owned just as much professional expertise as the ones who fought in the Legion Kondor.
Naturally, Marshal Sanjurjo’s men understood all that as well as the Republicans. Naturally, the Nationalists kept their own elite troops opposite the Internationals’ positions. Naturally, any advance against those Fascist soldiers was a lot tougher than it would have been against the usual odds and sods who filled out the ranks on both sides.
You outflanked a bunch of odds and sods, they either ran away or surrendered. Raw troops were as sensitive about their flanks as so many ticklish virgins. You outflanked a bunch of men who knew what they were doing and really meant it, and they hunkered down, dug their foxholes deeper, turned their machine gun your way if they had one, and defied you to winkle them out. Doing it wasn’t much fun.
“?Chinga tu madre!” one of Sanjurjo’s finest shouted back when a man from the Abe Lincolns yelled that he should give up. A sharp burst of fire followed the obscenity: this gang of Nationalists did have a machine gun.
Some of the bullets snapped by overhead much too close for comfort. “Boy, I wish I was takin’ hot dogs outa boilin’ water back at Coney Island,” Izzy said.
“Yeah, well, nobody held a gun to your head and made you get on a boat,” Chaim answered. “Now that I think about it, me, neither.”
“?Que dices?” asked one of the Spaniards who plumped out the Abe Lincolns. Chaim thought he went by Paco, but wasn’t quite sure. He’d never set eyes on the guy till he came back to the trenches.
“What’s he say?” Izzy asked. He’d been in Spain as long as Chaim. He could cuss some in Spanish, but that was about it.
“He said, ‘What did you say?’ ” Chaim answered. He did some more explaining, in both English and Spanish. Then he added, “I wish we had a mortar handy. That’d make those fuckers and their machine gun say uncle.”
“?Que dices?” Paco asked again. Chaim repeated himself in the Spaniard’s language. Then he had to explain the explanation to Izzy.
Paco spoke excitedly: “But we do have one!” He hurried away, staying low-he was learning.
“Where’s he going?” Izzy said. “Is he running off, the little son of a-?”
“No, no,” Chaim broke in. “He said we do have a mortar. Since when?”
“I dunno.” Izzy shrugged. “I don’t remember if the French Communist Party sent it to us or we captured it off the Nationalists.”
If the Communist Party of the United States stashed a mortar and some bombs at its headquarters in New York City, J. Edgar Hoover and his G-men would land on it in hobnailed boots, close it down, and send the leading American Reds to jail for about a million years. Things were different in Europe. Political parties of the left and the right took themselves a lot more seriously over here. Chaim, who also took politics seriously (if he didn’t, what was he doing in Spain?), leaned that way himself.
Paco not only knew the Abe Lincolns had a stovepipe, he knew where the critter was hiding. Maybe ten minutes later, mortar rounds started stalking the Nationalist diehards. The first one landed so far short, it was scarier than the enemy machine gun. But succeeding bombs walked toward and then came down on the battered foxholes Sanjurjo’s men were holding.
All the same, the machine gun opened up when the Abe Lincolns moved forward. The mortar crew must have been watching, perhaps through field glasses. More bombs landed on the Nationalists. Now the nasty little piece of field artillery had the range. The new shells didn’t scare the piss out of the guys they were supposed to help.
“Come on!” Chaim scrambled out of his own trench and ran toward the enemy line. “Follow me!”
The rest of the men in the assault party did follow him. He would have ended up slightly dead (or, sad to say, more than slightly) if they hadn’t. The mortar hadn’t put all the Nationalists out of action. Bombardments never did, however much you wished they would. A couple of men popped up with rifles. Shots from the oncoming Abe Lincolns made them fire wildly, though. And when one of Sanjurjo’s finest tried to point the machine gun at the charging Republicans, Chaim shot him in the face. He fell back with a wild, despairing scream. It had to be the best-or the luckiest-shot from the hip Chaim had ever made.
“?Viva la Republica!” Chaim yelled as he jumped after the would-be machine gunner.
“?Chinga la Republica!” a stubborn Nationalist shouted back, raising a Lebel-a French rifle that had been outdated at the start of the last war-to his shoulder.
