn’t left him any other choices.