Taken by surprise, Vaclav dropped the mess tin in the mud and had to rinse it again. “I’m here!” he said, first in Czech and then in German, which a non-Czech had a better chance of following.
The International replied in the same language: “Letter for you.”
“I’ll be damned.” Vaclav said that in Czech. He shoved through his countrymen to get to the guy with the mail. Several of the Czechs murmured jealously. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t done the same thing as other soldiers who got mail and he didn’t.
“Hier, Freund,” the International said, and handed him an envelope.
“Danke. Danke schon.” Vaclav took it over to a fire. He shielded it from the rain with his hand. When he got close enough to the flickering light to read, his heart did a pole vault. That was his father’s handwriting! His letter had got through to Prague, and he’d got an answer.
The stamp in the upper corner of the envelope didn’t look familiar to him. He swore under his breath: the damned thing had Hitler’s face on it, complete with ugly mustache. Printed over the Fuhrer were the words Bohmen u. Mahren-the German for Bohemia and Moravia. The Nazis had even taken away the name of his country!
He tore the envelope open. If only the real Hitler were so easy to mutilate! The letter inside was short. He had a little trouble reading it; some German censor’s rubber stamp blurred and covered up a few words. But he managed.
My dear son, his father wrote, so good to hear from you after so long! Your mother and I and your two sisters are all well. I am sorry to have to tell you that Grandpa Stamic-that was his mother’s father-passed on a year ago. It was a liver disease, and had nothing to do with the war. Work is hard, but there is work. We eat well enough. Be safe. We will pray for you. With love, Papa.
“What’s the word?” another Czech asked.
“My dad says there’s food in Prague. He’s working hard. One of my grandfathers died.” It all sounded so flat when you came out with it. But to have heard! To have heard for the first time since the fight in the Sudetenland went to hell!
“So the Nazis really do let letters through if the Red Cross handles them?” The other Czech soldier sounded as if he had trouble believing the German occupiers showed even that tiny bit of mercy and of adherence to international law.
“It’s my old man’s handwriting, sure as I’m standing here, so I guess the assholes do.” Vaclav sounded the same way, because he was amazed. Expecting anything good or even decent from Germans-especially from Germans in uniforms with swastikas on them-wasn’t easy for Czech exiles.
“I’ll send my folks a letter, too,” the other soldier declared. “Up till now, I just figured I was wasting my time.”
Vaclav nodded. “Well, sure. Same here. Christ, this is the first time I’ve heard anything from anybody back in Prague since I went over the border and let the Poles intern me.”
“Give the Red Cross some credit,” Benjamin Halevy said. “Even Hitler thinks twice before he lets them see him acting like a dickhead. Sometimes he does it anyway, mind you, but he does think twice.”
That got the Czechs suggesting where Hitler could stick his second thoughts. Vaclav doubted whether even a man considerably more limber than the Fuhrer was likely to be would have been able to stick them in some of those places, let alone twist them once he’d done it. The soldiers had played such games before. It was one more way to coax a few laughs out of misery and to make fifteen minutes or a half hour go by faster than they would have otherwise.
Then somebody noticed Hitler’s face on the stamp. The guy wanted to use it for toilet paper. “Forget that, pal,” Jezek said. “Anybody gets his shit in the Fuhrer’s mustache, it’ll be me. I just wish I could do it for real.”
“Don’t we all?” Halevy said. “The queue for that would stretch all the way from here to Berlin-and you’d better believe plenty of Germans would line up along with everybody else.”
“Yeah, well, they can wait way at the back. They don’t get to crap on him till all the others have had their turns,” Vaclav said.
“Sounds fair to me.” The Jew nodded. “If it wasn’t for them, none of the rest of us would’ve had to worry about him.”
They embellished that idea for a while, too. Then the Nationalists lobbed a few mortar bombs their way. Mortars and the finned shells they hurled were cheap, easy to make, and didn’t have tight tolerances. They were well suited to manufacture in Spain, in other words. The way things were right now, Hitler and Mussolini had trouble shipping goodies to Marshal Sanjurjo. Spaniards-even Fascist Spaniards-were stubborn people. Sanjurjo went right on fighting, doing all he could with what he had left and what he could figure out how to build for himself.
Huddled in the mud, Vaclav said, “I wish England and France would send the Republic a couple of hundred tanks. New tanks, I mean, not the worn-out junk they don’t want for themselves any more. We’d have the Nationalists howling for mercy and on the run in about a week.”
“Wouldn’t even take that long,” Halevy said, his voice muffled because his mouth wasn’t more than a centimeter out of the muck. “But don’t hold your breath, not unless you want to turn bluer than a French uniform from the last war.”
“Don’t they care whether they win?” Vaclav demanded.
“Good question. I wish I had a good answer for you,” Halevy replied. “Remember, they both sent armies into Russia to fight on Hitler’s side. They don’t want Germany to conquer them, but they aren’t dead keen on knocking the Fascists flat, either.”
Jezek wished he could have called the Jew a liar. But if England and France had been serious about taking on the Nazis, they would have hit Germany hard from the west as soon as Hitler attacked Czechoslovakia. It hadn’t happened then. All this time had passed since. Everyone had spent oceans of blood and snowdrifts of money. And the Western democracies still weren’t more than half serious about the war.
The Spaniards were, on both sides. Mortar bombs kept falling on the Czechs’ trenches. The foreign tanks that might have turned the war around were nowhere to be seen.
Ivan Kuchkov HAD watched Soviet forces retreat for years. Now the Red Army was moving forward in the Ukraine, even though it wasn’t winter. The Germans still fought hard in every village and on every north-south water line, no matter how small, but they were distracted in a way they hadn’t been before. Now they had to worry about the West, too, and they’d taken a lot of men out of the Soviet Union to fight back there. The ones who were left could slow down the Russians, but couldn’t stop them.
Right this minute, Kuchkov’s company wasn’t even facing Fritzes. The bastards in front of them were Romanians. Some of the swarthy men in the dark brown uniforms were brave enough. More surrendered on any excuse or none. They didn’t want to be here. They didn’t have artillery and tanks to put some weight on their side, the way the Hitlerites did.
So they came up to the Russians with their hands held high, hopeful smiles on their faces. “Kamerad!” they shouted, just as the Germans did.
They were miserably poor. Hardly anyone, even the officers, had anything worth stealing. Their field ration was cornmeal mush-mamaliga, they called it. They were willing-eager, in fact-to share it with their captors. Kuchkov wasn’t so eager to take it. Most of the time, he could do better scrounging off the countryside.
“Friends?” asked the Romanians who’d picked up bits and pieces of Russian. “Friends now?”
“You’re fucked now, is what you are,” Kuchkov would tell them. “You’re totally fucked, as a matter of fact.”
Most of the time, they couldn’t understand him. Or maybe they didn’t want to understand. They’d managed to surrender. They hadn’t got killed trying. The hard part was over. Now they could sit in POW camps till the war was over. Then they’d go home. The worst thing they had to worry about was whether their girlfriends were blowing the guy next door while they were stuck behind barbed wire.