What Walsh wished right at that moment was for a chance to punch the personnel sergeant in the nose. It would have to come some other time, though. Too bad. “Yes. I still want that,” he said heavily.
“Well, we can accommodate you, then, and in jig time, too.” The personnel sergeant reached into a drawer, pulled out forms, and shoved them across the counter at him. “Complete these, and we’ll carry on from there.”
“Right.” Walsh bent to the task. When he came to the line that read Reason for seeking discharge, he couldn’t help snorting. The personnel sergeant raised a questioning eyebrow. Walsh pointed to the line and said, “Looks like they want to know why I want the clap.”
“Damned if it doesn’t. Never noticed that before.” The personnel sergeant would laugh at such foolishness. Walsh had trouble imagining a soldier who wouldn’t.
He had no trouble giving his reason. Adolf Hitler is the enemy of the UK, he wrote. I will not serve with German soldiers, or under German officers. He thought for a moment. That covered most of it, but not all. He added, It is wrong for any British soldier to do so. He nodded. Better now. He’d taken care of why he didn’t want to stay in even if they said he didn’t have to go to Russia himself.
He’d expected that resigning from the service would take a lot of paperwork. He hadn’t expected it to take as much as it did. He waded through one form after another. It all boiled down to I’ve done my bit, and I don’t want to play any more as long as I have to play on Adolf’s side.
“Here,” he said at last. He signed his name for the final time-he hoped it was for the final time!-and shoved the sheaf of papers back across the counter at the personnel sergeant.
That worthy went through them to make sure Walsh had crossed every i and dotted every t. He didn’t find anything missing, which seemed to disappoint him. When he’d examined the last form, he asked, “Have you any idea what you’ll do after leaving his Majesty’s service?”
“Not the foggiest notion,” Walsh answered, more cheerfully than he felt. “Something will turn up before I land on the dole. I hope so, any road. If all else fails, maybe I’ll go to Spain. I hear the Republic is still taking on men who want to fight for her.”
The way the personnel sergeant curled his lip said what he thought of that. It also said he’d watched a lot of aristocratic officers and was doing his best to imitate them. It was the kind of sneer that tempted Walsh to say the hell with Spain and to go sign on with the Red Army instead. Any man who didn’t turn a bit Bolshie when he saw a sneer like that wasn’t worth the paper he was printed on.
“You’d sooner fight for a pack of wogs than your own country?” the personnel sergeant said. It was that kind of sneer. Oswald Mosley would have been proud of it-which was, in its own way, a measure of Mosley’s damnation.
“No, I’d sooner fight for my own country, all right,” Walsh said, wondering how long that punch in the nose could be delayed. “But I’m not about to fight for the Fuhrer. They aren’t the same thing, and it doesn’t matter if the Prime Minister says they are. I know a damned lie when I hear one. I don’t care who comes out with it, either.”
Even under the rather dim bulbs that lit the personnel office, he could see the other sergeant go red. “It’s just as well that you’re getting out,” the man said.
“You bet it is,” Walsh agreed. He started to turn away, then paused. “When does it become official?”
“Oh, you’re out. Don’t fret yourself over that,” the personnel sergeant said. “The gents who run things, they don’t want your kind in. You can take that to the bank, you can.”
For upwards of twenty years, officers had been telling Walsh that men like him were the backbone of the British Army. His fitness reports had shown the same thing. All the same, he didn’t doubt the personnel sergeant for a minute. Men who were not only able to think for themselves but insisted on doing so were dangerous-at least to their superiors’ peace of mind-in any army.
Walsh left the personnel office with his last fortnight’s pay and his provisional discharge papers in hand. He wondered if London would look different now that he was a civilian. It didn’t, not so far as he could tell. A crew of men in uniform was hauling down a barrage balloon. No one expected Russian air raids, and people didn’t have to worry about Hitler any more. Wasn’t life grand?
Part of it was: no one could give him orders now. On the other hand, he needed to start worrying about bed and board… and everything else. What was he going to do now? As he’d told the personnel sergeant, he hadn’t the faintest idea. But he wouldn’t do anything because some damn Fritz told him to. As far as he was concerned, that mattered most.
The train rolled into Germany. German soldiers-or maybe they were just frontier guards; their uniforms looked funny-waved to the French soldiers inside. Some of the poilus waved back.
Luc Harcourt muttered in disgust. To hell with him if he’d do anything like that. Most of the fellows who waved were new fish. They hadn’t come up against German tanks and artillery and machine guns and dive bombers and grenades and… The list went on and on. They hadn’t come up against Germans, was what it boiled down to. Luc had. Politics might put him on the same side as the Feldgrau bastards, but politics couldn’t make him like them.
Beside him, Lieutenant Demange chain-smoked Gitanes. He would have done that anywhere, probably including church. “I wish I never would have come along for this, you know?” Luc said.
“Yeah, yeah. Wish for the moon while you’re at it.” Demange gave out as much sympathy as he usually did: none. “You should have let the pox eat off your foreskin. Then they would have thought you were a kike and given you something else to do.”
“You love everybody, don’t you?”
“But of course.” The cigarette in the corner of Demange’s mouth jerked as he spoke. It always did. Somehow, it never fell out, even when it got so small the coal was about to singe his lips.
“Well, come on. Did you ever figure we’d be fighting with the Nazis and not trying to blow their heads off?”
“No, but I’m not that surprised, either. Cochons we’ve got running things, they were always scared to death of another war with Germany. That’s how come we’ve got the Maginot Line. That’s how come Daladier went to fucking Munich: to hand Hitler the Sudetenland. But Hitler went to war anyhow, so we got sucked in. The good thing about fighting the Russians is, they’ve got to go all the way through Germany before they can bother us.”
“Oh, no, they don’t. We’re going to them,” Luc said.
Demange waved that aside. “You know what I mean. Think like a Paris politico. If the Germans took the place, they’d grab your mistress and her flat, and you’d be stuck in the provinces with your wife.” He rolled his eyes at the inexpressible horror of the idea.
“Wonderful. Fucking marvelous,” Luc said. “I’d sooner be a politico stuck with a fat, fifty-year-old wife than a poilu on his way to Russia to get his dick shot off.”
“But the politicos don’t give a shit what you’d sooner.” Demange pointed out that basic truth with a certain savage gusto all his own. “And they’ve got tough bastards like me to make good and sure you do like they tell you.”
“You’re on your way to Russia to get your dick shot off, too,” Luc observed. “What good does being a politico’s watchdog do you?”
“Hey, I still get to tell all the sorry cons under me what to do,” Demange answered. “Now that the dumb fucks went and made me an officer, I get to tell more sorry assholes what to do than ever.”
“Doesn’t help when the artillery starts coming in,” Luc said.
For once, he might have got under Demange’s armored hide. “Ahh, shut up,” the older man said. Because he was an officer and Luc only a sergeant, Luc had to do as he was told.
In due course, they passed from Germany into Poland. Luc had never heard French spoken with a Polish accent before. German-accented French was a joke-a nervous joke, but a joke. Luc remembered a prewar cartoon of Hitler holding out a French translation of Mein Kampf and going, “Barlons vrancais.” The way he butchered the French for We speak French gave his words the lie. But French with a Polish twist sounded extra weird-along with odd pronunciation, the Poles put the accent for every multisyllable word on the next to last.
And Poland looked weird, too. It wasn’t the people Luc saw from the windows as the troop train rolled through towns (well, except for the black-hatted, long-coated, bearded Jews, who seemed like refugees from another time). It wasn’t even the towns themselves. None of them would turn into Paris any time soon, but no provincial French towns would, either. It was the countryside. There was too much of it, and it was too flat.
