"Right," Jezek said, but his voice lacked conviction. The Germans were good at pulling new stuff out of the hat. That was part of what made them Germans, at least in a Czech's eyes. How good the French and English were at the same game… The war was a long way from new, but the French were just now figuring out that German tank tactics beat the snot out of their own half-bright ideas.
Benjamin Halevy gave him a crooked grin. "C'mon, man. We've got to try," the Jew said. "We keep our mouths shut, nobody with the clout to do anything about it will find out what's going on for another month and a half. You think the tankers'll tell?"
Vaclav considered that, but not for long. Tankers thought their big, clattering mounts were perfect. They wouldn't want to admit that the enemy had come up with a big new flyswatter. Sighing, Jezek said, "Let's go."
The next problem, of course, was getting an officer to listen to them. Two noncoms, one a Czech, the other a Czech and a Jew (naturally, the French thought of Halevy as a Czech, even if he'd been born in France-he spoke Czech, didn't he?), didn't have an easy time getting through to the fellows with fancy kepis. At last, though, a captain said, "Yes, I've already heard about this from other soldiers."
"And?" Halevy said. The captain looked at him. He turned red. "And… sir?" Even Vaclav, with his fractured French, followed that bit of byplay.
"I will do what I can," the captain said. "I don't know how much I can do. I am not in the air force, after all."
Sergeant Halevy translated that for Vaclav. Then he went back to French to inquire, "Sir, if no one says anything at all to the air force, what will happen then?" He also turned the question into Czech.
"Rien," the officer replied. Nothing was a word Jezek followed with no trouble. The Frenchman went on, "But it could also be that the air force will do nothing just because the army is screaming at it to move."
"Those pilots don't want everybody in the army spitting at them, they'd better start treating German tanks the way the Nazis treated ours," Vaclav said. Sergeant Halevy did the honors with the translation. Vaclav thought it sounded better in Czech than it did in French.
"Yes, yes," the captain said impatiently. He looked from one grubby front-line soldier to the other. "Now, men, you have done your duty. You have done what you thought you had to do, and you have done it well. You can do no more in this regard-it is up to me to take it from here. I will do so. You had best return to your own positions, before the officers set over you start wondering where you are, and why."
Go away. Get lost. The message, once Halevy translated it, was unmistakable. And the Jew and Vaclav went. What else could they do? Maybe the officer would make some progress with his superiors and the air force; maybe not. But two foreign or half-foreign noncoms couldn't. Back to the war, Vaclav thought gloomily, and back to the war it was. THE SPANISH NATIONALISTS HAD ALWAYS had more artillery, and better artillery, than the Republicans. Up on the Ebro front, Chaim Weinberg had got resigned to that. It was part of the war and something you had to deal with, like the endless factional strife between Communists and anarchists on the Republican side. Since the Soviet Union supplied Communist forces in Spain while the anarchists had to scrounge whatever they could wherever they could, the red flags had had a big advantage over the red and black.
Now nobody supplied anybody in Spain, not in any reliable way. Everyone was too busy with the bigger war off to the northeast. Both sides had forgotten about this particular brawl between progressive and reactionary forces-except for the people still doing the fighting and dying here.
The Nationalists still had the guns Hitler and Mussolini had lavished on Marshal Sanjurjo. What they didn't have any more were the endless crates of high-quality Italian and German ammunition. They'd already fired it off. So if they wanted to shoot at the Republicans defending Madrid, they had to use shells they made themselves.
Spanish factories didn't turn out nearly so much ammo as the ones in Germany and Italy. Not only that, Spanish artillery rounds, like Spanish small-arms ammunition, were junk.
Chaim didn't know why that should be so, but it was. At least half the shells the Nationalists threw at the Republicans lines just north of University City were duds. He would have liked to think the workers in the munitions plants were sabotaging their Fascist masters. He would have liked to, but he couldn't. The ammo that reached the Republicans from factories in Madrid and Barcelona was every bit as crappy. The workers on the Republican side should have had every incentive to do the best work they could. They did have every incentive, in fact, but the best work they could do wasn't very good.
"And what do you expect?" Mike Carroll asked when Chaim complained about that. "They're Spaniards, for Chrissake. They're brave. They'd give you their last bullet or their last cigarette or the shirt off their back. But they haven't heard about the twentieth century. Hell, they haven't heard much about the eighteenth century-and what they have heard, they don't like. As far as they're concerned, it's still 1492. They've cleaned out the Moors, and they're waiting to see what happens when that Columbus guy gets back."
As if to punctuate his words, another dud thudded in fifty meters away and buried itself in the hard brown dirt. That was too close for comfort; it would have been dangerous had it gone off. Chaim nodded-what Mike said held some truth. But only some, as he pointed out: "So how come the Republic won the election, then? The kind of progressive government Spain had-the kind our chunk's still got-doesn't come out of 1492. Not out of 1776, either."
"Think of it as a peasant uprising," Carroll said. "Spain was like Russia. It was one of the places where the jerks on top came down hardest on everybody under them. So of course it was the place where the reaction against oppression hit hardest. That's how the dialectic works, man."
More shells came in from the Nationalist gun pits off in the hills. Some of these burst, fortunately none too close to the arguing Internationals. Chaim peeped over the parapet to make sure Sanjurjo's soldiers weren't trying anything under cover of the barrage. He ducked down in a hurry: no point letting snipers get a good look at him. Then he took out a pack of Gitanes and lit one.
"Can I bum a butt off you?" Mike asked eagerly. "I'm all out."
"Sure," Chaim answered without rancor, holding out the pack. Mike would do-had done-the same for him plenty of times.
The big blond American leaned close to Chaim for a light. "Thanks." Carroll took a drag. He made a face as he exhaled. "Fuck me if I know how the Frenchies smoke these goddamn things all the time."
"Better than nothing," Chaim said, which wasn't disagreement. He chuckled sourly. "See? This is what it really comes down to: shitty shells and shitty tobacco, not the dialectic."
"Oh, no." Mike stuck out his chin and looked stubborn. "Oh, no. Everything comes down to the dialectic in the end. Without the dialectic, the world makes no sense. And if the world makes no sense, who gives a rat's ass about shells and cigarettes?"
"If you don't, how come you keep working on your bombproof there?" Chaim retorted. "And who just scrounged that cigarette? Wasn't it some guy who looks a lot like you?"
With the evidence still sending up a thread of smoke from the corner of Carroll's mouth, he couldn't very well deny the charge. He did look exasperated. And he had his reasons, which he proceeded to spell out: "If a political officer hears you talking like that, you'll be lucky if you get off with public self-criticism. You could end up in a lot more trouble than that, and you know it."
Chaim did. He didn't like it. He took American-style freedom of speech for granted. He also took the revolution of the proletariat for granted. When one set of ideals ran headlong into the other like a couple of linemen on a football field, he ended up with a bad case of… what did the guy with the glasses and the chin beard call it at this one lecture he'd gone to?