Harry Turtledove: The Big Switch

“And maybe they’re right, and maybe they’re wrong,” Peggy said. “All I want to do is go home. It’s 1940, for crying out loud. I was going to be in Europe for a month in fall 1938.”

“You picked the wrong month, and the wrong part of Europe,” Beard said.

“Boy, did I ever!”

“There may still be a way,” he said. “You would have to take some chances.” He shook his head. “No-you would have to take a lot of chances.”

“Tell me,” Peggy answered. “If I don’t have to put on a uniform and carry a gun, I’ll do it. And I’d think about putting on a uniform, as long as it isn’t a Nazi one.”

“You can still travel to Poland. From Poland, you can get to Romania. From Romania, you can probably find a ship that will take you to Egypt. Once you get through the Suez Canal, you’ve left most of the war behind you,” Beard said.

Italy and England were fighting a desultory war over Somaliland and Abyssinia, a campaign neither one of them could get very excited about. But that was the least of Peggy’s worries. “Like the kids’ magazines say, what’s wrong with this picture?” she replied. “If I fly in to Warsaw, say, the Red Army’s liable to be running the airport. And if it isn’t, the Luftwaffe will be. Besides, isn’t there fighting in the stretch of Poland that borders Romania?”

“There is,” Beard acknowledged. “But you could skirt it by going from Poland to Slovakia and to Romania from there.”

For all practical purposes, going into Slovakia was the same as going back to Nazi Germany. There was no guarantee the Russians wouldn’t invade Father Tiso’s almost-country, either. Come to that, there was no guarantee they wouldn’t invade Romania. As the embassy undersecretary’d pointed out, there was a war on. There were no guarantees anywhere.

Peggy’d told him she was willing to take a lot of chances. Had she meant it? “Well,” she said brightly, “can you help me with the arrangements?” taff Sergeant Alistair Walsh wore a shepherd’s sheepskin coat on top of his greatcoat. His thick wool mittens came from the Norwegian countryside, too. He’d cut a slit in the right one so he could fire his rifle. He’d wrapped a knitted scarf around his face. The only flesh he exposed was that from his eyes to the brim of his tin hat. He was cold anyhow.

English, French, and Norwegian soldiers still hung on to Namsos, on the coast of central Norway. Sooner or later, the Fritzes were going to throw them out. That seemed obvious to Walsh. His superiors hadn’t figured it out yet. He’d been in the army since 1918. He walked with a bit of a limp from a German bullet that had got him more than half a lifetime earlier. He wasn’t surprised that he had a clearer view of things than the blokes with the shoulder straps and peaked caps.

Smoke rose from the direction of the docks. The Germans had come bombing again. They did it blindly, from above the clouds: to fly down below them was to risk flying straight into the ground. But they’d got lucky, damn them.

All the same, sailors and locals and, no doubt, some dragooned soldiers labored like draft horses to unload whatever ships hadn’t been hit. Without the stuff the Royal Navy brought in, resistance here wouldn’t last long. Even with it…

Walsh had plenty of clips for his submachine gun. He wasn’t too hungry. The artillery, though, was severely rationed. The expeditionary force’s handful of tanks still running were low, low, low on petrol. He could hardly remember the last time a Hurricane, or even a Gladiator, had got airborne.

The Germans didn’t have those worries. They held Denmark. Their planes and U-boats and even their pissy little excuse for a surface navy dominated the Skagerrak, the strait between Denmark and Norway. And they occupied the south here. Whatever they needed, they could bring in and bring up to the front with nothing to worry about except occasional ambuscades from Norwegian ski troops.

Of course, the Germans had ski troops, too. They would, Walsh thought, less angrily than he might have. He’d fought Fritz in two wars now, and trained to fight him in the gap between them. He had a thorough professional respect for the sons of bitches in field-gray. That didn’t keep him from shooting them whenever he found the chance. After all, they respected his side, too, but they’d plugged him all the same.

Some French chasseurs alpins had been part of the expeditionary force. Damned if they didn’t ski with berets on their heads. Nervous Allied soldiers had shot a couple of them anyway. Anything unfamiliar was assumed to be dangerous. More often than not, it was. The rest of the time? Hard luck for the poor bugger who’d made somebody jumpy.

One of the men in Walsh’s company came up to him and said, “ ’Ere, Sergeant, can I talk to you for a minute, quiet-like?” His broad Yorkshire contrasted with Walsh’s buzzing Welsh accent.

“What’s up, Jock?” Walsh asked. They’d been together a long time. Catching the worried look on the big man’s face, he added, “Is something wrong with the cat?” They’d sneaked the little gray-and-white beast onto the troopship that carried them here, and somehow they’d kept it with them ever since. Plenty of hard-bitten troopers would have been heartbroken if a shell fragment found Pussy.

But Jock shook his head. “Nay, it’s not the beastie.” He looked this way and that. As with Sergeant Walsh, his eyes and forehead were the only skin he showed. Seeing no one close enough to Walsh’s foxhole to overhear him, he dropped his voice to a near-whisper and said, “It hurts when I piss-hurts powerful bad.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Walsh exploded. “Who have you been fucking?”

Soldiers used the word all the time, in every possible form and most of the impossible ones. But hearing it used in its basic meaning made Jock blush-Walsh watched the skin above his eyes redden. Hesitantly, he answered, “There was this lady in one o’ the villages we went through a few days back. She gave my mates an’ me bread an’ boiled pork-an’ she must’ve given me summat else to remember her by, too.”

Coming down venereal was serious business. Your pay got stopped. Your family might even get a wire from the War Ministry-which was, of course, the last thing on God’s green earth you wanted. Even so, Walsh said, “You’d better take it to the medical officer.”

“Sergeant!” Jock yelped-pure anguish.

“I mean it,” Walsh said. “They’ve got new pills that can really cure you. You take ’em, you keep it in your trousers for a bit, and a few days later you’re fine. That’s better than letting the clap stew.”

“Nah. It ain’t.” The Yorkshireman shook his head again. “Ah don’t wahnt nobody t’ken of it.” His accent thickened as he got more upset.

Walsh set a hand on his shoulder. “Look, things are going to the devil around here. Nobody’s going to worry about paperwork at a time like this.”

“The sawbones will.” Jock spoke with dour certainty.

“Tell the miserable quack to fix you up, and tell him to talk to me before he goes and gets all regulation on you,” Walsh said. “I’ll take care of it-you see if I don’t.”

“All right.” Jock still sounded miserable, and well he might. He didn’t seem so proud now of jumping on that friendly Norwegian lady, though doubtless he had been at the time.

An artillery barrage livened things up after Jock mooched off. Sure as hell, the Germans had plenty of ammunition, even if the expeditionary force didn’t. In weather like this, shells didn’t tear up the landscape the way they did in a more civilized climate. Snowdrifts muffled bursts. And even a 105 made a crater only a little bigger than a washtub when the ground was frozen hard.