Walsh didn't blame him. He hadn't seen many British planes himself. But they were there now. Two broad-winged bombers tumbled out of the air, wrapped in smoke and fire. Parachutes sprouted in the sky. Walsh waited for the British pilots-he assumed they were his countrymen, though they might have been French-to machine-gun the descending German airmen. But they didn't. He wondered why not. Not sporting? Were he hanging helpless from a silk half-bubble, he didn't suppose he would have wanted a German blazing away at him.
"Blimey!" the other soldier said again. "That bugger's going to come down right on our 'eads, 'e is."
He didn't quite. But he landed no more than fifty yards away. Walsh aimed his rifle at him. "Give up right now, you fucking bastard!" he bawled.
The German paid no attention to him. The fellow sprawled on the ground, clutching his ankle and howling like a dog with its tail caught under a rocking chair. The parachute flapped and billowed like a live thing, threatening to drag him away.
"Easiest prisoner I ever took," Walsh said. "If he hasn't broken that, I'm a Belgian myself."
"But do you want to go out there and get 'im?" the other British soldier asked. "What if more bombers come over?"
"Urr," said Walsh, who hadn't thought of that. Letting the German flyer's countrymen blow him to pieces was a distinctly unattractive notion. But so was listening to him.
When Walsh said so, the other man replied, "Then shoot 'im. Or if you don't care to, I will."
"No," Walsh said. If he were lying there with a broken ankle, he would want a German to take him prisoner. And he thought there was a pretty good chance some German would. The bastards in field-gray fought hard. They'd fought hard even when they knew the game was up in 1918. They mostly fought fair, though. Of what army could you say more?
That made up his mind for him. He scrambled out of his hole and trotted toward the downed Luftwaffe man. The German saw his rifle and held up his hands. He gabbled something in his own language. If that wasn't I give up!, Walsh really was a Belgian.
He pointed to the pistol on the flyer's belt. "Throw that damn thing away, and make it snappy!" he said.
"Ja! Ja!" Maybe the German understood a little English, even if he didn't seem to speak any. Or maybe the sergeant's gestures made sense to him. Walsh kept his finger on the trigger while the man disarmed himself. If he turned out to be a fanatic, he'd be a dead fanatic pretty damn quick. But he didn't. He tossed the little automatic-smaller and neater than the Enfield.38 revolver that was the British standard in this war, to say nothing of the last go-round's man-killing brute of a Webley and Scott.455-into the bushes.
"All right." Walsh knelt beside him and pointed to the trench from which he'd come. "I'm going to take you back there." He got the German's arm around his shoulder. Grunting as he rose, he went on, "This may hurt a bit."
The airman hopped awkwardly on one leg. He tried not to let his other foot touch the ground at all. Sure as the devil, that ankle was ruined. Well, he'd done worse to plenty of Dutchmen and Belgians and Englishmen.
"Give me a hand with this bugger," Walsh called. Unenthusiastically, the other British soldier did.
Once in the hole, the flyer reached inside his coverall. He came closer to dying than he probably realized. But he came out with…"Zigaretten?" he said, proffering the packet.
"Thanks." Walsh took one. So did the other soldier, who gave him a light. They both took a drag. "Bloody hell!" Walsh said. "Tastes like hay and barge scrapings." If this was what the Germans were smoking, no wonder the bastards acted mean.
He gave the Luftwaffe man a Navy Cut. People said they were strong. God only knew they were cheap. But the new prisoner's eyes went wide when he puffed on it. "Danke schon! Sehr gut!" he said. He reverently smoked it all the way down to the end. It probably had more real tobacco in it than he usually got in a week.
Stretcher-bearers took him off to the rear. If he got more proper cigarettes, odds were he was glad enough to go. CHRISTMAS WAS RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER, but Peggy Druce found Berlin a singularly joyless place. She supposed she should count her blessings. If she weren't from the neutral USA, she would have been interned, not just inconvenienced. All the same…
So many shops were empty. Hardly any cars rolled down the street. Even the trolleys operated on a wartime schedule, which meant you took a long time to get anywhere. The city was blacked out at night. As far as Peggy could tell, the whole damn country was blacked out at night.
Maybe all of Europe was blacked out. Peggy tried to imagine Paris dark at night. The picture didn't want to form. The City of Light was bound to be as shrouded as any other European capital. After what the Germans did to Prague and Marianske Lazne and the rest of Czechoslovakia, they wouldn't leave Paris alone. She supposed it was a genuine military target. But the idea of bombs falling on it made her almost physically ill.
She walked past a restaurant not far from the hotel where they'd put her up. She hadn't the slightest desire to go inside. Like everyone else in Germany, she had a ration card. Even in a restaurant, she had to spend points on what she ate. Whatever she got, most of it would be cabbage and potatoes and black bread. Fats of any sort-butter, cheese, lard-were hard to come by. Milk and cod-liver oil were reserved almost exclusively for children and nursing and pregnant women.
A man with a white mustache walked past her. He tipped his hat as he went by. His wool suit had seen better years, but he couldn't do much about that. The Germans had ration points for clothes, too. If you bought a topcoat, that was about it for the year. Peggy didn't have all the clothes she wanted, either; most of what she'd brought to Czechoslovakia was still there. Or, maybe more likely, it was on some German woman's back these days.
A team of horses drew an antiaircraft gun down the street. The horses might have come straight out of the Civil War. The field-gray uniforms on the soldiers were modern, though. As for the gun, it might have appeared from the future. She didn't think she'd ever seen a piece of hardware that looked more lethal.
Newsboys held up papers full of headlines about German triumphs. People walked past without buying. If the Berliners were enthusiastic about the war, they hid it well.
"English and French air pirates bombard German towns!" a boy shouted. "Many innocent women and children murdered! Read about the latest enemy atrocities!"
Peggy almost stopped at the street corner to argue with him. Only the thought that her husband would have told her she was crazy made her keep her mouth shut. She admired Herb's common sense, most of the time without wanting to imitate it. And she'd seen the fun the Nazis had knocking Czechoslovakia flat. If they were on the receiving end for a change, if this wasn't all just propaganda and nonsense, boy, did they ever deserve it!
But the kid wasn't to blame for that. He was only doing his job. The ones who were to blame were Hitler and Goebbels and Goring and Himmler, and she couldn't very well tell them where to head in. If she took it out on the newsboy, what would happen to her? Neutral or not, American or not, she didn't want a visit from the Gestapo.
Because she looked as shabby as everybody else, the Berliners assumed she was a German, too. They'd nod and say, "Guten Morgen." She could manage that. She understood German tolerably well, but she spoke French much better. When people here expected much more than Good morning from her, she stumbled badly.
She hated that. She also hated being so dowdy. She'd made a life of standing out from the crowd. No one would ever have noticed her if she didn't make a point of getting noticed. If she disliked anything, it was invisibility.
A few minutes later, ambling along on a day as gray and gloomy as her mood, she found a way to get noticed. She walked past a place whose window said ROTHSTEIN'S BUTCHER'S SHOP. It wasn't bigger or fancier or more run down than the shops to either side: a secondhand bookstore to the left, a place that sold wickerwork purses and baskets to the right. The wickerwork place was busy-wicker, unlike leather, didn't eat up ration points.