"If we didn't fuck up this stupid goddamn war-"
Rudel heard the words through all the other chatter, as one might hear a radio station through waves of static and competing signals. His ears pricked up. Treason would do that. You could say some things in some ways, but there were limits. This shot right past them.
He thought so, anyhow. He wondered how Sergeant Dieselhorst would feel about it. Dieselhorst was an older man and a veteran noncom. Both factors generated a broader view of mankind's foibles than a young officer who was also a minister's son was likely to have. Rudel suspected as much, but only in a vague way. He would not have been himself were he mentally equipped to grasp the full difference between how he thought and how Albert Dieselhorst did.
He didn't enjoy being the only sober man in the middle of a drunken bash. Who in his right mind would? But this was nothing he hadn't been through before. They'd think him a wet blanket if he stayed. They'd think him an even worse wet blanket if he got up and walked out. They'd think he thought he was better than they were. He did, too, but he'd learned that showing it only made things worse.
Somebody not far away was going on about the vastness of Russia, and about how a war against a country like that could have no sure ending. Sober or not, Hans-Ulrich got angry. "Once we smash the Reds, we'll run the country for ourselves," he said. "Russia is our Lebensraum. England and France have colonies all over the world. We'll get ours the way the Americans did, by grabbing the lands right next door."
"Yes, but the Americans only had to worry about Red Indians. We've got Red Ivans, and they're tougher beasts." The other flyer chuckled in not quite sober amusement at his wordplay.
Ignoring it, Hans-Ulrich said, "We can beat them. We will beat them. Or do you think the Fuhrer's wrong?"
The other fellow's mouth twisted. He couldn't say yes to a blunt question like that, and he plainly didn't want to say no. What he did say was, "We all hope the Fuhrer's not wrong."
That was probably safe. Rudel would have had to push to make something out of it. He didn't want to push. He wanted his comrades to like him. The easiest way to do that would have been to act like them. He couldn't bring himself to do it. Showing he was brave and skillful in combat was the next best thing. The others didn't despise him any more, anyhow.
Progress. He could throw it away in a flash if he got too strident about politics or about the way he thought the war ought to be going. He said, "Wherever we run into the enemy, we'll whip him, that's all."
"That's what the Kaiser's General Staff told him, too," the other flyer remarked.
"We beat the enemy," Hans-Ulrich said. "It was the traitors inside Germany who made us lose." He'd been two years old when the last war ended. He was parroting Mein Kampf, not speaking from experience.
The other flyer was probably younger than he was. "That's not what my old man says," he replied. "He was a lieutenant on the Western Front the last year and a half of the war. They had swarms of panzers by the end of 1918, and most of ours were retreads we captured from the Tommies. He says we got whupped."
"What's he doing now?" Rudel asked.
"He's a lieutenant colonel in Poland. Why?"
"Never mind." If the complainer was fighting, Rudel couldn't call him a defeatist. Not out loud, he couldn't. What he thought… he kept to himself. Little by little, he was learning. CHAIM WEINBERG'S SPANISH was still lousy. It would never be great. But it was a hell of a lot better than it had been, especially when he talked about the class struggle or dialectical materialism.
He hadn't liked the political agitators who indoctrinated the Internationals so they would fight more ferociously. If they needed that kind of indoctrination, they wouldn't have come to Spain to begin with. Or it looked that way to him. The leaders of the International Brigades, and the Soviet officers and apparatchiks who stood beside them, held a different opinion. Theirs was the one that counted.
Indoctrinating prisoners with the ideals of the Republic-and of the USSR-was different. Chaim told himself it was, at any rate. The hapless campesinos the Nationalists had dragooned into their army needed to understand that everything they'd believed in before they were taken prisoner was a big, steaming pile of mierda.
"They exploited you," he told the tough, skinny, ragged men who came to the edge of the barbed wire to listen to him. He didn't fool himself into thinking he was all that fascinating. Time hung heavy for the POWs. Anything out of the ordinary seemed uncommonly interesting. "They were shameless, the way they exploited you." Sinverguenza-he loved the Spanish word for shameless.
One of the captured Nationalists raised a hand. Chaim pointed to him. "Excuse me, Senor," the fellow said apologetically, "but what does this word 'exploited' mean?"
Chaim blinked. He'd known these peasants were ignorant, but this took the cake. They literally had to learn a whole new language before they could understand what he was talking about. Before he answered the prisoner, he asked a question of his own: "How many others don't know what 'exploited' means?"
Two or three other grimy hands went up. After some hesitation, a couple of more followed them. How many other Nationalists were holding back? Some, unless he missed his guess.
"Bueno," he said. "If you don't know, ask. How can you understand if you don't ask? When the priests and the landlords exploit you, they take advantage of you. You do the hard work. They have the money and the fancy houses and the fine clothes and the pretty girls who like those things. They take your crops, and they make most of the money from them.?Es verdad, o no?"
The POWs slowly nodded. That was how things worked in Spain-how they had worked before the Republic, and how they still worked where Marshal Sanjurjo and his lackeys governed. Joaquin Delgadillo raised his hand. Chaim nodded to him. He had a proprietary interest in Joaquin.
"What you say is true, Senor." Delgadillo had learned to slow down a little to give Chaim a better chance to stay with him. "But how can things be different? How can anyone do anything about it?"
"Land reform," Chaim answered at once. "There are no landlords in the Republic." There were no live landlords in the Republic, not any more. "Peasants own their lands. Sometimes they form collectives, but no one makes them do that." Plenty of Republican enthusiasts wanted to impose collective farms, as Stalin had in the USSR. Oddly, Soviet officials discouraged it. They didn't want to scare the middle classes in the cities and towns.
"But what about the holy padres?" another prisoner asked. "Haven't terrible things happened to them?"
"They sided with the reactionaries, or most of them did. They wanted to go on living well without working," Chaim said. "Progressive priests follow the Republic." There were some. There weren't very many. He didn't go into detail. His job here was to persuade, after all.
"The priests say God is on Marshal Sanjurjo's side. They say the Republic is the Devil's spawn," the prisoner said.
"?Y asi?" Chaim asked. And so? "What do you think they will say? No one says God fights for his enemies, but Satan is with him. No one would be that stupid. But do you believe everything the padres tell you?"
"They're holy men," the Spaniard said doubtfully. He wasn't used to questioning assumptions. He probably hadn't imagined assumptions could be questioned till he started listening to Chaim. Exploited, indoctrinated… Was it any wonder that, when the people of Spain found out they could overthrow the system that had been giving it to them in the neck for so long, they often threw out the baby with the bath water?