He would have picked up a Springfield, found a tin hat that came close to fitting, and joined the Americans and Filipinos trying to hold off the Japanese invaders. From the reports trickling out of the Philippines, the defenders were losing ground day by day.
Well, the Boise and the handful of other American ships in the western Pacific hadn’t done much to slow down the Japanese attacks on Malaya or the Dutch East Indies, either. Here on the cruiser, though, he wasn’t shivering with malaria. He had plenty of chow. It might not be great, but it wasn’t terrible, either. He wouldn’t come down with amoebic dysentery if he ate it or drank water that wasn’t heavily chlorinated. If you wanted to fight a war in comfort, a ship was the place to do it-unless you got hit, of course. Getting hit was bad news no matter where or how it happened.
It wouldn’t happen right this minute. That sub lurked somewhere deep in the sea, with luck damaged by the ash cans the Boise threw at it. Any which way, the cruiser would be long gone before the sub surfaced again. And then…? New Zealand and Hawaii? Sydney or Melbourne? In a way, which choice hardly mattered. They both meant that, sooner or later, the Japs would get another chance at the Boise and everybody she carried.
To say that the Spanish Republic wasn’t rich only proved what a poor, inadequate thing language could be sometimes. Vaclav Jezek had heard that the Republic had sent all its gold to Russia for safekeeping (and, incidentally, to buy weapons). Giving Stalin your gold reserves struck him as the exact equivalent of handing a fox the keys to your chicken coop. He might be here fighting for the Republic, but he had scant use for Stalin.
Because the Republic was chronically broke, soldiers’ pay chronically ran late. He didn’t much care about that; he had little to spend money on but cigarettes and booze, and he usually found enough in his pockets for those. Before long, the Spaniards doled out rank insignia so their people would know who was who and what was what among the Czechs. Vaclav got two gold cloth stripes with red borders.
“Is the mark of a brigada,” the fellow who gave it to him said in German with a Spanish accent strong enough to make it almost incomprehensible to Jezek. “A sergeant, they say in this language.”
“But I’m only a corporal,” Vaclav answered, also in German.
“People from European armies, we promote one grade,” the Spaniard said. “You have combat experience soldiers from Spain do not.” His face clouded. “The Fascists, they also this do with the men of the Legion Kondor.”
“Oh, terrific,” Vaclav said, fortunately in Czech. Gaining a privilege because a pack of Nazis also enjoyed it was the last thing he wanted. But he damn well did have combat experience the locals lacked. And, if his pay went up to match the Spanish rank, he’d get more money even if they stiffed him now and then. So he managed to compose himself when he returned to German: “Danke schon.”
“Bitte,” the Spaniard answered, and showed himself a true student of Kultur by clicking his heels German- style. Vaclav didn’t tell him any Czech despised that nonsense as a reminder of the not-quite-dead-enough Austro- Hungarian past. The fellow doubtless meant well. Then again, when you thought about which road was paved with good intentions…
Because Benjamin Halevy was already a sergeant, the Spaniards made him into a second lieutenant. He took it for a joke, which made Vaclav think better of him. “I sure as hell never would have turned into an officer if I’d stayed in France!” the Jew exclaimed.
“Maybe if you’d gone to Russia and done something brave, the Germans would have given you a battlefield promotion,” Vaclav suggested with a sly grin.
Halevy told him what he could do with any battlefield promotion won from the Nazis. It sounded uncomfortable, especially if Vaclav tried to do it sideways, as the other man urged. When the Czech said so, he found Halevy remarkably unsympathetic.
By the time the Spaniards got through, none of the Czechs had a grade lower than PFC, and most of them were at least corporals. It might matter when they dealt with the locals. Their relative ranks remained unchanged, so for their own purposes the promotions gave some merriment but otherwise might as well not have happened.
More serious business for Vaclav was picking off any of Marshal Sanjurjo’s officers who came within range of his elephant gun. The Nationalists made his murderous work easier by prominently displaying their rank badges and medals. “Stupid,” he said, after potting a fellow he thought was a colonel. “They’d be a lot safer if they showed off less.”
