Eisenhower climbed down from his jeep. Two unsmiling dogfaces with Tommy guns escorted him to a lectern in front of the church’s steps. The sun glinted from the microphones on the lectern…and from the pentagon of stars on each of Ike’s shoulder straps. “General of the army” was a clumsy title, but it let him deal with field marshals on equal terms.
He tapped a mike. Noise boomed out of speakers mounted to either side of the lectern. Had some bright young American tech sergeant checked to make sure the fanatics didn’t try to wire explosives to the microphone circuitry? Evidently, because nothing went kaboom.
“Today it is our sad duty to pay our final respects to one of the great soldiers of the twentieth century. General George Smith Patton was admired by his colleagues, revered by his troops, and feared by his foes,” Ike said. If there were a medal for hypocrisy, he would have won it then. But you were supposed to speak only well of the dead. Lou groped for the Latin phrase, but couldn’t come up with it.
“The fear our foes felt for General Patton is shown by the cowardly way they murdered him: from behind, with a weapon intended to take out tanks. They judged, and rightly, that George Patton was worth more to the U.S. Army than a Stuart or a Sherman or a Pershing,” Eisenhower said.
“Damn straight,” muttered the man standing next to Lou. He wore a tanker’s coveralls, so his opinion of tanks carried weight. Tears glinted in his eyes, which told all that needed telling of his opinion of Patton.
Eisenhower’s voice hardened, his Midwestern accent stern as weathered granite: “But these Nazi cowards also judged they could scare us out of Germany by murdering General Patton. They judged they could run us out of Germany, and they judged they could take over again once we cut and ran-take over and start getting ready for the Third World War. That’s what they thought. That’s how they thought.”
He looked out at the assembled GIs. “Well, folks, I am here-I am right here, in Erlangen, in the American occupation zone-to tell them they are wrong.”
Lou whooped. He clapped. He was one of many, very many. The soldiers here had seen too much of what Hitler’s thugs had done ever to want to see any more of that.
“We are doing all we can to put an end to their wicked violence,” Eisenhower went on. Then he used the word of the moment: “Because they’re fanatics, our enemies are taking longer than they should to realize they can’t hope to defeat the might of the United States of America.”
He got another round of applause, louder than the first. The tankman next to Lou joined in, but he also murmured, “Son of a bitch, but I wish I was back in Omaha.”
Lou wished he were back in New Jersey, too. Unfortunately, wishing wouldn’t put him there. Cleaning up the leftover Nazis just might. It looked like his best chance, anyhow.
“I have one more message for you men, and for the SS goons who skulk in the woods and in the darkness,” Eisenhower said. “It’s very simple. We are going to stay here as long as it takes to make sure Germany can never again trouble the peace of the world.”
He probably expected more cheers then. He got…a few. Lou was one of the men who clapped. The guy in the tanker’s coveralls edged away, as if afraid he had something contagious. That saddened him without much surprising him. He wondered how many of the others who applauded there were also Jewish. Quite a few, unless he missed his guess.
Yes, Eisenhower had looked for more in the way of approval there. He’d acted professionally grim before. Now his eyes narrowed and the corners of his mouth turned down. He wasn’t just grim any more; he was pissed off.
“We would waste everything we’ve done up till now if we walked away too soon,” he said, and Lou thought he was speaking off the cuff rather than from prepared remarks, as he had earlier. He pointed south. “Down in Nuremberg, we’re going to try the thugs who are the only reason we had to come here at all. And after that I’d be very much surprised if we don’t hang ’em higher than Haman.”
This time, Lou clapped till his palms hurt. Most of the soldiers in the market square joined him. They wanted to see the war criminals get what was coming to them, all right.
Eisenhower looked a little happier after that-not much, but a little. “And if we catch Reichsprotektor Heydrich by then, we’ll try him and hang him, too,” he said. “Or maybe we won’t bother trying Mr. Heydrich, not when the maniacs he leads have done so much dirty work after the surrender.”
More hot, fierce applause. Heydrich was Public Enemy Number One these days, sure as hell. Lou and the Counter-Intelligence Corps were responsible for that. Posters displaying Heydrich’s rather lizardy features were plastered to everything that didn’t walk. They promised the famous $500,000, tax-free to GIs, for information leading to his capture…or to his body. To a dogface making fifty bucks a month-and, with luck, to a kraut, too-that had to look pretty damn good.
It also looked pretty damn good to Lou: 250 years’ worth of a first lieutenant’s salary. He glanced around. Lots and lots of GIs. No Reinhard Heydrich, dammit. Heydrich was too cool a calculator to risk himself for the glory of it. He’d be hiding away somewhere, cooking up more trouble.
“And there’s one more reason we don’t want to step away before it’s time.” Eisenhower looked east. “The fanatics have hurt the Soviet Union, too. Remember, they killed Marshal Koniev before they got General Patton. But whatever Heydrich’s men do over in the Russian zone, they won’t drive drive out the Red Army. You can bet your bottom dollar on that.”
Lou looked around again. That comment didn’t raise much applause, but it made a good many soldiers nod thoughtfully. Almost the only thing that kept the USA and USSR on speaking terms was that they both hated and feared the Nazis worse than they hated and feared each other. Without the fanatics, they might have squabbled even more. There’s irony for you, Lou thought.
Having got in his licks, Eisenhower stepped away from the lectern. After that, Patton’s memorial service was in religious hands. It wasn’t Lou’s religion, but that wasn’t why he stopped listening. Ike had surprised him a couple of times. The preacher sounded canned. You knew what he’d say three sentences before he got around to saying it. Nothing was wrong with his remarks, exactly, but they got bloody dull.
Somebody not far from Lou enlivened the proceedings by passing out. He’d stood in the sun too long, and was fine as soon as they flipped water on him. But the near-panic when he pitched forward on his face told how jumpy all the GIs were. No German snipers, no nothing-only jitters. Enough jitters, though, and you didn’t need anything else.
As the memorial broke up, a corporal talking to his buddy delivered his own verdict on Patton: “Sure he was a ballbuster, but he was our ballbuster.” The buddy nodded. So did Lou. That made more sense than most of the highfalutin blather he’d listened to before.
Like any Soviet citizen, Vladimir Bokov had learned more about what war could do than he ever wanted to know. Leningrad: besieged by the Germans and Finns for three years, with hundreds of thousands dead of bombs and shells and hunger and cold and disease. Stalingrad: blasted from the air, then systematically pounded flat by two armies till one could fight no more. Kharkov and Rostov-on-the-Don: both taken by the Nazis, retaken by the Red Army, taken back by the Nazis, and finally seized for good by the USSR, with each side slaughtering the other’s collaborators and toadies as soon as it grabbed power.
And those were only a few of the high points-or the low points, if you thought that way.
But despite everything Captain Bokov had learned, despite everything he’d seen, despite his utter lack of sympathy for the folk who’d come too close to enslaving the Soviet Union forever, Dresden gave him the willies. British and American bombers had visited hell on the city in the winter before the war…was alleged to have ended.