If he ever came home from Russia… Neither he nor his countrymen had been thrilled about the idea of taking on the Red Army. A good many Frenchmen were Reds themselves, and not all of them had been weeded out of the expeditionary force, not by a long shot. Even the French soldiers who weren’t Communists would have been happier to keep fighting Hitler’s crew. The Germans, after all, had invaded them.
But their politicians had cut a deal, and this was what came of it. The Russians had dropped leaflets (written in better French than most Germans used) urging the French soldiers to go over to them, promising not just good treatment as prisoners but practically anything else their little hearts desired.
A few Frenchmen did desert. But the promises were so overblown, they roused Luc’s ever-ready suspicions. Anything that sounded too good to be true probably was.
He and his comrades hadn’t advanced against the Russians with any great enthusiasm. But the Russians, no matter how juicy the promises they packed into their leaflets, fought like wild animals. They weren’t skilled military technicians, the way the Germans were. They had no quit in them, though. If you wanted to shift them, you had to kill them. They weren’t about to run away.
And you needed to make sure you killed them all. They had the wild animal’s gift for concealment. If you saw one, you could bet ten more were hiding close by. If you didn’t see one, ten more were liable to be hiding close by anyhow. The Russians had the charming habit of digging foxholes camouflaged from the front and shooting troops who incautiously went past them in the back.
If you walked off into the bushes to take a crap, you were liable to get your throat cut. You were liable to have worse than that happen to you, too. One poor bastard in Luc’s company had been found with a French flag-just the kind you might wave if you were lining the sidewalks at a Paris parade on Bastille Day-stuck up his ass. Luc wondered if that happened to the poor, sorry poilus who went over to the Russians with leaflets in hand. He hoped not, but he wouldn’t have been surprised.
One thing the way the Red Army fought undoubtedly did: it made the French fight the same way. When the other bastards were sneaky and murderous and cruel, the international proletarian brotherhood looked a lot less persuasive all of a sudden. You wanted to do unto others as they were doing unto you. Wasn’t that your best chance to stay alive?
The Germans sure thought so. They’d fought a pretty clean war in France: not perfect, but pretty clean. Luc, who’d seen Landsers shot while trying to give up, knew his own side hadn’t fought a perfect war, either. Pretty clean, maybe, but not perfect. Here in Russia, the Germans didn’t even pretend to try. They fought at least as foully as the Red Army did. Most of the time, they didn’t bother taking prisoners. When they did, they often didn’t bother feeding them.
They also often didn’t bother feeding civilians in towns they captured. Whatever they got their hands on, they seized for themselves. In a way, that made military sense. In another way…
“They know how to make people love ’em, don’t they?” Luc said after tramping through a village full of hollow-eyed peasants.
“Oh, maybe a little,” Lieutenant Demange said. Somehow, he’d managed to keep himself in Gitanes. Luc, these days, was smoking anything he could find. Russian tobacco was bad; German, worse.
“Tell you one more thing?” Luc went on. Demange nodded and raised an eyebrow, waiting for whatever the one thing was. Luc said, “I’ve always been glad I’m not a Jew, you know? I mean, who isn’t? But what with the way the Boches and the Poles treat ’em here, now I’m really fucking glad I’m not a Jew.”
“I dunno. If you’d got your cock clipped right after you were born, you wouldn’t’ve had to come here. For some reason or other, the brass doesn’t think Jews and Nazis mix so well,” Demange said.
“Wonder why that is,” Luc said. “Maybe they aren’t as dumb as they look.”
“Couldn’t prove it by me,” the older man answered. “But the other funny thing is, the Germans aren’t doing anything to the kikes in Poland. They can’t stand ’em, and neither can most of the Poles, like you said. But the government there doesn’t want the Nazis fucking with ’em, on account of they’re Poland’s kikes. Politics can spin your head around faster’n absinthe.”
“You ever drink that shit?” Luc asked. It had been illegal about as long as he’d been alive, but Demange was old enough to have tried it before it was outlawed… and afterwards, if he respected the laws against it the same way he respected everything else.
“Oh, sure,” the veteran said casually. “Take some mighty strong brandy and smoke some hashish while you’re pouring it down. That’ll give you the idea.”
“Got you.” Luc had no more smoked hashish than he’d drunk absinthe, but he wasn’t about to let on. Demange would have been as ready to scorn lower-middle-class respectability as he was with anything else that drew his notice. Strong brandy Luc did know. He’d heard about the kinds of things hashish did, so he could make what he thought was a halfway decent guess about absinthe.
If Demange saw through him, the veteran didn’t let on. He didn’t have much time to let on: the Russians started shelling the French positions. They might have most of Europe in arms against them, but they showed no signs of giving up. Holland and Belgium, Luxembourg and Denmark had fallen down on their backs with their legs in the air and their bellies showing when the Germans invaded them. Czechoslovakia and Norway hadn’t lasted much longer. Now that they were conquered, they weren’t giving the Nazis much trouble any more.
Only France had fought back hard (with, Luc grudgingly admitted to himself, some help from England). France… and now Russia. France hadn’t-just barely hadn’t, but hadn’t-let the Wehrmacht nip in behind Paris. Moscow was a hell of a lot farther from the German, or even the Polish, border than Paris was from the Rhine. The same held for St. Petersburg-no, it was Leningrad these days-and Kiev. The Russians could trade much more space for time than France had been able to.
Luc wished he hadn’t had such thoughts with Red Army 105s crashing down all around him. He wanted to hope he’d go home one day, not to know he’d be stuck in this goddamn Russian icebox forever and a day. What he wanted and what he was likely to get no doubt weren’t even related to each other.
Chaim Weinberg had seen Czechs in Spain before. There were more than a few of them in the International Brigades, along with men from just about every other country in Central Europe. That’s why they call ’em Internationals, smart guy, he jeered at himself. He admired what he’d seen of them, too. They had the same solid virtues as most Germans, without being such assholes about it. Almost all of them spoke German, and they could make out his Yiddish, so he could talk with them. He approved of talking. Plenty of people said he did it too fucking much.
He’d never seen so many Czech soldiers all at once, though. And he’d never seen so many who weren’t all solidly Marxist-Leninist, either. But the Popular Front was alive and well in Republican Spain. These Czechs might not be Communists, but nobody could say they weren’t anti-Fascist. They’d hated the Nazis enough to keep shooting at them even after their own country went under.
Chaim rapidly discovered they were damn fine soldiers, too. Nothing they saw outside of Madrid fazed them, not even a little bit. On the contrary: they’d learned their trade in a harder classroom than any Spain offered. One guy used an antitank rifle as a sniper’s piece. That struck Chaim as swatting flies with an anvil, but the Czech was a damn maestro with the brute. Anything that moved, out to a mile away from him, maybe farther, was liable to stop moving very suddenly.
His name was Votslav, or something like that. He looked down his rather blunt nose at Marshal Sanjurjo’s men. “They don’t know much about taking cover, do they?” he said in slow, deliberate Deutsch.