“But they’d be less macho,” Halevy told him.
“Less what?” Vaclav hadn’t run into the Spanish word before.
“ Macho. It means being tough for the sake of being tough. It means, if you’ve got a big cock, you wear a codpiece so it looks even bigger. It’s like elk growing antlers every spring so they can bang heads with other elk.”
“Elk can’t help growing antlers every spring,” Vaclav protested.
“Spaniards, or a lot of Spaniards, can’t help showing how macho they are,” Halevy said with a shrug.
“If they had any brains, they could,” Jezek said. “That colonel would still be breathing if he’d worn a private’s tunic and kept his medals in the boxes they came in. The way he was strutting around with all those gold stars and ribbons, he might as well have written SHOOT ME! across his chest in big red letters.”
“If they had any brains, Vaclav, how many of them would be officers in a Fascist army?” Benjamin Halevy asked.
Vaclav pondered that. “Well, you’ve got something there,” he admitted.
The next day, the Spanish papers that came out from Madrid had big headlines. The only problem was, Vaclav had no idea what those headlines said. Spanish was even more a closed book to him than French had been.
Halevy, who read French like the native he was, could make a stab at written Spanish, just as a native Czech speaker would recognize some written Polish words and might be able to extract sense from a Polish newspaper story. “Something’s going on in England,” the Jew reported. “Somebody-the army, I think-doesn’t like the way the government’s jumped into bed with the Nazis, and they’re trying to do something about it.”
“And?” Vaclav said. “Don’t cocktease, goddammit! Are they winning? Are they losing? Will England tell Hitler where to head in? That’d be something, wouldn’t it?” He imagined the Royal Navy and the RAF pounding the hell out of German-held Europe again.
“I don’t know ‘and,’ ” Halevy replied in an unwontedly small voice. “Either the paper doesn’t say or my Spanish is too crappy for me to figure it out. Maybe they’re hanging traitors from lampposts. Or maybe the traitors are still running things and they’re translating ‘Deutschland uber Alles’ into English right now.”
“Give me that goddamn thing.” Jezek snatched the newspaper out of Halevy’s hand. As usual, the Czechs and the men from the International Brigade held adjoining stretches of the Republican line. The Republic naturally grouped its best fighters together. And the Czech didn’t take long to find somebody who could read Spanish and speak German.
“It just says there’s unrest in England,” the International told him. By the way the man pronounced his r’s, Vaclav guessed he was a Magyar. Had they met anywhere but in Spain, they probably would have quarreled- Hungary had sat on Slovakia for centuries, and mistrusted Czechs for wanting to help Slovaks. Here, they both had bigger things to worry about.
“Who’s winning?” Vaclav asked, as he had with Halevy.
The Magyar spread his hands. “We’ll have to wait and see,” he said. “The guy who wrote this doesn’t know. He’s trying to hide that so he won’t look dumb, but he doesn’t.”
Vaclav made a disgusted noise down deep in his throat. “Sounds like a newspaperman, all right.”
“It sure does.” The Magyar studied him. The fellow had green eyes, high cheekbones, and an arrogant blade of a nose. He looked the way Vaclav would have expected a Magyar to look, in other words. And he sounded faintly surprised when he added, “You’re not such a fool, are you?”
For a Czech, he might have meant. To Magyars, Slovaks were nothing but bumpkins, and Czechs were a lot like Slovaks, so… Vaclav thought Slovaks were bumpkins, too, and Fascist-loving bumpkins at that, but he knew Magyars were dead wrong about Czechs. How did he know? By being a Czech himself, of course.
“Well, I try,” he said dryly.
“Heh,” the Magyar said. He tapped the paper with his left hand. The little finger was missing its last joint. “Thanks for bringing this. I hadn’t seen it yet. If England really is having second thoughts, that could be big.”
