More sailors with Mausers escorted Lemp to the office where he was to make his report. He wasn’t astonished to find Rear Admiral Donitz there waiting to hear him. Whatever was going on, it was going on at levels far over his head.
He came to attention and saluted. “Reporting as ordered, sir. My news is very simple: we saw nothing and found nothing.”
“Very well,” Donitz said. “That makes it more likely the 110 reached England, then. Scotland, I should say.”
“Sir, did you want it to do that?” Lemp asked.
The admiral looked through him. “Don’t worry about it, Lieutenant.” In his mouth, Lemp’s rank might as well not have existed. A word from him, and Lemp’s rank wouldn’t exist.
“Yes, sir,” Lemp said. “But you can’t wonder if I’m a little curious. Everyone on my boat is a little curious, or more than a little.”
“It has to do with high policy. You can tell them that much,” Donitz answered. “And you can tell them not to push it, not if they know what’s good for them.” His eyes were gray-blue, and at the moment frigid as the North Sea in February. “The same goes for you.”
Lemp could take a hint. “I understand, sir,” he said quickly.
“I doubt that. The scheme surprised me when I heard about it,” Donitz said. “If it works, everything changes. And if it doesn’t, we’ve lost very little.”
What was that supposed to mean? One more quick look at Donitz’s face discouraged Lemp from asking. He saluted again. Then he asked, “May my men go ashore for liberty now?”
“After you let them know they’d better keep their mouths shut,” the admiral said. “Anyone who makes a mistake will regret it. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir,” Lemp said. Clear as mud, he thought. Maybe events would answer his questions for him one of these days. Or he might spend the rest of his life wondering. You never could tell.
Chaim Weinberg believe his eyes. Was he really seeing this? Damned if he wasn’t. Half a dozen French tanks clanked up to the stretch of line the Abe Lincoln Battalion was holding outside of Madrid. These weren’t slow, ancient Renaults-leftovers from the last war. They were brand-new Somua S-35s, the best medium tanks the French made. The Spanish Republic had got a few-only a few-in 1938. Chaim didn’t know France had turned any loose since.
But here they were, painted a pale grayish green that put him in mind of olive leaves. It was a good color for operating in Spain. It would be even better once they got dusty and dirty. The Italians and Spaniards painted theirs khaki. The German tanks of the Legion Kondor were mostly dark gray, which made them stand out more. That mattered only so much. If you couldn’t stop them, so what if you saw them coming?
He wasn’t the only guy who got a charge out of seeing these-nowhere near. And he wasn’t the only guy who could see what they meant. The Abe Lincoln Battalion, like the International Brigades generally, was full of people who found politics a game more exciting than baseball, bridge, or chess.
“We’re going to knock Sanjurjo’s cocksuckers into the middle of next week,” somebody said gleefully. “The froggies must’ve decided Hitler ain’t gonna do ’em in, so they can turn loose of some of their toys.”
“About fuckin’ time, ain’t it?” Chaim said. “Been a year now since the big German push fell short. They woulda given us these babies back then, we coulda started cleaning out the Nationalists that much sooner.”
“Piss and moan, piss and moan,” the other Abe Lincoln said. “We’ve got ’em now. That’ll do it.”
Maybe it would. Each tank had the Republic’s flag-horizontal stripes of red, yellow, and purple-painted on the side of the turret. The crewmen were Spaniards. They all seemed as enthusiastic as the men from the International Brigades. They knew what the tanks meant. In a word, victory.
So it seemed to Chaim, anyhow. The next interesting question was, could victory and manana coexist? The Abe Lincolns were wild to hit the Nationalists in front of them as soon as the tanks arrived. The attack was ordered-but nobody bothered to tell the artillery, which stayed quiet. Even with tanks, you couldn’t go forward without artillery support. Well, you could, but they didn’t. Things got pushed back a day.
Then one of the tanks broke down, and the driver to another caught influenza, which spread to the rest of his crew the next day, to two other crews the day after that, and to the Abraham Lincolns the day after that. “Germ warfare,” an International said dolefully, in between sneezes. “The fucking Nationalists are trying to make us too sick to fight.”
If they were, they made a good job of it. Chaim lay flat on his back, weak as a kitten with aches and fever, for five days, and felt as if one of the fancy French tanks had run over him for a week after that. The tanks, meanwhile, sat out in the open. No one seemed to wonder whether the Nationalists were watching.
At last, everything was ready again. The attack was scheduled for 0600. The artillery barrage was scheduled for 0500. It actually started at 0530. By Spanish standards, that was a masterpiece of punctuality.
At 0618 on the dot, the tanks rumbled forward. The Abe Lincolns trotted along with them. Nothing like putting all those tonnes of hardened steel between yourself and the other fellow’s machine guns.
Chaim loped with his buddies. He wasn’t a hundred percent yet, despite enough aspirins to make his ears ring. He wished he were still in bed-with luck, with La Martellita, but even alone would do. But he’d improved to the point where he could carry a rifle without falling over. He went forward. Plenty of other Americans-and the foreigners and Spaniards who filled out the battalion-were in no better shape.
One of the fancy French machines stopped so the commander, who doubled as the gunner, could blast a machine-gun nest to ruin. Which he did. But, while he was doing it, a Nationalist soldier popped up out of a foxhole next to the tank and chucked a wine bottle filled with blazing gasoline through the open hatch. Flames, greasy black smoke, and screams rose from inside the tank. The Republicans shot the brave Nationalist, but the damage was done.
