little excuse for a surface navy dominated the Skagerrak, the strait between Denmark and Norway. And they occupied the south here. Whatever they needed, they could bring in and bring up to the front with nothing to worry about except occasional ambuscades from Norwegian ski troops.
Of course, the Germans had ski troops, too. They would, Walsh thought, less angrily than he might have. He’d fought Fritz in two wars now, and trained to fight him in the gap between them. He had a thorough professional respect for the sons of bitches in field-gray. That didn’t keep him from shooting them whenever he found the chance. After all, they respected his side, too, but they’d plugged him all the same.
Some French chasseurs alpins had been part of the expeditionary force. Damned if they didn’t ski with berets on their heads. Nervous Allied soldiers had shot a couple of them anyway. Anything unfamiliar was assumed to be dangerous. More often than not, it was. The rest of the time? Hard luck for the poor bugger who’d made somebody jumpy.
One of the men in Walsh’s company came up to him and said, “ ’Ere, Sergeant, can I talk to you for a minute, quiet-like?” His broad Yorkshire contrasted with Walsh’s buzzing Welsh accent.
“What’s up, Jock?” Walsh asked. They’d been together a long time. Catching the worried look on the big man’s face, he added, “Is something wrong with the cat?” They’d sneaked the little gray-and-white beast onto the troopship that carried them here, and somehow they’d kept it with them ever since. Plenty of hard-bitten troopers would have been heartbroken if a shell fragment found Pussy.
But Jock shook his head. “Nay, it’s not the beastie.” He looked this way and that. As with Sergeant Walsh, his eyes and forehead were the only skin he showed. Seeing no one close enough to Walsh’s foxhole to overhear him, he dropped his voice to a near-whisper and said, “It hurts when I piss-hurts powerful bad.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Walsh exploded. “Who have you been fucking?”
Soldiers used the word all the time, in every possible form and most of the impossible ones. But hearing it used in its basic meaning made Jock blush-Walsh watched the skin above his eyes redden. Hesitantly, he answered, “There was this lady in one o’ the villages we went through a few days back. She gave my mates an’ me bread an’ boiled pork-an’ she must’ve given me summat else to remember her by, too.”
Coming down venereal was serious business. Your pay got stopped. Your family might even get a wire from the War Ministry-which was, of course, the last thing on God’s green earth you wanted. Even so, Walsh said, “You’d better take it to the medical officer.”
“Sergeant!” Jock yelped-pure anguish.
“I mean it,” Walsh said. “They’ve got new pills that can really cure you. You take ’em, you keep it in your trousers for a bit, and a few days later you’re fine. That’s better than letting the clap stew.”
“Nah. It ain’t.” The Yorkshireman shook his head again. “Ah don’t wahnt nobody t’ken of it.” His accent thickened as he got more upset.
Walsh set a hand on his shoulder. “Look, things are going to the devil around here. Nobody’s going to worry about paperwork at a time like this.”
“The sawbones will.” Jock spoke with dour certainty.
“Tell the miserable quack to fix you up, and tell him to talk to me before he goes and gets all regulation on you,” Walsh said. “I’ll take care of it-you see if I don’t.”
“All right.” Jock still sounded miserable, and well he might. He didn’t seem so proud now of jumping on that friendly Norwegian lady, though doubtless he had been at the time.
An artillery barrage livened things up after Jock mooched off. Sure as hell, the Germans had plenty of ammunition, even if the expeditionary force didn’t. In weather like this, shells didn’t tear up the landscape the way they did in a more civilized climate. Snowdrifts muffled bursts. And even a 105 made a crater only a little bigger than a washtub when the ground was frozen hard.
After the barrage let up, the Fritzes came forward on foot. Machine guns and accurate rifle fire soon persuaded them that they hadn’t blasted their foes to kingdom come. They pulled back, leaving a few bloody bodies on the snow between the two sides’ lines. By the same token, wounded Tommies and poilus and squareheads went back toward Namsos for treatment, as Jock had before them.
