The Man with the Iron Heart

“You’re right,” Duncan said. “You’re absolutely right. Some of the mistakes we made in the first part of the war…Well, thank God we didn’t lose on account of them. Sometimes I wonder why we didn’t. Believe me, I do. And the public still doesn’t know about a lot of them.”

“A few weeks ago, I would have been shocked if you told me something like that. Shocked. Now I believe you,” she said. “Why do those people want to sweep everything under the rug?”

“To keep folks from pointing a finger at their mistakes.” Again, Jerry replied without hesitation. With a politician’s facility, he chose not to remember that he’d voted against the draft bill that passed by a single vote the summer before Pearl Harbor, and that he’d also voted against more money for the War and Navy Departments before the USA actually got into the fighting. Pointing a finger at the administration’s mistakes was easy. Pointing a finger at his own…

“High time somebody did,” Mrs. McGraw said. “Germany’s smashed. It’s knocked flat. It’s not going to magically come back to life if we bring our boys home.”

“I hope not.” Jerry did remember that people had said the same thing after World War I. But nobody’d blown up American doughboys in the aftermath of that fight. Who could say now what would have happened had the Germans tried it then?

“Let’s get on with it,” she said crisply. “How many GIs will the fanatics have killed by this time next week or next month or next year? And why will those GIs have died? For what?”

“For making sure the Nazis don’t come back and start up again.” Jerry knew exactly what his Democratic colleagues would say. He said it himself, to see how Diana McGraw responded.

She snorted. She looked at him as if she’d found half of him in her apple. She was nothing but a housewife, but she made him flinch. “Oh, nonsense,” she said, and somehow she got more scorn into that than a cigar-puffing committee chairman would have from Oh, bullshit. “How do you hold down a whole country?” she went on. “And how do you fight people who’ll blow themselves up to get rid of you? If they’re already willing to die, what can you do to make them quit?”

Jerry Duncan opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. Nobody in America had been able to find a good answer to that. One of the things the public didn’t know was how much damage Japanese kamikazes had done. How much more would they have inflicted if the USA’d had to invade the Home Islands? Jerry silently thanked God for the A-bomb. It had saved one hell of a lot of American casualties. Probably kept a good many Japs from joining their ancestors, too, not that he gave a rat’s ass about them.

“It’s a good question,” he said, hoping his pause wasn’t too noticeable. “I’ll be honest with you-I don’t know. Maybe some Army officers do-”

“Fat chance,” Mrs. McGraw broke in.

“I was going to say, but if they do, they sure haven’t given any sign of it.”

“No. They haven’t.” Her bitterness was hidden while she planned action. It came back now. “And Pat’s dead, and my grandson will grow up never knowing his uncle, and my husband stumbles around like a man in a daze-no, like a man who’s stopped caring. And he has. And how can you blame him, if Pat died for nothing?”

“If-” Jerry began.

She interrupted him again: “If we get our troops out of there because of what happened to Pat, it may turn out to be worthwhile after all. It may. If we don’t…” She shook her head, then brushed at the bit of transparent black veiling that came down over her eyes from her hat.

She left a few minutes later, back straight, stride determined. She had a Cause, and she’d stick with it come hell or high water. Jerry Duncan stared after her, even though she’d closed the door when she went out. Damned if she hadn’t given him one, too.

Breslau wasn’t in Germany any more. For that matter, Breslau wasn’t Breslau any more. Stalin had shoved the USSR’s border several hundred kilometers west, and shoved newly resuscitated Poland west about as far at Germany’s expense to make up for it.

The Poles were calling the place Wroclaw, which they pronounced something like Breslau. Captain Vladimir Bokov didn’t give a damn what they called it. He also didn’t give a damn that he was in Soviet-occupied Poland rather than Soviet-occupied Germany. As long as the Red Army was around, nobody except the Fascist bandits he was trying to root out would give him any trouble. Local officials sure as hell wouldn’t.

Breslau, Wroclaw, whatever you wanted to call it, had its share of bandits and then some. Its garrison, surrounded on all sides, had held out till just before the general surrender. The Poles were trying to solve their German problem by resettling their countrymen from Lwow and other cities to the east who didn’t want to live under Soviet rule, and by uprooting the local Germans and marching them west toward the new border-at gunpoint, if necessary. That would probably work…in the long run. For the time being, it gave the remaining Germans every reason to support the fanatics.

Thus, the local Polish governor had just come to a sudden and untimely end. A sniper had put a Mauser round through his head from close to a kilometer away. Shooting Poles had its points; Bokov had done it himself, more than once. Even shooting Communist Party members was sometimes necessary, as anyone who’d worked through the purges of the late 1930s could attest.

But shooting someone who was in the Soviet government’s good graces went over the line. And so Vladimir Bokov had come east to do something about it. The highway to Wroclaw was wide and fine. It had been part of the German Autobahn system. Now the Poles got to use it.

There was an American film where one police official told another, “Round up the usual suspects.” The local authorities in Wroclaw, Polish and Russian, seemed to have followed that rule. To them, the usual suspects seemed to include anyone who thought the city should still be called Breslau…should, in other words, stay German.

They’d rounded up hundreds of Wehrmacht veterans. They’d added all the butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers who’d ever said anything bad about Poles or Russians. In a town like Wroclaw, that gave them plenty to choose from.

A captain in a csapka met Bokov outside the wire-fenced camp where the locals were stowing their prisoners. Bokov thought the square-crowned Polish headgear looked asinine, but that wasn’t his worry. After a couple of false starts, he and Captain Leszczynski conversed in German. He could almost understand Leszczynski’s Polish, but Leszczynski didn’t want to try to follow his Russian. The Pole wore three Red Army decorations on his chest, but he was plainly a nationalist as well as a Communist.

One day, no doubt, Leszczynski would get purged. Bokov was sure of it. Maybe the proud Pole knew it, too. But they were on the same side now.

“These damned Werewolves are driving us nuts,” Leszczynski said. Bokov was highly fluent in German; he’d studied it for years. Leszczynski spoke it like a native. Before the war, he’d likely used it as much as Polish. The Poles might hate and fear their western neighbors, but they leaned toward them as if drawn by a magnet. In Russian, a traveling fort with a cannon in the turret was a tank, as it was in English. The Poles borrowed pancer from the Germans.

“We’ll deal with them. One way or another, we will,” Bokov said confidently.

“Jawohl. Aber naturlich.” Irony filled Captain Leszczynski’s voice. Poles didn’t like Russians much better than they liked Germans. They looked down their noses at Russians, though, and hardly bothered to hide it. So did Germans, of course. It was almost less annoying from them than from fellow Slavs.

“We will,” Bokov insisted. “If we have to kill them all, we’ll do that.”

“Hmm. Well, maybe.” Captain Leszczynski seemed to be reminding himself they were allies here. “Which prisoners will you want to interrogate?”

“The ones you think likeliest to know something about Comrade Pietruszka’s murder,” Bokov answered. Before the Pole could say anything, he added, “The ones who hate us worst.”

“Oh, they all hate us,” Leszczynski said. “The only question is, which ones did something about it?”

Adrian Marwede said he’d been a Wehrmacht noncom. He still wore a ratty field- gray service blouse. Bokov eyed a slightly darker ring on the left sleeve near the cuff: the sort of ring a cloth cuff- title might leave after it was removed. Only a few Wehrmacht divisions used cuff-titles. However…“You were really in the Waffen-SS, nicht wahr?” All their outfits had them.

Marwede turned pale. “Well-yes,” he muttered.