The announcer went on and on about towns bombed from the air, atrocities on the ground, and numbers of Japanese soldiers killed. Except for civilians, he said not a word about Soviet casualties. There must have been some; chances were they were heavy. Sergei was sure he wasn't the only one to notice the omission. Notice or not, the Red Air Force officers went right on nodding.
"Foreign Commissar Litvinov has pledged that this war against the Japanese will have a result different from that of the Tsar's corrupt regime in 1905," the newsreader finished. Sergei cheered and clapped his hands. So did everyone else. Nobody could be proud of Russia's performance in the Russo-Japanese War.
After a pause, the announcer talked about fighting in the Soviet west. "The rasputitsa has made movement difficult for both sides," he admitted. That wasn't the smallest understatement Sergei had ever heard. Eastern Poland and western Byelorussia were somewhere between swamp and bog. The Germans still occasionally flew off paved runways. The Red Air Force was grounded.
"In western Europe, the fighting in France has reached what the Germans call a decisive phase," the fellow went on. "The French government denies German claims that there is fighting inside the Paris city limits. The French and English admit heavy fighting continues east and northeast and even north of the French capital. They state they still hope to halt and eventually repel the latest German thrust, however."
He spoke with an air of prissy disapproval, like an important man's plump wife talking about the facts of life. As far as the USSR was concerned, the imperialists were hardly better than the Fascists. But the Soviet Union and England and France had the same enemies at the moment. Expedience could trump ideology.
And, sure enough, the newsreader sounded a little warmer when he said, "British and French bombing of German territory seems to be picking up-judging, at least, by the outraged bleats emanating from Hen Goebbels. If one listens to the Germans, their opponents take care to bomb only schoolhouses, orphanages, and hospitals."
Sergei chuckled. Then he wondered why he was laughing. Yes, German propaganda was pretty ham-fisted. But wasn't what poured out of Soviet radios just as clumsy?
That was something a good Soviet citizen wasn't supposed to notice. After all, didn't Pravda mean Truth? Maybe only someone who was serving in the military-maybe only someone serving in the military who'd spent some time in a foreign country-would notice the discrepancies. Once you spotted a few lies, though, you started wondering what else you heard was malarkey.
Across the table, Anastas Mouradian sat there smoking papirosi one after another. Did irony fill his liquid black eyes, or was that only Sergei's imagination? Anastas was going to get in trouble one of these days. Anybody who looked ironic in the middle of the morning news was bound to get noticed. The only surprise was, it had already taken this long.
When the announcer shifted to increased production and overfulfillment of the Five-Year Plan's norms, the officers started to relax. This was only fluff; they'd already got the meat from the news. If you were careful, you could smile about this stuff without risking too much.
At last, music replaced the news. "Two fronts," remarked the flyer from Siberia, the guy who came from a thousand kilometers north of Irkutsk and laughed at the cold weather here. Quickly, Bogdan Koroteyev added, "It's not what we wanted, of course, but it's what we've got."
"We'll win anyhow," Anastas Mouradian said. Sergei nodded vigorously. He grinned at his crewmate. That was how you were supposed to talk! He had his doubts whether Anastas meant it, but what did that have to do with anything? The picture you showed the outside world was more important (to your survival, anyhow) than whatever you carried deep inside your heart.
"You'd better believe we will," Lieutenant Colonel Borisov boomed. "We can whip the little yellow monkeys with one hand tied behind our back, and as soon as things are dry here we'll show the Nazis and Poles what we can do."
No one argued with the squadron commander. For one thing, he was the squadron commander. For another, what he said was bound to be the Party line. Russia hadn't beaten the Japanese the last time around, but it was easy to blame that on Tsarist corruption, as the radio announcer had. The Red Army had performed well in recent border clashes.
Well, it had if you believed the news. Sergei wished he hadn't started wondering about what he heard on the radio and read in the papers. It made him wonder about everything. Oh, well. What could you do? Doubting the official stories might give you a better notion of what was really going on. What was the phrase in the Bible? You saw through a glass, darkly-that was it. In the USSR, that was likely to be your closest approach to truth.
No enemy planes came overhead. If German or Polish bombers had taken off from paved runways, they were harassing other Soviet fields. And the SB-2s here couldn't fly even if the pilots wanted to. As with the winter blizzards, the flyers had nothing to do but sit around and wait.
Somebody pulled out a bottle of vodka. It was early to start drinking. Sergei thought so, anyhow. By the way Bogdan Koroteyev tilted back the bottle, he started at this heathen hour all the time-or maybe he hadn't stopped from the night before. Sergei took a swig, too, when the bottle came his way. Why not? You didn't want to look like a wet blanket or anything. NEWSBOYS HAWKED THE VOLKISCHER BEOBACHTER on every street corner in Berlin. "Decisive battle in France!" they yelled. DECISIVE BATTLE IN FRANCE! the newspaper headline shouted in what had to be 144-point type. The photo under the headline showed three Wehrmacht men, rifles in hand, leaping over some obstacle in unison. Except for the weapons and helmets, they might have been Olympic hurdlers. NOTHING CAN STOP OUR INFANTRY! the subhead boasted.
"Paper, lady?" asked a towheaded kid of about fourteen. If the war lasted long enough, he'd put on the same uniform the soldiers on the front page were wearing.
See how you like it then, you little son of a bitch, Peggy Druce thought. Aloud, all she said was, "Nein, danke." In another block or two, she knew she'd have to do it again.
Boys, old men, women…The only men of military age were cops, soldiers and sailors on leave, and middle-aged fellows who'd been too badly wounded in the last war to have to wear the uniform this time around. She supposed some farmers and doctors and factory workers were also exempt, but she didn't see them. Whatever jobs they had, they were busy doing them.
Another newsboy cried a different headline: "Soviet Russia now encircled in a ring of steel!" Several people stopped to pay a few pfennigs for his paper. The Germans like that idea. When they thought about it, they didn't have to think that the Reich was fighting a two-front war.
Peggy wouldn't have called a half-assed fight over here and what might be a bigger, more serious one way the hell over there a ring of steel. A ring with gaps so big would fall off your finger pretty damn quick. But the Goebbels school of newspaper writing had perpetrated far worse atrocities. Even a Hearst headline man might have come up with this one.
A big, beefy cop came out of his tavern. He was in his fifties, with a big mustache he'd probably grown before the last war and never bothered to shave off. At the moment, he was using a prehensile lower lip to suck beer foam out of it. He saw Peggy watching him do it. To cover his embarrassment, he did just what she'd known he would: he held out his hand and said, "Papieren, bitte!"
Out came her American passport. "Here," she said. "I'm a neutral, as you see."
He scowled at the passport, and at her. "In the struggle against Bolshevism and world Jewry, there can be no neutrals," he declared. Some Germans really did talk that way, the same as some Communists really did parrot the Moscow line. Then he said, "Come to the station with me, so my captain can decide what to do with you."