Grudgingly, Adam Pfaff said, “Well, maybe you were right, Corporal. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be putting mascara and rouge on this corpse.”
“Bet your ass we wouldn’t,” Baatz agreed, also grudgingly. Neither Pfaff’s rank nor his own, which shielded them from most fatigue duties, kept them from shoveling and hauling as if they were kikes or jailbirds. His hands were getting blisters in places where they didn’t already have calluses.
Even more galling was the ironic glint that sparked in the dark eyes of the big-nosed bastards with the yellow stars on their clothes. See? they might have been saying. You like Hitler, and what has it got you? You’re doing the same kind of shit we are.
If one of them had said anything like that to Arno, he would have knocked the pigdog’s teeth down his throat with an entrenching tool. The Jews knew better than to open their big yaps. Whether or not they said anything, though, their eyes spoke for them.
The SS began moving in in droves: Gestapo men, SD men, hard-faced troopers from the Waffen-SS. The looks they gave ordinary German soldiers were even more scornful than the ones the Landsers got from Jews. To the SS functionaries, soldiers were only cowflops under their boots. Medieval barons must have looked at peasants the same way.
Every so often, the peasants had risen up against their noble overlords. They’d killed all the barons and counts and princes they could catch. Arno had never sympathized with the peasants till now. He finally understood.
He still got angry when he saw Jews eyeing him in their sneaky, snotty way. His understanding wasn’t all that flexible. It stretched only so far.
SD men-faggots if he’d ever seen any-started hanging red-white-and-black bunting and swastika banners all over town. They wanted to give the impression that Münster loved the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and the Führer. Even Arno knew better than that. Why were soldiers and panzers holding the place down under martial law if everybody in it was such a contented citizen of the Grossdeutsches Reich?
Well, everybody in it except the Jews. They weren’t citizens of the Reich. They were only residents. Most Germans-most good, moral, upright Germans-wished they weren’t even that.
A few RAF bombers came over by night. In the confusion of the air raid, someone with matches and a can of kerosene torched a lot of banners and bunting. The soldiers had more important things to worry about. For Arno and his men, staying alive stood pretty high on the list.
By contrast, the blackshirted fairies pitched conniption fits when the sun came up and they discovered how their artistic handiwork had been vandalized. They started screaming and wailing and demanding house-to-house searches to smoke out the culprit. Some of the things they wanted to do to him once they caught him made Arno’s blood run cold. For somebody who’d spent so long on the Eastern Front, that was saying something.
“Boy, they’re sweethearts, aren’t they?” Adam Pfaff said.
“At least,” Arno answered. He wasn’t used to agreeing with the miserable Obergefreiter, but they saw eye-to-eye on this one.
The artistic SS men raised such a hue and cry that it finally took a Wehrmacht colonel general to tell them to shut up and to make it stick. Along with Himmler’s elite, high-ranking Army, Navy, and Luftwaffe officers were coming into Münster to hear what their chief of state had to say. Some of them eyed the SS paladins the way the blackshirts looked at Landsers. An interesting time was had by all.
CHAPTER 19
Pete McGill handed the Marine Corps quartermaster sergeant his helmet. He’d worn one like it ever since he became a leatherneck. So had a zillion other Marines, and even more doughboys and dogfaces. Any English soldier who’d gone over the top at the Somme in 1916 would have recognized them: they were nearly exact copies of the limeys’ tin hats. Tommies wore them to this day.
Marines and soldiers had worn them to this day, or something close to it. But Progress with a capital P was now reaching even the garrison on Midway. In exchange for Pete’s steel derby with its broad brim, the quartermaster sergeant handed him a pot-shaped plastic helmet liner and a helmet that fit tightly over it. You could adjust the straps and padding inside the liner so it gave a good fit to your particular noggin.
When Pete started to do that, the quartermaster said, “One thing at a time, if you don’t mind. You’ve got to sign for this baby first.”
As a matter of fact, Pete had to sign twice: once for the helmet and once for the liner. He said, “You sure there’s not an extra form for the goddamn chin strap?”
“No, that’s included on the form for the helmet proper, to which it attaches,” the quartermaster sergeant answered automatically. Then, a beat slower than he should have, he realized Pete was being sarcastic. He jerked his thumb at the tent flap. “Funny guy, huh? Get the hell outa here, funny guy.”
Grinning, Pete got. He looked out at sand and at the Pacific, which from Midway seemed to stretch to infinity in all directions. The island still stank faintly of dead Japs. The Marines hadn’t taken more than a handful of prisoners, most of them captured too badly wounded to die fighting or kill themselves. As far as Pete was concerned, if Hirohito’s boys hadn’t caused so much trouble from this place, they would have been welcome to it.
Come to that, if Midway hadn’t been a place from which you could either cause trouble or try to stop it, no one in his right mind would have wanted to set foot on it. It could have stayed as it was in the beginning, all sand and thin grasses and crash-landing gooney birds.
But on the Pacific’s vast, watery chessboard, islands were important squares. You could put garrisons on them. Even more crucially, you could fly planes off them.
They still hadn’t told him when they were going to let him and the rest of the Marines who’d recaptured Midway get off the island and go somewhere with more civilized comforts. They also still hadn’t imported any vaccinated hookers. As far as Pete was concerned, that was really a goddamn shame.
He barked sudden laughter. The quartermaster sergeant who thought he was God’s anointed because he doled out the spiffy new helmets … They wouldn’t let that sorry son of a bitch off Midway any time soon, either. Pete wondered if they’d told the guy yet. He would have bet against it. The quartermaster was too full of himself to have got that kind of bad news.
An American flag fluttered near the chugging desalinization plant. And, Pete saw, a new banner had gone up alongside: a smaller, plainly homemade one. MIDWAY-HOME OF THE TYPHOID MARY PARACHUTE BRIGADE, the flag declared.
Pete laughed again. You could laugh or you could cuss or you could go Asiatic: grab a rifle or a Tommy gun and do as much shooting as you could till they got you. Nobody here had actually done that. More than one Marine had talked about it, though. Some were just blueskying. Others sounded honest-to-God tempted.
They said that when you talked about crap like that you never actually went and did it. Pete never had worked out who they were supposed to be. He had seen that a lot of what they said was pure bullshit. This once, he hoped the mysterious they knew what they were talking about.
One way to keep from going Asiatic was to take your mind off your troubles. As soon as things like prunes and canned apple juice started getting to the island, a couple of enterprising Marines rigged up a still and started turning out joy juice. It wasn’t what you’d call good hooch-it wasn’t within miles of what you’d call good hooch-but hooch it was. With no good hooch closer than Kauai, the customers weren’t inclined to be fussy.