One advantage of air force life was sleeping out of artillery range of the enemy, sometimes even in a real cot in a heated barracks. Nothing like that here. There weren’t even tents. You wore as many clothes as you could, rolled yourself in a blanket (if you had a blanket) as if you were a cigar and it the wrapper, and either you slept or you didn’t.
The soldiers in Ivan’s new squad eyed him warily, wondering how he’d cope with living rough. No one came out and said anything about it to him. Not all the infantrymen could read and write, but ignorance didn’t make them stupid. If they pissed him off, he’d make them sorry. He had the look of somebody who wouldn’t worry about regulations when he did it, either.
Three days after parachuting down into the Red Army, he led his squad out on patrol. He picked a skinny little nervous Jew called Avram as point man. Somebody like that was liable to jump at shadows, but he wouldn’t happily amble into a Nazi trap.
Even with his fur-and-leather flying togs on under the snow smock, Ivan was miserably cold. In wool greatcoats, the ordinary Red Army men would be even colder. But, from everything everybody said, the Germans would be colder yet. Russians made jokes about Winter Fritz. Ivan hoped all the jokes were true.
A private trotted back to him. “There’s a field up ahead, and a village out past it,” the fellow reported. “Avram says the Germans are holed up in the houses.”
“Oh, he does, does he?” Ivan still didn’t know how far he could rely on Avram-or anyone else in the squad, come to that. “I’ll fucking see for myself.”
“Be careful going forward, he says,” the private told him. “A sniper in the village can hit you if he sees you.”
“Right.” Kuchkov wasn’t sure if the Zhid was only warning him or trying to find out if he was yellow. He didn’t know all the ground-pounders’ tricks yet. He did know enough to keep his head down and to stay behind trees as much as he could. He made it out to Avram without getting shot at. The point man sprawled behind a stout pine. “So? Nazi cocksuckers in the village?” Ivan asked him.
“ Da, Comrade Sergeant.” Avram nodded. “If you want to look-carefully-you’ll spot them.”
Only his eyes showing under the snow smock, Ivan peered out from behind the pine. The Germans in the village weren’t being nearly so cautious. “They’re fucking there, all right,” he agreed. “Scoot back to the lieutenant. Tell him where the cunts are at. Tell him we can take ’em-bet your ass we can-if the machine gun and mortar help keep our dicks up.”
After another nod, Avram silently disappeared. He made a good point man. Half an hour later, Lieutenant Obolensky crawled up to check things out for himself. The mortar crew and machine gunners set up not far away. Ivan smiled wolfishly. Obolensky didn’t think he had the vapors or was showing off, then. Outstanding.
Other men from the company took places near the edge of the woods. They’d be ready to go forward as soon as they got the word. The lieutenant put a hand on Kuchkov’s shoulder. “You’re right,” he whispered. “We can take them. And we will.”
Soldiers swigged from their hundred-gram vodka rations, borrowing bravery for the fight ahead. Kuchkov drank, too, because he liked to drink. The mortar dropped bombs on the village. The machine gun sprayed death toward it. Obolensky’s brass officer’s whistle squealed like a shoat losing its nuts to the knife. “Forward!” he yelled.
“Urra!” the Russian soldiers roared as they swarmed out of the woods. A few rifle shots answered them, but no machine gun. Either the Germans didn’t have one there or the mortar’d knocked their crew out of action. Ivan pounded forward with the rest. Till he got a lot closer, the PPD was just a weight in his hands.
He never did have to fire it. The Nazis put up only a token resistance. Then they got the hell out of there. A bullet broke one Red Army man’s arm. Another fellow lost the bottom half of his left ear and bled all over his snow smock. The Nazis left two dead men behind. How many casualties they took with them, Ivan couldn’t guess.
The village came back into Soviet hands-not that any peasants remained in it. It had been a dreary little place even before the Germans overran it. Kuchkov didn’t care. He’d proved himself in front of his men. That, he cared about.
Vaclav Jezek found himself even more isolated in Spain than he had been in France. The Czech hadn’t imagined such a thing possible, but there you were. The Spanish Republic might have been the most isolated country, or half a country, in the world. When England and France forgot about fighting Fascism and turned on the Bolsheviks instead, they made a point of forgetting about their erstwhile Iberian ally.
Great Powers had the luxury of doing such things whenever they pleased. Jezek didn’t. He’d battled the Nazis ever since the day they jumped Czechoslovakia. Instead of surrendering after the Germans overran Bohemia and Moravia and Father Tiso led Slovakia into Fascist-backed “independence,” he crossed the border into Poland and let himself be interned.
The Russians hadn’t jumped the Poles then, so Poland remained neutral. Czech soldiers were allowed-even unofficially encouraged-to go to Romania (likewise neutral in those days) and from there by sea to France to take service with the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. Vaclav did all that. His thinking, and the government-in-exile’s, was that keeping the Nazis from conquering France was his own country’s best and perhaps only hope for eventual resurrection.
That best hope looked none too good. The Czech lands (and Tiso’s puppet Slovakia) remained under the Reich ’s muscular thumb. Which was not to say Corporal Vaclav Jezek hadn’t done the Germans as much harm as one man could. From a poilu who’d never need it any more, he’d acquired an antitank rifle: a godawful heavy weapon that kicked like a jackass but could drive a thumb-sized armor-piercing bullet right through the hardened steel plating on a German light tank or armored car.
He also discovered that the antitank rifle made a great sniper’s piece. It shot far and fast and flat. After he mounted a telescopic sight on it, he could pick off a man more than two kilometers away: not always, but often enough to be useful. At half that range, he’d blow off a Nazi’s head with nearly every round.
His countrymen and allies loved him-till the French suddenly turned into Hitler’s allies instead. Just as suddenly, the Czechoslovak government-in-exile and its little army became embarrassments. France somehow did find the courtesy not to intern the men who’d given their blood to help keep her free. She let those of them who so desired cross the Pyrenees to Republican Spain instead.
In France, Sergeant Benjamin Halevy, a French Jew with parents from Prague, had interpreted for the refugee soldiers. Now he was a refugee himself, having no more stomach for fighting on the Fuhrer ’s side than did the stubborn Czechs.
Someone fluent in French like Halevy could follow a word of Spanish here and there, the same way a Czech could understand bits of Russian. Vaclav had learned just enough French to swear with. The only foreign language he really spoke was German. That was of no more use to him here than it had been in France. It was the enemy’s tongue in the Spanish Republic as it had been on the northern side of the mountains, but fewer people in these parts understood it… and most of the ones who did backed Marshal Sanjurjo’s Fascists, not the Republic.
Most, but not all. The fighters from the International Brigades had come to Spain to lay their lives on the line to halt the advance of Hitler and Mussolini’s malignant ideology. Some were from America, some from England, but more from Central and Eastern Europe. An awful lot of them could speak German or Yiddish, even if they were no more native speakers than Vaclav.
By what amounted to a miracle in this bureaucratic age, the powers that be in the Republic realized as much. Instead of sending the Czechs to some threatened border region (and all the Republic’s borders except the one with France were threatened), the Spaniards grouped them with the Internationals defending Madrid.