same as with Navy Cuts.” In aid of which, he lit a cigarette and offered his new friend the packet.
With a nod of thanks, the other man took one. “I’m Joe Billings,” he said, and stuck out his hand.
Walsh shook it and gave his own name. “And just as much a Taffy as you’d expect from the handle,” he added. If he said it first, the other fellow couldn’t use it against him.
But Billings only nodded. “Heard it in the way you talked,” he said, and no more. By his own accent, he came from England’s industrial Midlands. He went on, “Some of the Italian regiments, they aren’t worth tuppence ha’penny. Others… Others’ll give you everything you want and more besides. For a while, I should say. They’re all short of staying power.”
“Not the men, by what you say.” Walsh was trying to put pieces together.
“Not in those outfits. Some damn fine soldiers there,” Billings said. “Rifles, machine guns, grenades, that kind of thing, one bloke’s kit is about as good as the other’s. But they’re short on artillery, they’re woefully short on tanks, and the ones they’ve got are old-fashioned junk.”
“Heh.” Walsh drained his pint. “Back in France, I would have said the same thing about ours. The Germans chased us a deal more than we chased them, and that’s the truth.”
“You aren’t fighting the Germans any more, though,” Billings said. “This is a different business.”
How different it was Walsh discovered anew when he ducked out of the tent to ease himself. A million stars blazed down on him. The Milky Way was a pearly mesh cast across black, black sky. You never saw night skies like this in England or France. Too much moisture in the air, and, till the blackouts, too many lights sullying the darkness. Oddly, the only place he’d ever known the heavens like this before was in Norway, on a few of the rare clear winter nights.
But this wasn’t Norway, either. He’d frozen his ballocks off there despite a sheepskin coat. Nights got cold here-you did want your greatcoat-but not cold like that. The wind smelled different. You didn’t breathe in ice and pine trees here. You smelled sand and dust and petrol and exhaust. English forces here were far more motorized than they had been in Norway.
Walsh sniffed again as he did up his trousers. He didn’t know what he was sniffing for. Camel shit? Something like that, he supposed. He’d seen a few camels since he got to Egypt. The natives used them. So did the English and the Italians-when they ran short of lorries. You could also eat them if you had to. Walsh hoped like hell he’d never have to. Could anything that ugly possibly taste good?
He went back into the tent. Joe Billings had bought them both fresh pints while he was outside. Pretty soon, he’d buy a round himself. They’d both be pissing all night long.
He was nursing a headache the next morning. That didn’t keep the personnel wallahs from sending him up to his new slot: senior underofficer for an infantry company. All the young lieutenants eyed him as if he were a leper. And well they might. They had the seniority of rank, but he had that of experience. They could order him around, and they didn’t have to do what he told them to do-not by military law they didn’t. But they might land in worse trouble for ignoring him than he would for ignoring them.
One of them asked him, “Did you go through it the last time around?”
“Yes, sir.” Walsh tapped his leg. “Bought part of a plot, but not the whole thing.” He grinned crookedly. “Weather’s better for it here than it is back in Blighty-I’ll tell you that. Hardly aches at all.”
The subaltern nodded. His name was Wilf Preston. He had a sunburned, wind-chapped face full of freckles, and he looked hardly old enough to have escaped from public school: his posh accent said he’d likely gone to one. He hesitated before continuing, “Speaking of Blighty, were you, ah, in London when the government, ah, changed?”
“Yes, sir,” Walsh repeated. By the way Preston asked the question, he already knew the answer. That’s… interesting, Walsh thought. My reputation goes before me. They aren’t leery just because staff sergeants are supposed to eat second lieutenants without salt.
He wasn’t used to having that kind of reputation. For the rest of his life, he would be the man who’d brought in Rudolf Hess, the man who’d known Winston Churchill, the man who’d helped topple Horace Wilson in a military coup. He might be a lowly staff sergeant, but people with far more power than lowly lieutenants would look sidelong at him from here on out. Who are your friends? they’d wonder. What can you do to me if I cross you?