Chaim shot him, too. The old-fashioned rifle fell from his hands. It went off when it hit the ground, but the bullet buried itself in the dirt. Other Abe Lincolns were cleaning out the rest of the men who’d held them up.
A couple of Nationalists did try to surrender then. The Abe Lincolns disposed of them in a hurry. The new Spaniards who filled out the force were quicker to shoot than the remaining Americans. This wasn’t about fighting Fascism to them. This was about getting rid of people who’d probably done horrible things to their loved ones. Chaim didn’t know why they called a war inside one country a civil war. It was anything but.
None of the Americans said anything about the shootings to their Spanish comrades. It wasn’t as if Sanjurjo’s men didn’t do the same thing. The machine gun also turned out to be surplus from the last war: a water-cooled German Maxim. Once in position, it was as good as any more modern weapon. Getting it there, however, was less than half the fun. It was more portable than an anvil, but only slightly. And the mount from which it fired was massive enough to let somebody preach a sermon on it.
Chaim said as much to Izzy, and got the groan he deserved. When he tried to translate the joke for one of the Spaniards, he discovered it worked in his language but not in theirs.
There were other things to worry about. Going on with the advance, for instance. He hadn’t had any particular rank when this attack started. He still didn’t, come to that. But both Americans and Spaniards seemed to expect him to tell them what to do next. He’d given an order before. It had worked. Not so surprising, then, that they expected more of the same.
He wanted to be a de facto officer the way he wanted a second head. His new order consisted of, “Well, let’s go, goddammit.”
They went. They drove everything before them. The Nationalists fled all the way to Valladolid, eighty miles west of Madrid. Marshal Sanjurjo was so dismayed, he hopped in a plane and flew back to Portugal. The Fascist cause in Spain collapsed. In Rome, Mussolini ground his teeth in fury. In Berlin, so did Hitler. Because of Chaim’s brilliant command, the progressive powers won the war.
Well… no. It wasn’t like that. Easier to dream of La Martellita going down on him than to look for so much from one grudged order. But the Abe Lincolns did capture that machine gun and go on to gain several hundred more meters of ground. Somebody must have put in a good word for Chaim, because a Republican major general (who wore overalls like a factory worker-and like La Martellita, though he didn’t fill them out so well) came up to the new front line, shook his hand, and kissed him on both cheeks.
The major general had been eating garlic. “You did some political indoctrination in the city, si?” he asked. Chaim admitted it. “Why did you leave that post?” the officer inquired. Chaim only shrugged. Taking that for modesty, the general said, “Would you like to go back?” Chaim nodded, hoping he didn’t seem too eager. La Martellita would be furious. Aww-wasn’t that too bad? he airport outside Stockholm. A tall, blond Swedish foreign- ministry official stamping her passport. “I don’t believe this,” Peggy Druce said dazedly. “It can’t be true.”
“If you like, Madame, I will pinch you.” The official spoke almost perfect English. If he had a slight singsong Scandinavian accent, so did plenty of people from Minneapolis.
“But… But…” Only a few days before, Peggy had been thinking about Warsaw as a stepping stone to Hungary and, eventually, to Romania or Greece. Even though one of their staff members had suggested it, everybody at the American embassy was sure she was nuts for wanting to try it. That didn’t mean the people there weren’t helping her. Maybe they didn’t care if she got blown up. Maybe they were glad to send her on her way even if the odds of that were pretty good. She didn’t endear herself to everyone, not if people stood in the way of what she wanted. More than a few Nazis would have agreed with the embassy personnel about that.
Now, though, a big, beautiful Swissair DC-3 sat on the runway outside the terminal. It was going to fly from Stockholm to London, and she had a seat on it. The foreign-ministry official’s gaze clouded, ever so slightly. “Now that Denmark and southern Norway are no longer considered a war zone, air traffic by neutrals has resumed,” the man said, no expression in his voice or on his face.
Now that the Germans have sat on the Danes and Norwegians and driven the English and French way the hell up into the frozen north. That was what he meant. How did he feel about it? Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes might as well have been brothers. This fellow probably wasn’t happy about being the only brother left free and independent. Then again, Sweden did a lot of business with Germany. Quite a few Swedes admired Hitler-one of
