Harry Turtledove: West and East

Maybe Cavendish had been born in 1918, maybe not. If he had, he was still making messes in his nappies. He hadn’t seen-or, for that matter, smelled-the Western Front. He hadn’t got shot there, either. Walsh had done all of those things, however much he wished he hadn’t.

For a wonder, Cavendish heard the reproach in his voice. The youngster blushed like a schoolgirl. “I know you’ve been through a good deal, Sergeant,” he said stiffly, “but I do believe I am gaining on you when it comes to experience.”

That he could come out with such claptrap straight-faced only proved how much experience he didn’t have yet. Telling him so would have been pointless precisely because he lacked the experience that would have let him understand what an idiot he was being.

Walsh didn’t even try. “Whatever you say, sir,” he answered. One of the things staff sergeants did was ride herd on subalterns till their nominal superiors were fit to go around a battlefield by themselves without getting too many of the soldiers under their command killed for no reason.

Cavendish might have been doing his best to prove he hadn’t reached that point yet. Pointing east, he said, “Well, we’ve given the Boches a proper what-for this time, eh?”

His posh accent only made that sound even stupider than it would have otherwise. Walsh wouldn’t have thought such a thing possible, but Cavendish proved him wrong. “Sir, the Germans came from their own border all the way to Paris. We’ve come from Paris all the way to Messy,” Walsh said. “If you want to call that a proper what-for, well, go ahead.”

“There are times when I doubt you have the proper attitude, Sergeant,” Cavendish said. “Would you sooner be fighting behind Paris?”

“No, sir. Not a bit of it.” Walsh’s own accent was buzzing Welsh, and lower-class Welsh at that. What else to expect from a miner’s son? He went on, “I’d sooner be fighting in bloody Germany, is what I’d sooner be doing. But that doesn’t look like it’s in the cards, does it?”

“In-Germany?” By the way the subaltern said it, the possibility had never crossed his mind. “Don’t you think that’s asking a bit much?”

“Evidently, sir.” Walsh left it right there. If the French generals-to say nothing of the British generals (which was about what they deserved to have said of them)-were worth the paper they were printed on, the German High Command wouldn’t have been able to impose its will on them with such effortless ease. That had happened the last time around, too. The Boches ran out of men and materiel then, while the Yanks gave the Allies all they needed.

No Yanks in the picture now, worse luck. Just the German generals against their British and French counterparts. Christ help us, Walsh thought.

As if to remind people who’d forgotten (Second Lieutenant Herman Cavendish, for instance) that they hadn’t gone away, German gunners began lobbing shells into Messy. When they started landing too close for comfort, Walsh jumped into the nearest hole in the ground. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have plenty of choices.

He thought Cavendish would stay upright and make a brave little speech about command responsibility-till a flying fragment did something dreadful to him. But no: the subaltern dove for cover, too. He’d learned something, anyhow. Walsh wouldn’t have bet more than tuppence ha’penny on it.

After ten minutes or so, the bombardment eased off. Walsh cradled the Schmeisser he’d taken off a dead Boche -for throwing a lot of lead around at close quarters, nothing beat a submachine gun. If the Germans decided they wanted Messy back, he was ready to argue with them.

But no hunched-over figures wearing field-gray and coal-scuttle helmets loped forward. This was just harassing fire: hate, they would have called it in the last war. Somebody off in the distance was yelling for a medic, so the bastards serving a 105 had earned their salary this morning.

Lieutenant Cavendish went off to inflict his leadership on someone else. Walsh lit a fresh Navy Cut. He climbed out of the hole to see what the shelling had done to the hamlet.

A skinny little stubble-cheeked French sergeant puffing on a pipe emerged from cover about the same time he did. The Frenchman waved. “ Ca va, Tommy?” he called.

“Va bien. Et tu?” Walsh ran through a good part of his clean French with that. He waved toward the east, then spat.

The French noncom nodded. “Fucking Boche,” he said. His English was probably as filthy as most of Walsh’s Francais. A couple of his men came out. He started yelling at them. He was a sergeant, all right.

Walsh checked on the soldiers in his own section. The fellow who’d bought part of a plot came from a different company. That was something, anyhow. After nodding rather smugly, Walsh wondered why it should be. The British army was no better off because the wounded man wasn’t from his outfit. And that other company was weakened instead of his. In the larger scheme of things, so what?

But it was a bloke Walsh didn’t know, not one he did. You didn’t want one of your mates to stop one. Maybe that was a reminder you were too bloody liable to stop one yourself. Of course, you had to be an idiot not to know as much already. Still, there was a difference-whether there should have been or not-between knowing something and getting your nose rubbed in it.

“Are we supposed to move up again, Sergeant?” asked a soldier named Nigel. Like Lieutenant Cavendish, he spoke like an educated man. He didn’t sound toffee-nosed doing it, though.

“Nobody’s told me if we are,” Walsh answered. “You can bet your last quid the lieutenant would have, too.”

He wasn’t supposed to speak ill of officers. He was supposed to let the men in his charge form their unflattering opinions all by themselves. By the way Nigel and Bill and the others chuckled, they needed no help from him.

“He’s a bit gormless, ain’t he?” Bill said. He came from the Yorkshire dales, and sounded like it. The word wasn’t one Staff Sergeant Walsh would have chosen. It wasn’t one he’d heard before he took the King’s shilling more than half a lifetime ago. Well, he’d heard-and used-a lot of words he’d never imagined back in his civilian days. Gormless was one you could actually repeat in polite company.

“Oh, maybe a bit,” Walsh said, and they chuckled again. He added, “Say what you want about him, though-he is brave.”

“Well, yes, but so are the Germans,” Nigel said. “Even some of the Frenchmen… I suppose.”

“They are. We’d be a lot worse off if they weren’t,” Walsh said.

“Half of them are Bolshies, though. Can you imagine what would happen if the Nazis and Reds were on the same side?” Nigel plainly could. By the way he rolled his eyes, he didn’t fancy the notion. “Some Communist official would say, ‘The Germans are the workers’ friends,’ and all the fellow travelers would decide they didn’t feel like fighting any more.”

“It’s not going to happen, chum,” Walsh declared, not without relief. “They’re slanging away at each other on the far edge of Poland. You ask me, anyone who wants Poland enough to fight over it has to be daft.”

“Anyone who’s not a Pole, you mean,” Nigel said.

“Them, too,” Walsh said with more than a little heat. “Look at that bloody Bosnian maniac Princip in 1914. He got millions and millions killed because he couldn’t stand the damned Austrian Archduke. Suppose that was worth it, do you? Just as bloody fucking stupid to go to war over Poland.”

“There you go.” Bill grinned at him from under the dented brim of his tin hat. “Now you’ve solved all the world’s problems, you have. Go tell the Boches to quit shooting at us-’twas all a misunderstanding, like. Then get on your airplane and fly off to wherever the hell you go to pick up your Nobel Prize.”