If he shouted “Boo!” young Wilf Preston would probably jump right out of his skin. It was tempting-damned if it wasn’t. Instead, he pointed west and asked, “Could you tell me what Musso’s lads are up to, sir?”
“They’re just patrolling for the time being,” Preston answered with transparent relief. “So are we, mainly. They haven’t shown a great deal of push since we drove them back over the border. We have the feeling that the only reason they attacked at all was so Benito could show Adolf he was strafing us for ducking out of the alliance against Russia.”
“Pity he can’t be his own fool instead of Hitler’s,” Walsh said.
Up at the front, a mile or two from where they talked, gunfire started up. Walsh began to unsling his Lee- Enfield, but noticed Preston wasn’t getting excited. “They always open fire around this time of day,” the subaltern said. “We think they have orders to shoot off so many rounds every morning, and this is how they make their quota.”
“War shouldn’t be about work rates,” Walsh said. “If it were, all the soldiers would unionize-and likely go out on strike. Then you’d need to hire blacklegs if you wanted any killing done.”
Preston looked at him in yet another new way. “You’re quite daft, aren’t you?” he said.
“Who, me?” Walsh shrugged. “I do my best.”
Hans-ulrich Rudel woke to a soft drumming against the canvas of his tent. He was afraid he knew what that was, but he might have been wrong. He stuck his nose outside to see. Said nose, and the rest of his face, met raindrops. He didn’t take the Lord’s name in vain. Even now, he remembered he was a minister’s son. But he did say something that never would have come out of his mouth before he joined the Luftwaffe.
The rain poured down from a pewter sky. Hans-Ulrich squelched over to the mess tent. Some of the flyers in there had already started drinking. One of them raised a flask in salute to him. “Have a snort, Rudel!”
“You know I don’t do that,” Rudel answered.
“You may as well. We sure as hell aren’t going up for a while.” Peter took a long pull at the flask. Did his cheeks and nose turn redder, or was that only Hans-Ulrich’s sanctimonious imagination?
Preferring not to dwell on it, Rudel said, “It may stop. The ground may dry up again.” He didn’t believe himself, either. He’d been in Russia the autumn before. He knew what these rains were like.
So did Peter, who laughed raucously. “Go talk to a virgin, pal! This weather’s fucked us before, and it’s fucking us again.”
Since Hans-Ulrich feared he was right, he walked over to see what the field kitchen had turned out. It was a thick stew of boiled buckwheat groats-kasha, the Ivans called the stuff-and onions and carrots and bits of flesh. Pointing to one of those bits in his mess tin, Hans-Ulrich asked, “What is it?”
“Meat.” The fellow who’d ladled out the stew gave back a laconic answer.
“I figured that,” Rudel said with exaggerated patience. “But will it neigh when I bite down? Or bark? Or meow?”
“As long as it doesn’t ask you for a loan, Herr Oberleutnant, odds are you’re better off not knowing,” the cook replied.
Sighing, Rudel decided he was likely to be right. He sat down on a bench and spooned up the stew. They’d never serve it at the Adlon-although food inside the Reich was nasty these days, too. The meat had been boiled so long, he couldn’t tell what it had started out as. It tasted… meaty. He emptied the tin tray faster than he’d expected. He would have gone back for seconds if he hadn’t worried that the cook would laugh at him.
There was a strange thing. Around his neck hung the Knight’s Cross, proof that he didn’t fear anything enemy flak might do to his Stuka-or to him. Yet the thought that an enlisted man who needed a shave might mock him kept his behind glued to the planking.
Courage, and then again courage. Before the war started, he hadn’t understood that it came in different flavors. And what kind of courage was required for an Aryan holder of the Ritterkreuz to sleep with a half-Jewish barmaid? To love her? Hans-Ulrich shook his head. It wasn’t like that-quite. Even having anything to do with her, though, took bravery unlike either bearding a cook or diving on an enemy panzer. It took a certain amount of moral courage, though Rudel himself was unlikely ever to see it in that light.
Colonel Steinbrenner ducked into the mess tent. At a training base in Germany, no doubt, the flyers would
