He let it out again with a cough. “Jesus Christ! Is that phosgene, or what?”
Halevy also lit up. After a judicious puff of his own, he answered, “More like mustard gas, I’d say.”
They both went right on smoking. You could complain about the tobacco as much as you pleased. Everybody did. You couldn’t do without it, though. Almost everybody on both sides smoked like a factory chimney. Going without cigarettes while he hid himself somewhere in no-man’s-land always gave Vaclav the jitters. He sometimes thought a smoke would be worth getting shot. He didn’t yield to those temptations, but he had them.
As if to fuel them, Halevy said, “Marshal Sanjurjo’s still out there somewhere.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Vaclav waved that away. “Like he’s gonna come out and stand in the same place where I plugged what’s-his-name-Franco. Nobody’s that goddamn dumb, not even a Nationalist Spanish general.”
“Cojones,” Halevy murmured.
That was a Spanish word the Czech understood. There weren’t many, but he’d picked up the dirty bits first, as he had with French. And maybe it was a question of balls. Would Sanjurjo say, in effect, I’m not afraid to go where Franco got shot? If he did, he was liable to be sorry-but not for long, not if he stopped a 13mm armor-piercing antitank round.
During the night, the Nationalists shelled the Czechs and the Internationals. They hit them harder than most Republican troops. Vaclav, huddling in what he devoutly hoped was a bombproof, could have done without the gesture of respect.
As soon as the shelling stopped, Jezek tumbled out and rushed to a firing step, ready to repel the enemy’s infantry if they pressed the attack. But they didn’t. The Nationalists just wanted to hurt their foes without much risk to themselves. Who wouldn’t make war on the cheap if he could?
Republican guns gave back a belated response after sunup the next morning. Maybe the artillerists wanted to see what they were shooting at. Maybe they hadn’t had any shells handy during the night. Maybe they’d been drinking sangria in a cantina back of the line, and catching crabs from the barmaids. Maybe … Who the hell knew, or cared?
Any which way, Vaclav got to scout no-man’s-land while the Nationalists were keeping their heads down. The two barrages had torn up the landscape-again. He looked for new hiding places from which he might torment Sanjurjo’s men. Then a short Republican round burst in front of the trench and showered him with dirt. He ducked as fragments whined not far enough overhead.
“Fucking assholes!” he shouted. “Whose side are they on?” He brushed at his uniform, for all the world as if it would do any good.
“They’re artillerymen,” Benjamin Halevy said. “If it’s in front of them, it’s a target-and it’s all in front of them.”
“Too right, it is,” Vaclav said. Warily, he straightened and looked out toward the Nationalist trenches again. That new crater with the tall lip facing the enemy’s line … That just might do. Republican shells kept coming down. With his luck, they’d flatten the hidey-hole before he ever got to use it.
But they didn’t. He crawled out to it under cover of darkness. Yes, it was the kind of place he needed. He had foliage stuck to his helmet with a strip of inner tube. A muddy burlap cloak with branches thrust into it also helped break up his outline. And he camouflaged the antitank rifle’s long barrel well before light could give him away.
Then he settled down to wait. He wanted a cigarette, but no, not enough to risk his life for one. He knew the urge would grow on him. He gnawed garlicky Spanish sausage instead. He’d taste that all day, too, but it wasn’t the same thing, dammit.
He eyed the Nationalist lines through a magnified circle with crosshairs. Men in yellowish khaki did the kinds of things soldiers did. Out beyond ordinary rifle range of the Republican forward trench, they didn’t take much cover. They didn’t think they were in any great danger, and they were right. Jezek didn’t feel like wasting his rounds on ordinary jerks. Those fat, fancy bullets were reserved for extraordinary jerks.
Maybe he’d lie here till darkness came again. He didn’t fire every day. When he did pull the trigger, he wanted his shots to mean something. He also didn’t want to get killed himself. He swung the heavy rifle a couple of centimeters to the right, then peered through the scope again.
A glimpse of a fabric long familiar but not seen for some time made his attention snap back to it. The Nationalists wore that diarrhea-colored khaki. Republican forces used khaki, too, khaki or denim or whatever civilian stuff they happened to own. No Spaniard, though, had a uniform of Feldgrau.
Sanjurjo and Hitler, of course, had been in bed together since the war in Spain started. The Germans had helped the Nationalists take Gibraltar away from England. German troops and flyers of the Legion Kondor let the Nazis field-test weapons and doctrines. But Germany’d paid Spain much less attention since the big European fight heated up.
So what was this Nazi officer doing here now? Whatever it was, he wouldn’t keep doing it long. Neither he nor the Spaniard with him worried about snipers. They were more than a kilometer away from the front. Why should they?
Vaclav showed them why. The antitank rifle slammed against his shoulder. The German stood stock-still for a moment, then crumpled. No, he wouldn’t report back to Berlin, or even back to Marshal Sanjurjo. They paid a sergeant pathetically little, but Vaclav knew damn well he’d earned his handful of pesetas today.
Chaim Weinberg huddled in a hole scraped into the front side of his trench, waiting for the Nationalists to quit shelling the front. Sanjurjo’s shitheads were ticked off about something, sure as hell. This was what they did when they got up in arms: used the big guns to make the Republicans sweat. Chaim was sweating, all right.
Latrine-trench rumor said the Czech sniper with the elephant gun had punched some Wehrmacht big shot’s ticket for him. When you got punched with that piece of artillery, you stayed punched, too. Gotta ask him the next time I see him, Chaim thought as another round from a 105 crashed down. That Vaclav knew some German, and Chaim’s Yiddish came close enough.
What really worried the International, though, was why a German officer had been looking over the Republican lines in the first place. Ever since the balloon went up in Czechoslovakia, and especially since Gibraltar went under, they’d had Spain on the back burner.
His fertile imagination could conjure up plenty of reasons for them to bring it to the front of the stove again. If the Nationalists smashed the Republic, German planes in northeastern Spain could pay France back for rejoining the fight against Fascism by knocking the crap out of the southern part of the country. Maybe Sanjurjo could even mount some half-assed raid across the Pyrenees. That would set the froggies hopping like fleas on a hot griddle.
But the Republic wouldn’t fall any time soon. It had been teetering in 1938. After Hitler jumped the Czechs, though, France and England threw enough supplies into Spain to level the war, and it had stayed pretty much level since. Chaim shook his head as he tried to make himself smaller. Christ, but 1938 was a long time ago now! A marriage ago. A child ago. A lifetime ago.
All at once, the shellfire let up. The first thing Chaim did was stick a cigarette in his mouth. His hands shook as he lit it. Shellfire always took a toll on you. Some guys couldn’t get over it. There were beggars in Madrid who twitched all the time. Odds were they’d been reasonably good soldiers once. Modern war dished out more than a lot of human beings were made to take.