Harry Turtledove: Two Fronts

There was a seal on the door. The Ivans didn’t want their guests wandering around. They just wanted them out. He’d been told there would be hell to pay if that seal got broken. Well, too bad. There was already hell to pay, and his men were doing the paying. He broke the seal and slid the door open. He supposed he should have counted himself lucky that some subcommissar hadn’t nailed it shut.

“Out!” he ordered. “Grab your rifles, too. Maybe we can fuck up the lousy Nazi’s aim if we make him flinch or something.”

Out went the French soldiers. The hale helped the wounded. Demange waited till everybody else had left the cattle car before he jumped down himself. He still carried a rifle. No officer’s pantywaist pistol for him. If he spotted something half a kilometer away that needed killing, he by God wanted the proper tool for the job. He was damned nasty with the bayonet, too, and didn’t flinch from using it: more than half the battle right there.

Here came the Stuka again, machine guns winking malevolently. It flew low enough and slow enough to let Demange see the pilot’s face for a couple of seconds. He fired two shots, neither of which did any perceptible good. The plane’s bullets kicked up puffs of snow. They thocked into the train. A couple hit with the soft, wet splat that meant they were striking flesh.

Some of the poilus fired at the Ju-87, too. It buzzed off toward the southwest. Demange looked around. Nothing to see but the shot-up train, snowy fields, and distant, snow-dappled pines. If he wasn’t in the exact middle of nowhere, he sure as hell wasn’t more than a few centimeters away.

And how long would the Russians need to figure out that this troop train was well and truly fucked? Would they get it before the French soldiers stranded here within a few centimeters of the middle of nowhere started freezing to death? All Demange could do was hope so. In the meantime, he lit a new Gitane and bent to bandage a man with a bullet through his forearm.

“Merry Christmas, Sergeant!” Wilf Preston said, and handed Alistair Walsh a tin of bully beef.

“Well, thank you very much, sir,” the staff sergeant said, surprised and more touched than he’d dreamt he could be. The young subaltern was a decent enough sort. He might even make a good officer once he got some experience to go with all his Sandhurst theory.

Till he acquired that experience, he had Walsh as his platoon staff sergeant. Walsh had been in the Army since 1918, around the time Preston was born. The junior lieutenant had the rank, but men higher up the chain of command were more likely to hearken to Walsh. At a pinch, the British Army could do without subalterns, but never without sergeants. So it had been for generations. So, the admittedly biased Walsh suspected, it would be forevermore.

He hadn’t thought to provide himself with a Christmas present for Preston. Truth to tell, he hadn’t remembered it was Christmas. Well, there were ways around such difficulties. He took an unopened packet of Navy Cuts out of a breast pocket of his battledress tunic.

“Here you go, sir,” he said. “A happy Christmas to you, too.” He’d scare up more smokes somewhere. He could always cadge them from the men. They knew he didn’t welsh on such small debts.

Even thinking the word made him swallow a snort. He was Welsh, as his last name suggested. He proved as much every time he opened his mouth; to English ears, his consonants buzzed and his vowels were strange. If he hadn’t stayed in the service after the last war ended, he would have gone down into the mines instead. Chances were he’d been safer in uniform than he would have been had he taken it off with most of the Great War conscripts.

For all he knew, he was still safer here in North Africa than he would have been grubbing coal out of rock. As long as the Italians were England’s only foes on this side of the Mediterranean, he’d reckoned his odds pretty good. Musso’s boys made a feckless lunge into British-held Egypt, then retreated into Libya. Tobruk, their main base in the eastern part of the colony, had looked like falling soon.

But it hadn’t fallen, and now it wouldn’t-not in any kind of future Walsh could see, anyhow. The main reason Mussolini’d tried pushing forward was to punish England for backing out of its alliance with Germany against the Russians. With il Duce in trouble, Hitler had sent in planes and tanks and men to pull his chestnuts out of the fire. Who would have guessed that the Fuhrer , always so ready to double-cross most of his neighbors, would prove loyal to this strong-jawed son of a bitch who didn’t come close to deserving it?

At this season of the year, Libya wasn’t so bad. Rain made the hillsides and even the desert green up a little. It wasn’t blazing hot, the way it had been and the way it would be again before long. Even the flies and mosquitoes and gnats and midges were only annoying, not pestilential.

The Fritzes, now, the Fritzes were pestilential the year around. Walsh had fought them in France in two wars, and in Norway this time around as well. He didn’t love them, but they knew their business in temperate climes and in the snow.

They knew it here in the desert, too. As always-and as dauntingly as always-they were very much in earnest. A lot of Italian units fired a few shots for honor’s sake and then gave up, the men smiling in relief because they hadn’t wanted to go to war to begin with. Not all the Eyeties were like that, but plenty were. Who could blame them? Fighting when you were short of aircraft and armor was suicidal, and they never had enough.

Tell a platoon of Germans to hold a hill no matter what and they damn well would, as long as flesh and blood allowed. And if the survivors did finally have to surrender, they’d spit in your eye when they came down from the hilltop, as if to say you’d only whipped them by fool luck. Bastards, sure as hell, but tough bastards.

Walsh wasn’t the only soldier to feel the Royal Navy should have kept the Germans-and the Italians, for that matter-from reinforcing Tobruk. Say that any place where both sergeants and petty officers bought their pints, and you’d get yourself a punchup. If we had Gibraltar, now … the sailors would go.

They had a point-of sorts. Gibraltar had fallen to Marshal Sanjurjo’s men way back in 1939. Without it, the Royal Navy had to run a formidable gauntlet to get into the western Mediterranean, and an even more formidable one to go farther east. These days, most naval support went all the way around Africa, through the Suez Canal, and over to Alexandria. Even there, the Italians had sunk a heavy cruiser with a limpet mine attached by a raider who rode a man-carrying torpedo (or maybe a one-man submarine; the stories wafting through the veil of secrecy varied).

With France back in the fight against Hitler and Mussolini, maybe things would get better. The Mediterranean was the froggies’ natural naval province. They’d done a decent enough job in the narrow waters the last time around. Of course, Italy had been on their side the last time around.

Nowadays … Nowadays Musso was liable to grab Malta before England could take Tobruk away from him. That would hurt almost as much as losing Gibraltar had. Well, I can’t do a bloody thing about it , Walsh thought. He might be able to help in some small way with the seizure of Tobruk-if Lieutenant Preston let him, anyhow.

A moment too late, he realized the subaltern had just said something more to him. Unfortunately, he hadn’t the least idea what. “I’m sorry, sir. You caught me woolgathering there, I’m afraid,” he confessed.

“I said ”-Preston let his patience show-“that some doctors are telling us we’d be better off if we didn’t smoke. As far as health goes, I mean.”