By the time he got drafted, Hungary had been transformed into the Hungarian People’s Republic. He wasn’t thrilled about that, but what could you do? If you complained, you could find out all about the MGB and its Hungarian counterparts-that was what. Better to nod when anybody praised Joseph Stalin (whose name was always spelled Sztalin in Magyar, to make it sound right), and to try to get on with the rest of your life.
After he got drafted, political officers talked his ear off, and the ears of all the other conscripts. They shouted that the Germans had been Fascists, which they had. They shouted that Hungary’s Arrow Cross regime had been Fascists, which they had. They insisted that Admiral Horthy had been a Fascist. Nobody was dumb enough to stand up and tell them they were full of it.
Americans, as far as the political indoctrinators were concerned, weren’t quite Fascists. But they were imperialists and reactionaries and class enemies. They were capitalist oppressors of the proletariat, too. So were the English.
Maybe they were. Maybe they weren’t. Again, telling the political officers it was all a pack of rubbish was a long walk off a short pier. You nodded. You gave back the slogans. You tried to go along. You figured being a soldier couldn’t last forever, no matter how much it seemed to while you did it.
Then the war broke out. The Russians didn’t trust the Hungarians-or think they were strong enough-to break through the enemy defenses. But, no matter how many Russians there were, there weren’t enough to do all the fighting they needed to do and to hold down the land they’d overrun.
They figured the Hungarians were good enough for that. And so Tibor and his company found themselves occupying Schweinfurt while the Russians tried to break through at Fulda, farther north and west.
They made ball-bearings in Schweinfurt. Because they did, the Americans had bombed the hell out of the town in the big war. No doubt Stalin had cheered them on when they did, too. Now the Red Army’s planes and tanks had flattened a lot of what the Germans worked so hard to rebuild during the war and after it.
“No fraternizing with the locals!” Sergeant Gergely shouted, again and again. “You can’t trust them. Anything you say to them is liable to go straight to the enemy’s ears. Or some of the bastards who learned their trade with the Nazis may try and blow your head off.”
Bastards like you? Tibor wondered, but that was one more thing you didn’t say.
They’d already had trouble with sniping. Some of the Germans wore almost-uniforms and armbands that proclaimed them part of the emergency militia. Orders were not to kill those guys out of hand, but to capture them if possible and hand them over to the Red Army. What the Russians would end up doing with them or to them…was anybody’s guess.
Other Germans just had rifles or pistols or grenades and a sense of determination. Somebody would toss a grenade at a truck or shoot from a third-floor window or from behind a burnt-out auto. The Magyars took casualties, and couldn’t always catch the sons of bitches who caused them.
Hungarian authorities dealt with that problem the same way the Germans had in two world wars before them. They seized and shot large numbers of hostages. Tibor hated firing-squad duty. You couldn’t shoot to miss, though. You’d land in worse trouble if you did.
To his surprise, Isztvan Szolovits hated it even worse than he did. “They’re Germans,” Tibor said to him after an execution. “Don’t you want to get even with them for what they did to your people?”
“I don’t want to kill people up against a post,” the Jew answered. “The SS did shit like that. And I don’t know that the people we’re shooting did anything to anybody during the war. If I have to fight, I want to fight, where the other guys have guns, too. Killing blindfolded people with their hands tied isn’t war. It’s murder.”
“You might as well be a fighter pilot, huh?” Tibor said.
“That would be funny, except it isn’t funny,” Szolovits said.
His syntax might be twisted, but Tibor knew what he meant. American fighters-jets and prop jobs-often flew low over Schweinfurt on their way to shoot up Red Army units on the move inside the Russian zone of Germany. If they saw a truck column or a few tanks or even some soldiers bunched together, they would open up with their machine guns or fire some of the rockets they carried under their wings.
You couldn’t shoot them down, not if you were a rifleman on the ground. You could fire a few rounds at them, but they went by too fast for you to lead them the way you needed to. The slam of your piece against your shoulder might make you feel better, but you had to understand you were only wasting ammunition.
What happened when a rocket hit a truck, on the other hand…Tibor dragged a burning man out of the wreckage. The soldier’s clothes weren’t on fire. He was. Tibor rolled on top of him, careless that his own uniform and flesh were getting singed. Then two men rushed up with a big pail of water and dumped it over both of them.
They took the badly burned soldier away. Tibor got some ointment to smear on his scorches. He also got, for the first time ever, Sergeant Gergely’s genuine respect. “Good job, kid,” the veteran said. “Not everybody’d lay his balls on the line for his buddy.”
“He’s not my buddy,” Tibor said; his own burns were starting to sting in spite of the ointment. “I don’t even know who he is. And I didn’t think about taking chances. I just ran over and grabbed him. If I’d taken the time to think, I bet I would’ve stood there with my thumb up my ass.”
“That’s how it works most of the time,” Gergely told him. “But how you did it doesn’t matter. What matters is, you did it. Next time we’ve got a slot for a lance-corporal, now I know who to fill it with.”
Tibor cared about becoming a lance-corporal no more than he cared about being elected Pope. But Sergeant Gergely’s good opinion of him meant something-meant quite a bit, in fact. It hadn’t while the army was on a peacetime footing. Then he’d wanted to stay out of trouble and to keep the sergeant out of his hair. Past that, Gergely could have gone and hanged himself for all Tibor cared. Tibor might have hoisted one if he had, to tell the truth.
War was different, though. War was different all kinds of ways. You found out why they drilled so many things into you in peacetime training. It wasn’t only to kill time or to wear you out. When the bullets and rockets and shells started flying, you needed to obey orders without wasting an instant. You needed to know how to dig a foxhole and how to keep your rifle clean. And you needed to know when to hit the dirt a split second before you had any conscious reason to.
Even second-line soldiering, which was all the Red Army demanded from its none too eager Hungarian, Polish, and Czechoslovakian allies, taught you those things in a hurry. And, though Tibor wouldn’t have been in Schweinfurt if not for the Russians, they weren’t trying to kill him here.
The Americans were. He might not have hated them before he started trying to hold down the city. When they did things like blowing up that truck, though, whatever kindness he’d felt toward them melted away as if it were snow in a hot oven.
A hot oven…The sight of burning flesh was horrible. The smell was even worse. His stomach wanted to turn over. He sternly told it it would do no such thing. To his relief, it decided to listen to him.
American bombers came over that night. They pounded Schweinfurt as if it were the Second World War all over again. “Why don’t they hit the Russians?” Szolovits complained from his foxhole near Tibor’s. “We didn’t do anything to them.”
“We’re here,” Sergeant Gergely said flatly, and that did seem to be as much answer as anyone needed.
–
We’re here, Cade Curtis thought. The Korean with him punched him softly on the shoulder to wish him luck, the way an American might have. The man whispered something in his own language, touched him again, and slipped away to the north in the darkness, back toward his own village.