Some ants-the red ones-had stings. Vaclav waited to find out if anyone over there had spotted his muzzle flash. No machine guns snarled at the dead Citroen. No mortar bombs walked toward it. He decided the excitement created behind the enemy line made the Spaniards forget about everything else.
Marshal Sanjurjo’s men didn’t even start shelling the Republican trenches to avenge the fallen flamethrower specialist. They almost always did that after Vaclav killed somebody. From their quiet, he concluded that they were as uneasy about their late German friend and his little toy as soldiers from the other side would have been.
It was funny. There wasn’t likely to be much difference between any one man on Vaclav’s side and his opposite number on the other. Both guys worried about staying alive, about not getting maimed, about their rations, and about making themselves as comfortable as they could while they fought this stupid war. Taken in a mass, though, the guys on his side were his friends, while the guys who followed Marshal Sanjurjo were nothing but Fascist swine.
Of course, they’d call his buddies a bunch of Reds and swear on a stack of Bibles they had God on their side. But what the hell did they know?
The sun eventually burned through the morning clouds. It crawled across the sky. When it went down, Vaclav wriggled out from under the dead Citroen and crawled back to the Czech positions. When he scrambled down into the trench, he found his usually stolid countrymen more excited than he could remember seeing them for a long time.
“What’s going on?” he asked after he fired up a cigarette-first things first.
“We can go back to France and shoot Nazis again if we want to!” one of the men answered. “The French government asked our government-in-exile to send us up there again.”
When the Third Republic jumped into bed with the Third Reich, the soldiers who still fought under Czechoslovakia’s red, white, and blue tricolor turned into an embarrassment. Vaclav supposed they were lucky to have been allowed to go to Spain instead of getting interned or turned over to the Nazis. Now, though, Daladier had decided Hitler wasn’t the lover of his dreams after all. And so the Czechs turned useful again. When it came to cynicism, Frenchmen were hard to beat.
“What’s the government-in-exile got to say?” Vaclav asked. If it tried to give orders, he didn’t know if he’d be any happier following them than Benjamin Halevy had been with his from France.
“So far, it hasn’t said anything,” the other Czech answered. The Czechoslovakian government-in-exile had abandoned Paris the last time the French switched sides-no, the next to last time now-and was currently ensconced in Barcelona. Marshal Sanjurjo’s bombers visited Barcelona every so often. Otherwise, from what little Vaclav had seen of it, it was a nice place. It was a lot nicer than these trenches; the sniper was sure of that.
“Can’t say I’m surprised,” he observed. “They’ve probably caught manana from the Spaniards.” Most of the people in Barcelona thought of themselves as Catalans. Hearing themselves called Spaniards would have pissed them off, the way Slovaks got pissed off if you mistook them for Czechs. Vaclav didn’t worry about that. Catalans had manana fever, too.
“My bet is, if they tell us to go, they don’t know whether we will or not,” the other soldier said. “They don’t know whether the Republic will let us go, either.”
Vaclav grunted. France was clogged with soldiers. The Spanish Republic starved for them. On the other hand, the Republic was only fighting the equally half-assed Spanish Fascists. France was up against the Germans. Anybody up against Germans had his hands full by the nature of things, as Vaclav had too much reason to know.
“Me, I’d go to hell to kill Nazis,” he said. “I guess I’d go to France, too.”
“Yeah, that’s the way it looks to me,” his countryman agreed. “Christ only knows what the government-in-exile will decide, though. Christ only knows what the Frenchies’ll end up doing, too. Maybe they’ll flip over one more time. How are you supposed to know?”
“Good question.” Vaclav found another good question: “What’s in the stewpot? After sausage and hard bread all day, I’ll eat damn near anything.”
Alistair Walsh remembered telling another English soldier he was lucky to have caught a Blighty wound. That was just before he’d caught one himself. You didn’t think it was such ruddy wonderful luck when something laid open your leg.
He didn’t know whether they’d taken the other wounded man back to England. He did know he hadn’t said boo when they decided to ship him home instead of letting him recover in Egypt and go back to war against General Model’s Afrika Korps.
Had someone behind the scenes quietly pulled wires for him? He hadn’t tried to get anybody to do that. He’d pulled wires to get to Egypt. He wasn’t about to do the same thing to get away.
And even if someone had, he didn’t know whether that someone was necessarily doing him a favor. For the second time in this war, England had troops on the European mainland. One Staff Sergeant Alistair Walsh, who’d done a tour in France the last time around and another much more recently, might make a prime candidate to go back yet again.
He might once he recovered, anyhow. He’d gone back to Blighty the long, slow way: through the Suez Canal and around Africa. That was what losing Gibraltar did to you. By the time his hospital ship reached London, he was limping on the deck with a stick.
He was limping through London now, still a convalescent. The leg hadn’t festered-not badly, anyhow-but it wasn’t up to the demands going into the field would put on it. The people at the hospital had made noises about turning him into a behind-the-lines type: a military bureaucrat, in other words. The look he gave them put paid to that. He had the front-line soldier’s essential quality-he wanted to go out there and do for the buggers on the other side. He just didn’t want them to have too good a chance to do for him instead. At least the doctors and such had the sense to see that.
And maybe, again, he had people pulling wires for him. How many career NCOs got visits in hospital from sitting MPs? Ronald Cartland and Bobbity Cranford both called on him. “Heard you stopped a packet in the desert,” Cartland remarked. “Hard luck, that.”
“Yes, sir. Afraid so, sir,” Walsh replied. Along with being a Tory MP, Cartland was also a decorated captain. He’d seen France, too: this time around, since he was too young to have served in the last war’s trenches.
“Well, we do muddle along here in spite of everything,” he said.
“A good thing we do,” Walsh said. Cartland and Cranford and some of the other aristos had played a bigger part than Walsh in overthrowing the reactionary government that cozied up to Hitler, but the part Walsh had played left those aristos still interested in him. Speaking carefully, he went on, “How are things here in Blighty these days?”
“Interesting times, old man. Definitely, interesting times.” One of Cartland’s elegant eyebrows rose toward his hairline.
They weren’t alone in the sitting room. A glance from Walsh didn’t show anyone else overtly snooping, but he knew perfectly well how to listen in without seeming to do anything of the kind. He had to assume other people could aspire to the same low talent. Since he did, he contented himself with saying, “Like that, is it?”
“Very much like that. Almost too much like that, in fact.” The slight smile on Captain Cartland’s face said he understood perfectly.
Later, Cartland and Cranford filled in more details at a pub where the only customers were likely to be friends. “It’s on tenterhooks, really,” Bobbity Cranford said, slugging back a whiskey with the air of a man who badly needed one. “If we can make a go of knocking Hitler for a loop, I daresay we’ll be forgiven our constitutional trespasses-Lord knows the other side also has a deal that wants forgiving. But if it looks like bogging down into a long, bloody slog like the one you cut your teeth in, Sergeant, we may have ourselves a bit of a problem.”