Harry Turtledove: Two Fronts

That helped, but only so much. Many of them fell scrambling forward. Some lay still once they went down. Others writhed and thrashed and screamed. The noises ripped from the throats of wounded men sounded very much alike regardless of which side they fought on or which country they came from. Suffering was a more universal language than Esperanto ever would be.

One of his own cartridge cases bounced off Chaim’s boot. He loaded and fired and loaded and fired, now and then ducking automatically when an enemy round cracked past his head. Sanjurjo’s men got through the barbed wire with alarming ease. Had they sent out cutting parties the night before? If they had, this attack had been laid on all along; it wasn’t mounted on the spur of the moment.

I can worry about that later-if I’m still around to worry about it , Chaim thought as he slapped a fresh magazine into his rifle. He started to fumble for his bayonet. Unless he was going trench-raiding himself, he used it for a knife and a tin-opener, not a weapon. But this might turn out to be one of the rare times he was glad to have it.

Then a Republican machine gun opened up on the Fascists. A moment later, so did another one. Now despair filled the shrieks from Sanjurjo’s men. They’d braved rifle fire. Nobody, though, could hope to cross open ground in the face of the industrialized murder machine guns personified. Concentrated essence of infantry, someone had called them during the last war. That still seemed a plenty good label.

The Nationalists were recklessly brave (so were the Spaniards who fought on the Republican side). This time, their courage only cost them more casualties. They kept coming for a while after more pragmatic troops would have seen the thing was hopeless.

Some of them got close enough to the Republican trenches to fling grenades into them. A fragment ripped Chaim’s baggy trousers. It didn’t bite his leg, though, for which he thanked the God in Whom good Marxist-Leninists weren’t supposed to believe. He didn’t particularly fear dying in battle. Getting badly hurt … He didn’t know anybody who wasn’t scared of that.

At last, sullenly, the Nationalists pulled back. Some more of them got shot before they could reach the protection of their own trenches. Out in the space between the lines, the wounded groaned.

Some of the Abe Lincolns took pot shots at them, as much to shut them up as for any other reason. Part of Chaim thought that was cruel. Part of him hoped somebody would put him out of his misery if he lay there, helpless and suffering, out in no-man’s-land.

Then one of the Abe Lincolns’ officers said, “Let’s bring in some prisoners and see what we can squeeze out of them. You, you, you, you, and you.” Chaim was the second of those you s, Mike Carroll the third.

“Thanks a bunch,” Chaim said. You could bitch about an order, but you couldn’t disobey one.

Out he went, keeping his belly on the ground like a serpent. Finding Fascists to bring in wasn’t the problem, not this time. Not getting killed bringing them in might be another matter. He’d worry about that when he came to it.

A Nationalist moaned in the next shell hole. Chaim scrambled down into it. “Aw, fuck,” he said softly. His stomach did a slow lurch. The guy’d been blown almost in half. Why wasn’t he dead? Human beings could be uncommonly hard to kill, yeah, but this was-what was the next step past ridiculous?

His eyes found Chaim’s. “ Por favor, Senor Internacional ,” he said clearly.

Please, Mr. International . He could even be polite about it. Chaim wanted to ask if he was sure, but, given the butchered ruin that he was, there couldn’t be much doubt about that. “Fuck,” Chaim repeated. But he would be doing the guy a favor-there couldn’t be any doubt about that, either.

Chaim pulled out his bayonet and did what needed doing. Then he crawled off to find some other wounded Nationalist to haul back for questioning.

Bacon and eggs and white toast with plenty of butter and marmalade. If that wasn’t a breakfast to let you go out and spit in winter’s eye, Peggy Druce had never heard of one. She said as much to her husband as she set the plate in front of him.

Herb nodded. “You betcha, babe. Of course, the hot coffee doesn’t hurt, either.” The plume that rose from his Chesterfield behind the morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer might have been a smoke signal.

“Want another cup?” Peggy asked.

“Sure do.” Herb murmured thanks when Peggy poured it for him. He tucked into his breakfast.

Peggy sat down and ate, too. “What we’re putting away would feed a family in Germany for a week,” she said. “I don’t know when the last time was they saw white bread or eggs or real coffee.”

“Breaks my heart.” Herb stubbed out the cigarette and lit another one. “We ought to be at war with Hitler, too, same as we were against the Kaiser.” He tapped the newspaper with a nicotine-stained forefinger. “What I want to know is, how’d it get to be 1942 already? Like a dope, I wrote ‘1941’ on a check yesterday, and I had to void the darn thing.”

“I’ve done it-not this year yet, but I have,” Peggy said. “It’s a pain in the keester, is what it is.”

“What really frosts my pumpkin is, I’m supposed to be one of FDR’s hot-shot efficiency experts, right?” Herb laughed at himself. “Here I can’t even remember what year it is, for cryin’ out loud. Some efficiency, huh?”

“If you don’t tell the people you’re dealing with, they’ll never know,” Peggy said reasonably. “And chances are they’ve all pulled the same rock one time or another.”

“There you go.” Herb lowered the Inquirer so he could grin at her across the table. “Which one of us is the lawyer? Remind me again.”

“One of the girls in the dorm room next to mine at Penn State was from Alabama or Mississippi or somewhere like that. She always pronounced it liar .”

“She knew what was what, all right.” Herb put away the grub as if he were a doughboy shoveling food into his chowlock at a field kitchen in some ruined village in France. He paused to check his wristwatch. “I’m still good.”

But even as he said that, he sent Peggy a pointed look, so she ate faster, too. “What time does your train head out? A quarter past nine?” she said.

“That’s right.” He nodded.

“You’re fine, then,” Peggy said. “Where are you going this time? Was it Kentucky?”

“Tennessee.”

“Oh, yeah.” She thumped her forehead with the heel of her hand, annoyed at herself for forgetting. “And who’s mucking things up in Tennessee?” Herb had come back from other trips with amazing stories of waste and corruption and stupidity run amok. Anyone who listened to him for a while would be sure the United States couldn’t possibly win the war-unless everybody else in the world was just as fouled up. Humanity being what it was, that made a pretty fair bet.

This morning, though, her husband’s face closed down tight, as if he sat at a poker table or in a conference room with the other side’s attorneys. “Sorry, babe, but I can’t talk about that.”

“What?” Peggy could hardly believe her ears. “I’m your wife, in case you hadn’t noticed. What am I gonna do? Send Hitler a telegram?” She’d spoken to the Fuhrer once, when she was marooned in Berlin. To say she had no desire to repeat the experience proved the power of understatement.

“I know, I know. But this is heap big secret-and even that’s more than I ought to say about it.”

“Some of the other stuff you’ve told me about was secret, too.”

He sighed. “Peggy, I can’t talk, not about this stuff. I can’t even talk about why I can’t talk about it. If they had any way to vacuum out my brains after I finish what I need to do there, they’d use it.”