All he wanted to do now was get away from Baatz, get away from the war. He gave his Mauser and grenades to the Feldwebel in charge of the company’s weaponry. The senior noncom told him to have fun on leave. They weren’t all shitheads. Some of them sure were, though.
Out of the line. Away from Awful Arno. Then the chain dogs were on him. So Landsers called military policemen because of the metal gorgets they hung around their necks. Once more, his papers passed muster. The Kettenhunde never cracked a smile, but they waved him on.
Antiaircraft guns stuck their snouts into the sky around the train station. The stationmaster was also a Feldwebel -and, at a guess, a veteran of the last war who’d been called up to help run the military trains. Willi showed him the leave papers. “All right, son,” the gray noncom said. “Where do you want to go?”
“Breslau. That’s where I’m from,” Willi answered. Homesickness, long swallowed, welled up inside. “All the way over on the other side of the Reich. ”
“Thought so, by the way you talk.” By his own musical, half-Scandinavian drawl, the Feld came from Schleswig-Holstein, up near the Danish border. He puffed on a pipe and nodded to himself. “Well, we can do that.”
And he did. Along with the leave permit, which he returned, he gave Willi a round-trip ticket to Breslau. “Do I have to pay anything?” Willi asked.
The Feldwebel looked affronted. “Don’t be silly. You’re in the service of the Reich. If we can’t take care of our own, what are we good for?”
Luxurious that care wasn’t. Willi’s seat was hard, and the car packed with soldiers getting away from action for a while. The stink of so many bodies that hadn’t washed lately would have bothered Willi… had he noticed it. He fell asleep almost as soon as the train started rolling. The hard seat and crowding bothered him no more than the thick fug. He’d slept in plenty of worse places. Nor was his the only snore rising to the low ceiling-far from it.
When he woke, he was back inside Germany. The train was rolling through countryside that hadn’t been bombed or shelled. It looked abnormal to Willi. He’d been at or near the front too goddamn long. He wanted to say something to somebody about it, but he had no friends sitting close by. Half a dozen soldiers in the car were still sawing wood, too. He kept his mouth shut. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have practice. When Awful Arno ordered you around, biting your tongue became a matter of self-preservation.
A few of the towns through which the train rolled showed bomb damage. The locals probably thought they’d survived disaster. They didn’t know how lucky they were. If they stayed lucky, they wouldn’t find out.
More chain dogs came through the cars at a stop, checking people’s papers. Willi showed his without hesitation. Why not? They were good. Farther back in his car, the military policemen caught somebody whose papers weren’t good, or who didn’t have any. They dragged the poor bastard away. “I can explain,” he kept saying. If he couldn’t, he’d landed in more trouble than he knew what to do with.
Willi had zwieback and a tube of butter in his pockets. Hoping the dining car would give him something better, he made his way to it. The stew was cabbage, potatoes, and tripe rubbery enough to use as a tire retread. The coffee was German ersatz, not spoils taken from French houses. It tasted bad and had next to no kick. All things considered, butter smeared on crackers might have been better.
Because the train traveled slowly and made many stops, he took almost a day to cross the country and get to Breslau. People got on and off. Some of them were civilians. Some of the civilians were women. Hearing women talking in a language he could understand was a treat he’d forgotten.
Breslau was a city of bridges, set right in the middle of the Silesian plain. It was also a city of many smokes. There was coal nearby, and iron, so factories worked round the clock. And it was a city of many Jews. Willi had known that before, but he hadn’t thought about it one way or the other. Riding the streetcar out to his folks’ block of flats, he got his nose rubbed in it. The yellow stars on the clothes of people on the street leaped out at him. No yellow stars on the streetcar passengers, though. Public transport was for Aryans only.
No one sat near him. People stood up instead, as far away as they could. He realized he really could use a bath. He was a little embarrassed, but only a little. If they couldn’t figure out he was just back from the front, too bad.
Even if he was ripe, his mother squealed and almost squeezed the breath out of him when he knocked on the door. “Why didn’t you wire that you were coming?” she demanded.
“I thought I’d surprise you,” he said.
“Think? You didn’t think.” But Klara Dernen didn’t sound angry. “Now where am I going to get my hands on a nice, fat hen?” She winked. “There are ways that don’t cost ration points. Magda owes me. If she’s got one, or knows where to get one…”
“Sure, Mutti,” Willi said. You could always find a way around rules you didn’t like, whatever they happened to be. He’d seen that.
A hot bath! When was the last time he’d had one? He couldn’t remember. It had been a while, though. He put on civilian clothes when he got out of the tub. The pants were too big through the waist, but all his shirts felt tight at the shoulders. He was in better shape than he had been before the Wehrmacht got him.
His younger sister, Eva, and his kid brother, Markus, both squealed when they got home from school. They told him about Russian air raids and running for the cellar. “That’s just like fighting, huh?” Markus said.
“Pretty much.” Willi left if there. Markus was only thirteen. The war would be over-the war had better be over-by the time he got old enough to fight.
Sure enough, Mother got her fat hen. She’d make a better chicken stew than the thumb-fingered soldiers who cooked in the field. It filled the flat with a savory smell. Father came home not long before the stew was ready. Herbert Dernen worked in a factory that had made clocks before the war and was turning out gauges and dials for panzers and planes these days.
He’d fought in France in the last war. After a long, measuring look at Willi, he slowly nodded at whatever he saw. “Well, son, now you know” was all he said, and it seemed more than enough.
“Now I know,” Willi agreed. No, they needed not another word on that score.
Father understood. So did other men of his generation, and other soldiers on leave. Willi couldn’t find anyone else in Breslau who did. He felt like a stranger, or maybe even a Martian, in his home town. That didn’t stop him from seeing-and kissing, and doing his best to feel up-the girls he’d been friendly with before conscription called. But they were either like his brother and thought they knew all about war because some bombs had fallen here, or they wanted him to explain what the fighting in France was like.
And he couldn’t. If you hadn’t done it, you’d never get it. In that, it was more like screwing than anything else. He said so once. He thought it would get his face slapped. Instead, it got him laid. Even afterwards, though, he couldn’t tell sweet Susanna what shooting and being shot at and getting shelled and bombed were like. They weren’t like anything.
He couldn’t tell her about the camaraderie, either, not in any way that would make sense to her. But, when his leave was up, a big part of him was glad, or at least relieved, to head west once more. He was a real, for-sure Frontschwein, all right. God help me, he thought, but it was true.
Chapter 11
Luc Harcourt had just found a good place to crap when the sniper got him. It really was perfect. The bushes screened him from sight-or he’d thought so, anyhow. And the leaves were young and soft and green. This side of a goose’s neck, you couldn’t get a better substitute for paper.
He dug a little hole with his entrenching tool. He undid his belt, dropped his pants, and squatted. The shot rang out. “Aiii!” he howled, and sprang straight up. If the Olympics had a record for a high jump from a squatting position, he broke it by thirty centimeters.