Maybe. But it didn't look that way now.
Luc's company marched out of Germany at almost exactly the place where they'd gone in a month earlier. Luc eyed the customs post, now wrecked, that marked the frontier. Men had suffered there. And for what? Maybe the important people, the people who ran things, understood. Luc had no idea.
"It's the capitalists who are making us pull out," Jacques Vallat said. He'd been drafted out of an army factory in Lyon, and was as Red as Sergeant Demange's eyes. "The fools are more afraid of Stalin than they are of Hitler."
"Shut your yap, Vallat," the sergeant said without much heat. "Just keep picking 'em up and laying 'em down. When you get to be a general, then you can talk politics."
"If I get to be a general, France has more trouble than she knows what to do with," Vallat replied.
"You said it. I didn't." Demange might have come out of an auto factory in Lyon himself. He showed no weariness, or even strain. By the way he marched, he could have tramped across France with no more than some gasoline and an oil change or two.
Luc wished he had that endless, effortless endurance. He was a lot harder than he had been when he got drafted, but he knew he couldn't match the sergeant. Demange was a professional, a mercenary in the service of his own country. With a white kepi on his head, he wouldn't have been out of place in the Foreign Legion.
"Back in France," Paul Renouvin said. "Funny-it doesn't look any different. Doesn't feel any different, either."
"Oh, some, maybe," Luc said. "When I camp tonight, I won't have the feeling some bastard's watching me from the bushes."
"No, huh? You don't think the Germans'll sneak after us?" Paul said.
"Merde!" Luc hadn't thought of that. He'd figured that, once the French pulled back from Germany, the Boches would leave them alone. Why not? The Germans had pretty much left them alone while they were inside Germany.
"We're going to pay for this," Jacques Vallat predicted. "We had our chance, and we didn't grab it. Now they're done in Czechoslovakia. Where do they go next?"
"Didn't I tell you once to shut up?" Sergeant Demange's voice stayed flat, but now it held a certain edge. "You want to go pissing and moaning, go piss and moan to the captain."
"He'd throw me in the stockade," Vallat said with gloomy certainty.
"You'd deserve it, too," Demange said. "Running your mouth when you don't know shit…But if you're in the stockade, you can't do anything useful. Tonight, you fill up everybody's canteen."
Jacques' sigh was martyred. Everyone took turns at the different fatigue duties. That one was more fatiguing than most. And the men had already been marching all day. Not that the day was very long. Darkness came early, and with it rain. Luc's helmet kept the water off his head, and the greatcoat let him stay pretty dry, but marching through rain and deepening twilight wasn't his cup of tea.
But tents and hot food and strong coffee waited for the soldiers who'd withdrawn from Germany. It wasn't as good as ending up in bed with a pretty girl-but what was? Nobody was shooting at him. He had a full belly, and he was warm. When you were a soldier, that seemed better than good enough. PEGGY DRUCE HAD HOT FOOD, even if most of it was boiled potatoes and turnips. She had coffee. The Germans insisted it was the same stuff they drank. If it was, she pitied them. Nobody was shooting at her. She'd never thought she would have to worry about that…till the day she did.
She was a neutral, which meant the Germans treated her better than the English and French they'd also caught at Marianske Lazne. She got plenty of potatoes and turnips and godawful coffee. They had enough to keep body and soul together, but not much more. And if she were a Jew…
Till the war started, she'd looked down her snub nose at Jews. If you weren't one, you did. She'd taken it for granted, the same way she'd taken for granted that nothing bad could ever happen to her. She was an American. She had money. She had looks.
Shells didn't care. Neither did machine-gun bullets. She'd seen things at Marianske Lazne she wouldn't forget as long as she lived. (And she wouldn't call the place Marienbad any more, even if that was easier to say. The Germans used the old name anew. If they did, she wouldn't.)
Not all of what she wished she could forget came during the bombardment, or when she was bandaging wounded afterwards.
Quite a few Jews had been stuck in the resort with everybody else. The ones who were foreign nationals aimed their passports at the Nazis the way you'd aim a crucifix at a vampire. Peggy had no idea whether crucifixes worked; in that part of Europe, some people might. But the passports did. By their growls, the German soldiers and the SS men who followed them into Marianske Lazne might have been Dobermans brought up short by their chains. However much they growled, though, they treated Jews who weren't from Czechoslovakia no worse than any other foreign nationals they'd nabbed.
Jews who were from Czechoslovakia…Peggy shuddered at the memories. Jews from Czechoslovakia were basically fair game. It wasn't so much that the Blackshirts kicked some of them around for the fun of it. It wasn't even that the soldiers set others to scrubbing sidewalks with toothbrushes.
No. It was the way the Germans grinned when they did it. Peggy had had the misfortune to watch several SS men surround a plump, dignified, bearded, middle-aged Jew. The Jew wore ghetto attire: black trousers, long black coat, broad-brimmed black hat. In color, his clothes matched the Nazis' uniforms.
Which did him less than no good at all. One of the Blackshirts grabbed his hat and scaled it. He might have been a nasty kid on a schoolyard flinging another boy's cap. He might have been, yes, if he and his buddies didn't carry pistols and have the might of a mechanized army behind them. A schoolboy could punch another schoolboy in the nose. The Jew would have been committing suicide if he tried.
He just stood there, hoping they'd go away now that they'd had their sport. No such luck. A different SS man pulled out a big pair of pinking shears. He went to work on the Jew's beard. If he got some cheek or nose or ear while he did his barbering, that was part of the fun.
And the Jew just went on standing there. The look in his eyes was a million years old. It said his ancestors had been through this before, again and again. It said he hadn't done anything to deserve it, but deserving had nothing to do with anything. It said…It said Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. Yes, that was from the New Testament, but so what? After all, what was Jesus to the Romans? Just another goddamn Jew.
Later, Peggy wondered why she didn't charge the SS bastards. I should have, she thought bitterly. Most of the time, she was somebody who went ahead first and worried about it later. Here, she only stood and watched. Maybe horror froze her. Maybe it was sheer disbelief. Could this really be happening right here before her eyes, here in Europe, cradle and beacon of civilization, here near the middle of the twentieth century?
It could. It was.
The Jew didn't say a word as he was shorn. He didn't flinch-much-whenever the shears drew blood. He just…looked at the SS men with those ancient, pain-filled eyes. And that didn't do him any good, either. When the barber was satisfied with his handiwork, he hauled off and slapped the Jew, hard enough to turn his head around. Another Nazi kicked the man in the ass. That got a groan from him and doubled him over.
"Enough for now," said the SS noncom with the shears.
"Ja. Let's find a fresh kike," another Blackshirt replied.
Peggy didn't speak a lot of German-her French was much better. She understood them, though. Off they went, laughing and joking. The worst of it was, they didn't act like men who'd just done something evil and cruel. As far as they were concerned, this was what they'd come to Czechoslovakia to do, the same way she'd come here to take the waters.