Harry Turtledove: Two Fronts

“You think we can advance across those fields?” Willi asked.

“Sure-as long as there aren’t any Russians in the woods on the far side,” Pfaff said. “But if they’ve got a couple of machine guns set up amongst the trees there, they’ll screw us to the wall if we try it.”

“Yeah, that’s about how it looks to me, too. Not a pfennig’s worth of cover along the way.” Willi sighed out a young fogbank. “ Leutnant Freigau, he kinda wants us to go forward, though.”

The junior lieutenant commanded the company now for the same reason a senior private led the squad: the guy who should have had the slot was getting over a wound. Adam Pfaff sighed, too. “If he’s so hot to go charging ahead like that, let him come here and scout it out. Christ, even ordinary riflemen’d give us a hard time. Like you said, they’d be shooting from cover, and we don’t have any.”

“Go tell him to come up and check for himself,” Willi said. “If he sends us out anyway …” He shrugged. He would have made the effort, anyhow.

“I’ll do it. Can’t hurt. Maybe he’ll have a rush of brains to the head.” Pfaff’s tone said that was likely to be too much to hope for. Even so, he bobbed his head at Willi and went back to the west.

Willi had time to duck behind a pine and smoke a cigarette before Pfaff came back with Rudi Freigau. The Leutnant was only a couple of years older than the two Obergefreiters . He wore a neat mustache that was blond almost to the point of invisibility. Instead of a rifle, he carried a Schmeisser. He greeted Willi with, “Pfaff says you’re not too happy about moving up from here.”

“See for yourself, sir,” Willi replied. “If they’re waiting for us in that next bunch of trees, we’re sticking our heads in the sausage machine.”

Lieutenant Freigau did look. He was as careful as Willi and Adam Pfaff had been. He’d seen his share of tight spots before; he didn’t want to make things easy for a Russian sharpshooter. After eyeing the bare field and the woods on the far side, he said, “Everything looks quiet.”

“Well, sure, sir. It would if they’re trying to see whether we’re dumb enough to go out there, too.” As soon as he spoke, Willi realized he might have put that more tactfully.

“Or if they aren’t there at all. Which is my judgment of the situation, Dernen.” Freigau sounded irked. Willi supposed he would have, too, if he were an officer who’d just got the glove from somebody hardly even a noncom.

The lieutenant started across the snowy field. Yes, he wore winter white, but that didn’t come close to making him invisible. Willi and Adam Pfaff exchanged stricken looks. “Sir, don’t you want to come back? You’ve made your point,” Willi called after him.

Freigau shook his head. “No need,” he answered. “I’m not going to run away from shadows and ghosts and unicorns and other imaginary things. And every advance we make brings us that much closer to-”

A Russian machine gun barked to life. Willi and Adam Pfaff both flattened out. The gunner might not be aiming at them, but they were still close to his line of fire. Lieutenant Freigau went down, too, but not because he meant to. He writhed feebly and made horrible choking noises. He’d been hit at least twice: once in the belly and once in the neck. Blood darkened his snowsuit and pooled and steamed in the drift where he lay. After a couple of minutes, he quit gurgling and lay still.

“Well, you were right,” Pfaff said to Willi.

“ Ja . And a whole fat lot of good that does the lieutenant.” Willi didn’t even point toward Freigau’s body, for fear of drawing the machine gunner’s notice.

“Other thing is,” Pfaff went on, “you’ll be commanding the company pretty soon, the way the people above you keep stopping stuff.”

“If I end up commanding the company, we’re all in deep shit,” Willi said. Adam Pfaff didn’t try to tell him he was wrong. After all, what were friends for?

The Nationalists were spewing out the usual lies through their loudspeakers: “Come across to our lines and we’ll fill you full of mutton stew! Lovely mutton stew! We eat it every day! We’ll fill you so full, you won’t walk any more-you’ll waddle instead! Lovely mutton stew!”

Sometimes it was mutton stew. Sometimes it was chicken stew instead. The Nationalists’ announcer sounded as smooth to Chaim Weinberg as any radio pitchman flogging Lucky Strikes back in the States.

Mike Carroll didn’t take it so kindly. “I’m sick of that lying bullshit,” the other Abe Lincoln growled. “I wish putting a bullet through his loudspeaker would make him shut up.”

“As long as you know it’s bullshit, it doesn’t wear on you so much. And as long as you’ve got enough to eat yourself,” Chaim added. “When times were tough, a big old bowl of stew sounded mighty fine.”

“The Nationalists knew it was bullshit. They’d cross over to our lines, hoping we’d feed them,” Mike said.

“Talk about optimists!” Chaim exclaimed.

“Yeah, well, sometimes they’d be skinnier than we were-and that wasn’t easy.”

“I remember. Those days on the Ebro … Everybody was hungry all the goddamn time. Hell, even I was on the way to being scrawny back then.” Chaim was short and thickset; an unkind man would have called him squat. He looked and talked like the New York Jew he was. In Madrid, he’d got himself a different kind of handle: el narigon loco -the crazy kike. In bar brawls, he’d sail into guys half again his size. He’d flatten them, too, because there were times when he didn’t give a rat’s ass whether he lived or died and because he brought his front-line meanness with him when he went on leave.

Mike Carroll, by contrast, could have come off an SS recruiting poster. You’d lose teeth if you were stupid enough to tell him so, though. He was as good a Communist as Chaim or any other Abe Lincoln. He was probably a better Communist than Chaim, as a matter of fact. Chaim had a habit of asking pointed questions. Mike-Mike believed .

“Delicious mutton stew!” the Fascist announcer called again.

“What did you do to the sheep before you threw it in the pot?” Chaim yelled back. His Spanish was far from smooth, but he could make himself understood.

These days, Spaniards filled out the Abe Lincolns’ ranks, and those of the rest of the International Brigades. They understood Chaim fine. Laughing, they started shouting “Sheep-fuckers!” toward the Nationalist trenches.

That pissed off Marshal Sanjurjo’s heroes. It would have pissed Chaim off, too, and he didn’t have the touchy Spanish sense of machismo. The Nationalists’ machine guns started raking the Republican trenches. “Now look what you went and did,” Mike said reproachfully as the Internationals returned fire.

“It’s a war,” Chaim explained. It wasn’t the first firefight jeers at enemy propaganda had touched off, and chances were it wouldn’t be the last.

But he stopped taking it lightly when the Fascists opened up with mortars and artillery. They were more than just pissed off, and they were taking it out on the Republicans. He dove into a bombproof dug into the front wall of the trench, hoping no shell would burst on top of it and bury him alive.

Then somebody banged on a big shell casing with an iron bar. “They’re coming! The bastards are coming!” The shout rang out in English and Spanish.

Chaim scrambled out of the bombproof and took his place on a firing step. Sure as hell, the troops who followed Sanjurjo were rushing across no-man’s-land. It wasn’t like the doomed English plodding forward at the Somme. These fellows knew better. They stayed low. They kept in loose order. Every chance they got, they jumped into shell holes. Some of them fired while others scrambled forward.