“Fuck,” Chaim said, eyeing the pyre the tank had become. The Republicans had invented the infantryman’s antitank weapon. The Nationalists had christened it the Molotov cocktail. Now both sides used it. So did foot soldiers everywhere who had to fight tanks without antitank guns.
Another Nationalist threw a Molotov cocktail at the back of a Somua S-35. Flaming gasoline dripped down through the louvers over the engine. Before long, the engine started burning, too. The crew got out, but that tank wouldn’t go anywhere ever again.
“Assholes,” an American near Chaim said. “Don’t they know how expensive those goddamn things are?”
“I wonder how the Republic is paying for them,” Chaim said.
“IOUs,” the other Abe Lincoln said. They both laughed. The Spanish Republic might not have thought it was so funny. Spain’s gold reserves had gone to the USSR for safekeeping, and to pay for Soviet aid in the dark days when no one else thought the Republic was worth helping. Would that gold ever return from Moscow? Chaim might be a loyal-if talkative, even argumentative-Marxist-Leninist, but he wasn’t holding his breath.
Whang! That was a big shell hitting, and devastating, a tank. The machine brewed up at once. You could kill tanks with artillery, but most antitank guns were of smaller caliber than the monster that fired that round. The Germans made an 88mm antiaircraft gun. Being Germans, and thorough, they also made an armor-piercing shell for it. Chaim would have bet that was what had put paid to the French tank.
And another round from the same gun, whatever the hell it was, blew the turret clean off another S-35. “It’s like the bastard tipped its hat when it got hit by that one,” Chaim said. It wasn’t a bad joke… as long as you didn’t happen to be inside the turret when the big shell hit. If you did, you were too dead to appreciate the wit. You were, in fact, scorched raspberry jam.
The last two surviving tanks decided they wanted to go on surviving. They wheeled around almost in their own length and hightailed it for the rear. One tank used the thick black smoke rising from another that had been killed as a smoke screen for its own getaway.
Chaim had trouble blaming the crews, though he knew people in positions of authority might have no trouble at all. Going forward into certain death was a losing proposition. And what about going forward into likely death? his mind gibed. Advancing without armor support sure made death more likely. His own death, for instance.
Not surprisingly, the Republican attack bogged down. Chaim wasn’t the only Abe Lincoln who could see that Sanjurjo’s soldiers would slaughter them if they banged their heads against a stone wall without tanks to smash it down. They’d gained a few hundred meters before things went south. Okay, fine. Chaim pulled a fancy entrenching tool off his belt (some Italian who’d taken Mussolini’s orders would never need it again) and started improving the hole in the ground in which he huddled.
Dirt flew from more holes and bits of shattered trench as other members of the battalion imitated him. Or, more likely, he was imitating others. He doubted he was the first one who’d decided the Abraham Lincolns had gone about as far as they could go. You didn’t need to belong to the German General Staff to figure it out. No more tanks equaled no more advance. If that wasn’t one of Euclid’s axioms, it should have been.
Now… would the Nationalists counterattack? Not right away, anyhow. They might have feared the tanks would come back or more would show up. Chaim knew better, but he wasn’t about to tell them. He kept on digging. He’d spent a lot of time in foxholes. If you worked at it, you could make them nearly bearable. Work he did.
Corporal Baatz glowered at Willi Dernen. “Let me see that paper one more time,” he said suspiciously.
“Sure.” Willi handed it over. Did Awful Arno think he could have forged a certificate of leave? He might have, if he’d thought he could get away with it. But he hadn’t. This one was legitimate. Could Baatz make the same proud claim?
Still unhappy, the underofficer handed it back. “If you’re even one minute late returning to duty, your ass is mine,” he declared.
“Sure, Corporal,” Willi repeated. He would have said anything to get Awful Arno out of his hair. “Can I go now?”
“Yeah, go on. Get out.” Baatz wasn’t about to do anything so bourgeois-so human-as to wish him a good time. That wasn’t his style. Why one of his own men hadn’t shot him… Why haven’t I shot him? Willi wondered. Easy to do in combat. I probably wouldn’t’ve got caught.
All he wanted to do now was get away from Baatz, get away from the war. He gave his Mauser and grenades to the Feldwebel in charge of the company’s weaponry. The senior noncom told him to have fun on leave. They weren’t all shitheads. Some of them sure were, though.
Out of the line. Away from Awful Arno. Then the chain dogs were on him. So Landsers called military policemen because of the metal gorgets they hung around their necks. Once more, his papers passed muster. The Kettenhunde never cracked a smile, but they waved him on.
Antiaircraft guns stuck their snouts into the sky around the train station. The stationmaster was also a Feldwebel -and, at a guess, a veteran of the last war who’d been called up to help run the military trains. Willi showed him the leave papers. “All right, son,” the gray noncom said. “Where do you want to go?”
“Breslau. That’s where I’m from,” Willi answered. Homesickness, long swallowed, welled up inside. “All the way over on the other side of the Reich. ”
“Thought so, by the way you talk.” By his own musical, half-Scandinavian drawl, the Feld came from Schleswig-Holstein, up near the Danish border. He puffed on a pipe and nodded to himself. “Well, we can do that.”
And he did. Along with the leave permit, which he returned, he gave Willi a round-trip ticket to Breslau. “Do I have to pay anything?” Willi asked.