They didn't know where they were going, either. Some guessed Russia. More plumped for Norway. "Me, Ah don't much care," Jock said. "Put a goddamn Fritz in front of me, and Ah'll shoot the bugger." When he came out with that, the rest of the men solemnly nodded. How could you sum things up better?
One fellow kept insisting they wouldn't see any more Fritzes-they'd done their bit, he insisted, and were going back to Blighty for good. The other soldiers humored him, as they would have humored any harmless maniac. Like them, Walsh would have loved to believe it. Like them, he couldn't. Once the army got hold of you, it didn't turn you loose till the war ended-which didn't look like happening any time soon-or till it used you up.
In Brest (which turned out to be their destination), they filed aboard what was called a troopship. By the way it smelled, it had hauled more cattle, or maybe sheep, than soldiers. Pussy found the symphony of stinks fascinating. Walsh lit a Navy Cut to blunt what it did to his nostrils. On that ship, he would have lit a Gitane, and he thought they smelled like smoldering asphalt.
They made it back to England without meeting a U-boat. He heartily approved of that. They came into port just after sunup, and got served huge helpings of bangers and mash and properly brewed tea. After British army rations, French army rations, and a lot of whatever he could scavenge, he approved of that, too.
"You see?" said the chap who was convinced they were going to be discharged. "They wouldn't feed us like this if they meant to keep us on." For the first time, Walsh began to wonder. That did fit in with the way the army mind worked.
Whether it did or not, it turned out not to be true. A captain with a really splendid red mustache stood up on a barrel and addressed the soldiers just returned to their native soiclass="underline" "Well, lads, we'll be entraining you soon. Then it's Scotland, and then another little pleasure cruise." His wry grin said he knew what the troopship had been like. Maybe he'd been on it, though an officer would have had better accommodations than other ranks. He went on, "After that, it's Norway. If Adolf thinks we'll just sit by whilst he gobbles it up, he'd best think again, what?"
"Norway?" That astonished, dismayed bleat came from the luckless private who'd been so sure he would soon be set at liberty.
"Norway," the captain repeated. "The Norwegians are tough fighters-there just aren't enough of them to hold back the Fritzes on their own." His smile suddenly went broad and lickerish. "And the girls there are mighty pretty, and they'll be mighty glad to see the blokes who're helping to keep 'em free."
That might turn out to be true, and it might not. Most likely, it would be part truth, part stretcher. Some Frenchwomen enjoyed spitting in an English soldier's eye, while others were complaisant as could be.
Lorries growled up to take the troops from the dockside to the train station. Had the Germans sneaked a few bombers across the Channel, they could have worked a fearful slaughter. But everything went off smoothly. No one seemed to give a damn about Pussy. Walsh was probably breaking all kinds of laws by bringing her into the country, but he didn't care.
The train proved less crowded than the one in France that had hauled him away from the fighting there. Tinned rations were passed out. He sighed. They'd keep him full, which didn't mean he loved them.
As the train rattled through the north of England, Jock nudged him and asked, "You won't mind if me and my mates 'op it here, will you, Sergeant?" The Yorkshireman's grin said he didn't expect to be taken seriously.
"Oh, right," Walsh answered. "Desertion in wartime-they'll pin a medal on you for that, they will." He glanced over to make sure the private understood exactly what officialdom would do if he and his mates took off. The twinkle in Jock's eyes showed he did. Walsh gave him a cigarette and fired up one of his own. They smoked in companionable silence.
Scotland. Walsh had expected Edinburgh, but the train pounded on, north and east. "Aberdeen," guessed someone whose clotted accent said he knew the local geography pretty well. It made sense. Norway was pretty far north, and they wouldn't be sailing toward the part the Germans had already grabbed. Walsh hoped like blazes they wouldn't, anyhow.
Aberdeen seemed to come out of nowhere. It was a gray granite city, as if the bones of the countryside were carved into churches and shops and houses and blocks of flats. The North Sea lay beyond. Walsh hadn't seen it before. It looked colder and generally grimmer than the Channel. Who would have imagined anything could?
More khaki lorries waited at the station as the soldiers got off their trains. Some of the drivers smoked. One or two nipped from flasks unlikely to hold water. A raw wind blew down out of the north. Summer? Gray Aberdeen scoffed at summer. What would Norway be like? Walsh half wished he hadn't thought to wonder.
He clumped up the gangplank onto a freighter that had seen better days but didn't reek of livestock, Pussy still in her hatbox. As soon as he found his assigned place, he let her scurry around for a while. The cat had been very good about staying cooped up-she'd slept most of the way north. But she needed to get out while she could.
She rewarded him by dropping a dead mouse on his bunk. Aren't you proud of me? the green eyes asked. Isn't it a lovely present? Will you eat it right now or save it for later? Walsh took it by the tail and tossed it in a dustbin. He made much of Pussy afterwards and chucked her under the chin, but he could tell she was disappointed.
A small convoy pulled out of the harbor: troopships escorted by a destroyer and a pair of smaller warships. Frigates? Corvettes? Walsh was no sailor; he didn't know their right names. He did know he was glad to have them along.
A name began to drift through the freighter. Trondheim. It was somewhere up the Norwegian coast. Just where, Walsh couldn't have said. How far away from the place were the Germans? Somebody in the convoy probably knew. Walsh hoped so. Nobody admitted anything about it where he could hear, though. He did notice that abandon-ship drills came more often and were more thorough than any he'd seen before. He didn't take that for a good sign.
Daylight lingered long, and got longer as the ships zigzagged northeast. Walsh didn't take that for a good sign, either. U-boats and enemy airplanes had most of the clock's face in which to prowl. A sailor told him the last run in to Trondheim was planned for the brief hours of darkness. He hoped that would be long enough to shield them from prying eyes. Past hoping, he couldn't do anything about it but worry.
As twilight neared, an angular biplane with floats under the wings buzzed toward the convoy from the east. The warships opened up on it right away. It flew past them and dropped a small bomb that just missed one of the lumbering freighters. Then it sprayed that troopship with machine-gun bullets and went back the way it had come.
Two more German biplanes attacked the convoy an hour later. Gathering darkness or dumb luck kept them from doing much harm. All the ships made it to Trondheim. As he had before, Walsh filed off the freighter. Pussy meowed inside her makeshift carrier. Off in the distance, artillery rumbled. That answered one thing. The Germans weren't very far away after all. EVERYONE ON HIS SIDE had told Joaquin Delgadillo he would march into Madrid in triumph. Well, here he was, but not the way he'd had in mind. He'd heard the Republicans shot prisoners. That didn't seem to be true: he was still breathing. Maybe they thought he was too insignificant to be worth a bullet. If they did, he didn't want to change their minds for them.
He wasn't even in a proper jail. They housed him and their other prisoners in a barbed-wire enclosure in a park. They gave the captives tents of such surpassing rattiness that he would have thought it a deliberate insult had he not known they used equally ratty ones themselves (so did his side).