Walsh hoped he could deliver on his promise to the Yorkshireman. Doctors were nominally officers. They didn’t have to listen to a career noncom, though the ones with any sense commonly did.
Captain Beverly Murdoch seemed typical of the breed. Though overworked and indifferently shaved, his accent and the way he looked at Walsh declared him a member of the upper classes. Chaps like him, it’s no wonder a bloke like Trotsky gets a hearing, Walsh thought irreverently.
“I am given to understand you wish this man treated for his social disease in an informal fashion.” Murdoch’s tone said that ought to be a hanging matter on the off chance it wasn’t.
“Yes, sir.” Walsh kept his response as simple as he could.
“Why?” The word sounded colder than the Norwegian winter enfolding them.
“He’s a good soldier, sir. I’ve known him a long time. He took what he could get, but plenty of others would’ve done the same. I might myself, if the lady was pretty. So might you.” Walsh hoped the quack wasn’t a fairy. That would queer his pitch. “And the way things are right now, we need all the men we can find, and we need them with the best morale they can get. Since you have your pills-”
“I’d do better using them on wounded men than on those who diseased themselves,” Murdoch broke in.
“Sir, he’s wounded in war, too, in a manner of speaking. He never would have met that woman if we hadn’t been posted to Norway,” Walsh said.
“No, he would have got his dose from some French twist instead.” Murdoch sent him an unfriendly look. “And I suppose you’ll find ways to make my life miserable if I don’t play along.”
“How can I do that, sir? I’m only a staff sergeant.” Walsh might have been innocence personified.
He might have been, but the doctor knew he wasn’t. “People like you have their ways,” he said sourly. “Half the time, I think officers run the army on the sufferance of sergeants.”
Walsh thought the same thing, but more often than half the time. All the same, he said, “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean, sir.”
“Yes, likely tell.” Murdoch made a disgusted gesture. “All right. Have your way, dammit. He’ll get the bloody sulfanilamide, and I’ll write it up as a skin infection.”
“Much obliged to you, sir.” Walsh knew he might have to pay the sawbones back one day, but he’d worry about that when the time came. He had got his way, and Jock wasn’t in a jam on account of it. Except for the Norwegian winter and the advancing Nazis, everything was fine.
Hans-Ulrich Rudel had thought he’d flown his Ju-87 under primitive conditions in France. And so he had: with its heavy, fixed undercarriage, the Stuka was made for taking off and landing on dirt airstrips. All the same, he’d been flying in France, and France was a civilized country. Poland, now…
The pilot came from Silesia. He knew about Poles: knew what Germans in that part of the Reich knew about them, anyhow. They were lazy, shiftless, drunken, sneaky, not to be trusted behind your back. Nothing he saw in this village east of Warsaw made him want to change his mind. If anything, the Poles here were even worse because they hadn’t been leavened by Germans the way they had in Silesia. They were well on their way to being Russians, and how could you say anything worse about a folk?
With no Germans in these parts till the Wehrmacht came to pull the Poles’ chestnuts out of the fire, the only leavening they got was from Jews. A Jew named Fink ran the local pharmacy. Another one named Grinszpan was the village bookkeeper. Yet another named Cohen pulled teeth. A Pole owned the newspaper in Bialystok, the nearest real city, but his editor was a Jew named Blum. And on and on.
Rudel thought the Jews in the Reich had got what was coming to them after the Fuhrer took over. He knew for a fact that Poles liked Jews even less than Germans did. But he and his comrades were forbidden from giving Jews what-for here. The Poles hadn’t cleared them out of their own armed forces, even if they didn’t like them. And, no matter how the Poles felt, Jews still had legal equality in Poland.
“Orders are orders,” said Colonel Steinbrenner, the wing commander. “All we have to do is follow them.”
“They’re crazy orders,” Hans-Ulrich complained. “The Poles are on our side, but the way they act, they might as well be Bolsheviks. Plenty of Jew officers in the Red Army.”
Steinbrenner shook his head. He preferred a German-issue tent to a house in the village, which would probably be full of vermin. Hans-Ulrich felt the same way. The colonel said, “No, Lieutenant, the Poles are not on
